Finding Arthur (34 page)

Of course, perhaps, the Angles withdrew the way they had come, through Lauderdale. In this event Stow Fort would have commanded the western end of the pass that separated the Angles from Arthur, and would still be perfectly placed to have been the site of the Battle of Guinnion.

According to Skene there was corroboration for the Guinnion-Stow connection in local oral traditions, which said the Battle of Guinnion was, “connected by old tradition with the church of Wedale, in the vale of the Gala Water.”
⁴
The church of Wedale is in Stow.

This left a clue that so far had led nowhere; the matter of the name, Guinnion, itself. The
Vatican Recension
, one of the forty-or-so versions of Nennius’s
Historia
to survive, contains the following additional material.

For Arthur proceeded to Jerusalem, and there made a cross to the size of the Saviour’s cross, and there it was consecrated, and for three successive days he fasted, watched, and prayed, before the Lord’s cross, that the Lord would give him the victory, by this sign, over the heathen; which also took place, and he took with him the image of St. Mary, the fragments of which are still preserved in great veneration at Wedale, in English Wodale, in Latin Vallis-doloris. Wodale is a village in the province of Lodonesia, but now of the jurisdiction of the bishop of St. Andrew’s, of Scotland, six miles on the west of that heretofore noble and eminent monastery of Meilros.
⁵

Again the supernatural elements stand to be deleted. It is impossible to believe that Arthur went to Jerusalem and made a life-sized cross. It is more likely that these things were the invention of some Christian cleric who saw fit to expand the eighth entry on Nennius’s battle-list. Given the clearly biased source of this evidence, it is highly unlikely that Arthur starved himself and did the other Christian things he is said to have done. As always with obvious promotional material, care has to be taken to identify the suspect evidence and to find whatever worthwhile evidence might lie hidden behind it.

It is possible there were pieces of wood in the church at Wedale that people said had been part of an image of Mary the mother of Jesus, but this is simply the type of thing some people have claimed and some people have believed for centuries. This information was not a helpful. I put it aside.

By contrast, the place-names in this passage point precisely to a connection between Guinnion and Stow in Wedale. Stow is said to be in
Lodonesia
, that is, in Lothian. The distance from the center of Stow to Melrose town center is twelve miles but would be less if measured from the medieval land boundaries. In any event the difference between six medieval miles and twelve modern miles is a relatively trivial point.

Wodale is the dale of the Anglo-Saxon god Woden, and so at one time Stow Fort was probably Woden’s Fort (perhaps an Angle outpost before the war although it is more likely the fort-name Woden, is an Anglicization of later centuries). Anything to do with Woden would not have been pleasing to Christian ears, and so, just as Wodensday became Wednesday, places named Woden’s fortification became Wednesbury, and places named Woden’s open-land became Wedensfield, Wodale became Wedale.

The name Woden being unacceptable to Christians, it is likely that some cleric, having noticed that Woden sounded like the English word
woe
, decided to create a Latin version of the dale or vale and came up with the Vale of Woe: in Latin,
Vallis-doloris
. Woe was popular among the Christians. This was but one more pretense among many designed to empower the Christian Church at the expense of the truth: in this case, at the expense of truth about Arthur.

The
Vallis-doloris
invention was not used as the name of Arthur’s battle, because to exorcise all Woden-associations, later Christian writers brought out their biggest gun: Mary the mother of Jesus, also known as St. Mary or the Blessed Mary. The P-Celtic for “blessed” in the adjectival form is
gwyn
, from which the name
Guinnion
eventually came.

This scenario fits neatly with Christian practice: not to eradicate sites of the Old Way but to commandeer them and use them as their own. This practice was made official by Pope Gregory I in the decade after The Great Angle War. Mary’s name was frequently used when places of the people of the Old Way were taken over by Christians, particularly if the place had particular female connections.

The “Lady’s Well” that once lay near St. Mary’s Church in Stow was once a well of the women of the Old Way. The large stone that was to be found outside the church until about 1815 and was said to have borne Mary’s footprint had nothing to do with Mary. It was almost certainly similar to the stone at Dunadd from which Arthur took a sword and probably used for the same purpose.

I picture Arthur at the Battle of Guinnion leading the combined forces of Strathclyde, together with his Scots and Men of Manau, and forcing a crossing of the Gala Water, “shattering the Angle line and scattering their columns, laying men low and making Angle wives widows.” The words of Aneirin, Arthur’s druid-bard, written fourteen years later, apply equally to Guinnion, “Stiff spears this splitter would slash in battle, ripping the front rank.”
⁶

The Angles fell back from the ford over the Gala Water, some to the fort, some eastwards through the pass to Lauderdale, and some southwards to the City of the Legions, where they would soon face Arthur again. After the Battle of Guinnion-Stow, there was nothing to
stop the Gododdin army of the north from joining Arthur’s army of the west and going after the Angles together.

Arthur had fought the Angles to a standstill in the Caledonian Wood and driven them back from the fort at Stow in the Battle of Guinnion. Arthur was now riding the crest of a wave of victory, and so it was not the time for the allied kings to dispute the matter of command. This was the time to use their momentum, to harry the enemy and stop them regrouping. If Arthur had not continued to advance, the kings would surely have decided that they were not after all content to be led by a Scots warlord, no matter how well he had done, and that one of their own should be appointed in his place.

Arthur must have known that although he had bested the Angles in two battles, many Angle divisions remained untested and that consequently, he had to move fast. At the head of the largest force he was ever to command, Arthur stepped up the pace and so ensured that the Angles remained off balance.

Twelve miles to the south, the Angle survivors of Guinnion-Stow met the rest of their army retiring south through Lauderdale. This reunited Angle army formed up on ground upon which they thought they could stand secure. So it was, as Nennius says, “The ninth battle was fought in the city of the Legion.”

Trimontium, where the Gala Water joins the River Tweed, was the Roman capital of Scotland in the first and second centuries. By the 580s it would have been in a state of advanced disrepair, but it would still have been remembered as the City of the Legion. It was here for the first time in the campaign that the entire armies of both sides concentrated and faced each other. This was to be the Gettysburg of the first part of the Great Angle War.

Arthur did not hesitate but moved fast against his enemies. Shields clashed, men hacked with axes, cut with swords, and stabbed with spears, as both sides sought weaknesses in their enemies’ shield-walls.

Again, Aneirin’s words provide a taste of events at the Battle of the City of the Legion-Trimontium:

Ringed round him a rampart of shields, sharp they press the attack, seize plunder,

Loud as thunder the crashing of shields.

Ardent man, prudent man, champion, he ripped and he pierced with his spearpoints,

Deep in blood he butchered with blades, in the strife, heads under hard iron.
⁷

When the Angle shield-wall eventually broke, the real horror began as Arthur’s men slaughtered their retreating enemies. Arthur was,

A reaper in War, he drank the sweet wine.

Mind bent on battle, he reaped battle’s leeks.

Battle’s bright band sang a battle song armed for battle,

Battle’s pinions, his shield was sheared thin by spears in the strife.

Comrades were fallen in battle-harness.

Stirring his war-cry, faultless his service, spellbound his frenzy …
⁸

The Angle stores in the fort would have made good plunder, and it cannot have been easy to maintain disciple in the ranks of Arthur’s army of allies when Trimontium fell. Many other commanders would have rested secure in the knowledge that they had comprehensively defeated the enemy army, even if they had not destroyed it entirely, but not Arthur. Unlike Meade after Gettysburg, when he delayed before following Lee’s defeated army to the Potomac, Arthur sprang after the Angles, looking to bring them to battle, one more time.

When I started looking for Tribruit, the tenth battle on Nennius’ list, I was impressed by R. G. Collingwood’s idea that the
tri
prefix meant “three.” I was less impressed with his conclusion that the site of the battle might have been Chichester Harbour, where there was a triple estuary when the tide was coming in fast.
⁹
The nearest I got to something sensible using the “three” idea was when I considered the place where the rivers Tweed and Teviot meet. I knew these only added up to two rivers, but the Tweed at its junction with the Teviot is divided
by an island that creates two streams, which, when they join the Teviot, produces three streams of rushing water. But I knew this was about as daft as Collingwood’s triple-estuary-of-Chichester-Harbour suggestion, and I had scoffed at it. In my notes I wrote next to my idea, “Not confident about this.” I was right not to be confident about this, because it was the wrong answer. I was, however, very close to the right answer, although, at that time, I did not know it.

Benny Hill once recited,

They said it was an impossible task.

Some even said they knew it.

But I … I tried the impossible task,

And I couldn’t bloody do it.

I knew how he felt. Thinking “three” proved to be a pointless exercise—three what? I wasn’t the first to add innumerable P- and Q-Celtic words
to
tri
to see what I would get, and I was as unsuccessful as everyone else. One Welsh word however,
brwydr
, meaning “battle” or “struggle,” seemed promising. It produced something like Third Battle, but this did not make sense because Tribruit was the ninth battle on the list.

Tribruit
is an awkward word both euphonically and linguistically, and awkward words do not survive because users change them. I came to believe that, like many sixth century words,
Tribruit
was a corrupt form of an earlier word, one which was more awkward still. I found this earlier word in the Vatican Recension–version of Nennius’s
Historia
, which contains not
Tribruit
but
Trevroit
. I was getting warmer.

As things turned out I did not have to find Tribruit. When I found the locations of the seventh, eighth, and ninth battles, the location of the tenth battle became obvious, to the very yard. The tenth battle on Nennius’s list of Arthur’s battles was fought, “On the banks of a river which is called Tribruit.”
¹⁰
If the seventh, eighth, and ninth battles had been fought, respectively, in the Caledonian Wood, at Guinnion-Stow, and at the City of the Legions-Trimontium near Melrose, all that was necessary to find Tribruit was to draw a line through these three battle locations and keep going. It was impossible to miss Tribruit-Trevroit,
because ten miles south of the City of the Legion-Trimontium is the River Teviot.

Tribruit-Trevroit-Teviot is in the right place on the battle-list, immediately after the battles of the Caledonian Wood, Guinnion-Stow, and the City of the Legion-Trimontium. Geographically the Teviot is a perfect fit, and it is of course a river, just as Nennius said. The name Tribruit and to an even greater extent the name Trevroit are close kin to the name Teviot. All three of Nennius’s criteria—the place on the list, the river connection and the name—are satisfied by the River Teviot.

It may be reasonably inferred that the Angles retreated along Roman Dere Street, and so it is possible to identify the exact spot where the Battle of Tribruit took place: where the modern footbridge is today, a few yards south of Monteviot House, where the Roman Road crossed the Teviot. There is corroboration of this Tribruit-Trevroit-Teviot identification in the eleventh-century Welsh poem
Pa Gur
, which tells of a place called Tryfrwyd, generally accepted as Tribruit.