The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  Who are the Victors?

  One recent suggestion is that Gildas has been read wrongly since the time of Bede. Higham argues that his true meaning is not that Badon is the last victory, followed by a British-dominated peace, but rather that it is the last victory, followed by defeats and Saxon domination. This conclusion is based on the biblical allusions chosen by Gildas and the assumption that his references to diabolical or bestial powers are consistently intended to mean the Saxons. Gildas only uses the word ‘Saxons’ (‘name not to be spoken!’) once, and thereafter refers to the invaders as wolves, devils and the like. As Higham understands the situation, a single powerful Saxon ruler, the Father Devil, exercises overlordship over Gildas’s Britain (Higham 1994).

  Although Higham does not himself allow evidence to be drawn from the later sources, it is possible to read them in this way. In the Historia, for instance, a literal reading is that the Saxon resurgence starts immediately after Mount Badon. This leads to Saxon victory and dominance, not a British-governed peace. Saxon kings are brought over from Germany to rule all Britain. They are distinct from the Saxons descended from the revolting mercenaries. One of these could easily be the ‘Father Devil’.

  The source of Higham’s contention is the biblical material used by Gildas as a basis for his critique, especially his analogies with Jeremiah. The prophet begins his career and writings after the defeat of Israel by the Assyrians and ends after the Babylonian conquest. His images are all of defeat and despair, with no indication of triumphant Israelites.

  This is an ingenious, but odd, reading of Gildas. He is convinced that the current peace has made his contemporaries forget the Saxon threat. If it had been brokered by the still-powerful Saxons after some more recent victories, then it is hard to see how the tyrants could have let this knowledge slip. It is difficult to see the Britons complacent and forgetful of the Saxon menace if they were living under Saxon overlordship, sustained by threats and extortion.

  As noted, Gildas constructed his concept of what had preceded the Saxon wars on the framework of what came afterwards. What he imagined happening during that early period was based on the analogy of what had happened since. The Britons trusted in God, rallied and massacred the Picts and Scots who retreated from them. The Scots returned home, the Picts kept quiet, and a period of ‘peace’ ensued characterised by civil wars and cruel British kings. There were occasional returns by the Scots and plundering raids by the Picts; the massacre is thus not the last victory, but it is seen as far more important than the minor skirmishes which follow.

  The whole point of Gildas’s historical analysis is that, under similar circumstances, the British victory ushered in a period of complacency, sin and civil war. This in turn led to even greater destruction. The analogy with Gildas’s own time is abundantly clear. It is no more likely that the tyrants of the present are subservient to the Saxons than that the Council and Proud Tyrant were pro-Pictish quislings.

  Gildas’s understanding of Jeremiah is also not as straightforward as Higham suggests. It is not clear from the Bible whether Jeremiah is always writing after the fact or whether his works are to be considered prophetically, describing the future. If Gildas casts himself in the role of Jeremiah, he may think of himself writing between the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians and the final defeat and exile of the Jews by the Babylonians. As he tells us, the eastern part of Britain has fallen to the Saxons and its previous inhabitants are slaves or exiles. In fact, the only explicit biblical parallel Gildas draws with the Saxons is that their assault on the Britons is ‘comparable with that of the Assyrians of old’ (DEB 24). And, like the remnant of Israel of old, the free Britons must mend their ways or face an even worse catastrophe. I should add that Gildas uses prophetic material from throughout the Old and New Testaments without necessarily drawing exact analogies with their historical context. Jeremiah’s Lamentations are just one of the sources he cites in his introduction and draws on for inspiration.

  To take every reference to the devil as figurative for Saxons seems highly unlikely. DEB 67 makes it clear that, in this case at least, the devil Gildas refers to is actually the Devil, not a Saxon lord. Those who go abroad for ecclesiastical promotion are in search of ‘an illusion sent by the Devil’ and return as ‘instruments of the Devil’, though obviously they must have gone to Christian lands for preferment. Exactly what use a pagan Saxon overlord would be making of such foreign-promoted clerics is a mystery!

  On balance, the evidence seems to be that the traditional reading, that Britons dominate the post-Badon island, still seems the best.

  Where was Gildas Writing?

  Since the Dark Ages, almost every region in and around the British Isles has been suggested as the place where Gildas lived and wrote. Although certainty is not possible, there are some reasonable pointers to his location. This has an important influence on the analysis of what he wrote and its connections with later material:

  1. Gildas is writing in Britain. He does not have access to the literary remains of the Britons which have been taken overseas by the exiles (DEB 4.4).

  2. Gildas names very few locations in Britain, although his scheme covers the whole island. The locations named are: Verulamium (St Albans), Legionum Urbs (City of the Legions, Chester or possibly Caerleon), the Thames (twice), the Severn, Mons Badonicus (not certain), Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall), Demetae (the Dyfed people). He knows about Hadrian’s Wall and an associated turf wall (the Antonine Wall?), but not the names of any towns or forts associated with them. All the locations named of which we are sure are in the southern half of Britain. This is what persuades most writers that Dumnonia is not the other region of that name, in Strathclyde. It is likely that Mons Badonicus is somewhere in the region between Chester, St Albans and Devon.

  Gildas’s Britain.

  3. Gildas is not in the east of England. The Saxons return ‘home’ to this area and leave Gildas and his contemporaries in unoccupied Britain.

  4. Britons are unable to visit, because of the partition of the island, the shrines of the saints in Verulamium and the City of the Legions. We infer that Gildas is in this position himself. Whatever location, Chester or Caerleon, we accept for the City of the Legions, it would be accessible to Christians in Strathclyde, Gododdin, Cumbria or Wales. Only Verulamium would be cut off by the Saxons. The only insular Christians who could not reach both of the shrines would be those in the West Country, menaced by Saxons in the Thames Valley.

  5. Most commentators see a geographical scheme in the denunciation of the tyrants, albeit under the influence of a North Welsh location for Maglocunus not warranted by the text. Constantine of Dumnonia, first on the list, could be the nearest to Gildas. Gildas specifically claims to have recent knowledge of him ‘This very year’ he has killed the two royal youths, and Gildas knows for sure he is alive.

  Medieval views that Gildas was from Strathclyde, a son of Caw of Pictland, have no support in DEB. No demonstrably northern location is referred to by name. Although Gildas does deal with Roman activities in the wall zone, his knowledge of the area is sketchy. Hadrian’s Wall, he imagines, runs between towns which just happen to be there (DEB 13.2). He thinks that the northern border defences were built within the last hundred years or so, during which time the area north of them had seen the first settlements of the Picts, ‘an exceedingly savage overseas nation’ (DEB 13.2). Surely no local could make these claims, easily falsifiable by consulting any aged Pict. If Gildas’s father were from Pictland, his descriptions of Picts as ‘dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rocks’; ‘foul hordes . . . more ready to cover their villainous faces with hair than their private parts with clothes’, would be very peculiar.

  A voyage to Ireland by Gildas is recorded in Annales Cambriae, but his knowledge of that island, its Scottish inhabitants or the burgeoning work of Christian missionaries among them, is almost zero. South-western Britain therefore seems the most plausible location for Gildas.

  FIVEr />
  Gildas’s historical analysis climaxes with his denunciation of the rulers of his own time:

  Britain has kings, but they are tyrants; judges, but they are unjust

  They often plunder and terrorise, but do so to the innocent;

  they defend and protect people, but only the guilty and thieving;

  they have many wives, but these are whores and adulteresses;

  they swear constantly, but their oaths are false;

  they make vows, but almost at once tell lies;

  they wage wars, but only civil and unjust ones;

  they chase thieves energetically all over the country, but love and even reward the thieves who sit with them at table.

  They distribute alms profusely, but pile up an immense mountain of crime for all to see;

  They take their seats as judges, but rarely seek out the rules of right judgement.

  they despise the harmless and humble, but exalt to the stars . . . their military companions bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God!

  Through Gildas’s condemnations, we can see a pattern of heroic ‘Celtic’ kingship, as celebrated in Y Gododdin and the poems of Dark Age Wales. Five rulers are singled out for special condemnation. Gildas then castigates the wicked priests, men who degrade even the harlots they lie with. They rejoice if they find even a single penny (indicating that some form of monetary economy is still in operation). Bishops, priests and monks are all mentioned. Most have bought their positions from the tyrants and even the best have not risked martyrdom by standing up to the wicked rulers.

  It is worth noting that Gildas says nothing about a resurgence of paganism. The time when Britons misguidedly worshipped mountains, hills, rivers and idols is far in the past. Indeed the kings are specifically said not to be pagans: ‘Just because they do not offer sacrifices to heathen gods, there is no reason for them to be proud, they are still idolaters because by their actions they trample on the commands of Christ.’ There is also no mention of heresy, although Gildas left no stone unturned in searching out iniquity.

  The five named tyrants are generally assumed to be kings, though this is not specifically stated. They are ‘infausti duces’, unlucky leaders (DEB 50.1). They are not the only rulers of Britain. Gildas specifically tells us that some leaders have found the narrow path to salvation. In many ways, the wicked rulers are the focal point of de Excidio Britanniae. None of the exemplary rulers are mentioned by name, nor are any bishops or priests, good or bad, singled out from the general mass.

  The first is Constantine, ‘tyrant whelp of the filthy lioness of Dumnonia’. Whelps (catuli) and lionesses figure prominently in Gildas’s vocabulary of condemnation. For example, he describes the Saxons as a pack of whelps issuing from the lair of the ‘barbarian lioness’, meaning their Germanic homeland. On the other hand, when Gildas earlier mentions a ‘treacherous lioness’ who rebels against Rome, it is not clear whether he is speaking figuratively of Britain or specifically of the leader of the rebellion – Boudicca.

  Equally in Constantine’s case, it is not possible to state categorically that it is his kingdom and not some notorious Dumnonian woman which is meant. The manuscripts of Gildas use the form ‘Damnonia’ or variations on it. Most commentators believe that Gildas is referring to Dumnonia, the civitas (Roman administrative area based on a British tribal area) which covered modern Cornwall and Devon. The latter county derives its name from the Welsh version of Dumnonia, Dyfneint. The error is most likely to be scribal, occurring as it does in other places too (Rivet and Smith 1979). The copyist is influenced by the word damnatio (‘damnation’) when faced with an unfamiliar name. Roman geographers recorded another Dumnonia, just south of the Clyde. It did not survive under that name into the Dark Ages, whereas Dumnonia/Dyfneint become one of the last surviving British kingdoms outside Wales. We note, however, that the early medieval Life of Gildas did connect Gildas to the Strathclyde area, perhaps influenced by this place-name.

  Gildas shows that he has recent knowledge of Constantine. He says he knows for sure that he is alive, as if there is some doubt about this. His worst crime took place ‘this very year’ after he had sworn a terrible oath not to work his wiles on his fellow Britons. Dressed in the habit of a holy abbot, though armed with a sword and spear, he killed two noble youths in a church. Who these murdered youths were is not revealed, although almost no man could handle weapons as bravely as them. They were sheltering with their mother when Constantine killed them. Constantine is not himself a young man, as he put aside his lawful wife ‘many years before’.

  ‘What are you doing, Aurelius Caninus,’ Gildas continues, ‘are you not being engulfed by the same slime as the man I just talked about?’ We are not told where Aurelius is from or whether he is actually a king. He is, however, described as a lion’s whelp. This may be figurative. Gildas adds ‘as the prophet says’. On the other hand, it may be that he really is a relation of Constantine. His name could also suggest that he is related in some way to Ambrosius Aurelianus whose living grandsons have already been mentioned. Aurelius’s brothers and father died young, while he himself thirsts for civil war and plunder. There is no chance that he will live to a ripe old age, Gildas adds. He is very unlikely to outlive his descendants.

  Fornications and adulteries, ‘domestic wickedness’ characterise the lives of Constantine and Aurelius Caninus, and they are equally present in the life of the next tyrant, Vortiporius. Figuratively he is like a leopard, spotted with his sins: murder, rape and adultery. Gildas gives us rather more circumstantial detail about Vortiporius than the previous two. We are told he is the Tyrant of the Demetae, the civitas of south-west Wales, the name of which survives in modern Welsh as Dyfed. Moreover, he inherited this position from his father, who was a good king. Vortiporius is not young, his hair is already whitening. His father, therefore, would have been one of those kings of the Badon generation.

  We have corroboration of Gildas’s words in the form of the sixth-century memorial stone from the borders of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, precisely in Dyfed. This commemorates ‘Voteporix the Protector’, inscribed in both Latin letters and Irish Ogham.

  With the first tyrant in Devon and the third in Dyfed, it has seemed to most commentators that Gildas is following a geographical logic in his denunciations of the tyrants, working northward through the kingdoms of western Britain. It may be that he has some other pattern to guide him – family relationships, similarity of crimes, prophetic inspiration or any number of other factors. However, in the absence of any other evidence, geography seems a reasonable starting point. That Gildas begins with Constantine in Dumnonia suggests he may be the nearest tyrant, with the others increasingly further away. The balance of probability is that Gildas is writing from south-west England. The direct land route between Dumnonia and Demetia would pass through three more civitates, the Durotriges in Somerset and Dorset, the Dobunni in Gloucestershire and the lower Severn and the Silures in Gwent, south-east Wales. These could be possible locations for Aurelius Caninus and are also the areas we have previously classed as ‘South Welsh’, areas of strong early Arthurian tradition. Builth and Ercing, the locations of Arthurian wonders, might be considered to lie between Devon and Dyfed. The area of south-eastern Wales where the Historia placed Ambrosius would be defined in this way, which would again suggest the possibility of a link between Aurelius Caninus and Ambrosius Aurelianus.

  Next comes Cuneglassus, another tyrant not specifically located nor given a definite title. We are, however, given plenty of circumstantial detail about him. He is no longer young, but has been wicked since his youth. He is a rider, even a charioteer, with many horses or riders. (Some of the Gododdin heroes are also called charioteers, probably an antiquated poetic image.) He fights with weapons special or particular to himself, waging war constantly against the Britons, and against God. Gildas says that his name, in Latin, means ‘tawny butcher’. In fact it means blue dog, though whether Gildas really knows this or not is uncert
ain. Of Cuneglassus’s domestic arrangements, we know that he is rich and haughty, that he is surrounded by holy men and that he has put aside his lawful wife to marry her sister.

  Although all this material provides a fertile source for information about a key character of Gildas’s time, it is two odd and almost incidental parts of the denunciation which have brought the most attention. Gildas calls him ‘bear’ and ‘charioteer of the bear’s stronghold’. This is suggestive, as most scholars derive the name ‘Arthur’ from Arth, the British word for a bear. One medieval version of Historia Brittonum gives a possible translation of ‘Arthur’ as ursus horribilis – ‘horrible bear’. It goes on to translate Arthur’s surname mab Uter as ‘terrible son’ because he has been terrible even from his youth, exactly the same information as Gildas gives us for Cuneglassus. This raises the question of a connection between Arthur and Cuneglassus. If Cuneglassus is a neighbour of Vortiporius of the Demetae, he could be the ruler of Ercing and/or Builth where the Arthur wonders are located.