Finding Arthur (32 page)

As for
cara
, I thought of the Italian word
cara
, not because I speak Italian (I do not), but because I remembered the aria “O mio babbino cara” from the opera
Gianni Schicchi
. In the Italian of Puccini’s opera,
cara
means dear or beloved. This worked in both Latin and in Gaelic, where “dear” is
carus
and
caraid
, respectively. When I put all this together and thought about what was going on when Antoninus was given the nickname Caracalla, it seemed obvious that the real meaning of the nickname was, “dear to” or “the beloved of the Caledonians,” that is, colloquially, Caledonian-Lover.

If this is correct, then Antoninus’s policy of appeasement would have been known to the men in the ranks, and, although these men might have been happy to remain in camp or lay roads and build bridges
instead of hunting dangerous Picts in the glens, they would still have mocked their less-than-warlike general with a name equivalent to the nasty little soubriquet once used in the American west—
Indian Lover
.

Is it not more likely that such a derisive nickname would have appealed to the legionaries more than the insipid Gaulish Cloak? If I am right, and Antoninus was sympathetic toward the Picts, this would fit with what I had concluded was the real meaning of the name Caracalla.

This is but one more example of how a Scottish insight can throw new light on old matters. If there are Scottish insights, and there are, and if they remain unknown or are ignored, as they tend to be, we will continue on the complacent path that has led almost everyone to believe that Arthur was a man of the south of Britain, when according to the evidence he was from what is now Scotland.
⁹

If I am right, Bassas was fought after the Douglas campaigns on a river in the land of the Picts. If I am right, Antoninus-Caracalla built two bridges over a river in the land of the Picts, at least one of which remained for long enough after his departure for his name to be associated with, first the bridge and then the place where the bridge had been, even after the bridge itself had disappeared.

Which of his names was remembered in connection with this bridge?

Antoninus? This was a name given for purely political purposes (to associate the family of Severus with the family of the late emperor, the highly respected Marcus Aurelius). It is unlikely this name was used in daily life, except for official purposes. This is not uncommon. Edward VIII, Nazi sympathizer and tie-knot promoter (the one who was forced to abdicate), was named Edward for official purposes, but his friends and family called him David.

Caracalla? This nickname was invented at the time when the bridges were being built but it was only a nickname and not a flattering nickname at that. If I am right about what it means, it is likely it was only popular among the legionaries and most unlikely that it would have been kept in circulation among the Picts after the legions left.

It is almost certain, in my opinion, that the name that was remembered in connection with the bridges was the name Antoninus-Caracalla used day-to-day, the name he had before his father called him
Antoninus and before the soldiers took to calling him Caledonian-Lover, that is, his original name, Lucius Septimius Bassianus.

There was ample time in the four centuries that separated Antoninus-Caracalla-Bassianus from Arthur and the six centuries that separated him from Nennius for this name to be shortened, mispronounced, misheard, miswritten, misread or simply changed to make it more euphonic. There was ample time for Bassianus to become Bassas.

I believe the bridges at Carpow, and when they were gone their successors, or simply the Earn and Tay crossings, were remembered in connection with Antoninus-Caracalla by his familiar name Bassianus, a name that was later shortened to Bassas.

Of course, it is always possible that Bassianus was
deliberately
shortened to cover up the fact that Arthur’s sixth battle was fought in Scotland, although it is more likely that by the time Nennius came to list the sixth battle fought by the legendary Arthur, all he knew about the battle was that it was fought “on the river at Bassas.”

In the river crossing at Carpow I had found a vital strategic site that fitted the three clues in Nennius’s battle entry. Carpow was in the right place to be a follow-up to the Douglas campaigns: it was on a river, and it had a Bassas connection in the name Bassianus. I took the view that the Battle of Bassas was fought at Carpow fort and that I had the evidence to prove it.

Then I found other, entirely separate, evidence that proved, again, that the Battle of Bassas was fought at Carpow.

C
ARPOW AND THE
B
ATTLE OF
B
ASSAS

In 558 Bridei Mac Maelchon, king of the Picts, defeated Arthur Mac Aedan’s grandfather, Gabhran Mac Domangart, in a battle fought at Circenn. This was the first of three battles of Circenn.

Just over twenty years later the house of Gabhran was avenged when Aedan’s army (with Arthur in command) defeated and killed Bridei at the second Battle of Circenn.

The third Battle of Circenn was in 596. On this occasion Aedan was officially said to have been victorious although the annals also mention his sons, including Arthur. While the victory was ascribed to Aedan
this was only because he was the king: the victorious general was Arthur.

Three generations of Arthur Mac Aedan’s family, all engaged in battle at a place called Circenn. What it may be asked has any of this to do with Bassas? Circenn was one of seven Pictish provinces that according to legend were named after the seven sons of Cruithne, a fabled Pictish king. This is just the ancient equivalent of modern celebrity culture, which demands that things are personalized as much as possible. In fact Cruithne is a generic name for the Picts. Bridei, for example, was designed
rig Cruithneach
, king of the Picts.

Circenn has been identified as Coupar Angus, north of Perth; Kincardine, south of Stirling; and somewhere between the rivers Tay and Dee. According to the information provided to tourists by the local council for Angus (the area about Perth), “The Pictish name for the area is known, however, and
Circhenn
or
Circenn
as the Picts knew it seems to embrace Angus and Mearns in the 9th century. The name may well be a Gaelic translation, for it is readily translated as the ‘crested head,’ meaning the premier province of the Picts.”

Why would the Picts choose
Circenn
as the name of their premier province, if
Circenn
meant “Crested Head”? I thought this unlikely. It seemed to me that
Circenn
was taken to mean “Crested Head” only because it sounded something like the Gaelic word,
cuircinn
, which means, “A particular kind of head-dress for women.”

In Scots this would be
courche
or
curges
, a covering for a woman’s head, from which same root we get the English word
kerchief
. In any event, this struck me as too far-fetched.

The location of and the meaning of the name Circenn puzzled me for some time before I realized the solution had been in front of me all along, and that
Circenn
was where Carpow is today, because
Circenn
and Carpow are but two names for the same place.

The prefix
cir
in
Circenn
is the equivalent of the
car
in Carpow—the difference in the vowel is insignificant after so many centuries. What does this prefix mean?
Carn
, according to O’Brien, is a province. The language of the Picts has been all but lost but it is thought to have been, like Welsh, a form of P-Celtic. In Welsh,
caer
meant “fortress.”

We have, therefore,
cir
or
car
meaning “a province” or “a fortress.”
It does not matter much which it was, province or fortress, because it is quite reasonable to suppose that the premier province of the Picts and the main fortress of the premier province of the Picts, might both be called by the same name. Just as we have New York, New York, we might have had a fort called
Circenn
in a province called
Circenn
.

The suffix
cenn
was obviously the Q-Celtic-Gaelic
ceann
, “head,” which made
Circenn
the head fort or province (in effect, headquarters), a name that makes sense when applied to a place that actually was a main province or fortress. Certainly this makes more obvious sense than Crested Head.

This left me with the suffix
pow
. Where did that come in? I knew the poem
John Anderson, My Jo
, by Robert Burns:

But now your brow is beld, John,

Your locks are like the snaw;

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson, my jo.

There it was—
pow
, like
ceann
, meant “head” and so there was no difference between
Circenn
and
Carpow
, they were synonymous. Both meant, in user-friendly terms, headquarters. If this is right then there is no need for tortuously defined Crested Head place-names.

Circenn and Carpow are the same name and demark the same place, the place where Arthur Mac Aedan battled against the Picts on two occasions, first in the 580s and then in the 590s. They are also where Bassianus built his bridges and gave the name Bassas to the area. They are where, according to Nennius’s battle-list, the legendary Arthur did battle. The Battle of Bassas, it appears, was fought where the Rivers Tay and Earn meet, where once there was a Roman Fort and two bridges.

Before the Romans arrived at Circenn, it was a Pictish capital. Then the Romans arrived and built their great fort at Carpow, where the rivers Tay and Earn meet, because it was an ideal strategic site for a fortress. After the Romans left the Miathi Picts reoccupied this site and made it their capital again. The reason there were so many battles in this one place is obviously because of its strategic importance.
¹⁰

After his victories in the civil war in the glens of Argyll, commemorated by Nennius as the Battle of Glein, around 574 or 575, Arthur Mac Aedan fought and won four campaigns against the Miathi Picts, Nennius’s four Douglas battles. These four battles were fought on the Dalriada–Pictish border, near Loch Lomond, between approximately 577 to 580.

Despite all these victories Arthur knew the Picts were still strong enough to present a threat in the future and so he decided to attack them and defeat them on their own ground. The war of the Scots against the Picts that followed was waged both on land and at sea. According to the
Annals of Ulster
, in the year 580 there was an “expedition to
Innsi Orc
by Aedán son of Gabrán,” that is, an attack on the Orkney Islands by Aedan’s navy.

Nennius’s battle-list does not include this naval expedition among Arthur’s—that is, Arthur Mac Aedan’s—battles, because Arthur was not in command of this expedition. He was in the south on the Pictish border with the Scots army.

Following his father’s naval victory in the Orkneys, Arthur invaded the lands of the Picts, marched to the gates of their capital, and there in circa 584 his army met and defeated the army of the Pictish king, Bridei Mac Maelchon (the man who had defeated Arthur’s grandfather in that same place some twenty-six years before, at the first Battle of Circenn).

In this, the second Battle of Circenn, sometimes called the Battle of Bassas, fought in the vicinity of the old Roman fort at Carpow, Arthur avenged his grandfather. Bridei the king of the Picts was killed, and Arthur’s half-brother Gartnait was made king in his place.

There were three battles of Bassas-Circenn-Carpow. In the first battle, in 558, Gabhran, Arthur’s grandfather, was defeated by the Picts. In the second battle, in circa 584 Arthur defeated the same Picts; this was the battle known as the Battle of Bassas. In the third battle, Arthur again defeated the Picts, although it was a pyrrhic victory in which Gartnait among many others in Arthur’s army were killed.

If the sixth battle on Nennius’s battle-list had been named the Battle of Circenn or Carpow, its name alone would have set the scene in the far north of Britain, contrary to the interests of southern storytellers
and their patrons. No one in the south would have been interested in the Picts and so the Picts were written out of the picture. Nennius or someone before him simply used the mysterious and so unproblematic name Bassas and that was that.

There are only four battle-entries in the
Annales Cambriae
between circa 447, when the entries begin, and 600, when, everyone agrees, Arthur (whoever he was) was dead. These are the Battle of Badon, the twelfth battle on Nennius’s list; the Battle of Camlann, at which, according to a general consensus, Arthur died; the Battle of Arderydd, at which the entry for 573 says “Merlin went mad”; and a battle, supposedly, fought on the Isle of Man. This fourth battle is dated 584.

The legendary Arthur fought at Badon and at Camlann. Merlin fought at Arderydd and so there is at least some connection between the legendary Arthur and this battle. This leaves only the battle on the Isle of Man. It seems unlikely that this battle is the only one of the four that has no Arthurian connection.

What if this fourth battle was not fought on the Isle of Man? What if, to bolster the case for a southern Arthur, the evidence has been enhanced by “a scribe who … thinks he knows, more than the original, and who cannot resist the temptation to insert his knowledge”?
¹¹