Finding Arthur (18 page)

Of course, it may be that the name Airdrie was inspired by some warrior or a war-band unconnected with Arthur Mac Aedan. If this is so then it would be necessary to explain why Merlin-Lailoken too was associated with Arderydd in 573, a battle fought far to the south on the border of Scotland and England.

Two miles north of Airdrie is Arderyth (now little more than a name on the map and a few houses). Arderyth and Arderydd are
exactly the same name (
dd
is pronounced “th.” I will use Arderyth for the Airdrie location and Arderydd for the battle location simply to avoid confusion).

The legendary Arthur fought and killed the warrior Hueil, the brother of the Christian polemicist Gildas. If Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan this probably occurred in the twelve miles of contested land that separate Airdrie and Cambuslang. Hueil and Gildas were the sons of Caw, a chief of Strathclyde whose lands were centered on Cambuslang on the River Clyde, half way between Glasgow and Merlin-Lailoken’s lands at Cadzow, and just across the River Clyde from Arthur Mac Aedan’s Manau. There were several reasons why Arthur Mac Aedan and Hueil might have crossed paths and swords. Hueil was from Strathclyde and Arthur was from neighboring Manau, and so there would have been a local rivalry engendered by inevitable raiding. It is also reasonable to suppose that the family of the ultra-Christian “Saint” Gildas was also Christian. This would mean that Hueil and Arthur would have had religious differences because Arthur was a man of the Old Way.

While Arthur’s humiliation in Caradoc’s
Life of Gildas
is primarily propaganda, there is still reason to believe that some of what Caradoc wrote reflects what really happened, because much of it is contrary to Caradoc’s interest. Southern writers did not invent Scottish locations; they had no reason to do this. On the contrary, given that their audiences were southern, it made more commercial sense for them to use southern locations. When Caradoc said that Gildas was the son of “the king of Scotia,” that is, Scotland, it follows that either a southern Arthur went to Scotland to kill Hueil or that Hueil came south to be killed by Arthur. If, however, Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan, there would be no need for Arthur to travel north to kill Hueil or for Hueil to “swoop down from Scotland,” as one southern writer put it, to raid the lands of a southern Arthur and get himself killed in the process. All Hueil would have had to do was cross the Clyde and raid land that fell under Arthur’s protection, once too often. I am not aware that anyone has ever thought that they both lived in the same area. Indeed, by one account Arthur is said to have chased Hueil to the Isle of Man, when it is much more likely that Arthur chased Hueil into Manau. Of course, to have
identified Manau as the scene of the fight would have been to place Arthur and Hueil firmly in Scotland.

Manau sometimes stretched as far north as the Firth of Tay and east into Fife. As for the eastern marches of Manau, south of the Forth, geography almost dictates that these skirted the drum of hills that stands between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Arthur Mac Aedan’s Manau lay among the lands of the Picts, the Britons of both Strathclyde and the Gododdin, and the Scots of Dalriada. The people who lived there reflected this border-country status; they were predominantly Pictish with a large admixture of Britons, the descendants of the various peoples who had manned the Antonine Wall in Roman times, and, of course, Arthur Mac Aedan’s Scots.

Arthur Mac Aedan’s great-grandfather Domangart, king of the Scots, son of Fergus Mor, died around 507, probably fighting to secure his Scottish kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll. He left two sons to compete for the throne, Comgall and Gabhran, the latter of whom would be Arthur Mac Aedan’s grandfather. The Scots of Dalriada did not practice primogeniture and so the elder son, Comgall, was not automatically bound to succeed. The Scots knew that simply allowing the firstborn male child of the last king to succeed to the throne would almost inevitably mean they would end up with a king who was not up to the job. These were dangerous times and they dared not take this risk. To ensure they had a leader who was at least adequate, they chose their king from a pool of candidates that included the late king’s close male relatives: sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins.

A sitting king could try to sway the decision by choosing a tanist, a position akin to an American vice president in that while it did not provide the tanist with an automatic right to succeed, it certainly put him in the running. The final decision lay with the people or, at least, the chiefs among them. That said, Comgall and Gabhran were both very young when their father, Domangart, died, and there was probably very little of substance to distinguish them. So Comgall, the older brother, was chosen to be the next king, probably simply because he was the older brother.

While Comgall ruled from Dunardry-Dunadd, Gabhran was stationed in the east to man the frontier beyond which lay the threat of
the great Miathi-Pict confederation. This took Gabhran far from the center of power but also allowed him an independent command, and so this arrangement probably suited both brothers. This posting to the eastern marches of Dalriada may be inferred from what happened next.

Gabhran proved to be an able general while fighting the Miathi Picts and this attracted the attention of the people of Manau, themselves a predominantly Pictish people. Around 525 they invited Gabhran to join them in some capacity, either as an ally or as a warlord in their army. Perhaps Gabhran was tired of playing second fiddle in Dalriada or maybe he saw an opportunity to advance his interests, but, in either event, he decided to try “pastures new.” From then on, Gabhran and his descendants, including his grandson-to-be Arthur, were closely connected with Manau (indeed, the Men of Manau formed the core of the war-band that Arthur was to lead to everlasting fame).

Power descended through the female line among the Picts, and so when Gabhran married the Pictish Princess Lleian, the daughter or granddaughter of Brychan, king of Manau, and possibly the niece of Clinoch, king of Strathclyde, Gabhran gained high standing in the Pictish hierarchy. From this time on, Gabhran is described as a man who lived near the River Forth—that is, in Manau.

The ferocious Scots warriors who came with Gabhran to Manau, fresh from fighting the Picts, would have been invaluable to the people of Manau as they struggled to survive, locked as they were between four great powers. In these circumstances it is most likely that Manau sold its swords to various bidders, bobbing and weaving in and out of alliances, trying to ensure no one of its neighbors became predominant. I picture something akin to British foreign policy in the second half of the second millennium CE, when Britain worked to prevent any one nation on the European mainland from becoming powerful enough to pose a real threat to Britain’s security.

Based upon what happened a few decades later (in the actual age of Arthur, when Manau became the dominant military power), it is likely that Manau unconsciously aped Athens in the age of Pericles. Athens grew strong by taking money rather than ships from members of the Delian League. This money enabled Athens to build even more Athenian ships and so to attain naval supremacy. Under Gabhran,
Manau stopped being the “pig in the middle” and started out on a road that would lead to the creation of a standing army of full-time professional soldiers, while Manau’s neighbors continued with armies of predominantly citizen-soldiers (mainly farmers called up to support their kings’ relatively small professional bodyguards).

All Gabhran had to do was require payment from his neighbors in exchange for Manau’s acting as a well-armed buffer state, the implicit understanding being that whoever broke the peace would find themselves up against their target and Manau too. In this event it would have been in everyone’s interest to maintain Manau. It would not have been in anyone’s interest that Manau become too strong but, just as with Athens, this is exactly what happened.

Manau soon became the only body that could afford to maintain a strong permanent fighting force, because it was the only body that had permanent work for them. This force would not only have been engaged in the perennial raiding that was the leitmotif of the sixth-century warrior but also in border skirmishes with neighbors who wanted to test Manau’s strength or to attack one of the other great powers and so had to cross Manau first.

The endemic fighting that was rife in Manau inevitably attracted free-lances, second-sons, the disinherited, and outlaws prepared to sell their swords for a place in a community that offered them the plunder that followed victory. In a time when only a king’s bodyguard could be considered professional soldiers and when standing armies were too expensive to maintain, Manau ended up with an efficient fighting force that was out of all proportion to its size and population.

Under Gabhran, Manau bolstered its army with outsiders: first Gabhran’s Scots and later, inevitably, men who were not much better than mercenaries. Manau became practiced in warfare beyond the experience of its neighbors. It became a Celtic Sparta, a Celtic Macedonia.

In fiction, the best and noblest knights came from afar to Arthur’s Camelot to join the Knights of the Round Table. These fictional (and anachronistic) “knights” are said to have joined Arthur because they wanted to do good deeds. Such nonsense is just too milk-soppy to be true. In real life, the men who came to be called the Knights of the
Round Table were Arthur Mac Aedan’s chosen men, the
ArdAirighaich
: Men of Manau, Scots of Dalriada, free-lances, and others who gravitated to Arthur because … well, because Arthur was a winner. These most warlike of men gravitated to Arthur, as they had to his grandfather Gabhran, for purely mercenary motives. These men did not go about doing good deeds. They went about killing people.

We can see in what Gabhran started the beginnings of the fighting-force that would win eternal fame under Arthur. It was only much later, after much of the history had been rubbed away and the rest blurred, that Arthur’s war band, the
ArdAirighaich
, the high lords (of war), came to be known as “The Knights of the Round Table.” Although it is not possible to say exactly how successful Gabhran was in war, the deep inroads he made into the lands of the Miathi Picts, fighting in Gowrie, near Perth, and in Forfar, suggest that Gabhran was very successful indeed.

Comgall ruled Dalriada for more than thirty years. Gabhran carved out a place for himself in the neighboring kingdom of Manau before succeeding his brother as king of the Scots of Dalriada. Comgall is said to have abdicated his Dalriada throne because of ill health in about 537, although there is reason to believe that he was deposed. In any event he died in retirement or exile, four years later.

Although Comgall left a son, Conall, it was Gabhran who in 538 was chosen as the new king of the Scots, probably because he had a track record of success against the Picts and because his activities in Manau had provided him with powerful allies. Gabhran had five sons including Arthur’s father, Aedan, who was born near the river Forth in 527, 530, 533, or 534 CE (the sources vary).

Aedan is unlikely to have visited Dalriada often, if at all, before his father’s inauguration in 538. Aedan’s roots were in Manau, in the east. Indeed, in later years he would be called, among other less complimentary things, king of the Forth. As the son of a Pictish mother, born and brought up in the east, Aedan must have been treated with some suspicion if not outright hostility by the native Scots of Dalriada. This would not have daunted Aedan. He grew up to be an able politician and to be known as Aedan the cunning or Aedan the wily (although these appellations were attached to him by Christian writers and so they
must be read with some suspicion). Cunning and wily or not, Aedan was clever and ambitious. One may picture him, even as a young man, seeking out strengths and weaknesses in potential friends and enemies and forming alliances with chiefs of Dalriada.

Gabhran was married at least twice: first, to Aedan’s mother, a Pictish princess and, second—to consolidate his position after he became king of the Scots—to a Scots woman of the House of Comgall, by whom he had a son, Éoganán.

In 558 Gabhran invaded the lands of the Miathi Picts only to be heavily defeated by the Pictish king, Bridei son of Maelchon. He died within the year, probably from wounds suffered in the battle. This defeat was a disaster for the Scots. The Picts recovered much of the land they had lost to Dalriada and Manau in the preceding decades. (It would be left to Arthur to avenge this defeat.)

There were two main contenders for the vacant throne: Aedan, son of Gabhran, and his cousin Conall, son of Comgall (the last king but one). Conall was older than Aedan and was Scots on both sides of his family, having been born and raised in Dalriada. Aedan was the son of a princess of the Picts and had spent his formative years in Manau. Not only did Aedan have Pictish blood, but his side of the family, the House of Gabhran, was tainted by recent defeat. Aedan had one other disadvantage. Even if all other things had been equal, and they were not, there was a tendency in tanistry to alternate the kingship between rival branches of the family. This meant that those whose favored candidate lost on one occasion would know there was a good chance that their man or someone from his branch of the family would be chosen next time. This took some of the steam out of the whole process.

Comgall had been succeeded not by his son Conall, but by his brother Gabhran. Gabhran was succeeded not by his son Aedan, but by his nephew Conall, Comgall’s son. A king from the house of Comgall had been succeeded by a king from the house of Gabhran, and so a king from the house of Gabhran was succeeded by a king from the house of Comgall.

Aedan had been unsuccessful but he had not given up. He was now only one step away from being king in Dalriada. At this same time Bridei’s Miathi Picts followed up on Gabhran’s defeat by putting pressure
on the defenses of Manau. Aedan saw an opportunity. It was probably about 560 that Aedan returned to Manau and made it once again his main base. In this he acted as his father had before him and for similar reasons—to avoid internecine strife in Dalriada.