Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (18 page)

The
History of the Kings of Britain,
on the other hand, refers to devastation due to a war taking place sometime after the death of Arthur. Perhaps significantly, the date given for Arthur’s demise is the very date Continental historians have given here for the beginning of the plague catastrophe in Constantinople and Europe. It is interesting that the dates “selected” for Arthur’s death are those in which key recorded natural disasters occurred.

The medieval Arthurian romances are seen as being associated with famine and/or disease and/or war—a potentially significant reflection of the real circumstances of the mid– to late sixth century, in which famine was followed by plague, which in turn was followed by invasion and war. The relative chronology is, not surprisingly, somewhat confused in the Arthurian romances, but all the elements are there.

Even the type of disease—namely plague—may be hinted at in the nature of the mysterious wound that the king of the soon-to-be-wasted land suffers from. This royal wound—which magically causes the land to be wasted and is therefore symbolic of the Waste Land as a whole—was a bleeding injury to the thigh region in general and the groin/genital area in particular. In the real events of the sixth century, it was the plague that was the main cause of the Waste Land, and the key physical manifestation of plague were the buboes (great boils), which erupted bloodily into open sores, specifically in the groin and armpits.

The Arthurian romance
The Quest for the Holy Grail
(early thirteenth century) actually refers to “a great pestilence” in its description of the Waste Land phenomenon.
⁴
And
The Post-Vulgate
(also of the thirteenth century) talks of half the people in the villages lying dead and “labourers dead in the fields”—exactly the sort of situation one would expect to see from plague. Indeed, there are strikingly similar historical accounts from Constantinople and Anatolia for the 540s.

The first brief mention of anything approximating a “wasting” of the land in Britain is in the
Welsh Annals
entry for 537, as previously noted. It states: “The battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell and there was
‘mortalitas’
[mass deaths] in Britain and Ireland.”

But, as I touched on earlier in this chapter, the earliest proper description of the Waste Land phenomenon (though without any Arthurian connection) is in the
Mabinogi,
an epic Welsh folktale, eventually written down in the eleventh century. The story relates how a magical mist descended and that when it eventually lifted, everything had gone—“no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling.” The houses of the princely court were “empty, deserted, uninhabited without man or beast in them.”
⁵
Later, there is a symbolic threat of famine when all the ears of wheat are magically stolen (by an army of mice) from the stalks on which they had been growing: “In the grey dawn only the naked stalks” remained. In the end, it transpires that this proto–Waste Land was caused by an evil wizard, possibly symbolizing death, called “The Grey One.”

There are geographical similarities between the literary Waste Lands and the real ones of the sixth century. Indeed, most of the Waste Lands in the Arthurian romances and other medieval literary sources were said to be located in Wales
⁶
or, more specifically, south Wales
⁷
or Logres/Loegria.
⁸

More generally, Britain or Listenois (probably another name for Britain or a part of Britain) is cited as the location of the Waste Land. The Arthurian romances in general—the literary backdrop for the Waste Land—tend to be associated with the Somerset/south Wales region. Thus, the southwest quadrant of Britain is often seen as the area that was wasted—and this corresponds with what was probably the case (due mainly to the plague) in the real world of the sixth century.

The next description of the Waste Land phenomenon was written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his
History of the Kings of Britain
in the mid–twelfth century and describes how some years after Arthur’s death—conceivably in the 560s or 570s—the city of Cirencester was captured and burned by advancing barbarians. The British were chased over the river Severn into Wales. Then the leader of the barbarians “ravaged the fields, set fire to all the neighbouring cities and gave free vent to his fury until he had burnt almost all the land in the island, from one sea to another.

“All the settlements were smashed to the ground with a great force of battering rams. All the inhabitants were destroyed by flashing swords and crackling flames. Those left alive fled, shattered by these dreadful disasters,” wrote Geoffrey in a work that, while inaccurate in terms of names and dates, may be illuminating in terms of more general themes.
⁹

Next, in the late twelfth century, the French writer Chrétien de Troyes in his
Story of the Grail
(sometimes also just called
Perceval
) describes the first truly Arthurian Waste Land associated with the castle/town the hero, Perceval, visits just before discovering the home of the Holy Grail—the so-called Grail Castle.

As a result of war and lack of food, the men-at-arms of the castle were “so weakened by famine and long vigils that they were wonderously changed.” And just as Perceval “found the land wasted and impoverished outside the walls [of the town], he found things no better within, for everywhere he went he saw the streets laid waste and the houses in ruins, for there was no man or woman to be seen. Thus he found the town desolate, without bread or pastry, without wine, cider or beer.”
¹⁰

A further account written in the thirteenth century,
The Perlesvaus
(sometimes called
The High History of the Grail
), describes “a waste land, a land stretching far and wide where there dwelt neither beasts nor birds, for the earth was so dry and so poor that there was no pasture to be found.” The walls of the huge city were “crumbling round about and the gates leaning with age.” It was “quite empty of inhabitants, its great palaces derelict and waste, its markets and exchanges empty, its vast graveyards full of tombs, its churches ruined.”
¹¹

Then, in a thirteenth-century addition to one of the manuscripts of
The Story of the Grail
(an addition known as
The Elucidation
), there is a further Waste Land story with a spectacularly Celtic flavor to it. Unlike the Geoffrey of Monmouth story or Chrétien de Troyes’ version, the advent of this particular Waste Land is set years before the time of Arthur—and it is Arthur’s Round Table knights who are said to have vowed to bring it back to health by rediscovering the Grail Castle.

The story starts with a wicked king and his men, who rape the mysterious, otherworldly maidens who guard a sacred well and who serve water in golden cups, virtual proto-Grails, to all travelers. The rape and the theft of the golden cups drive the maidens away and disrupt the flow of goodness from the wells. The wells dry up and the land becomes waste: “The kingdom [of Logres] turned to loss, the land was dead and desert in such wise as that it was scarce worth a couple of hazel-nuts. For they lost the voices of the wells and the damsels that were therein.”
¹²

Another thirteenth-century Arthurian romantic description appears in
The Quest for the Holy Grail
in which, for the first time, the Waste Land is regarded as a term of geographical nomenclature—a proper noun—and is seen as the direct result of the maiming of a king (ostensibly by a sword), though on this occasion it is set in a time before Arthur. It is also the occasion in which a great epidemic is seen to flow from the maiming: “This was the first blow struck by that sword in the Kingdom of Logres. And there resulted from it such a great pestilence and such a great persecution in both kingdoms that the earth no longer produced, when cultivated. From that time on, no wheat or other grain grew there, no tree gave fruit and very few fish were found in the sea. For this reason, the two kingdoms were called the Waste Land [for] they had been laid waste by this unfortunate blow.”
¹³

Another blow (ostensibly by a lance), the so-called dolorous stroke, features in the thirteenth-century
Merlin Continuation.
This assault, seen in the narrative as having occurred at the time of Arthur, was regarded as the cause of the Waste Land. Balaain (Balain), the knight with the two swords, is described as having seized the sacred lance (the weapon used to wound Christ on the Cross) in both hands. He “struck King Pellehan who was behind him so hard that he pierced both his thighs.” The king fell to the ground, severely wounded. Then the palace trembled and shook, a great voice was heard throughout the castle, and people fainted everywhere. “The true history says that they lay unconscious two nights and two days and of this great fear more than one hundred died in the palace.”

Balaain then left the castle. “As he rode thus through the land, he found trees down and grain destroyed and all things laid waste, as if lightning had struck in each place, and unquestionably it had struck in many places, though not everywhere.

“He found half the people in the villages dead, both bourgeois and knights, and he found labourers dead in the fields. He found the Kingdom of Listenois [Britain] so totally destroyed that it was later called by everyone the Kingdom of the Waste Land and the Kingdom of the Strange Land, because everywhere the land had become so strange and wasted.”
¹⁴

The Arthurian romances and other medieval Waste Land texts are all, of course, essentially nonhistorical.
¹⁵
Nonetheless, in terms of the period in which the action is set, in terms of the locations where the action takes place, and in terms of the mixture of famine, groin-area injury, pestilence, depopulation, and war, the idea of the Waste Land may have been partially derived, through oral and lost written accounts, from the real famine-hit, plague-ridden, war-torn, depopulated Waste Land of mid- to late-sixth-century southwest Britain.

T H E  B I R T H  O F
E N G L A N D

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight,

There burns no fire, no bed is made.

I weep awhile, and then am quiet.

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight,

No fire is lit, no candle burns,

God will keep me sane.

Cynddylan’s hall. It pierces me

To see it roofless, fireless.

Dead is my lord, and I am yet alive.

Cynddylan’s hall is desolate tonight

Where once I sat in honour.

Gone are the men who held it, gone the women.

Cynddylan’s hall. Dark is its roof

Since the English destroyed

Cynddylan, and Elvan of Powys.¹

A
Welsh poet whose name has been lost in the mists of time wrote these words, probably in the third quarter of the seventh century. They still speak across the centuries with tragic power about the end of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of what is now England. Cynddylan was a mid-seventh-century ruler of the central Welsh kingdom of Powys, and his hall (his royal palace) was almost certainly located in the city of Wroxeter—the same city that a century earlier had been hit by the plague.

The plague epidemic in the mid–sixth century and the fall of Wroxeter in the mid–seventh century are two events that at first sight appear unconnected. But nothing could be further from the truth, for it was the plague that fundamentally destabilized the geopolitics of Britain.

Whereas much of the British-ruled west was devastated, the Anglo-Saxon east was not. Almost certainly the plague did not reach the Anglo-Saxon part of the country until well into the seventh century.² Essentially, sixth-century Britain was an ethnically partitioned land. The contemporary British monk and historian Gildas wrote that pilgrims weren’t even able to visit sacred martyrial shrines in the east because of “the unhappy partition of Britain.” For virtually the entire sixth century (until the 590s) not a single west British monk is recorded as having even attempted to preach to the pagan Anglo-Saxons in the east.

On the whole, the British absolutely hated the Anglo-Saxons and refused to have much contact with them. Even abroad, several continental writers were shocked at the stubborn refusal of the British to dine with Anglo-Saxons or even to sleep under the same roof when they encountered each other abroad.

Gildas did not even like uttering the word
Saxon.
Speaking of “impious easterners,” “villains” with “dreadful claws,” he described them as “ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken), hated by man and God.”³ Indeed, he, and no doubt most other Britons in the west, would have dearly liked to see them exterminated.