Finding Arthur (33 page)

What evidence is there to suggest that this is what happened? Skene says,

The name of Manau was applied by the Welsh to the Isle of Man … the Latin form was
Eubonia
, the Cymric,
Manau
; but it appears from Nennius that this name of Manau was also applied to a district in North Britain [Manau] … The Irish name for the Isle of Man is
Manand
or
Manann
; and it appears from the Irish Annals that a district on the north was likewise known by that name, as they record in 711 a slaughter of the Picts by the Saxons
in Campo Manand
, or the Plain of
Manann
, as distinguished from the island. It is, of course, difficult to discriminate between the two places, and to ascertain whether an event recorded as taking place in
Manau
or
Manann
belongs to the island or the district. Events which really belong to the one are often attributed to the other.
¹²

Nothing connects any historical Arthur with the Isle of Man, but there is evidence that connects Arthur Mac Aedan with Manau. His grandfather, Gabhran, lived there; his father, Aedan, lived there; and he lived there. As Skene says, it is difficult to discriminate between the Isle of Man and Manau (unless, of course, you are determined to set Arthur in the south, in which case, you will do what the compilers of the
Annales Cambriae
did: plonk for the Isle of Man).

Not only can the historical Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, be connected with
Manau
, he can be connected with an actual battle in Manau. An entry in the
Annals of Ulster
for the year 582 reads, “The Battle of Manu, in which Aedán son of Gabrán son of Domangart was victor.” The father of Arthur Mac Aedan is said to have won a battle at “Manu,” an irrelevant two years before the battle listed in the
Annales Cambriae
. This is not a simple coincidence. This is because the battles recorded in the two sets of annals are one and the same.

This means that of the four battles listed in the
Annales Cambriae
, three can be associated with the legendary Arthur and with Arthur Mac Aedan, and one, the battle said to have been fought on the Isle of Man but which was really fought in Manau, while not listed as one of the legendary Arthur’s battles can be associated with Arthur Mac Aedan.

The battle-list of Nennius, the
Lives of the Saints
, and the
Annales Cambriae
, are all southern British works, written for southern British purposes, by partisans of a southern British establishment. They are all determined, either consciously or not, to set the legend of Arthur in the south.

Before Nennius wrote his
Historia
, Arthur was simply a historical figure. After the
Historia
, under the pens of southern clerics, Arthur became a legend. To exist in the south of Britain it was necessary for Arthur to become a legendary figure, because Arthur does not exist in the history of the south.

9

The Great Angle War

T
HE LEGEND OF
A
RTHUR WAS BORN IN THE
G
REAT
A
NGLE
W
AR THAT
Arthur Mac Aedan waged and won by the 580s. Neither mainstream history nor conventional Arthurian wisdom recognizes the Great Angle War. It is not that they reject it as having nothing to do with Arthur, it is just that they had not heard about it until I found the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth battles on Nennius’s battle-list and saw that they were all parts of one campaign.

The Great Angle War began soon after Hussa came to the Angle throne of Bernicia around 585. Hussa launched a surprise attack against the Gododdin, marching north, hard and fast, through Lauderdale, along the line of Dere Street, the old Roman road, toward Edinburgh.

The available evidence is too slight to allow a detailed exposition of the campaign that followed. The following reconstruction is consistent with such evidence as there is. The Angles planned to defeat the Gododdin before the Gododdin could get help from their fellow Britons. Then they intended to secure their western flank before regrouping and attacking Strathclyde.

As the beacons on the hills spread news of the approaching Angles, the Gododdin mobilized their army. Men were called in from far fields, marshaled, provisioned, armed, and assigned, but these were men who
had not waged major war in a decade and lacked experience. The Gododdin army was not battle-ready as the Angles advanced.

The same could not be said of Arthur’s Men of Manau, positioned on the border of the Gododdin lands, some twenty miles from Edinburgh. Arthur’s warriors were battle-hardened veterans, fresh from the destruction of the Picts at the Battle of Bassas. They were well trained, well equipped, well led, and their morale was high because under Arthur, they were undefeated.

The obvious tactical line for Arthur to follow would have been to march east, join the Gododdin, and make ready to receive the Angles in Edinburgh. Instead, in an act of martial genius to rival Lee’s flanking attack at Chancellorsville, Arthur led his cavalry south to Peebles before turning east to place his force on the western flank of the main body of the Angle army, in a position to threaten the Angle lines of communication.

Arthur’s cavalry probed the flank of the Angle army as his infantry arrived from Manau and joined the ranks of his growing force. The Caledonian Wood was deep and dense, and the Angles could not have been sure how many men Arthur had, and so they sent warriors south and west as a precautionary measure, depleting the numbers they could bring to bear against the Gododdin.

Arthur, spreading his men thin and wide, moved speedily and aggressively, refusing major engagements. By this means he convinced the Angles that they were faced by far more men than in reality they were, just as the Confederate General Magruder stalled a vastly superior Union attack in 1862. The hit-and-run tactics of Arthur and his Men of Manau developed into a long running fight as they pressed on east through the woods: “With huge dark-socketed crimson spears, stern and steadfast the battle-hounds fought.”
¹

This battle, like the Battle of the Wilderness in the American Civil War, was more a series of engagements fought out over several days, perhaps a week or more, in the dark fastnesses of the great wood. This is why this “Battle” was called the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, an enormously imprecise name given that the Caledonian Wood covered half of southern Scotland in the sixth century. Just as with the Glein “Battle,” there was no one battlefield. The Battle of the Caledonian Wood was given that name because, as the name suggests, it was fought in the Caledonian Wood, wherever Arthur’s small but growing force could advance, find enemies, kill them, and advance again. The likely line of battle runs east from Peebles to Clovenfords, through what today are the forests of Glentress, Cardrona, Elibank, and Traquair, and Yair Hill.

The remains of the Roman Fort and the Pictish capital, where the Battle of Bassas was fought, were to the right in this photograph, above the smaller river, the River Earn
.

©
RCAHMS (Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Collection
).
Licensor
www.rcahms.gov.uk
.

Arthur’s tactics and aggression caused confusion in the counsels of the Angles. Soon they were looking over their shoulders unsure how
many more men would be needed to quell this unquantifiable enemy which had unexpectedly appeared on their flank and threatened to endanger their supply base in the ruins of the Roman fort of Trimontium (near modern Melrose).

Arthur and the Men of Manau had seized the initiative. They could not beat the massively more numerous Angles on their own, but they had won their fights in the forest, thrown the Angles off balance, slowed the Angle advance, and bloodied them. Arthur’s rapid actions took the heat out of the Angle advance and prevented the Gododdin from being crushed before the levies of Strathclyde had time to take the field.

By the end of the “Battle” of the Caledonian Wood, the Angles were up against the Gododdin to their front and Arthur’s Men of Manau, newly reinforced by the army of Strathclyde, on their flank. When this first phase of the campaign came to a close the Angle army was still intact and entirely formidable. Nennius famously wrote, “Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle.”
²

It is now generally accepted that this passage means Arthur fought in the company of kings, indeed, led them in battle, but that that he himself was not a king. It happens sometimes, when a danger is truly deadly, that established authorities will break with tradition and choose the best man for the job, as opposed to the one who best suits the individual interests of those in power. This does not happen often. It happened in 1940 at the start of the Second World War, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. It also happened in the mid-580s when Arthur Mac Aedan became the warlord of the Britons (and of course of his Scots and Men of Manau).

I
T IS COMMONLY
allowed, as I have explained, that Nennius’s seventh battle, the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, was fought in Scotland, but this is only because there is no real alternative, given that Caledonia, the Roman name for the north of Britain is undeniably Scotland. However, there is no consensus as regards the eighth, ninth and tenth battles, the battles of Guinnion, the City of the Legion, and Tribruit. Who
fought in these battles? Where were they fought and when? What was the reason why? These are all much disputed matters.

The allied kings recognized there was no time to debate the matter of command—the danger they faced was too great—and so they allowed Arthur, the de facto leader in the field, to continue in charge of what was now an allied army. The very fact that someone like Arthur, a Scots warlord, commanded kings, suggests an emergency measure taken in the heat of a fight and not a considered decision, coolly arrived at. If there had been time to argue the matter, it is unlikely that the kings would have allowed someone who was not a king to take command.

Arthur stayed in command for the next three battles. This suggests they were fought quickly, one after the other, without a break to allow “the natural order of kings” to reassert itself. If Arthur had faltered, halted, or suffered a defeat, he would have been immediately replaced; but Arthur, undaunted, advanced without stopping until he had beaten the Angles entirely and sent them homeward, to think again.

If the hand of Merlin-Lailoken, Chancellor of Strathclyde, was behind the decision to allow Arthur to take command of the allied army at the end of the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, this would explain why Merlin is always closely associated with Arthur. According to Nennius:

The eighth battle was in Guinnion Fort, and in it Arthur carried the image of the holy Mary, the everlasting Virgin, on his shield, and the heathen were put to flight that day, and there was great slaughter upon them, through the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the holy Virgin his mother.
³

I did what I usually did with passages such as this. I put aside the purely promotional material, the reference to Mary the mother of Jesus, and looked at the evidence that remained. This left three clues: Guinnion’s eighth place on the list; Guinnion the name; and the fact Guinnion was a fort.

In the sixth century there was a fort on a hill near Stow in Wedale, above the Gala Water. All that remains of this fort today is an irregular
oval of walls, about 100 yards across, although all that is visible above ground are ridges of stone where walls once stood high and men looked out for danger. It was here that Arthur’s allied army met and defeated the Angles in the battle Nennius called the Battle of Guinnion.

It seems likely that with Arthur now in command of a large allied army in their rear, a substantial part of the Angle army withdrew from Edinburgh along the line of the Gala Water to the fort at Stow. This placed them a mere six miles from Yair Hill, where Arthur was poised when the Battle of the Caledonian Wood was over.

Stow Fort is only a few miles from where the seventh battle, the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, ended, and so was perfectly situated to be the site of the eighth battle, the Battle of Guinnion. These factors allow the chronological order of the list to remain intact, with one battle following another just as Nennius listed them.

The first clue—Guinnion’s eighth place on the list—makes sense if Guinnion is Stow Fort. Stow is but a day’s march, if even that, from the Caledonian Wood. The fact that Stow Fort is, by definition, a fort, also makes sense of the third of Nennius’s three clues.