Finding Arthur Read online

  Anyone who, like me, believes in democracy not monarchy and in people not the supernatural will find it easier to picture a pre-Christian Arthurian Britain than someone like Queen Victoria’s Historiographer Royal for Scotland, W. F. Skene, would have. A man in thrall to organized religion, Skene had a Christian Monarchist blinker on one eye and a British Monarchist blinker on the other. Even so, there are places in his work where it seems he might have known the truth but been too cautious to say it, lest he lose his prospects of further preferment. Even the great Charles Darwin waited twenty years before publishing his ideas about evolution because he was wary of the Church’s potential reaction.

  If the search for Arthur in the south of Britain was ever in a period of upward momentum, it would now be possible to say that it has ground to a halt. Some southern-leaning historians claim there was no historical Arthur, others that there was no single historical Arthur but lots of proto-Arthurs. At best they are reduced to relying upon some soul’s slight echo in history to found their claims.

  The dearth of substantial evidence in the South has not led to a vigorous search for evidence in the North. In the North, fear of being labeled parochial shrivels “scholarly” inquiry. Fortunately, now that evidence is more widely available, popular culture has started to place Arthur in Scotland, in films like the otherwise risible King Arthur in 2004. But despite the fact that many of them are as clever as screenwriters, professional historians do not appear to be as open to new ideas or, indeed, evidence.

  Living in Scotland I was well-placed to find evidence, literally, on the ground. Indeed I had so much evidence while writing Finding Merlin that I neglected to say that the purportedly magical spring of Barenton, where Merlin is supposed to have met a woman called Vivienne and which is said to be in the forest of Brocéliande in France, is really in Barnton, Edinburgh. The spring is still there, for all to see.

  Medieval writers added romance and magic to their stories for the same reason that modern screenwriters add special effects to their films—these additions are popular with audiences. I have tended to ignore the magical references in the sources because magical things do not happen in real life. And while I believe in romance, I have also treated romantic events in the Arthurian canon with skepticism, because in real life such things do not happen nearly so often.

  We in the twenty-first century have been saturated with film and television from an early age, so we’re more aware of how storytelling works and how powerful the “front office” can be. Things were much the same in the Middle Ages, except that audiences were more gullible. To the same extent that producers of modern films dare not upset powerful commercial interests, men like Thomas Malory, who wrote perhaps the most influential Arthurian book of them all, Le Morte d’Arthur, dared not challenge the predominant powers of his day, the aristocracy and the Church. I have allowed for the fact that writers like Malory obscured and omitted truths they might have told openly because they were afraid such truths would have upset the powers-that-were.

  According to Lewis Thorpe, in his introduction to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, “Geoffrey had several clear-cut political reasons for what he wrote … [including] his wish to ingratiate himself with his various dedicatees.”2 Geoffrey did not set Arthur’s birth at Tintagel in Cornwall, England, because Tintagel had anything to do with Arthur. He did so because the castle belonged to a relative of his patron.

  Nor did Malory say Merlin was acting under the orders of a Christian archbishop when he organized the sword and the stone event because the addition of an archbishop improved Malory’s story. It did not, as evidenced by the fact that the archbishop is conspicuously missing from every modern depiction of this event. Malory inserted an archbishop to keep the Church from persecuting him. In my research, I have allowed for such biases.

  I have also given less weight to evidence that seemed “too good to be true,” unless there was other evidence weighing in its favor. Arthur and Mordred fighting in single combat to the death at the Battle of Camlann seemed too much like the kind of thing a modern screenwriter would add to a story for it to be believable.

  If an account favored a writer’s personal interests I have treated it as suspect, and I have given special weight to evidence that went against such interests. Fortunately for history, the Church only required that writers not alarm the largely uneducated majority, as distinct from the nobility, and so self-censoring writers only removed from their work the more obvious challenges to established opinion. As a result, while the only evidence we have available today has been percolated through Christianity, it includes information that these writers overlooked or were too lazy to delete. There is just enough left to re-root the story of Arthur in its proper place and time.

  The life of Arthur and the legends that grew up around his name cannot be understood without reference to the various forms of Christianity that were making inroads among the people of Britain and Ireland in the sixth century. I have nothing to say about modern Christianity in any of its many manifestations or about anyone who professes to be a Christian today. My only interest is in those who promulgated the various forms of Christianity that vied for power in the sixth century.

  The Celtic pre-Christian Arthur—the Arthur the novelist Bernard Cornwall called the “Enemy of God”—was a challenge to the churchmen who controlled Western society from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. For this reason, Arthur’s origins were disguised. It is difficult for us, steeped in Christianity as we are, to believe that the Church–State partnership that dominated Western Europe for so long under the brand-name Christendom expunged the historical Arthur from the record and created an alternative Arthur in its own image, but that’s exactly what happened.

  Other peoples may justly claim foundation myths of equal power to the Arthurian Cycle: the Mahabharata of the Indians; the Iliad of the Greeks; the sagas of the Icelanders; The Five Books of the Chinese; the Nihongi of the Japanese; and, less well known, the epic of the Mongol peoples that tells of the valiant Geser, who ruled the legendary Kingdom of Ling. However, only the Arthurian story-cycle has survived the molestations of a bitter rival with the power to reward and punish in this life and the ability to convince people that its baleful influence would follow them beyond the grave. That rival is of course Christianity. The Arthurian cycle survived Christianity. This makes the Arthurian cycle special.

  I use the term Scots to designate members of a particular sixth-century group, and it should not be confused with today’s Scots. Today, at least in my opinion, the term Scot includes all people who have made their home in Scotland and want to be part of the Scottish community, as well as those who live elsewhere but feel at home in Scotland and want to be called Scots. On the other hand, what we now know as Scotland and England did not exist in the sixth century, and so rather than continually say “what is now Scotland” and “what is now England,” when I say Scotland and England I mean the areas covered by the modern countries.

  Without William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, Scotland would have died. Without Arthur and Merlin, it would not have been born. Scotland is only a small country on the edge of Europe, but if it had ceased to exist as an independent nation or had never been at all, then there would have been no Camelot. Not the place called Camelot but the ideal that is Camelot.

  I believe Richard Dawkins is right when he encourages us to always demand evidence. If the evidence I have found stands up and my reasoning is sound, then 10 percent of British history should be rewritten, the foundation myth of the English-speaking world flies away, and everything is different.

  1

  The Four Horsemen of History

  THE STORY OF “KING” ARTHUR IS THE FOUNDATION MYTH OF THE English-speaking Western world. Almost everyone knows about Arthur, Merlin, and Camelot; their story was told in one of the first books printed in English, and for more than five hundred years it has not fallen out of favor. It changed over the centuries as it was told and retold, a
nd it was written and rewritten in innumerable manuscripts for the best part of a thousand years before ever it came to be fixed in print. The result is that the Arthur best known today is a fictional figure: an English, Christian, medieval king.

  The historical Arthur—if there was a historical Arthur (the matter is much disputed)—should be looked for somewhere in the middle of the first millennium, somewhere in Britain. Almost everyone agrees about this, but there almost all agreement ends. Until recently most of those who have looked for the historical Arthur have been Christian, Anglophile monarchists, and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, they have concluded that Arthur was a Christian English king (when they have not concluded that he did not exist). However, just as it is often said that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, Roman, or an empire, there is evidence that suggests Arthur was not a Christian, an Englishman or a king.

  What is the truth about Arthur? Was he a historical figure? If he was, then who was he, when did he live, where did he live, what did he do, why did he do it, and who did he do it to?

  THE EARLIEST DIRECT evidence of the man who became the legendary Arthur is the poem Y Gododdin written around 600 CE by the bard Aneirin in the land of the Gododdin, which included modern Edinburgh.

  Of the thousands of male and female bards in the sixth century, the names of only five survive: Talhaearn Tad Awen; Bluchbard; Cian; Taliesin, and Aneirin. Of these five the works of Talhaearn Tad Awen; Bluchbard and Cian are entirely lost. Of the works of Taliesin and Aneirin only a small number of poems have survived and these only in much amended forms. It is a tragedy of epic proportions (literally) that lifetimes of work by countless bards have fallen prey to the vicissitudes of time and the depredations of Christians who calculatingly destroyed what they did not want people to see, lest people learn what the Christian Church did not want them to know: that there was another way, that things did not have to be the way they were.

  Aneirin’s most famous poem, Y Gododdin, describes a disastrous campaign waged by the Gododdin Britons against the Angles. Having praised warrior after warrior in verse after verse, Aneirin delivers near the end of his poem, with reference to a warrior called Gwawrddur, the most devastating one-line introduction in literature:

  He charged before three hundred of the foe,

  He cut down both center and wing,

  He excelled in the forefront of the noblest host.

  He gave from his herd steeds for winter.

  He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fort.

  But he was no Arthur.

  Arthur, it seems, was the standard by which heroes were measured at the turn of the sixth century in eastern Scotland.

  Y Gododdin also contains one of the earliest references to Myrddin, a man indelibly linked to the legendary Arthur and better known as Merlin. In the poem, Myrddin-Merlin makes a financial contribution to the campaign. “Myrddin of song, sharing the best / Part of his wealth, our strength and support.”1

  De Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain) by Gildas, a Christian fanatic, contains the earliest surviving indirect reference to Arthur. This reference is only “indirect” because Arthur is not named. Gildas refers only to the Battle of Badon, one of the legendary Arthur’s most famous victories: “From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies … This lasted up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.”2

  De Excidio is more a concentrated rant against everything Gildas disapproved of than an attempt to write a sensible account of historical events, but it is the only contemporary history of the sixth century we have. The received wisdom places the writing of De Excidio in the first half of the century, around the year 540, although Michael Winterbottom of Oxford University says, of Gildas, “we cannot be certain of his date, of where he wrote, of his career, or even his name.”3

  Whatever its origins, De Excidio has been enormously influential. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in 731 by Bede, a monk of Jarrow in the far north of England, clearly uses Gildas as a source when it says, “Thenceforward victory swung first to one side and then the other, until the Battle of Badon Hill.”4 Bede, the father of English history, does not name Arthur either and can hardly be considered an independent source of evidence.

  Two hundred years after Bede, in the early ninth century, an appealing cleric called Nennius wrote his Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) because, he said, “the scholars of the island of Britain had no skill, and set down no record in books.”5 Nennius collected Roman annals, Church chronicles, writings of the English, writings of the Irish (which included writings of the Scots), and no doubt all the oral history available to him, and provided a rather endearing account of his methods: “I made a heap of all that I have found.” He used this heap to write his Historia, taking care to include everything that he could find that “the stupidity of the British had cast out.” I picture Nennius in an untidy room delving into his heap, taking bits and pieces from here and there to use in his great work. The end result understandably reflects his apparently haphazard working methods and the arbitrary nature of his sources.

  Nennius mentions Arthur three times in his Historia, the first instance being a list of twelve battles that he attributes to Arthur. This list is, perhaps, the single most important item of Arthurian evidence.

  Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle. 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 [Dubglas] which is in the country of Lindsey [Linnuis]. The sixth battle was on the river called Bassas. The seventh was in the Celyddon Forest [Celidonis] 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 (shoulder or shield?) 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.6 The ninth battle was fought in the city of the Legion. The tenth battle was fought on the bank of the river called Tryfrwyd [Tribruit]. 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.7

  It is generally accepted that when Nennius said Arthur fought “together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle,” he meant Arthur was a leader of kings but that Arthur was not himself a king. A one-off manuscript discovered in the Vatican in the early nineteenth century makes this even clearer, in a version of the above passage that begins:

  Then it was that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror.8

  The two other references to Arthur in Nennius come under the heading “wonders.” The first is a paw print on a stone, said to have been put there by Arthur’s dog while hunting boar. Nennius says men may remove the stone and carry it away for the length of a day and a night but that the next day it will always be back in its former place. Wonder two is the grave of Arthur’s son Amr, and Nennius describes its miraculous qualities thus: “Men come to measure the tomb, and it is sometime six feet long, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen. At whatever measure you measure it on one occasion, you never find it again of the same measure…”9 Needless to say, these wonders are not particularly helpful to someone looking for the historical Arthur.

  The Annales Cambriae, the Annals of Wales, were compiled in the tenth century and claim to be an annual record of events starting in 447. There are only twelve entries for the first hundred years, however, and they mainly record the births and the deaths of saints. The entry for the yea
r 516 reads, “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.” The entry for the year 537 is as follows: “The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut [Mordred] fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.”10 If these entries are accurate twenty-one years separated Arthur’s last two battles.

  The Annales Cambriae also contain one of the earliest references to the man called Merlin to survive. The entry for the year 573 reads, “The Battle of Arderydd between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell; Merlin went mad.” The Battle of Arderydd was not fought in Wales however, but at the fort Caer Gwenddolau, which would now be in the hamlet of Carwinley on the Scotland–England border.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, started in the ninth century and considered to be England’s most important historical record of pre-Norman history, covers many events during the age of Arthur but has nothing to say about him. We are left then with only four sources of evidence of a historical Arthur: Aneirin’s Y Gododdin; Gildas’s De Excidio; Nennius’s Historia; and the Annales Cambriae. After Nennius, Arthur becomes increasingly elusive as, in effect, he passes from history into legend.

  In the early seventh century the written word in the south of Britain was controlled by the Christian Church, which consequently was able to promote its own stories—predominantly tales from the lives of saints—to the exclusion of almost all others. This meant that the stories of Arthur had to flourish as part of the oral tradition or not at all. Fortunately for Western literature and indeed for history, the written word was restricted to a few compliant clerics, but the oral tradition was like the Internet—accessible to the masses and almost impossible to control.