Finding Arthur, page 27
It was while thinking through what might have happened at this time that I came to see how the matter of three days and three nights fit in. The Angles and the Picts had three days untrammeled by opposition before Arthur arrived.
When Arthur heard the Angle fleet had headed south he set off in pursuit with all the men he had available, without waiting for the rest of his army to return from its pursuit of the Angles and Picts who had headed for the hills.
If the Anglo-Pictish army marched ninety miles from Carpow to Benderloch in five days, then, by this same reckoning, Arthur’s army would have been able to cover the forty-two miles from Benderloch to Dunardry in about two days, despite the fact that Arthur’s army had only recently marched north and had only recently fought and won a major battle. Add to this the time it would have taken for the news that the Anglo-Picts had gone south to get to Benderloch, and we have a “perfect” three days from the time the Angles came ashore at Crinan to the time Arthur arrived to raise the siege.
We cannot know exactly how long it took Arthur to march south to relieve Dunardry-Dunadd; all we can say with certainty is that some time would have passed between the Battle of Agned-Breguoin and the raising of the siege of Badden-Dunadd-Dunardry, and that “three days” sounds about right.
Arthur’s flying column rode south along the line of the modern-day road and met the Angles and Picts where the road meets the Badden Burn in the shadow of Dunardry Hill, Mount Badon.
Badon-Badden was not much of a battle. The Angles and the Picts headed back to their ships when they heard Arthur was approaching, and Arthur’s vanguard fought only the Anglo-Pictish rearguard as they staged a fighting retreat to their ships. The Angles and Picts had staged a raid not an invasion, and they would have been foolish to engage Arthur in a pitched battle when all the time Scots reinforcements were arriving from the north. The Angles and the Picts had their plunder and had made their point, and so they sailed for home. Of course, in reality, they were beaten. As always, the victory was Arthur’s.
The now famous Battle of Badon, the battle that ended the second and final part of the Great Angle War, was, in fact, a bathetic event. It is really only famous because it is the last battle on Nennius’s list and the only one mentioned in the other early primary sources, Gildas’s De Excidio and the Annales Cambriae.
The above, necessarily somewhat speculative, account of the Battle of Badon is consistent with the evidence of Gildas and Nennius and with the three days and three nights of the Annales Cambriae. It is also consistent with the evidence that suggests Dunadd was where Arthur took a sword from a stone, and that the marshy land through which the River Add twists was Camelot.
Dunardry hillfort is connected to Merlin-Lailoken by the Battle of Arderydd, fought in 573, and to Arthur Mac Aedan by the inauguration ceremony in the following year. Dunadd, “Camelot,” and Dunardry all adjoin the land of Badden. How likely is it that all these things are mere coincidence?
It is likely that the Great Angle War was fought in the year or two that preceded 588, the year in which Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, fought and won the Battle of Badon. This is consistent with the non-supernatural passages in Gildas’s De Excidio, “From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies.”
Nennius listed twelve battles in which Arthur was commander. In all twelve of these battles Arthur was victorious. Of course, life is bound to have been more complicated than that. We may safely assume there were other peripheral skirmishes, fights, engagements, and lesser battles, in which Arthur was not in command of the forces that faced the Angles and that the Angles won some of these. So it is true to say that sometimes one side won and sometimes the other.
Gildas goes on to say that Badon Hill was “pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.”25 Apparently this passage is in especially tortuous Latin. It has certainly been much argued over. By my reconstruction, the Battle of Badon was indeed “pretty well” the last victory in the Great Angle War. It was also a bit of an anticlimax. We may reasonably suppose that after Badon-Badden there was the odd skirmish here and there but that, as far as The Great Angle War was concerned, the Battle of Badon-Badden as I have described it, was pretty well it.
As for the words, “certainly not the least”: why would these be necessary if someone had not suggested that Badon was the least of Arthur’s battles? No one ever says the Battle of Gettysburg was “certainly not the least” of the battles in the American Civil War, because no one would ever suggest it was. When someone says something is “not the least,” the one thing you can be sure of is that it is not the greatest either. Clearly the fact that Badon was only a relatively minor battle had arisen and given rise to some controversy. If it had not, Gildas’s denial of its lack of importance would have been otiose.
Having said that, Gildas’s Latin is so obscure it is impossible to be certain what exactly he was trying to say. Gildas was not interested in wars. Gildas was interested in religion. He probably only mentioned Badon to draw a line under it as the last Battle of the War, as if to say, “Well, that’s the War over with, now let us move on to more important matters,” before going back to moaning because people didn’t want to be Christians.
It is said that the Battle of Badon was followed by fifty years of peace. The Battle of Badon took place in about 588 (at least, by my account) and the Edinburgh of the Gododdin Britons fell to the Angles in 638: fifty years exactly. However, if there is one thing I have learned when writing this book, it is that sixth-century dates, like sixth-century names, are unreliable things and not to be trusted. Still, it is possible that the fifty years that separated the end of Great Angle War and the defeat of the Angles from the fall of Edinburgh and the victory of the Angles came to be called fifty years of peace, as if nothing had happened in between.
Before Badon, it was possible the Angles might conquer Scotland, as they were to conquer England in the next few centuries. If the Angles had conquered Scotland, Celtic-Britain as a significant entity would have ceased to exist, and today there would be only a Greater England with, perhaps, the last glimmers of Celtic culture clinging on along the western coasts.
After Badon, the danger of an Angle conquest of northern Britain ceased to exist for at least the ten years that preceded Gildas’s De Excidio.26 During this ten-year period, while many towns stood empty and ruined, there was, what Gildas calls, an unlooked for recovery.27
When next the Angles staged a full-blown invasion, in the mid-610s, they went south to what is now England, not north to Scotland, and so Scotland remained at “peace.” The Angles clearly remembered what Arthur had done to them the last time they went north.
In the south the Angles won the Battle of Chester or Carlisle around 615 and so cut off the Britons of the north from their southern cousins. In the next few centuries the Angles and their Saxon cousins pressed the British west into what is now Wales. The rest of the south of Britain became Angle-land, England.
So it was that Arthur and the Great Angle War determined the future of Britain. But for Arthur there would be no Scotland today, no Wales, perhaps even no Ireland, only a Greater England.
The Great Angle War ended with the Battle of Badon-Badden, but Arthur had still another campaign to fight—his last. Earlier, we saw that the capital of Dalriada was said to be the hillfort Dunadd, an opinion shared by Skene, although, as the toponymist William J. Watson said in the early twentieth century, some of the evidence Skene used referred to another site, the mysterious and unidentified Dun Monaidh. It is possible, indeed probable, that Dunardry is the mysterious Dun Monaidh and, even more famously, Mount Badon, the hill of hills.28
10
The Legend Is Born
THE SOURCE NENNIUS USED TO COMPILE HIS LIST OF ARTHUR’S BATTLES was probably based on an original created by someone who knew Arthur Mac Aedan. The Men of Manau were involved in other battles in the late sixth century, and so it would have been easy to inflate the number of battles in which Arthur was said to have been involved, but Nennius, and we must suppose Nennius’s source, mentions only twelve. He does not mention Arderydd or Delgon, because Arthur Mac Aedan was not in command in these battles; neither does he mention the naval action in which a Scots fleet attacked the Orkney Islands in the early 580s, because Arthur Mac Aedan, was not in command. Camlann, the legendary Arthur’s last battle, is omitted too. It is generally accepted that this is because Nennius’s source, whatever it was, was created before the Battle of Camlann was fought.
The twelve battles on the list are chronologically and geographically in order and lie within a sensible historical context and within literal striking distance of one another (in stark contrast to later writings, which have a southern Arthur fighting in Scandinavia, France, and Italy) provided, of course, that Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan. All this suggests some fundamental source written in the time of Arthur Mac Aedan. The question that arises is, Who created this source of evidence?
The most obvious candidate is Aneirin, the author of Y Gododdin, the poem that contains the earliest surviving reference to Arthur. There is just enough evidence to make a case for Aneirin, but that is all. There is not enough to say that the case is proved, at least not beyond reasonable doubt.
Aneirin flourished at the right time to create Nennius’s source. The last battle on Nennius’s list, the Battle of Badon, was fought around 588 (if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan). Arthur Mac Aedan died in 596. Nennius’s battle-list does not tell of Arthur’s last battle, and so, if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan, Nennius’s source was written before 596. The Catterick campaign that lies at the heart of Aneirin’s Y Gododdin was fought around the year 598. It is generally accepted that Aneirin wrote Y Gododdin around 600. This means it is possible Aneirin wrote the sources used by Nennius, sometime shortly before 596.
Aneirin was also in the right place to create Nennius’s source. It is generally accepted that Aneirin wrote Y Gododdin in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is only a few miles east of Stirling’s “Round Table” and a few miles north of the battlefields of the Great Angle War. Arthur’s Seat is in the middle of Edinburgh. Aneirin was in the right place to have known Arthur Mac Aedan and to have written about him.
The following, although somewhat speculative, is consistent with the slight evidence that survives.
Aneirin of the Flowing Verse, Prince of Poets, is almost invariably said to have been a Welshman, indeed his name is now stereotypically Welsh, but there is reason to doubt he was ever in Wales; indeed the little evidence that has survived suggests he was not.
The Britons who lived in the north of England had grown soft under Roman rule, while the Scots, who had never been conquered by Rome, had remained practiced fighters. Consequently, when the Romans left, the Scots increasingly raided British lands, and the Britons responded by bringing in Angle mercenaries from their German homes to provide them with protection. Before long the Angles became a greater threat to the Britons than the Scots had ever been; indeed by the mid-sixth century the Angles had become a threat to both the Britons and the Scots, and so the Britons and the Scots became allies.
Aneirin’s father, the warlord Dunod Fwr or Dunawd Bwr—that is, Dunod or Dunawd, the great or stalwart—was one of many Scots warlords who moved south and found employment bolstering the forces of the kingdom of Elmet in the north Pennines, against Angle pressure (just as Arthur’s grandfather Gabhran had been called upon to lead the Men of Manau a generation before). Dunod-Dunawd died around 593. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real name of Aneirin’s father has been forgotten, and that all we have left, Dunod or Dunawd, was really “of Dunadd” or “from Dunadd,” that is, Dunadd in Argyll. If he was a Scots warlord then this would make sense.
In “The Reciter’s Prologue” at the beginning of Y Gododdin, Aneirin is described as the “son of Dwywei.” This links him with the royal houses of the North of England. Dwywei, a princess of Elmet, the lands about modern Leeds, was the sister of Gwallog (r. 560–590), one of four “kings” who fought alongside Urien of Rheged, Rhydderch of Strathclyde, and Mordred of the Gododdin against the Angles at Lindisfarne in the late 560s.1 It appears that Aneirin’s father married into the royal house of the kingdom of Elmet just as Gabhran, Arthur’s grandfather, married a Pictish princess in Manau.
Dwywei was the mother of Deinioel, the patron saint of Bangor, who according to the Annales Cambriae died in 584. If Aneirin was Deinioel’s younger brother, these dates would fit well with those of a poet who flourished in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
Aneirin probably spent most of his boyhood in the north of England, although it may be he also spent some time among his father’s people. If he did, this would have allowed Aneirin to join Arthur Mac Aedan’s company, indeed, to have become Arthur’s friend and personal bard.
In his later years, despite many misgivings, Aneirin marched south with the Gododdin army to Catterick, when he must have known they were headed toward inevitable defeat. A man such as this, when he was a young man, would almost certainly have “charged to the sound of the guns.” In the sixth century the equivalent of sounding guns was the clash of shields, and, more often than not, this was where Arthur was to be found. It would have been only natural if a poet like Aneirin gravitated to Arthur, because Arthur was the most fruitful source of heroic material in the sixth century (and, indeed, as things would turn out, the most fruitful source of heroic material … ever). They would have been a perfect match, Arthur and Aneirin, the greatest warrior of the age and the greatest poet of the age. It is not possible to say with certainty that Aneirin was actually with Arthur Mac Aedan for all or indeed much of his career, but he was certainly in the right place at the right time to have heard about it firsthand.
In Y Gododdin Aneirin was scathing about those in authority. He seems to have been a man who pushed the envelope of tolerance to its limits. Luckily for him those in power needed the fighting men Aneirin championed and entertained with his work, and so, like one of Shakespeare’s fools, he was probably allowed some license. Arthur Mac Aedan was popular with his men because he brought them victory; Aedan, Arthur’s father, probably was not. Aedan was not primarily a warrior but a politician, and so he was less likely to be held in affection.
Older men, especially politicians like Aedan, a man known as “the wily,” have always been the butt of jokes made by younger men who do the fighting. A man like Aneirin probably played upon this by entertaining Arthur and his men with jokes and impersonations at the expense of the high command. Just as modern politicians have to put up with mockery, men like Aedan would have had to tolerate men like Aneirin, while pretending to enjoy the fun. Of course, given a free hand, things would be different, and when Arthur died Aedan had a free hand.
When Arthur died in 596, Aneirin lost his protector and became open to the vengeance of Aedan and the old, stolid men of the court whom he had ridiculed while he lived under Arthur’s shield. How would a hard, cynical politician like Aedan deal with a man like Aneirin when he no longer had to tolerate him? The answer must have been obvious to Aneirin, because within a year of Arthur’s death Aneirin was to be found hiring out his pen for cash in the dissolute court of the Gododdin. Aneirin had moved fast. He probably had to.
Of course it could be argued that Aneirin did not go to live among the Britons, because, as the conventional wisdom holds, he was already a man of the Britons. Until now I have always gone for the simplest explanation. Why then should I now place Aneirin with Arthur’s Scots and Men of Manau and then have to move him a few miles east and place him among the British Gododdin? Why not just accept that Aneirin was always a Briton? The answer to this question is, because even the Britons thought of Aneirin as a Scot.
It is unlikely that the sixteenth-century Greek painter, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, would have been called El Greco, The Greek, if he had stayed at home in Greece where there were a lot of … well, Greeks. He was called El Greco because he worked for much of his life in Spain, where he stood out as a Greek and so was given the sobriquet, El Greco.
An is Gaelic for the indefinite article “the.” Eirin is rooted in Éire, which, even today, is the Irish name for the island of Ireland.
At the turn of the sixth century, only a hundred years or so had passed since Fergus Mor’s Scots-Irish had invaded Argyll, and less that twenty-five years had passed since the Council of Drumceatt, when Scottish-Dalriada gained its independence from Irish-Dalriada. During this time and for a long time afterward, until at least the union of the Scots and the Picts in the ninth century, the designations Scottish and Irish were synonymous.
And so, just as we have El Greco, The Greek, we have An-Eirin, The Irishman, and just as the Spanish only called El Greco “the Greek,” because he was not Spanish, the Britons of the Gododdin called Aneirin, “the Irishman,” because, in their eyes, he was not a Briton.
Of course, it is always possible that Aneirin’s father’s Scots background led to him being nicknamed Aneirin, and that Aneirin inherited the sobriquet, but this is unlikely. Aneirin’s mother was British. If he lived for most of his life among his mother’s people, it is unlikely he would have been marked out as very different. If however he spent much of his life among his father’s Scots, as Arthur’s friend and bard as the evidence suggests, and only came back to live among Britons late in life, it is likely he would have been distinguished as An-Eirin.
Aneirin was killed by an ax-blow to the head, inflicted by someone called Eidyn or, and this is more likely, by someone of or from Eidyn, that is, of or from Edinburgh (the assassin’s real name has been lost). This suggests that Aneirin died in Edinburgh (or at least somewhere where there was a man with an Edinburgh connection). This could be Wales, but this must be considered unlikely.
