Finding Arthur (15 page)

From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to do) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not. This lasted right up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.
¹³

It seems to be common sense to suppose that the ten years during which Gildas “kept silence” followed the date on which he ended his
History
—that is, followed the date of the Battle of Badon. It would also be common sense to suppose that Gildas brought his
History
up to date, more or less. In other words, his history ended with the Battle of Badon, the last historical event he mentions. He then either waited ten years before writing about it, or, and this is more likely, he waited ten years before making his work public.

Gildas’s Latin is obscure in the extreme and apparently notoriously difficult to translate. The translator I have quoted above says Badon was, “pretty well the last defeat of [the Angles], and certainly not the least.” J. A. Giles interprets this vague passage differently: “… until the year of the siege of Bath-hill, when took place also the last almost, though not the least slaughter of our cruel foes.”
¹⁴

When someone feels the need to say something is “not the least” it usually means this something is pretty close to being “the least.” When Gildas tries to give the Battle of Badon some added status, he doth protest too much, methinks. There is therefore reason to believe that although Badon was the most famous of Arthur’s battles—because it is the only one mentioned more than one of the earliest sources, the four horsemen of history—it was far from his greatest battle.

It could be argued that if Gildas was writing some ten years after Badon and if Arthur Mac Aedan was the victor in the Battle of Badon, that Gildas would have mentioned this fact. Why does Gildas’s Badon passage not mention Arthur? Gildas’s
De Excidio
was not primarily a history but a piece of religious propaganda and so he mentioned very few individuals. In the whole fifth century he names only one person and one place and provides only one date (and he gets that wrong).

I have argued in
Finding Merlin
that when Gildas was a boy Emrys, the first Pen Dragon, saved the Britons from the Angles and consequently Emrys became Gildas’s boyhood hero. This is why Emrys appears in Gildas’s
History
(albeit burnished with spurious Roman antecedents and a grand name, Ambrosius Aurelianus). Gildas’s relationship with Arthur did not include hero-worship; on the contrary, Gildas hated Arthur Mac Aedan, because Arthur killed Gildas’s brother Hueil. In these circumstances it would be surprising if Gildas mentioned
Arthur in his history. If Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan he would have been a Scot in Gildas’s eyes, and Gildas hated Scots (he said we were “like worms which in the heat of mid-day came forth from their holes”). If Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan he was a man of the Old Way, and Gildas hated anyone who was not a Christian, in addition to a goodly number of people who
were
Christians: Gildas was big on hate. Even if Gildas had been bothered to name people in his
History
, and he was not, he would never have named Arthur Mac Aedan.

The main pillar upon which the dating of Gildas’s
De Excidio
stands is a passage dealing with the legendary Arthur’s famous Battle of Badon: “There is, perhaps, no passage in Gildas that has been more frequently discussed than that in which he appears to assign a date for the siege of the Badonic Mountain,” explained the
English Historical Review
in 1926.
¹⁵
All attempts to date
De Excidio
center on this one corrupt passage in which Gildas refers to Badon and to his own age.

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. That was the year of my birth: as I know, one month of the forty-four years since then has already passed.
¹⁶

This is usually taken to mean Gildas was born in the same year as the Battle of Badon. It is however a very corrupt passage. The English historian Bede, writing in the eighth century, lifted large passages from Gildas, including the above passage, but his version is somewhat different. Bede says, “Thenceforward victory swung first to one side and then to the other, until the Battle of Badon Hill, when the Britons made a considerable slaughter of the invaders. This took place about forty-four years after their arrival in Britain.”
¹⁷

This passage is more likely to reflect accurately what Gildas wrote because it makes some sense. One rule used when interpreting a law is to assume the law maker intended to make sense. Gildas either dated Badon with reference to his age or with reference to the arrival of invaders in Britain. He does not tell us when he was born nor does he
tell us when the invaders arrived. If we assume Gildas intended his readers to make sense of
De Excidio
, then the Bede version of the Badon passage is more likely to be correct, given that it would be reasonable to expect that more people would know about an invasion than would know about Gildas’s birth.

This passage in Bede may have escaped the depredations of those determined to place Arthur in the south because it was a little out of the Gildas mainstream and because, no matter what, Bede’s history was considered sacrosanct by the Church. As late as the nineteenth century J. A. Giles, ever determined to place Arthur in the south, translates the passage in Bede as, “Bath-hill … was (as I am sure) forty-four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity.”
¹⁸

Giles’s translation is an overt attempt to place Arthur in the south. The Latin
Badonici montis
is blithely translated as “Bath-hill” because Giles wanted Badon to be Bath and so he wrote what he wanted. The Latin says
novissimaeque ferme de furciferis non minimae stragis
, that is, “pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.” There is no mention of Angles or of Saxons. Where did Giles get his Saxons from? Not from Bede. Bede does not mention Angles or Saxons in the passage in question. It is however clear from the immediate context that the villains to whom Bede refers are Angles. Why, if Giles wanted to mention a particular people, did he not refer to Bede’s Angles? Perhaps this was because the Angles tended to be in the north and the Saxons tended to be in the south, and Giles wanted Arthur in the south.

If the received wisdom is correct and Gildas was born in the year of Badon, it follows that he ended the “History” part of
De Excidio
at about the time he was born. This is counter-intuitive. Gildas was permanently worked up to frothing point about people and events of which he disapproved. A man like Gildas would have been certain to touch upon events that happened during his lifetime. He would not have been able to stop himself.

Why would Gildas not bring his history up to his time of writing and so cover the one period of which he had first-hand knowledge? There is no good answer to this question.

It makes no sense to suppose that Gildas was born in the same year as Badon. This would leave what is a very precise period of time, forty-four years and one month, hanging in mid-air. What is the point of saying, in effect,
I am forty-four years and one month old and the Battle of Badon was fought the year I was born
? Unless Gildas tells his readers the date when he is writing, his readers cannot know either the date of the Battle of Badon or when he was born—what is the point of that?

If the received wisdom is correct and the time period, forty-four years and one month, relates to the date of publication of
De Excidio
, which it must if Gildas was born in the year of Badon, this presupposes a known and exact date of publication (to the very month), a concept that would have been meaningless in the sixth century.

It is probable that the received wisdom is wrong and that Gildas was not born in the same year as Badon but forty-four years before Badon. If this is correct the above problems disappear. It seems more likely that Gildas dated the Battle of Badon forty-four years after the Angles landed in Britain: that is, forty-four years and one month after he, Gildas, was born, just as Bede said.

Of course, without a date for the arrival of the Angles this does not help date
De Excidio
. The Angles had been arriving on the east coast of Britain from at least the middle of the fifth century, and so if the “arrival” of the Angles is to have any meaning, Gildas must have meant some particular arrival. There is only one particular arrival this might be: the arrival of the Angle chief war-chief, Ida. Ida and his men came to fight as mercenaries on behalf of Vortigern, the Gododdin British King. When? We do not know exactly—Gildas is imprecise.
¹⁹

All we know is that before long, Ida discovered that Vortigern was weak and so sent for more men: what Gildas calls “a second and larger troop of satellite dogs.”
²⁰
At earliest this would have been the following year. Ida and his Angles then inveigled themselves into positions of power, “sprouted in our [Gododdin] soil with savage shoots and tendrils.” This would have taken some little time, say, another year. The Angles asked for supplies, which had been given to them, but then they demanded more. When more supplies were not forthcoming they rose up against Vortigern and overthrew him. For a short while Vortigern was kept on as a figurehead but before long he had taken to the hills to
hide and Ida became king. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
says Ida became king in 547.

Given that the Angles had been coming to Britain for a long time, there must have been something special about this particular arrival, and there was: Ida overthrew the British king and started a sequence of events that culminated in the Great Angle War of the 580s. I say this is the arrival of the Angles to which Gildas refers, because the arrival of Ida changed everything, especially for Gildas, who, by my reckoning, was born the year Ida’s Angles arrived and who grew up a few days march from what was from then on hostile territory. By my calculation, and I accept this cannot be precise; Ida arrived some three years before he staged his coup in 547—say, in 544.

Following Ida’s coup Gildas spent his childhood, like everyone else in southern Scotland, in fear of Angle invasion. He would have had reason to remember the arrival of Ida circa 544, especially if he had been born that very year. It is easy to picture Gildas when he was a boy being told that he was born the year the Angles under Ida arrived in Britain. Every one of his contemporaries would have known that date.

The above, if correct, throws the received wisdom into confusion because, according to the received wisdom, based upon the
Annales Cambriae
, Gildas traveled to Ireland in 565 and died there five years later. This would mean, according to the received wisdom, that Gildas went to Ireland at the age of about seventy-five. If, however, I am correct, then Gildas went to Ireland at the age of twenty-one and left Ireland five years later. Gildas departed Ireland, not this life, in 570.

In summary, in my view, Gildas was born circa 544, the year Ida’s Angles arrived in Britain, and the Battle of Badon was fought forty-four years and one month later, circa 588. Gildas brought his history up to date, more or less. This means the “History” part of
De Excidio
tells of events in the late sixth century, which means the book was compiled or completed circa 598, when Gildas was an old man.

Gildas’s
De Excidio
is the nearest thing we have to a contemporary history of the sixth century. This is why so much effort has been put into claiming it for the south. In the centuries that followed
De Excidio
, the historical record was kept alive in the poems recited and songs sung by the bards. Many of these poems and songs were of Arthur; indeed,
it is likely he was one of the most popular subjects in the whole body of this work, because he was greatest hero of the Britons and, if he was Arthur Mac Aedan, of the Scots. “There is ample evidence,” historian John Morris writes, “that in the 6th and 7th centuries many epics of Arthur were sung in Britain … but only two survive, the
Elegy of Geraint
, preserved in modernised Middle Welsh form, perhaps of the 8th or 9th century, and the Nennius epitome.”
²¹
(Aneirin’s
Y Gododdin
, which contains the earliest reference to Arthur and which originated in Scotland, seems to have been overlooked.)

The
Elegy of Geraint
is said to be based on sixth-century material. It mentions Arthur only in passing, “In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s / Heroes who cut with steel.” Geraint’s father is said to have been king of Dumnonia (Devon), England; a place that is frequently confused, deliberately or in ignorance, with Damnonia, Strathclyde, Scotland. Even today
Damnonia
is sometimes simply translated as
Dumnonia
, irrespective of the spelling in the original. One translation of
De Excidio
reads in Latin, “est inmundae leaenae Damnoniae,” and in the English translation, “whelp of the filthy lioness of”—not Damnonia (Scotland) as one might expect—but “Dumnonia” (England).
²²

A Geraint also appears in
Y Gododdin
as a man of the south active in the north. It may be that this Geraint was one of the many Britons who came north to join the fight against the invading Angles, first successfully, under Arthur Mac Aedan, and then, after the death of Arthur Mac Aedan, unsuccessfully under the Gododdin king who led the disastrous campaign commemorated in
Y Gododdin
.