Finding Arthur (35 page)

Manawyd brought home

A pierced shield from Tryfrwyd …

By the hundreds they fell

To Bedwyrís’ four-pronged spear,

On the shores of Tryfrwyd
¹¹
.

Manawyd is usually placed in the south of Britain or held to be the Isle of Man by determined southern Arthurians, but when looked at as part of the big picture, it is obvious, is it not, that Manawyd is the Manau of Arthur Mac Aedan?

To paraphrase Aneirin writing at a later date in another connection, on savage stallions Arthur and his companions leaped as one and fiercely crushed their foes in hard fighting. Together they hewed the Angle enemy. Indeed they did. Arthur and his army drove the Angles back to the Teviot, and there they routed them entirely as the panicked Angles tried to put the river between them their worst nightmare, Arthur.

The Angles, all but trapped, fought ferociously for their lives. In
charge after charge Arthur’s lieutenants, including his nephew Gawain, led the warriors Arthur called “the best men in the world.”
¹²
Kay, Arthur’s boyhood friend and now one of his veterans, excelled on the banks of the Teviot: according to one account he killed one in three of the enemy, although this is doubtless somewhat exaggerated: “The sword in the battle was unerring in his hand.”
¹³

Kay rejoiced “as long as he hewed down,” and he hewed down until he was killed by arrows.

To battle he would come

By the hundred would he slaughter;

There was no day that would satisfy him.

Unmerited was the death of Cai [Kay] …

Before the pang of blue shafts.
¹⁴

Arthur’s lieutenant Bedevere and an otherwise unknown officer, Bridlaw, were in command of the wings of Arthur’s army:

Nine hundred would listen to them.

Six hundred gasping for breath,

Would be the cost of attacking them.

Eventually, the last bloody remains of what had once been a proud and powerful Angle army escaped across the Teviot and hurried in panic south to their coastal heartlands. It was to be thirty years before they staged such a campaign again, and when they did they went south not north. The Angles were victorious in the south; there they created Angle-land, England. Had it not been for Arthur, the same thing would have happened in the north and there would have been no Scotland, only a Greater England.

Arthur led an allied army on this one occasion only. In a campaign of relentless ferocity he won four battles, in the Caledonian Wood, at Guinnion-Stow, at the City of the Legion-Trimontium and finally on the banks of Tribruit-Trevroit-Teviot river.

When and where Arthur lived and who he was have long been mysteries that have beset historians for centuries. The Great Angle War
is different. It has not been a mystery because, until
Finding Merlin
, no one had said there had been a Great Angle War, and so no one was beset by its mysteries. If the above conclusions are correct then there was a Great Angle War, and it was won by Arthur.

Arthur’s victory on the banks of the Teviot ended only the first Act of the Great Angle War. When next the Angles attacked, Arthur would stand alone against them and win, quite literally, endless fame.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
A
GNED
-B
REGUOIN

The Picts were content to watch their enemies tear each other to pieces in the Great Angle War, and to wait and see who won. They knew that if the Angles were victorious they would soon have to face them in battle, and that if the Angles lost they would soon have to face Arthur again.

According to the conventional wisdom there are two alternative eleventh battles in the battle-list of Nennius. The eleventh battle most often referred to is in the Harleian-related manuscripts:
¹⁵
“The eleventh battle was on the hill called Agned.” The alternative eleventh battle is in Vatican Recension–related manuscripts:
¹⁶
“The eleventh [battle] was on the mountain Breguoin, which we call Cat Bregion.” The so-called Gildensian manuscript of the
Historia
,
¹⁷
effectively the Harleian manuscript with a few changes, confuses the matter further with a composite version of the Harleian- and Vatican-related manuscripts: “Mount Agned, that is Cat Bregomium [
sic
].”

Despite being predisposed to place Arthur in the south, many who favor a southern Arthur are prepared to concede that Agned-Breguoin, was fought in Edinburgh or at least that the Battle of Agned was fought there. Even J. A. Giles said Agned was fought in Cadbury, Somerset, England, but allowed that Edinburgh was a possible location.
¹⁸
This suggests that there must be really good evidence for Edinburgh.

Opinions are divided on Breguoin. Some say Agned and Breguoin were the same battle, others that they were different battles and that Breguoin was fought somewhere else. There is no consensus among those who hold that Arthur was a man of the south, but most of them
hold that there were two eleventh battles, perhaps because they cannot find a convincing Agned or a convincing Breguoin in the south, far less a place that satisfies both alternatives.

It is clear from the Vatican-related manuscripts, the ones that say, “The eleventh [battle] was on the mountain
Breguoin, which we call Cat Bregion
,” that the earlier name was Breguoin and that Bregion is an alternative to Breguoin in another language. If the battle name had been in Latin, the universal language of the day, it would have been the same everywhere and there would have been no need for Nennius to provide an alternative which was familiar to his audience. It is therefore unlikely that either Breguoin or Bregion are Latin names.

Nennius, a monk of Bangor in Wales, would have spoken an early form of Welsh and so, when he says, “which we call … Bregion,” he probably means in P-Celtic Welsh. It follows, therefore, that
Breguoin
cannot also be a P-Celtic word. If
Breguoin
is not a Latin or a Welsh P-Celtic word, then it is almost certainly a Q-Celtic word, because there is no other reasonable alternative language available. If
Breguoin
was a Q-Celtic word, it was likely it originated in Q-Celtic speaking Scotland or Ireland and not in the south of Britain.

The introduction to O’Brien’s 1768
Dictionary
says,

The other vestige of ancient Irish habitations in Anglesy [
sic
], is the name of the ruins of a great edifice in that island, which Mr Rowland thinks to have been the
Arch-Druid’s
supreme court of judicature. Those ruins are to this day called
Bruyn-gwin
, as the Welsh write it: a plain Irish word which signifies a white palace or house, the same as
white hall
in London.
Bruighean
, pronounced
Brúin
or
Bruyn
, in Irish signifies a great house or palace.
¹⁹

Here, in perfect pairing, is a Q-Celtic Irish-Scottish word,
Bruighean
, that is akin to
Breguoin
and an equivalent P-Celtic Welsh word,
Bruyn-gwin
, that is similarly akin to
Bregion
. (Irish and Scottish were interchangeable in the sixth century.) This corroborates the evidence that suggests
Breguoin
was a Q-Celtic-Gaelic word and
Bregion
a P-Celtic word. It seems unlikely that this is a mere coincidence.

Allowing for the inevitable mishearings and misunderstandings that would have occurred as these words were bandied about between innumerable people from different backgrounds, speaking different languages, over different generations, it is easy to see that the person who wrote, “
Breguoin
, which we call
Cat
Bregion,” might more accurately have written “
Bruighean
, which we call
Cat Bruyn-gwin
,” because the latter version has at least the virtue of making sense.

“
Breguoin
, which we call
Cat
Bregion” is meaningless. “
Bruighean
, which we call
Cat Bruyn-gwin
,” means, in Scots Q-Celtic, “the battle of the great house or palace,” and in Welsh P-Celtic, “the battle of the white palace or house.” O’Brien has more to offer. Even if he had not written about an Arch-Druid in connection with a great or white house or palace on the island of Anglesey, he would have highlighted a druidic connection because Anglesey was the main center of the druids in Britain until it was devastated by the Romans around 60 CE: the very reference to Anglesey smacks of the druids.

The color white has been associated with the druids ever since Pliny the Elder wrote about druids dressed in white cutting mistletoe from oak trees with golden shears, and so the association of druids and a white house also makes sense. All this evidence points to a location somewhere in Q-Celtic-speaking lands, which had some great or white house or palace connection … and some druids.

Of course, Agned still stands to be considered. If Agned was not Edinburgh or any one of the other suggested sites—where is it? Skene provides the necessary clue. Although, in his
Four Ancient Books of Wales
, he said that Agned was Edinburgh, he also provided evidence that suggested otherwise, although, of course, he did not know that: “…
Agned
or
Mynydd Agned
probably comes from an obsolete word,
agneaw
, to paint,
agneaid
, painted.”
²⁰
He is more specific a few pages later when he says
Mynydd Agned
means the Painted Mount.

The Picts called themselves
Cruithne
, the people. The name Pict by which they are best known today is said to have been derived from the Latin for “Painted People” and to have been given to them by the Romans because the Picts painted their bodies with intricate symbols. The Picts also carved stones with unique, intricate patterns. It may be reasonably supposed that a people called the Painted People because
they painted their bodies also painted their symbol stones and their buildings (just as the Greeks painted the statues and buildings that we only see in monochrome today).

If the hill of Agned was the Painted Mount, as Skene said, then this may have been because there were painted buildings and stones on its summit. This is more likely than the actual hill being painted—it is not easy to paint a hill. If there were painted buildings and stones on Agned, then it is likely that one or more of these buildings would have been painted white because white was one of the more readily available colors, and because it is likely that at least one building was specifically for the use of the druids.

Clearly one possible place for this painted hill, and so for Agned, was somewhere in the lands of the Picts, the painted people. If Agned has a Pictish connection this would suggest that Agned and Breguoin must be separate battles because other evidence suggested that
Breguoin
, which Nennius’s P-Celtic speakers called
Bregion
, was probably a Q-Celtic word, and the Picts did not speak Q-Celtic.

But then, this isn’t necessarily so.

If the eleventh battle was fought where battles tend to be fought, on a border, then, it may be that Breguoin and Agned were two names for the same place. It may be that on one side of the border the battle was named Breguoin by Q-Celtic-speaking people and that on the other side of the border the battle was named Agned by P-Celtic-speaking people. If this is correct then Agned-Breguoin would have been on a Q-Celtic–P-Celtic border. The longest such border in Britain lay between the Scots and the Picts.

Useful practical details are scanty in the extreme in the early sources, but
The Prose Lancelot
contains one specific, practical detail concerning Nennius’s eleventh battle: it says Bredigan (Breguoin) was five days’ march from Berwick on the east coast, on the Scotland–England border. This detail does nothing to enhance the story, and so, although
The Prose Lancelot
is twelfth century and thus a very late source, this five-day march has to be considered weighty evidence.

There are two clues—a distance and a starting point.

No one knows how far a “five days’ march” was in the sixth century. Roman legions marched about ten miles a day, and so, for a
Roman legionary, a five-day march was about fifty miles. This seemed a little short to me, but then I was not the one who had to build a fortified camp at the end of each days march. In 1066 King Harold of England force-marched his army from London to York, a distance of 210 miles, in some four or five days, depending upon the source, thus averaging forty-two to fifty-two miles a day. This seemed to me to be a little too far to be a standard five-day march. I asked modern soldiers how far they could march in a day, but no one I spoke to in the modern army had an answer to that question. They said everything depended upon the conditions, the circumstances, and the soldiers themselves. In 1982 in the Falkland Islands men of the Parachute Regiment “yomped” fifty-six miles over rough terrain carrying eighty-pound packs in three days. If they had kept going at this amazing pace they would have covered about ninety miles in five days.