In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Further on, emerging from a very minor road, I passed a row of down-at-heel bungalows with chickens and geese in the gardens; piles of scrap metal and assorted piles of reclaimed wood everywhere; a wheel-less Nissan Shogun, mounted high and dry on axle stands, being used as an outdoor storage cupboard; suspicious looks when I took a snap. Here were Dorset’s dark equivalent of the denizens of the liminal creeks of Essex: its rural poor.

  When I planned this walk my intention was to explore a parallel track six or seven miles west of here to visit regions of my own past. In the long, hot summer of 1975 my mother sent me away for two weeks of the summer holidays to an archaeological excavation in the village of Halstock. It was the only dig we could find that accepted children as young as I was—that is to say, fourteen. The campaign to excavate a Roman Villa just south-west of the village was directed by an ex-Royal Navy, former child-probation officer, by that time some years retired, called Ron Lucas. Ron, his assistant Ted Flatters, his wife Joan and a small army of genteel but very sharp folk assembled every August to dissect the villa. I arrived on a rainy day from the station at Yeovil Junction wearing, I remember, a quite unsuitable pair of white flared jeans, wanting very much to be back home. It was about the last rain to fall that summer, or indeed the next. Ron wore a too-small khaki scout hat, bleached almost white by the sun. His trousers were tucked into battered desert boots. He spoke with a Brummie accent and knew everything about teenagers. His party trick, when anyone complained that they were wearing their fingers to the bone, was to hold up his forefinger, truncated to the knuckle by some naval accident years before. His digging technique was old-fashioned, meticulous, thoughtful and confident. With him I served my apprenticeship.

  I was an unhappy young man. Ron and his clutch of retired schoolteachers, spinsters and various eccentrics from Dorset’s cadre of part-time excavators took me under their collective wing, demanded nothing more of me than companionship and camaraderie, and gave me back my childhood. They taught me how to use a trowel, a dumpy level, a scythe (I still have the scars), a spade, shovel and wheelbarrow. They could not have been kinder; and I served my time with them almost every year for a decade, right through my own university career. They are the modest heroes of my archaeological beginnings. And Halstock retains a fascination: partly because it is my childhood; partly because it is one of those late Roman sites that can boast a mysterious saint: Juthware. The name Halstock comes from ‘Holy enclosure’ and near to the church, which lies a little outside the centre of the village, were once a spring and a shrine. Here Juthware was supposed to have led pilgrims until a jealous step-brother decapitated her. At the site of the murder a spring burst from the earth. Juthware picked her severed head up and walked to the church before expiring. The fondly remembered village pub of my youth, sadly no longer extant, was called the Quiet Woman in ironic veneration. In the British-speaking parts of the island, the site of a holy martyrdom was sometimes preserved in the place name merthyr.

  Juthware, like St Winifred on the Welsh Marches whose shrine I had passed a few months before, seems to echo the memory of conflict in the early church between proprietorial rights and local cults—a tension in late Roman or Early English culture—perhaps between Briton and Saxon; perhaps between conservatism and radicalism, Christian and heathen. We cannot say; but sufficient numbers of these stories survive from around Britain for us to believe that they reflect a common set of tensions woven into the stuff of the landscape’s fabric. Juthware is an example of what is called, marvellously, a cephalophore—a head-carrying saint, following in the tradition of the original martyrdom of St Paul and going back at least to Homeric poetry. St Denis of Paris was another; so was St Osyth in Essex; and Cuthbert, England’s greatest saint of the Early Middle Ages, is depicted carrying the head of the decapitated Oswald. Oswald ties the motif into a very ancient, arcane head cult as, perhaps, does the first British martyr, St Alban, who lost his head to a Roman executioner before a well sprang up where it came to rest.

  There is another side to the story. Richard Morris,46 in his majestic and insightful book Churches in the Landscape, asks whether the earliest monastic establishments in Western Britain, during the fifth and sixth centuries, might not have evolved from the luxurious villas of a late Roman Christian elite. Villas have produced evidence for the new faith—the Christ and chi-rho mosaic at Hinton St Mary is not far away—and experts in early monasticism, notably Dame Rosemary Cramp, have noted the evident similarity between the classic monastic layout and the villa complex. Was Juthware the inheritor of the villa estate, and did she attempt to found a monastic community there in the face of family opposition?

  It seemed a pity to miss out on Halstock; on the other hand, part of me was relieved not to revisit a place with such intense memories. It could not but be painful, especially since the villa now lies beneath a golf course, my old friends are long gone and the Quiet Woman is silent for good. I was afraid of what I might find there; or not find there.

  Sherborne is a small, very pretty and venerable town grown up around its minster, supposedly founded by Aldhelm, the first Bishop of West Wessex, under King Ine (r. 688–726) at the beginning of the eighth century. Aldhelm was one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars, a correspondent of Northumbria’s King Aldfrith, a poet and former abbot of Malmesbury much admired by Bede. Crossing the River Yeo over the bridge by the railway station, I walked up the main street and found a community café where I consumed coffee and cake with the appetite of the refugee and chatted to a couple of customers and the waitress. I indulged in a room for the night, at the charming and cosily eccentric Old Bakehouse on Acreman Street. Arriving early in the afternoon I had, for once, ample time to explore the town; but not the abbey—there was a founder’s day service or some such, for the famous school which shares the town centre, and I could not get in. It was a shame; not only does the church offer architectural splendours, but it is reputedly the site of St Juthware’s translation in the eleventh century. Walks are strewn with lost opportunities; there is no space for the dead weight of regret in my rucksack.

  The room was a mixed blessing; the bed too soft and hot after nights in a tent. The streets were full of school-leavers hell-bent on erasing the night with drink; traffic was noisy; the humidity oppressive. I had a poor night of it and woke to torrential rain that the weather forecast threatened would last all day. The early news was full of lightning strikes, flash floods and a generally apocalyptic prognosis. As it happened, this was to be my longest day’s walk of this trip. I resigned myself to getting wet, so I stripped down to shorts and a vest—no point getting more clothes soaked than necessary—and set out early with Camelot my first destination. The sky was like a pillow, or a low corridor underground. The streets were wet with standing water, the back lanes and paths steamy with vapour. The atmosphere seethed moisture. I got lost, musing on Dorset’s impenetrable personality; by the time I realigned myself and came out onto the north-running Corton Ridge I found I had crossed into Somerset. A creamy-white barn owl emerged ghostly from a hedge in front of me, not two yards away, and silently flew off in search of peace and quiet.

  At last a view: west, to the flood plain of the River Yeo, the Roman town of Ilchester (Lindinis—perhaps the focus of four of Arthur’s battles according to the poetic list in the Historia Brittonum) and the beginning of the Somerset lowlands so recently inundated by the floods of winter 2013/14. Laid out like a threedimensional model, the counterpane drama of woodland and village, ribbon roads and church tower, farm and field, harvest interrupted by the rain, seemed held on pause. Low cloud scraped the top of the ridge and the morning’s humidity was palpable. The clouds wore yellow. More arresting still was the sight ahead of me of the cover photograph of Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain: South Cadbury hill fort. I stopped as near as dammit at the place where the photographer had stood in about 1970, on the brow of Parrock Hill which overlooks the fort. Its strategic location was blindingly obvious—an outrider of the Dorset hills which dominates
the plains north and west to Glastonbury. Even in today’s murk the massive triple ramparts looked like a serious disincentive to anyone wanting to take it. The flat, kidney-shaped crest, grazed by brown and white cows, was open pasture; below the ramparts a fringe of dark green woodland made the whole look like a tonsured monk’s head. It needed no Time Team reconstruction of its palisades and halls, bristling with spear and shield, to evoke an age of power, prestige and elite warfare: of glory and extreme violence.

  I descended to the foot of the hill and walked widdershins around the base of the fort to South Cadbury, the hamlet that nestles below its eastern entrance. The path to the top is steep and, like every other track in this part of the world, deeply incised through each successive rampart. I came out onto the top, breathless, and took a circuit of the formidable defences. This, then, is the place claimed by some desperate romantics to have been the Camelot of King Arthur. I have owned a copy of Leslie Alcock’s account of his excavations here, Cadbury/Camelot, since I was a teenager. It’s a riveting story of a campaign of excavation and a marvellous evocation of the appeal of archaeology in the late 1960s even if, as a technical publication, it leaves much to be desired. It was the campaign which set Alcock on the way to write his definitive account of the archaeology of the Dark Age British Isles in Arthur’s Britain. The project to uncover South Cadbury, identified spuriously by the early antiquary John Leland as Arthur’s Camelot in the sixteenth century, was an overt attempt to uncover the archaeology of Arthur. The results of five years’ digging more than justified the time, expense and heartache that all archaeologists are familiar with. At the time, Alcock concluded that if one wanted to put a historical Arthur anywhere, it might as well be here, at South Cadbury. Over subsequent decades, however, he took up a position of hard-line scepticism, treating evidence with a much more rigorous, forensic scrutiny. But standing on this superbly atmospheric site, looking down on the plains and watching a raven perched jet-black in the clouded canopy of a Scots pine tree, one could easily forgive him for allowing Arthur to infuse his earlier thinking.

  So, let’s get the Arthurian record straight. As Alcock himself pointed out, there are just three enigmatic references to a historical Arthur in all the surviving literature which may lay claim to authenticity. In the Annales Cambriae, not compiled before the ninth century but based on a set of British Easter annals originally dating from much earlier, two entries stand out:

  Ann. LXXII [equating to the year 518] The battle of Badon [Bellum Badonis] in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders [or, more likely, shield] and the Britons were victorious.

  Then…

  Ann. LXXXXIII [equating to the year 539] The battle [or ‘strife’] of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.47

  And, in the chronicle known as the Historia Brittonum, likewise a British compilation no earlier than the ninth century, there is the most famous entry of all, a list of twelve battles probably originating in a poem of praise for a great warrior.

  Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle [dux bellorum].

  The first battle was at the mouth of the river called Glein. The second, the third, the fourth and the fifth were on another river, called the Douglas, which is in the country of ?Lindsey [in regione linnuis]. The sixth battle was on the river called Bassas. The seventh battle was in Celyddon Forest, that is, the Battle of Celyddon Coed. The eighth battle was in Guinnion fort, and in it Arthur carried the image of the holy Mary, the everlasting Virgin, on his ?shield/shoulder and the heathen were put to flight on that day, and there was a great slaughter upon them, through the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Virgin Mary, his mother. The ninth battle was fought in the City of the Legion. The tenth battle was fought on the bank of the river called Tryfrwyd. The eleventh battle was on the hill called Agned. The twelfth battle was on Badon Hill and in it nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no-one laid them low save he alone; and he was victorious in all his campaigns.48

  SOUTH CADBURY

  None of the battle locations have been identified with any confidence, despite the spilling of a positive lake of ink, the wearing out of many a map and much tramping over hill and dale. Nor is there any sense of the length of time over which that campaign was fought. If we are to believe the Annales, Arthur survived another twenty or so years after Badon.

  The list seems, to begin with, straightforward, if rather thin and with no sense of political or narrative context. The geography ranges from an apparent conflict in southern Scotland (Cat Coit Celidon) to Badon, traditionally associated with a hill near the Roman spa resort that later became Bath. In reality, it’s not so simple. The only other source—belonging genuinely to the sixth century—that mentions the battle of Badon (but not Arthur) is the epistle of the British monk Gildas to his fellow countrymen on the history and woes of the Britons in the face of impious kings and rapacious Saxons: De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, ‘On the Ruin and conquest of Britain’.49 Gildas’s broadly accepted dates (a putative death in the 540s) and his account of Badon (he says he is writing forty years after that event) mean that the Annales Cambriae date of 518 for this great siege is probably twenty years too late. Who to believe?

  I do not think that we need worry much about the modern debate between a ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ Arthur. A sub-Roman British commander of what amounts to a cohort or warband of auxiliary mounted troops might perfectly well have fought campaigns along the length of Western Britain over two or three decades. The appendant fluff of round tables, holy grails, excaliburs and courtly chivalry belongs to a time when those tales were composed, more than half a millennium later. Only archaeology can offer more penetrating questions and answers to what Britain was like between about 430, when it seems Roman Britain was in a state of partial administrative meltdown, and a hundred and fifty years later when the Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Caledonian kingdoms emerged into the pages of literate recorders of history. Archaeology tells us that South Cadbury was fortified in the sixth century or thereabouts—a rebuilding of Iron Age defences; that a great hall stood on the summit; and that there was, perhaps, a church here. Pottery from the Mediterranean found its way to the site (via Scillies and Bristol Channel?); there is speculation that Cadbury became a royal estate centre, replacing (or restoring) the function of the Roman town at Ilchester—perhaps a relationship like Wroxeter and the Wrekin and then back again. But we don’t need to place the semi-mythical Arthur here; if we want to give its lord an identity, why not that of Cadda, the otherwise unknown Saxon who gave the place its name?

  Some centuries later, in the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon (see page 119) and the resurgence of Viking power in Eastern England, King Æthelred’s men reoccupied the fort, reinforced the defences one more time and set up a burgh here, church, mint and all. The place names and archaeology of the South-west which emerge from decades of scholarship and coal-face fieldwork suggest that for all the great deeds of kings, bishops and saints, most people, most of the time, stayed where they were. There was never a great immigration or colonisation of these parts by Germanic warriors or peasants (see Postscript: Who are the British?—pages 423–6). Control was concentrated in the hands of an aristocratic tribal elite, an exclusive warrior caste whose names, whether British or Germanic, reflect politics more than genetics. Most people were ethnically indigenous Britons, speaking first Brythonic, then a mixture of Latin and Early Welsh, and then, if they wanted access to lines of patronage flowing from Germanic-speaking lords, the language of Beowulf. I suspect that for several centuries bilingualism was common; that English became the lingua franca of trade and power and then the tongue of an English state and culture, even if the language of the literate remained Latin well into the Medieval period.

  South Cadbury’s most dramatic imprint on the history of the Britons came not, I think,
in the Dark Ages, but in the first century AD when it was the site of a battle that seems to have resulted in the massacre of large numbers of the indigenous people by the armies of Rome, after which its defences were slighted and the site abandoned until Rome herself found the game not worth the candle, four hundred years later. There is something to be said for the idea that the Roman period was no more than an interlude in the late Iron Age.

  Down into the plain of Somerset, then, with the sky threatening; through Sparkford and across the busy A303; down a muddy, thorny green lane, through rolling fields past Babcary and across the Roman Fosse Way (now the A37, it was built as a Roman grand design, to link the South-west with the Midlands and the East Coast in Lincolnshire) towards a group of villages, the Charltons, whose names reflect that caste of English farmer, the ceorl, who forms the backbone of any discussion about free warrior peasants in pre-Conquest England. Charlton is by no means an uncommon village name. It is often found in association, as it is here and in the Welsh Marches, with ‘cott’ names (Ashcott, Buscott, Hurcott)—small outlying farms, probably dependent on larger settlements or royal estates, probably poor, perhaps also liminal like those bungalows I had passed a day before. The small town of Somerton, immediately to the south-west, is the place from which this shire was named, a one-time capital of Wessex. It means ‘summer settlement’, a seasonal centre for the rich grazing lands of the high ground between the Rivers Cary and Yeo. In this layer cake of generations of farmers, drovers, artisans and cottagers, Arthur assumes his rightful place as a footnote to reality. Somerton sits on an island of high ground, never much more than 300 feet above sea level, surrounded by dead flat peatlands. On a much smaller, much lower rise a few miles to the west, lies Athelney. I had tried and failed to plan a route that would take me there. The fastness in the marshes on which King Alfred hid from the Great Heathen Army in 878 before his brilliant counter-attack at Edington is a place to evoke heroism like no other.