Finding Arthur (7 page)

In the late twelfth century, the French writer Chrétien de Troyes introduced
Camelot
as the name of Arthur’s capital. He mentions it only once: “On a certain Ascension Day King Arthur was in the region of Caerleon and held his court at Camelot …”
¹¹
Chrétien places his Camelot in the region of Caerleon, usually taken to be Carlisle in the far north of England, near the border with Scotland. By way of contrast, Malory’s Camelot is in Winchester in the far south of Britain. Others say Camelot was Camulodunum (Colchester) because it begins with “Cam,” although Colchester is an unlikely place for any Briton to have had his capital in any possible Age of Arthur because it was within Saxon lands at any time when any Arthur might have been active. Geoffrey did not mention Camelot, but this has not stopped Tintagel, Cornwall, where Geoffrey says Arthur was conceived, from being put forward as a possible Camelot.

Probably the most popular location for Camelot is Cadbury in Somerset, because Cadbury has a fort and there are several “Cam” names nearby. The idea that Cadbury was Camelot took off after the antiquary John Leland, writing in the sixteenth century during the reign of Henry VIII, said that local people referred to the area as
Camalat
. If they did, it was probably because there was a fort and some “Cam” names nearby, and because for some four hundred years the monks of nearby landlocked Glastonbury had been trying to pass off their monastery as the Isle of Avalon where Arthur was supposedly buried.

In Scotland, according to local tradition, Camelot was the village of Camelon in the Falkirk district, although local tradition also said that Camelon was the site of the Battle of Camlann, Arthur’s last battle.

The twelfth-century French writer Wace introduced the Round Table. He said Arthur made the table round, “On account of his noble barons, each one felt he was superior, each considered himself the best, and none could say who was the worst, Arthur had the Round Table made, about which the British tell many a tale. There sat the vassals, all equal, all leaders; they were placed equally around the table, and equally served. None could boast he sat higher than his peer; all were seated near the place of honor, none far away.”
¹²

This is marvelous nonsense. Sitting in a circle might suggest equality to modern readers but not to someone in the sixth century. One thing the Celts of the sixth century felt strongly about was “pride of place.” Everyone at a feast would have known who the most important person there was, and that the second most prestigious place was at that person’s right hand. If the real Arthur truly did have a Round Table, equality was not the reason.

Robert de Boron, active a generation or so after Wace, tried to curry favor with those in power by Christianizing the Round Table, saying that Merlin made it in imitation of the table used at the Last Supper. This is but one of many attempts to give a Christian gloss to a non-Christian story. (Of course no one knows the seating arrangements at the Last Supper. In Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
everyone is facing the same way, which seems unlikely, but … who knows.)

The
Annales Cambriae
say that “Merlin went mad” at the Battle of Arderydd in 573. Arderydd was fought at Caer Gwenddolau—today the Liddel Strength—a fort eleven miles north of Carlisle on the Liddel Water that forms the modern Scotland–England border. The battlefield lies just outside Longtown in the parish of Arthuret, centered on Arthuret Church. Close by lie the hills of Arthuret and seven miles away there is a hill called Arthur Seat.

The reference to Merlin at the Battle of Arderydd, coupled with the local Arthur-connected place-names, presents a problem for those who hold to the conventional view that Arthur was a man of the early sixth century who lived in the south of Britain and died in 537.
Arderydd was fought in the north in 573. Those who favor a southern Arthur have to decide whether their Arthur was a contemporary of Merlin, and, if they were contemporaries, whether they lived in the early or late sixth century. They also have to explain why a southern Arthur traveled north to fight at Arderydd. To solve this problem, it has been suggested there were two Merlins. The first Merlin is said to have been a contemporary of an early-sixth-century southern Arthur, a man who fought and won a memorable battle on the same battlefield where, in 573, a second Merlin fought in the Battle of Arderydd.

It is sometimes said that
Arthuret
originally meant “Arthur’s Head” although Skene, Queen Victoria’s Historiographer Royal for Scotland, said it is a modern form of
Arderydd
.
¹³
It seems Skene knew there was a connection between Arthuret and Arderydd but, at a loss to explain what it was, he simply conflated the two. One recent book in which scorn is cast on the very idea of finding a historical Arthur avoids the whole issue by calling the Battle of Arderydd, the Battle of Arthuret.
¹⁴

The name Arthuret has inevitably led to this area being associated with the legendary Arthur. Some say he was buried there. It has also been said that Camelot was there and that Camlann, where Arthur fought his last battle, was fought in this area.

It has been supposed that Arthur was initially portrayed as a villain because he raided church property and stole the flocks and herds of priests and monks (and, we must suppose, tunics too), but there is reason to believe that the Church’s early aversion to Arthur came from his association in the oral tradition with Merlin-Lailoken, an obviously non-Christian figure. This would have made Arthur anathema to Christian clerics.

The litmus test for the historical Arthur is the Battle of Badon, the only battle on the battle-list of Nennius to be mentioned in any of the other early sources: Gildas’s
De Excidio
and the
Annales Cambriae
. Why is the test not to connect a southern Arthur with all twelve battles? Better still, why not all twelve battles in some sensible order? The reason this is not done is because, in the south of Britain, it is all but impossible to find a historical Arthur who is connected to a place called Badon, far less one connected to all twelve of the Nennius battles, far
less all twelve of the Nennius battles in a sensible order. As Geoffrey Ashe says, “Four of the battle sites—‘the river which is called Bassas’, ‘Fort Guinnion’, ‘the river which is called Tribruit’ and ‘the mountain which is called Agned’—have defied identification.”
¹⁵
Other sites have proved all too easy to identify, albeit over and over again in many different places. The map in Alcock’s
Arthur’s Britain
shows a number of the battles including six Badons, all spread throughout Britain in no particular order, some as far apart as five hundred miles.
¹⁶

All of the twelve Nennius battles have innumerable purported locations. The battle-list begins, “The first battle was at the mouth of the river called Glein.”
¹⁷

Alistair Moffat, measured and fair, plumps for the River Glen in Northumberland, England, as the location of Glein battlefield, although he admits he has only a reasonable reading of geography and good dictionaries to back this up.
¹⁸
There is even less evidence to associate, as some people do, the River Glen in Lincolnshire, England, with any possible Arthur or with any battle in which someone who might have been Arthur might have been involved.
¹⁹
Norma Lorre Goodrich ingeniously suggests that Glein was Gullane, east of Edinburgh, but the dissimilarity of the names and absence of corroboration says this is a desperate throw.
²⁰

Glein
is said to be
glen
and to have been derived from the Gaelic for “pure,” although my dictionaries say pure is
glan
.
Glé
, meaning “pure” or “bright,” is the nearest word I could find to
glen
. The “pure” meanings of
glein
are unnecessarily complicated, especially when there is another rather obvious meaning available.
Glein
, according to all five of the Gaelic-English dictionaries I looked at, means “glen,” the Scots word for valley. Applying Occam’s razor—by which a simple answer to a question is always preferable to a complex answer—it would seem more likely that
glein
means “a glen” rather than something pure. But then, you might ask, who would call a river “the River Valley”? Well, there are innumerable rivers called Avon, and Avon is simply the Gaelic word
abhon
, meaning “river,” and so we have a lot of River Rivers.
²¹
It is possible that whoever named Arthur’s first battle did not know that a glen was a valley because he or she did not speak Gaelic. And so we have the River Glen when, in fact, the battle was fought in
a river with a glen running through it or even in a place of rivers and glens in general.

The second entry on the battle-list reads, “The second, the third, the fourth and the fifth [battles] were on another river, called the Douglas which is in the country of Lindsey.” The fact that Nennius lists four Douglas battles lends support to the idea that his battle-list had a real base in history. It is impossible to believe, if Nennius’s list was a work of fiction, that the person who thought up the other eight names on the list was unable to invent another three names and so avoid repeating Douglas three times.

The Latin version of the battle-list reads, “…
Super aliud flumen quod dicitur Dubglas et est in regione Linnuis
.”
²²
The place-name Linnuis has been blithely translated as Lindsey and identified as Lindsey near Lincoln in England. John Morris wrote in his
Age of Arthur
,

One identifiable site is the river Dubglas in the district of Linnuis … Linnuis translates as Lindenses, the men of Lindsey about Lincoln; the only significant river of Lindsey is the Witham, whose ancient name is not known but which might have been Dubglas. A campaign may have entailed four nearby battles, but the more likely explanation is that this battle received four stanzas in the poem, the others one each. On any interpretation, it was evidently regarded as the most important of the battles, apart from Badon.
²³

Instead of using the name to find the place, this writer, it seems, has taken a place and adapted the name to fit it. He says the River Witham “might have been Dubglas.” So might any river in Britain. There is no evidence that the Witham was once called Douglas. Lindenses is far from an obvious translation of Linnuis.
²⁴
Lincoln is however in the south of Britain, and that seems to have been sufficient to outweigh the absence of the name Douglas in the vicinity, not to mention the absence of an Arthur and any time when something approaching the battles in question might have taken place in the vicinity of Lincoln. There is a River Douglas on the other side of England, in Lancashire, but this river has no Linnuis association. This has not stopped
this Douglas also being put forward as a possible location for the second to fifth battles on Nennius’s list.

Innumerable other places have been suggested as possible Douglas battle sites, but there is no substantial evidence to back up any one of them. Indeed some have neither a hint of a Douglas nor a Linnuis, which, given that places called Douglas (from
Dubh Glas
, meaning “Black Water”) were common throughout Britain in the sixth century, suggests that someone was just not trying hard enough. Without some evidence to back up their claims, these places cannot be considered as possible locations of the battles of Douglas.

John Morris says four stanzas were given to the Battle of Douglas because, apart from Badon, it was the most important battle on the list. It is not easy to see why anyone would emphasize the importance of a battle by listing its name over and over and over again. On this basis it would be reasonable to expect Badon to be listed at least five times.
²⁵
According to Morris there may have been a Douglas campaign that included four Douglas battles, but as there is no historical foundation for even one such battle in the area, it is pushing things a bit to jump to four battles. The proposition just does not make sense.

Those who are determined to have the battles of Douglas in the south of Britain have a choice. They can have a location on the east coast, which has a Lindsey but no Douglas, or a location on the west coast, which has a Douglas but no Lindsey. Leslie Alcock says,

The best philological opinion is that Linnuis should derive from a British-Latin word like Lindenses, “the people of Lindum” or Lindensia, “land of Lindum.” Neither of these British-Latin words is in fact recorded, but there seems to be no doubt that such words must have existed as derivatives of the word Lindum.

Yes, well, maybe, but that seems to be stretching the evidence just too far. Alcock says these supposed words subsequently developed and became Linnuis. He then asks where Lindum was. “The most obvious candidate” is Lincoln, he says, although, as he then goes on to say, “The
only snag is that no Douglas … appears to be known in Lindsey [the area about Lincoln].”

There is however another Lindum, in Scotland. Why is this Scottish Lindum not “the most obvious” Lindum? Alcock does not say, but it may be because a Scottish location is too far north to weigh in favor of a southern Arthur. All Alcock is prepared to concede is that “This [Scottish site] could conceivably have been the scene of an Arthurian battle against the young Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, but it seems an unlikely place for four battles.”
²⁶