The Mammoth Book of King Arthur (2 page)

The great puzzle

Arthur lived at that one period of British history when historians looked the other way. In fact, apart from a few Continental writers who commented briefly upon the state of
Britain in the fifth century, there is only one possible contemporary of Arthur whose work survives – Gildas, who is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Unfortunately, Gildas was not interested
in recording history, and certainly not in noting dates, being more concerned with reprimanding the aberrant rulers whose waywardness had brought down the wrath of God by way of the Saxon invasion.
Even more unfortunately for the Arthurian scholar, Gildas doesn’t mention Arthur at all.

Nothing significant by any other contemporary writer survives, apart from a few church writings which tell us virtually nothing about the state of Britain. Even the surviving text of
Gildas’s work dates from the eleventh century, five hundred years after he wrote it. The same is true for other surviving texts, especially the Welsh Annals and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as
the copies we have were created several centuries later from long-lost sources. No matter how diligent the copyists were, mistakes
could have crept in – in fact, some
mistakes are all too obvious, as we shall see.

Then there is the problem of names – both personal and place names. Any individual could be known by a title, a personal name or a nickname. For instance, the name of the British king
Vortigern is possibly not a name at all but a title meaning High King. Likewise the names of the Saxon chieftains, Hengist and Horsa, were probably nicknames; both names mean horse (or, more
precisely in Hengist’s case, stallion). This is more common than you might think. “Genghis Khan” was actually a title meaning “very mighty ruler”; the great Mongol
ruler’s real name was Temujin. Perhaps the same happened with Arthur. It’s fine if we know the alternative names and titles for people, but hopeless if we don’t. How do we know
when we come across a new name that it isn’t someone we already know? In the time of Arthur and in later writings about his period, the name could be recorded in Celtic (both British and the
later Welsh variant), Latin or Anglo-Saxon. If these variants are also used for titles, real names and nicknames, then it means one individual could be called by nine different names, and that
doesn’t allow for misspellings, copyists’ errors or mistaken identity. The same applies to place names, which are further complicated by their having evolved over time, and by many
places throughout Britain having the same name. Just think how many rivers are called Avon or towns called Newtown. If original Celtic or local names have died out and been superseded by Saxon or
Norman names, and no documentation survives to identify the place, then tracking it down is as likely as winning the lottery.

The biggest problem is one of dates. The method of recording years from the birth of Christ may seem simple today, but it wasn’t in the fifth century and had only really been introduced a
few decades before. Copyists trying to update records from ancient documents encountered several problems. Firstly, they could not be sure whether the year recorded was calculated from the birth of
Christ or from his baptism, usually treated as twenty-eight years later, or from his death and resurrection, variously thirty-three or thirty-five years later. Thus a year recorded as, say, 460
years from the “incarnation” of Christ could, by our reckoning, be 432, 427 or 425.

Some annals recorded events on an Easter cycle. The dates for Easter more or less repeat themselves every nineteen years. But it was entirely possible, if working from an
incomplete manuscript, to lose track of which Easter cycle was being covered. The copyist would use his best judgement, but could be out by 19 years. This is certainly evident in early entries in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as we shall see.

Finally, the copyist might simply misread a figure, especially if working from a crumpled or charred document all but destroyed in a Viking raid. Years were usually recorded in Roman numerals,
but it’s easy to make a mistake, copying
ccclxviii
(368), for example, as, perhaps,
ccclxxiv
(374). Once the mistake is made and the original lost, who is there to correct
it?

This problem about dates, which will keep resurfacing, is crucial to identifying Arthur, because we need to know when he lived and how his life related to other events. Imagine a future
historian trying to understand events if the outbreak of World War II were placed 28 years earlier, in 1911, or 28 years later in 1967? How could you possibly relate it to individuals’
lives?

The events of the fifth century were every bit as critical to those living then as World War II is to us. The Roman Empire, which had existed for over 400 years, was crumbling and so-called
“barbarians” were taking over Europe. To individuals at that time the world was collapsing about them and chaos reigned. To help us interpret it and get back to what really happened, we
need to understand the complete history and geography of those times. The secret to identifying Arthur is to find the right name in the right place at the right time, and it’s those three
criteria which we need to tackle at the start of this book.

Where do we start?

The search for the real Arthur – and the legendary one – will take us through a mass of material, some of it detailed and much of it complicated. Piecing together
the Arthurian world is like trying to complete a jigsaw in which a lot of the pieces are missing. Many of those that remain may have only a partial picture, some may have the picture re-drawn, and
some belong to another
jigsaw entirely. We have to look at each piece in detail and see what it is, whether it fits and, if so, where it fits.

First, let’s start by looking at the big picture. It will help us keep things in perspective and give us a framework within which to fit the pieces.

If we are to find the real Arthur, we need to look somewhere in the two hundred years between the end of Roman administration of Britain, a date usually assigned as 410
AD
, and the emergence of the Saxon kingdoms, which were taking a strong hold by the start of the seventh century.

The general history of those two centuries can be described fairly easily, and that is our big picture. After the passing of Roman authority Britain sank into a period of decline. There were
civil unrest, plague and famine, and Britain – i.e., the territory south of Hadrian’s Wall – was constantly under threat of invasion by Germanic forces from the east, the Irish
(Scotii) from the west and the Picts from the north. By the middle of the fifth century the Saxons and other tribes had gained a hold on territory in the east, and progressively, over the next
hundred years or so, infiltrated Britain, pushing the British nobility west, primarily into Wales and Cornwall, and Brittany. The British, though weakened by their own strife, put up a resistance
under various leaders. One Briton in particular managed to defeat the Saxons so significantly at Badon, sometime towards the end of the fifth century, that the Saxon advance was halted. For a
period of at least twenty-five years the British held their ground, and the Saxons did not advance further for at least a generation. From the middle of the sixth century, the Saxons advanced again
and – presumably after the death of Arthur – began to win territory in the west. After a series of battles in the west (Dyrham in 577 and Chester in 615) and the north, the British were
divided. Soon after 600 the powerful warlord Athelfrith established his own kingdom of Northumbria, stretching across northern Britain. The heartland of Britain, where a few Celtic enclaves
struggled on, was also crushed by the Northumbrians and the next wave of Angles, who created the kingdom of Mercia under Penda. By 625, the territory later to be called England was under Saxon
control.

During these two hundred years several British kingdoms emerged. We know some better than others, depending on what
records have survived. Perhaps not surprisingly, the best
known were those in Wales, which survived beyond the Arthurian age and well into the Middle Ages. The major kingdoms were Gwynedd (originally called Venedotia) in the north, Powys along the Welsh
Marches, Dyfed (originally Demetia) in the south-west and Gwent in the south-east. There were several smaller Welsh kingdoms, such as Ceredigion, Builth and Brycheiniog, all of which will feature
in our explorations, but the history of Wales is really the history of those four main kingdoms.

In the south-west of Britain was the kingdom of Dumnonia, primarily Devon and Cornwall but also, for much of the fifth century, covering parts of Dorset and Somerset.

There were also several kingdoms in the north. The Scottish Highlands remained the domain of the Picts, but between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall further north there were three main
British kingdoms: the Gododdin (originally called the Votadini) in the east, with centres at Traprain Law and Din Eityn (Edinburgh), Strathclyde (originally Alclud) in the west, with its centre at
Dumbarton, and Galloway in the south-west. At some stage Galloway seems to have become part of the kingdom of Rheged, which at its height stretched from Galloway, down through Cumbria and into
Lancashire, probably as far as Chester, and thus bordering onto Gwynedd and Powys.

These were the main Celtic kingdoms to survive through the Dark Ages. There were further kingdoms in the east of Britain, but we know much less about these, because they were the first to be
overrun by the Saxons and the cultures soon merged. The main eastern kingdom in the north was York (originally Ebrauc). To the north of York was Bryneich, in Northumbria; to the south was Lindsey
(originally Linnuis), which covered much of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. To the west of Lindsey was Elmet, based around Leeds, one of the last British kingdoms to survive in England. There were other
smaller kingdoms north of Elmet, in the Pennines, one of which will prove of some interest to us, but no formal record of them survives.

To the south was a kingdom stretching from London into Essex and parts of Suffolk. There was also a kingdom in Kent, though this hardly seems to have started before it was snuffed out. Beyond
these it is probable that there were kingdoms based
in the Chilterns, Oxford, Gloucester, Sussex and so on. The map opposite shows the approximate location of these kingdoms,
but we do not know for certain their extent. Their boundaries remained fluid depending on the individual warlord’s power.

The importance of these kingdoms is that if Arthur really was a king, then he must have ruled one of these territories. Not all the pedigrees survive; the best preserved are for the Welsh
kingdoms and those of the North. We do not know the names of any of the rulers of London, for instance, and even the one name for a ruler of Kent is somewhat dubious. We will encounter several
people with a name like Arthur in the pedigrees, all of whom I outline in the first chapter, but whether any of them is the real Arthur, or whether the real Arthur was a composite of them or of any
other characters, is something that we need to explore.

At this stage we can think of Arthur solely as a British resistance leader. Whether he mustered that resistance from Cornwall, Wales or the North is something else we will have to consider.
Whether he did this in the late fifth or early sixth century, or perhaps another time, we will also have to deduce.

There are plenty of clues, but none of them is straightforward, and some are very misleading. And it’s dangerous to leap straight in and expect the clues to declare themselves. We have to
go looking for them, and we have to go armed with some basic information. First we need to consider the name Arthur itself.

Note on Spelling

Whilst I have tried to retain a consistent and generally recognizable form of spelling for all of the names used (e.g. Guenevere, Lancelot, Bedivere) there is such a huge
variance in these names across the mass of Arthurian literature that when citing a character from a specific work I have used the spelling used there. This is especially confusing with Celtic names
where spelling has changed over the generations and where there is not really a consistent or generally accepted spelling. On occasions I may use both forms of names (e.g. Dumnagual or Dyfnwal)
depending on the source but have endeavoured to cross reference within the text. Both the Index and the entries in Chapter 23 and 24 list all variants.

SECTION 1

THE HISTORICAL ARTHUR

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO ARTHUR – WHAT’S IN A NAME?

1. Myth, History and Mystery

You will find in the course of this book that we encounter several Arthurs. There’s not just one Arthur of legend, for a start, and there’s certainly not one Arthur
of history.

The Arthur we remember from our childhood reading is, for the most part, a fiction. Most of us know the basic legend from Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur.
Arthur was born of a
deceitful relationship. With the help of the magician Merlin, Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon, king of Britain, was able to take on the guise of Gorlois, duke of Cornwall, and seduce
Gorlois’ wife Ygraine. After Uther’s death, there was a contest to find the next king, who would be the one who could pull the sword out of the stone. All the champions and dukes tried
and failed but young Arthur, still only fifteen, succeeded. Not all of the dukes and other rulers were happy about this, and Arthur had to fight for his kingdom. But he won and, for a while, ruled
happily and wisely. Thanks to Merlin, Arthur acquired the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, the scabbard of which protected him from harm. He established the Round Table of brave and
valorous knights, including Sir Kay, Sir Bedivere, Sir Gawain, Sir Bors, Sir Tristram and, of course, Sir Lancelot. We learn of the adventures of these knights, saving damsels and fighting
villains, and we follow the quest for the Holy Grail. But there is a dark side. Arthur’s queen, Guenevere, fell in love with her champion, Lancelot, and those knights who disliked Lancelot
plotted against
him. These included Arthur’s illegitimate son Sir Mordred, whose mother, Margawse, was the wife of King Lot of Orkney and Arthur’s half-sister.
Mordred, caught up in the scheming of other knights, especially Sir Agravaine, revealed the truth about Lancelot to Arthur, and Guenevere was sentenced to burn at the stake. She was rescued by
Lancelot, but in the fracas Gawain’s brothers were killed. Lancelot exiled himself to France, but Arthur, urged on by Gawain, followed, allowing Mordred to usurp the kingdom. Arthur returned
to do battle with Mordred and was mortally wounded at the battle of Camlann. The heroes of the Round Table not already killed in the war with Lancelot lay dead, all but Bedivere who returned
Arthur’s sword to the Lady of the Lake. Arthur was taken to the Isle of Avalon where his wounds would be cured, and one day he will return. Thus he is remembered as the Once and Future
King.