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The point at which the myth of Arthur begins does not, in its first appearance, hold any mention of the king. It does not, in fact, hold the name of a hero at all. It occurs in the pages of a treatise by a monk writing in the middle of the sixth century; his name was Gildas, and the name of his book De Excidio Britanniae. The book is largely made up of exhortations to the Britons and of denunciations of their wicked kings, but these are preceded by a brief history of Britain since the coming of the Romans. He speaks of the withdrawal of the Romans, of the Saxon invasions, and of the wars between the Saxons and the Britons. The Britons were almost continuously defeated—many killed, some enslaved, some fugitives in the mountains or in exile beyond the sea—until they found a leader called Ambrosius Aurelianus. He was the descendant of a noble Roman family, but himself not notable until this crisis arose. He had some success against the Saxons, and established with them a kind of uncertain equality in the field. ‘The battles’, says Gildas, ‘were sometimes won by my countrymen and sometimes by the enemy.’ This state of affairs lasted until the obsessio Badonici montis—the siege of Mount Badon. ‘What was almost the last—though not the least—destruction of our cruel foes took place there.’ Gildas adds that his own birth happened at this time. He mentions a period of forty-four years and one month, but scholars are divided whether this is meant to conclude in or begin from the battle. It would be convenient to the myth to suppose it the latter.

After the victory of Mount Badon, Gildas continues, the Britons, those who had known both the invasion and the victory, for some time ‘lived orderly’ in their several vocations—kings, magistrates, priests, other clerics, and all the commons in general. 6 By the time Gildas was writing, however, another generation—some twenty or thirty years younger than he—had grown up. They had not known the danger or the deliverance, and (as younger generations are always said to do) they behaved less well. ‘Laws’, said Gildas in the very voice of a man of almost fifty, ‘are now shaken and turned upside down, and there is no virtue anywhere.’ He enlarged on this theme for the rest of his work, giving—it must be admitted—a number of horrid particulars.

We have then in Gildas a picture of the over-running of Britain by the Saxons until a rally under a leader of Roman descent holds them off, and prepares for ‘the siege of Mount Badon’ after which the Saxons are unable again to make head. The troubles in the time of Gildas did not arise so much from them as from civil wars between the patriots. The descendants of Ambrosius Aurelianus, degenerate as Gildas held them to be, were still capable of dealing with the pagans from beyond sea. But there is in all this no word of Arthur.

That name occurs for the first time four centuries later, and is still not that of a king. In the ninth century another monk, called Nennius, wrote a similar history, but in more detail. He gives the story of the calling in of the Saxons, under their leaders Hengist and Horsa, by the British Vortigern; of the marriage of Vortigern to Rowena, Hengist’s daughter; of the new arrivals of Saxons in force; of the outbreak of war and of the defeat of the Britons. He too speaks of a rally, but under a leader Vortimer; he mentions Ambrosius later, however, as ‘king among all the kings of the Britons’. The war desperately continues, until the rise of a new hero. Nennius goes on:

‘Then Arthur fought with the Saxons, alongside the kings of the Britons, but he himself was the leader in the battles. The first battle was on the banks of the river which is called Gelin. The next four were on the banks of another river, which is called Dubylas and is in the region Linnius. The sixth was on a river which is called Bossa. The seventh was in the wood of Celidon; that is, Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was by Castle Guinnion, in which Arthur carried on his shoulders an image of St. Mary Ever-Virgin, and on that day the 7 pagans were put to flight, and there was a great slaughter of them, through the strength of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the holy Mary His Maiden-Mother. The ninth was in the City of the Legion. The tenth was on the bank of the river which is called Tribiut. The eleventh was on the hill called Agned. The twelfth was on Mount Badon, in which—on that one day—there fell in one onslaught of Arthur’s nine hundred and sixty men; and none slew them but he alone, and in all the battles he remained victor.’

Another MS. adds that before Badon

‘Arthur had gone to Jerusalem, where he had caused to be made a cross of the same size as the life-giving Cross, and after it had been consecrated he had fasted and kept vigil and prayed by it for three days together, asking that by this wood the Lord would give him victory over the pagans, which was so done. And he carried with him the image of St. Mary.’

Nennius has a few more things to say of Arthur. He records certain wonderful things of which he had heard or which he had seen in the Britain of his day; that is, in South Wales. One is

‘a marvel in the region which they call Buelt. For there is a heap of stones, and on the top of the heap one stone bearing the footprint of a dog. When they hunted the boar Troynt, Cabal which was the dog of Arthur the soldier, put his foot on that stone and marked it; and Arthur afterwards piled up a heap of stones and that stone on top, on which was his dog’s footprint, and called it Carn Cabal. And men will come and carry away that stone for a day and a night, and the next morning there it is back again on its heap.’

Another wonder is in the district called Ercing.

‘There is a burial mound near a spring which is known as Licat Anir, and the name of the man who is buried in the mound was called Anir. He was the son of the soldier Arthur, and Arthur himself killed him there and buried him. And when men come to measure the length of the mound, they find it sometimes six feet, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, and sometimes fifteen. Whatever length you find it at one time, you will find it different at another, and I myself have proved this to be true.’

(The last statement is one of those mind-shattering things one finds in history. ‘Et ego solus probavi.’ Nennius has been careful enough all through to say that ‘it is said’ or ‘which is called’. He says nothing about proving the tale of the stone. And then, as it were unnecessarily, he dares his reader to disbelieve him on this one point. Was the sentence added later? Was he, suddenly and wildly, a liar? Was there some simple, but obscure, explanation? Or was there something very odd about that burial-ground?)

Another document, a century later than Nennius, the Annales Cambriae, has two entries, in the second of which is an additional statement about Arthur. The entries are:

‘518: The battle of Badon in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for three days and three nights, on his shoulders, and the Britons were the victors.

‘549: The battle of Camlaun in which Arthur and Medraut were slain; and there was death in England and Ireland.’

These are the early records or appearances of record. The fact that Gildas does not mention Arthur was attributed in the twelfth century to a personal—or rather a family—enmity. The brother of Gildas was said to have been killed by Arthur in a feud, and it was added that Gildas wrote as he did about the kings of Britain because of this killing, and that he had thrown into the sea ‘those books in which he had written of the deeds of Arthur and his countrymen’. This is why there is in his work no authentic history of the king. But by this time the myth had begun to come seriously into being, and it was as necessary to explain the apparent omissions as to invent occasional allusions. It is certain that Gildas does not mention him; we cannot certainly say whether this was because he was at feud with him, or because he did not know of him, or because there had never been any Arthur for him to know.

History, however, has of late inclined to let us believe in the reality of Arthur. The late R. G. Collingwood, in the first volume of the Oxford History of England, put forward a convincing 9 suggestion. He argued that the evidence we have of his battles becomes clear as soon as we ‘envisage Arthur as the commander of a mobile field-army’. At that period the Roman High Command was, in its European wars, using cavalry to a greater and greater extent. ‘The late Empire was in fact the age which established the ascendancy of heavy cavalry, clothed in chain-mail, over infantry. Already in the first twenty years of the century the count of Britain commanded six regiments of cavalry to three of infantry, and anyone thereafter, reviving his office with some knowledge of what it implied, would know that a count of Britain should be a cavalry general.’ Professor Collingwood went on to point out that, even without this special intention, a very small experience of contemporary warfare would expose the advantage of a mounted force. The local levies, defending particular towns, would have none. The highland tribes had none. The Saxon invaders certainly had none, just as they had no body-armour, and very little tactical cohesion. ‘Any one who could enrol on his own initiative a band of mail-clad cavalry, using as mounts the ordinary horses of the lowland zone and relying for armament on the standard work of contemporary smiths, and could persuade the British kings of their value, might have done what Arthur is said to have done.’ The list of battles in Nennius suggests that his mobile field-army moved, as it could do, all over the country, and was able to strike at different places. The final crashing victory at Mount Badon may mean that the Saxons had at last managed to confine this force to ‘some British hill-fort, reconditioned, as Cissbury was, for defence against the invaders’. The phrases describing it—‘one onslaught of Arthur’s’, ‘none but he alone’—may suggest that in this last battle he was not supporting some local king, but operating solely with his own force.

The site of Badon cannot be fixed. It has been supposed to be on a line of British earthworks running from the Bristol Channel to the Marlborough Downs near Newbury. It has been identified with Bath, with Badbury Ring, with other Badburys, with Bedwyn, with Baydon, Beedon, Bowdon, and 10 Bown Hill. All is very doubtful; on the whole, Liddington Hill, which has a Badbury near it, and might threaten a Saxon advance to the West, seems as good a guess as any and better than some.

We have then, to put all together, at least a possibility, behind the chronicles and the hypotheses—and perhaps rather more than a possibility—of an historic figure. The Saxon invaders, after a period of almost complete victory, had been checked by a chieftain, local but still notable among the British chiefs, of Romano-British descent. For some time after his success, the war hung level. There then came into prominence a man with a capacity for seeing and seizing military advantages. His name was Arthur; he too may have been of Roman descent, since the name Arturus belongs to a Roman gens. He raised a force of mounted men, and went to the aid of the kings, when and how the military situation required. Eventually the Saxons were compelled to make an advance in strength into the west. The Captain-General took up a position on a fortified hill threatening this advance. The enemy besieged, or attempted to besiege, this hill. They were defeated, and wholly routed by a final cavalry charge led by Arthur himself. The result of the battle was that they retired to their own part of the country, and that for thirty or forty years the Britons were left in comparative peace, under the prestige of the Captain-General. During the earlier part of that time, the organizations of their State (or States) operated freely and effectively. But afterwards disputes and wars broke out among them, in one of which Arthur was killed. The cavalry, after this, either no longer existed or had no adequate leader. The Saxons renewed their attacks; the divided and warring Britons could put up no sufficient defence; and presently the invaders subdued and occupied the whole country except the extreme West. But the memory, and indeed the name, of Arthur still remained as a fable of the past and a prophecy of the future.

It was, however, by no means certain that that name would last, still less that it would enter into a great literature. It might 11 have faded under the Saxons, let alone under the Normans. It was not to fade, and the time of decision was the twelfth century. Up to then Tennyson’s later lines describe the situation not inaptly:

that grey king whose name, a ghost,

Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,

And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.

Many names, so streaming, have not been re-imaged in poetry or even convincing prose. This name seems first to have been raised to royalty about 1075 (as far as our records go), in a Legenda Sancti Goeznovii, or rather in the historical prelude to the life of the saint. There the pride of the Saxons (‘pagans and devilish men’—soon after the Norman Conquest) is crushed ‘per magnum Arturum Britonum regem’, a precursor, as it were, of the Conqueror. Arthur proceeds to win other victories in Gaul as well as in Britain, after which, he having been ‘ab humanis actibus evocato’, the Saxons return. The phrasing is of some interest; the King is called away from human activity; he is not absolutely said to have died. It was still about this time currently reported by some of the poor who knew and repeated the name that he was to return. There is a tale, of about 1146, recounting events of 1113, which shows this. The canons of Laon, wishing to rebuild their cathedral, sent some of their number to England to raise funds, taking with them certain relics of Our Lady of Laon. They came to Devonshire; they heard of the tales of the Britons concerning ‘the famous King Arthur’. At Bodmin a man with a withered arm came to be healed by the holy relics. He and one of the visitors—Haganellus, related to the lord Guy, archdeacon of Laon—fell into a dispute. The man with the withered arm maintained that Arthur still lived; it seems likely, though we have no details, that the archdeacon’s relative told him not to be such a fool. There was a demonstration in force by the man’s friends; they rushed into the church ‘cum armis’, and there would have been bloodshed if a cleric named Algard had not somehow managed 12 to interfere. It was clearly felt in Bodmin that foreigners had no business to sneer at local tradition. But the foreigners had the last victory. Our Lady of Laon was displeased; and ‘the man who had the withered arm, who had caused the tumult on behalf of Arthur, was not healed’.

The man made such trouble ‘as the Britons make with the French about King Arthur’, the chronicle says. The Britons are, no doubt, the Bretons, and it follows that the tale was already widely known in that part of Europe. But it had—or certain names had—spread even more widely.