Finding Arthur (37 page)

If Nennius’s eleventh battle, Agned-Breguoin, was fought at Beregonium-Benderloch, then this eleventh battle was fought only some forty miles north of Dunardry-Dunadd and the battlefield of Badon-Badden. When I visited Benderloch with my son in 2003, we came across a living example of the way names change. We asked the young woman serving at the petrol station how to get to the fort and she gave us perfect directions to, what she correctly called, Beregonium. We still got lost however, and so when we met an older woman out walking her dog we asked her if we were on the right path to Beregonium. She told us the fort was right ahead, but she called it Ben Gonium. The young woman in the service station had probably both heard and read the name at school. The older woman had probably only heard the name
as she grew up, and, as she was familiar with the word
ben
, which means “a hill,” and as the fort was situated on a hill, she made the understandable mistake of thinking
Beregonium
was
Ben Gonium
.

Today the hillfort at Agned-Breguoin-Beregonium-Benderloch is heavily overgrown, with only a stub of a ruin on its summit, but in the sixth century it was a substantial place, standing above a sizable settlement. The fort was strategically vital because it lay on the border between the Scots and the Picts and because it commanded the bay of Selma, Ardmucknish Bay, and the main west coast seaways, several sea-lochs, and access to the Great Glen.

We did not make it to the top of the hill—it was too heavily overgrown—but from halfway up it was easy to see that the view over the crescent beach of the bay is largely unspoiled and easy to picture what Arthur saw when he stood there.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
B
ADON

Gildas’s
De Excidio
, which contains the earliest reference to the Battle of Badon, is generally taken to have been written in the early sixth century. “Gildas wrote his main work, the
Ruin of Britain
, about A.D. 540 or just before,” says one authoritative editor, but it is more likely that
De Excidio
was compiled by Gildas from earlier writings and completed around 598, some ten years after the Battle of Badon.

The second record of the Battle of Badon to survive is in Nennius’s battle-list: “The twelfth battle was on Badon Hill and in it nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low save he alone.”
²²

All the other records, including the
Annales Cambriae
, which places the Battle of Badon in 516, are based to some degree upon Gildas and Nennius; although it is likely some other source, now lost, informed the compilers of these
Annales
, because the
Annales
include an extra detail: the period of time over which the battle took place: “The Battle of Badon in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors.”
²³

Three days would make for a short siege. This would have been
barely enough time to invest a fortress and launch an attack upon its fortifications, and certainly too little time to starve out besieged defenders. So where did
three days and three nights
come from? What happened during these three days and nights?

Use of the number three is a common device in Western tales: the story of Jesus rising from the dead after three days, the story of “The Three Bears.” It may be that the matter of three days in Gildas’s
De Excidio
is only a device and no more.

Gildas hints that his god was toying with the people over this period of three days to see if they really liked him, “So that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to do) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not.”
²⁴

This is a bit bizarre. If the obviously spurious material in Nennius, the stuff that has Arthur killing everyone on his own, is disregarded, and if the passage in the
Annales
that has Arthur carrying a wooden cross about the battlefield on his shoulders is put aside (because that is just daft—holy product placement, pure and simple), then the material that remains can be looked at to see if it contains evidence that might confirm that Badon was fought at Badden. The most important item of evidence that remains is the fact that the
Annales Cambriae
say that the battle extended over three days and three nights, which is usually taken to mean that a siege was involved. When I got this far I found I had nothing more to work with. The matter of three days and three nights had to wait until they could be seen as part of a bigger picture.

The evidence suggests that the eleventh battle on Nennius’ battle-list, the Battle of Agned-Breguoin, was fought at Benderloch. Badon was the twelfth battle on the list. In the land of Badden at the foot of Dunardry, forty miles south of Benderloch, there is a likely site for the Battle of Badon. Given that Dunardry and Badden are contiguous, it is also likely that Dunardry is Badon Hill.

Once I had found the sites of the eleventh and the twelfth battles, the next question I had to answer was, Why do the records say that the Battle of Badon lasted three days and three nights? I had the answer to this question in the locations for the eleventh and twelfth battles, but I hadn’t seen it yet.

No one can say with certainty what happened in the lead up to and in the course of the Battle of Badon; all that can be said is that what follows is consistent with the earliest historical records and with the geography of Argyll. After the Battle of Agned-Breguoin Arthur’s warriors were in the glens and hills east of Benderloch hunting down the survivors of the Anglo-Pictish army who had not found refuge in their ships. Arthur Mac Aedan probably stood on the ramparts of the fort at Benderloch looking out across the Bay of Selma, Ardmucknish Bay, watching the Anglo-Pictish fleet sail west, thinking it was headed for home.

The Anglo-Pictish fleet, however, was still intact and its ships filled with angry Angles and Picts spoiling for revenge and lusting for some speedy riposte to sate their wounded pride. Instead of sailing north, back the way they had come, humiliated and disappointed with only shaming news to report, they sailed south some forty miles, intent on laying waste the fertile heartlands of Dalriada. This was not a part of a grand strategy designed to outflank the Scots and win the war. The war was already lost. This southern venture was no more than a wild hate-filled lunge born of anger and frustration. Its aim was to kill undefended people and plunder their property and to allow the Angles and Picts to go home with something to talk about other than utter failure.

The Anglo-Pictish warriors stormed ashore at Crinan and found themselves facing only Scots women and children and the wounded soldiers and veterans who had not marched north with the army. Word was sent north to Arthur, and the Scots took refuge in the forts of Dunardry and Dunadd. The Angles and the Picts were unable to capture Dunardry on its steep hill or Dunadd in the center of its deep marsh, and so they plundered and destroyed the lands of Badden, the lands that lay around the two forts.

It was while thinking through what might have happened at this time that I came to see how the matter of
three days and three nights
fit in. The Angles and the Picts had three days untrammeled by opposition before Arthur arrived.

When Arthur heard the Angle fleet had headed south he set off in pursuit with all the men he had available, without waiting for the
rest of his army to return from its pursuit of the Angles and Picts who had headed for the hills.

If the Anglo-Pictish army marched ninety miles from Carpow to Benderloch in five days, then, by this same reckoning, Arthur’s army would have been able to cover the forty-two miles from Benderloch to Dunardry in about two days, despite the fact that Arthur’s army had only recently marched north and had only recently fought and won a major battle. Add to this the time it would have taken for the news that the Anglo-Picts had gone south to get to Benderloch, and we have a “perfect” three days from the time the Angles came ashore at Crinan to the time Arthur arrived to raise the siege.

We cannot know exactly how long it took Arthur to march south to relieve Dunardry-Dunadd; all we can say with certainty is that some time would have passed between the Battle of Agned-Breguoin and the raising of the siege of Badden-Dunadd-Dunardry, and that “three days” sounds about right.

Arthur’s flying column rode south along the line of the modern-day road and met the Angles and Picts where the road meets the Badden Burn in the shadow of Dunardry Hill, Mount Badon.

Badon-Badden was not much of a battle. The Angles and the Picts headed back to their ships when they heard Arthur was approaching, and Arthur’s vanguard fought only the Anglo-Pictish rearguard as they staged a fighting retreat to their ships. The Angles and Picts had staged a raid not an invasion, and they would have been foolish to engage Arthur in a pitched battle when all the time Scots reinforcements were arriving from the north. The Angles and the Picts had their plunder and had made their point, and so they sailed for home. Of course, in reality, they were beaten. As always, the victory was Arthur’s.

The now famous Battle of Badon, the battle that ended the second and final part of the Great Angle War, was, in fact, a bathetic event. It is really only famous because it is the last battle on Nennius’s list and the only one mentioned in the other early primary sources, Gildas’s
De Excidio
and the
Annales Cambriae
.

The above, necessarily somewhat speculative, account of the Battle of Badon is consistent with the evidence of Gildas and Nennius and with the
three days and three nights
of the
Annales Cambriae
. It is also
consistent with the evidence that suggests Dunadd was where Arthur took a sword from a stone, and that the marshy land through which the River Add twists was Camelot.

Dunardry hillfort is connected to Merlin-Lailoken by the Battle of Arderydd, fought in 573, and to Arthur Mac Aedan by the inauguration ceremony in the following year. Dunadd, “Camelot,” and Dunardry all adjoin the land of Badden. How likely is it that all these things are mere coincidence?

It is likely that the Great Angle War was fought in the year or two that preceded 588, the year in which Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, fought and won the Battle of Badon. This is consistent with the non-supernatural passages in Gildas’s
De Excidio
, “From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies.”

Nennius listed twelve battles in which Arthur was commander. In all twelve of these battles Arthur was victorious. Of course, life is bound to have been more complicated than that. We may safely assume there were other peripheral skirmishes, fights, engagements, and lesser battles, in which Arthur was not in command of the forces that faced the Angles and that the Angles won some of these. So it is true to say that sometimes one side won and sometimes the other.

Gildas goes on to say that Badon Hill was “pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least.”
²⁵
Apparently this passage is in especially tortuous Latin. It has certainly been much argued over. By my reconstruction, the Battle of Badon was indeed “pretty well” the last victory in the Great Angle War. It was also a bit of an anticlimax. We may reasonably suppose that after Badon-Badden there was the odd skirmish here and there but that, as far as The Great Angle War was concerned, the Battle of Badon-Badden as I have described it, was pretty well it.

As for the words, “certainly not the least”: why would these be necessary if someone had not suggested that Badon was the least of Arthur’s battles? No one ever says the Battle of Gettysburg was “certainly not the least” of the battles in the American Civil War, because no one would ever suggest it was. When someone says something is “not the least,” the one thing you can be sure of is that it is not the greatest either. Clearly the fact that Badon was only a relatively minor
battle had arisen and given rise to some controversy. If it had not, Gildas’s denial of its lack of importance would have been otiose.

Having said that, Gildas’s Latin is so obscure it is impossible to be certain what exactly he was trying to say. Gildas was not interested in wars. Gildas was interested in religion. He probably only mentioned Badon to draw a line under it as the last Battle of the War, as if to say, “Well, that’s the War over with, now let us move on to more important matters,” before going back to moaning because people didn’t want to be Christians.

It is said that the Battle of Badon was followed by fifty years of peace. The Battle of Badon took place in about 588 (at least, by my account) and the Edinburgh of the Gododdin Britons fell to the Angles in 638: fifty years exactly. However, if there is one thing I have learned when writing this book, it is that sixth-century dates, like sixth-century names, are unreliable things and not to be trusted. Still, it is possible that the fifty years that separated the end of Great Angle War and the defeat of the Angles from the fall of Edinburgh and the victory of the Angles came to be called fifty years of peace, as if nothing had happened in between.

Before Badon, it was possible the Angles might conquer Scotland, as they were to conquer England in the next few centuries. If the Angles had conquered Scotland, Celtic-Britain as a significant entity would have ceased to exist, and today there would be only a Greater England with, perhaps, the last glimmers of Celtic culture clinging on along the western coasts.

After Badon, the danger of an Angle conquest of northern Britain ceased to exist for at least the ten years that preceded Gildas’s
De Excidio
.
²⁶
During this ten-year period, while many towns stood empty and ruined, there was, what Gildas calls, an unlooked for recovery.
²⁷