Finding Arthur (14 page)

I had always suspected that there had to be some connection between the
Ard Airigh
names in Argyll and the battle name, Arderydd, but when I thought
Ard Airigh
meant “pasture” I could not see what this connection might be. Why should so many places in Argyll and a battle fought on the Scotland–England border have high pasture names?

However if
Ard Airigh
meant “high lord” things made sense. It made sense that a warrior people, like Arthur Mac Aedan’s Scots, would name their most important fortress
Dun Ard Airigh
, Dunardry, hillfort of the high lord or lords, and that a battle would be called the Battle of
Ard Airigh
, Arderydd, the battle of the high lord or lords; after all, Arthur Mac Aedan was a high lord and his men were high lords (at least high lords of war).

I knew I was onto something when I saw O’Brien’s definition of
Airigh
, and so I tried to remember all I could about Arthur and Merlin and Argyll, to see if there was anything that worked for or against my provisional conclusion that Arthur Mac Aedan was the legendary Arthur. All the time I was doing this I knew I was missing something. I stopped to think what it might be, and when that didn’t work, I tried not thinking about it at all, in the hope that the answer would just come to me. But that didn’t work either until it did … well, almost.

I suddenly knew that what I was looking for was on a map, but which map? I had not been looking for evidence of Arthur until that day (indeed, I could not remember the last time I had even thought of Arthur—probably the last time I had seen him played in a film or read a book in which he featured, and that had not been for a long time). It followed, therefore, that if the map I was looking for was not primarily Arthur-connected it, probably had something to do with my name and was perhaps one of my maps of Argyll. If it was a map in a book I had looked at in passing and then put aside, then I had a problem.

When I got home that day I looked at my maps of Argyll—the maps the Forestry Commission had given me, Ordnance Survey maps, and maps in books—until I found what I was looking for in a standard Collins roadmap. It was a place-name.

I had overlooked its Arthurian significance when I used this map to get about Argyll when I was researching my family-name. Its significance would have been obvious to anyone thinking about Arthur, but at that time I had not been thinking about Arthur.

The earliest surviving indirect reference to Arthur is in Gildas’s
De Excidio
. It is “indirect” because Gildas hated Arthur and deliberately omitted Arthur’s name.
De Excidio
was written in the early sixth century according to the conventional wisdom, but, by reckoning, it was compiled
circa 598, although the exact date does not matter overmuch for these present purposes; what matters is that toward the end of his history Gildas writes, “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.”
⁷

Just over two hundred years after Gildas wrote
De Excidio
, Nennius listed twelve battles in which Arthur was in command in his
Historia Brittonum
. The last item on Nennius’s battle-list reads, “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.”
⁸

The
Annales Cambriae
, the earliest versions of which date to the early ninth century, contain records of four battles between circa 447, when the entries begin, and 600, when, everyone agrees, Arthur (whoever he was) was dead. These four battles include the Battle of Badon: “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.”
⁹
This makes the Battle of Badon the only battle mentioned in all three of the generally accepted, most important early sources. Indeed, the Battle of Badon is the only one of Arthur’s battles mentioned more than once in any of the early sources. The Battle of Badon has become the litmus test by which potential “Arthurs” are measured.

Arthur Mac Aedan lived at Dunardry-Dunadd. The place-name I had found on my Collins road map showed that the land between Dunardry and Dunadd is called Badden. This Badden extends north from the shadow of Dunardry to Dunadd, and east with the Badden Burn to Lochgilphead and Loch Fyne.

This Badden had the right name (allowing for the usual variations in spellings) and was the very place where Arthur Mac Aedan lived for much of his life and where his father was king. No case for any southern Arthur has evidence that can outweigh this one item of evidence that Arthur Mac Aedan was the man who became the legendary Arthur.

Once I knew what I was looking for and where to find it, I found Badden on other maps with ease, but these were all modern maps and
so I had to find out if the name Badden was modern too. For all I knew some “New Scots”—say the Badden family from the south of England—had moved to Argyll and named the land between Dunardry and Dunadd after themselves or, worse still, used a corrupt variation of their hometown, Bath! The maps created when the railways were introduced to Argyll showed a place called Badden in the late nineteenth century, and so if my hypothetical family from the south of England had called their new home Badden, they must have done this before 1873.

It is arguable that a period of more than 130 years is long enough to establish Badden as a traditional name and to allow it to be fairly inferred that it had been called Badden for far longer. However, the further back I could trace the name, the more likely it would be that it had some connection with Arthur Mac Aedan’s sixth century. I set out to see if I could fill the thirteen-century gap that lay between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries.

Fitzroy MacLean, writing of the sixth century in his book
Highlanders
, refers to the
Cinelbadon
, the family or “kin” of Baodan. This Baodan was a grandson of Lorne, one of the brothers of Arthur Mac Aedan’s great-great-grandfather Fergus Mor, and so Arthur’s second cousin twice removed. Unfortunately, Fitzroy MacLean did not identify his authority for this reference. MacLean did however parachute behind enemy lines during the Second World War, with instructions from Churchill to take the partisans in hand and beat the Nazis in Yugoslavia and he did just that. He was one of those men, who, if he said something, you could rely upon it: a man like that did not go about making things up. The very fact that it was he who was writing was good enough for me, but even Fitzroy MacLean was not around in the sixth century, and so it followed he must have had some authority for what he wrote.

I looked for MacLean’s source material and found other Baodans in the
Senchus Fer nAlban
, the history of the men of Scotland. The
Senchus
is a genealogical record—in effect, a
Who’s Who
of the sixth century. It shows several Baodans including a Baodan Mac Eochaid Mac Aedan Mac Gabhran Mac Domangart Mac Fergus (Arthur’s nephew); and a Baodan Mac Ninnud Mac Duath Mac Conall Mac Niall of the Nine Hostages, who died in 586. This first Baodan was closely related to Arthur Mac Aedan. The second Baodan, although a contemporary
of Arthur, was only distantly related to him (and to Columba-Crimthann who played a large part in events during Arthur’s lifetime).

Whether a particular Baodan lived a generation before or after Arthur Mac Aedan or was related to him is immaterial, however. What really mattered was the very existence of men called Baodan in Arthur’s day. Nor does it matter whether Lorne and Comgall were the sons, brothers, or grandchildren of Fergus Mor, Arthur’s great-great-grandfather (the sources vary). What matters is that they gave their names to the lands of Lorne in the north and to the Cowal Peninsula in the south of Argyll, names that are still used today.

In the sixth century, when Scots of Ireland led by members of Arthur Mac Aedan’s family invaded Argyll, they, quite naturally, replaced some of the place-names they found there with Scottish names. The aforementioned Baodans were in the right place at the right time to make these changes. It is likely therefore that the lands of Badden outside Lochgilphead were named after one of the many Baodans who were about at the time, which means, almost inevitably, a Baodan who was closely related to Arthur Mac Aedan. The existence of numerous Baodans in the time of Arthur Mac Aedan all but closes the gap between the sixth century and 1873. In any event, the legendary name Badon clearly echoes in the modern place-name Badden, a name that can be connected to the life and times of Arthur Mac Aedan.

Again, this evidence alone is more than anyone else can muster for any other possible location of the Battle of Badon. Furthermore, unlike so many southern sites, there is no shortage of hills around the lands of Badden, the most prominent being Dunardry. Dunadd was the ceremonial capital of Argyll, but Dunardry commanded the most important land route in Argyll and was its administrative capital. There is no more likely place for a sixth-century battle than the land about Dunardry; the land of Baodan-Badon-Badden.

There was reason to believe that the Battle of Badon had been fought on the approaches to and on the land about Dunardry and that, consequently, Dunardry is the legendary Mount Badon. In the American Civil War the North named battles with reference to geographical features, while the South named battles with reference the nearest town, and so we have Bull Run and Manassas, Antietam and Sharpsburg.
If the South had named Nennius’s twelfth battle it would have been the Battle of
Dun Ard Airigh
; if the North had named the twelfth battle it would have been the Battle of the Hill of
Boadan
(before it became in Latin the Battle of
Badonici montis
or
monte Badonis
, Mount Badon).

The Badon entry on Nennius’s list contained three clues. The first clue was the battle-name “Badon.” The second clue was that the battle had been fought on or in the vicinity of a hill. Both pointed to the Battle of Badon having been fought at Dunardry-Badden in Argyll. The third clue, the place of this battle on Nennius’s battle-list, twelfth of twelve, remained to be solved.

The
Annales Cambriae
say the Battle of Badon was fought in 516 and the Battle of Camlann, Arthur’s last battle, in 537. The entries in the
Annales Cambriae
for the fifty years before the Battle of Badon and for the fifty years after the Battle of Camlann mention twenty-two people. These include Columba-Crimthann, who lived in Dalriada where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king; Mordred of the Gododdin, who lived on the border of Manau, Arthur Mac Aedan’s father’s kingdom; Gabhran, Arthur Mac Aedan’s grandfather; Gildas of Cambuslang in central Scotland, Arthur Mac Aedan’s neighbor; the sons of Eliffer, who included Rhydderch Hael, King of Strathclyde, Merlin-Lailoken’s brother-in-law and a neighbor of Arthur Mac Aedan; Gwenddolau, defeated at the Battle of Arderydd fighting against Arthur Mac Aedan and the man known as Uther Pen Dragon; Merlin-Lailoken, Chancellor of Strathclyde, Arthur Mac Aedan’s friend and partner in the Great Angle War; Brendan of Birr, an advisor to Columba-Crimthann and so connected to Dalriada, where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king; Gwrgi and Peredur, probably lords of York and southwest Scotland respectively and contemporaries of Arthur Mac Aedan; Constantine, probably the son of Rhydderch of Strathclyde and Gwyneth-Languoreth, Merlin-Lailoken’s sister; and lastly Dunod, probably a man of Dunadd, the ceremonial capital of Dalriada, where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was king.

It boils down to this—these early entries in the
Annales Cambriae
are not concerned with people and events in Wales, despite the title
Annales Cambriae
(the Annals of Wales), but with people and events in
Arthur Mac Aedan’s late-sixth-century Scotland, and almost all of them are closely connected with Arthur Mac Aedan.

Gildas’s
De Excidio
contains the earliest reference to the Battle of Badon. It is generally accepted that
De Excidio
was written in the early sixth century. “Gildas wrote his main work, the
Ruin of Britain
, about A.D.540 or just before,” says one authoritative editor.
¹⁰
However, Michael Winterbottom of Oxford University said, “we cannot be certain of [Gildas’s] date, of where he wrote, of his career, or even his name.”
¹¹
This uncertainty ceases to exist when Gildas, a name that means Servant of God in Gaelic, is looked for north of the Scotland–England border. There Gildas can be found and recognized as a man of southern Scotland who flourished as a Christian polemicist in the late sixth century. It is more likely that
De Excidio
was compiled by Gildas from earlier writings and completed in circa 598, some ten years after the Battle of Badon.

In the
Preface
to
De Excidio
Gildas says,

I have kept silence, I confess, with much mental anguish, compunction of feeling and contrition of heart, whilst I revolved all these things within myself; … for the space of even ten years or more, my inexperience … and my unworthiness preventing me from taking upon myself the character of a censor.
¹²

Gildas waited “ten years or more” before he completed his masterwork, but ten years or more from when? It makes sense to suppose ten years after the last major event in the “History” part of
De Excidio
. The “History” part of
De Excidio
ends with an account of a victory won by Ambrosius Aurelianus (who, in
Finding Merlin
, I identified as Emrys, the first Pen Dragon). This account segues smoothly into the Battle of Badon passage: