Finding Arthur (8 page)

What he means is that this Scottish site is an unlikely place for a southern Arthur to have fought four battles. It is not, of course, an unlikely place for someone from Dalriada to have fought four battles; on the contrary, this Douglas is on the border that separated Dalriada from the lands of the Picts, and so it is a likely place for someone from Dalriada or someone from the land of the Picts to have fought four battles.

The problem for those who would prefer a southern Arthur is that if this Scottish location is accepted it means their southern Arthur would have had to travel north to fight a full third of Nennius’s twelve battles against the Scots of Dalriada. This would raise the question of why any southern Arthur would do such a thing. A southern Arthur would have had enough to do in the south, where his people were increasingly losing in battle to the Angles and the Saxons.

John Morris looked to the Witham, a place that “might have been Douglas.” Leslie Alcock relied upon words which had not been recorded but which, he said, “must have existed.” The matter would have been so much simpler if only they had been able to give serious consideration to the possibility that Arthur was a man of the north.

Britain has been fine-tooth combed for evidence of the location of the sixth battle, the Battle of Bassas. More than any other site on Nennius’s battle-list, Bassas has caused scholars to despair. Some have said it just could not be identified, while others would not even speculate with regard to its whereabouts. The English nominees include, among others, Bassington near Cramlington and Bassington near Alnwick, both in Northumberland; Baschurch, Shropshire; Basford, Nottinghamshire; Baslow, Derbyshire; Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire;
and Basingstoke, southwest of London. If it has “Bas” in its name, it is a contender.

In Scotland, the most favored location is the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth off East Lothian. The fact that the Bass Rock is not much more than 500 feet across and is more than a mile from the mainland, never mind from the nearest river, has not prevented it from having its share of supporters. Bass, near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, in the northeast, and Bass Hill, near Dryburgh, in the Scottish Borders, have also been considered but, like the Bass Rock, they have only their names to recommend them.

It is hard to believe, but Cambuslang a few miles southeast of Glasgow has also been put forward as a Bassas battle-site, although connecting “bas” with “bus” appears tentative in the extreme. Dunipace, where I say in
Finding Merlin
Merlin-Lailoken was assassinated, has also been thrown into the ring as a possibility due to an early alternative name, Dunibas, but perhaps this is also too tenuous a connection to be true.

It is commonly allowed 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. Having said that, J. A. Giles, ever determined to place Arthur in the south, suggests that the Battle of the Caledonian Wood may have been fought in the forest of Englewood, between Penrith and Carlisle, making it just over the Scottish border into England. This is rather sad really.

There is no such consensus with regard to the eighth, ninth, and tenth battles—the battles of Guinnion, the City of the Legion, and Tribruit. Where were they fought? When were they fought? Who fought in them? And why? There are no answers to these questions in the south.

Suggested locations for Guinnion include Caer Guidn, Cornwall, in southwest England; Binchester, County Durham, in northeast England; and Winchester, Hampshire, in the far south of England. J. A. Giles favored the Roman station at Garionenum, near Yarmouth, Norfolk, in the far east of England. The City of the Legion has been identified as Chester or Carlisle, both northwest England; Exeter,
southwest England; and Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. For centuries Tribruit has been acknowledged by those who have looked for Arthur’s battles as a nightmare. It has been said that the prefix “tri” refers to the city of Troy, for no reason other than the coincidence of the first two letters of the two names. An alternative opinion has the whole name mean “The Strand of the Pierced or Broken Place,” although this suggestion does not come with any particular strand attached.

The “strand” element echoes in the Scottish-Gaelic word
tràigh
, which means “a shore.” When
bruach
, a bank, is added to
tràigh
it produces the composite word,
tràigh
-
bruach
, which, at least, sounds something like
Tribruit
and fits Nennius’s battle-list entry, which says the tenth battle was fought on the bank of a river. However, the Battle of the “Shore and/or Bank” is too tautological to make sense, and, even if it did make sense, which shore, which bank?
Ruathar
(which apparently means “violent onset”) has also been added to
tràigh
to give a battle-name akin to “Skirmish on the Shore,” which may be thought too bland to be a name for a battle.

J. A. Giles, ever anxious to set Arthur’s battles in the south of Britain, said the battle-name
Tribruit
should really be “Ribroit,” which he identified with the River Brue, Somerset, or the River Ribble, Lancashire. Don’t ask me how. The rivers Severn in Gloucestershire in the far south of England and Eden in Cumbria in the far north of England have also been thrown into the pool of possible Tribruits.

Early in the twentieth century R. G. Collingwood interpreted the “tri” prefix as “three” before adding
bruit
, which apparently means “rushing” (as in the water of a rushing river). He concluded that Tribruit might have been the triple estuary of Chichester Harbour when the tide was coming in fast. How likely is that? In Scotland Tribruit has been identified as the place where the Rivers Forth, Teith, and the Goodie Water meet, west of Stirling, a claim which would have more force if these rivers actually met. The River Frew, once the River Bruit, another candidate, runs nearby.

According to the conventional wisdom there are two alternative eleventh battles in the list of Nennius. The eleventh battle most often referred to is in the Harleian manuscripts
²⁷
: “the eleventh battle was
on the hill called Agned.” The alternative eleventh battle is in Vatican Recension–related manuscripts:
²⁸
“The eleventh [battle] was on the mountain Breguoin, which we call Cat Bregion.” The so-called Gildensian manuscript of the
Historia
²⁹
—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
].” Somewhat surprisingly, given the general propensity among scholars to place Arthur in southern Britain, Edinburgh is the generally accepted location of the Battle of Agned. Even J. A. Giles, a man ever determined to place Arthur in the south of Britain and whose primary location for the Battle of Agned was Cadbury in Somerset, allowed that Edinburgh was a
possible
location.

It is ironic that Geoffrey of Monmouth, who did so much to make Arthur a southern hero, contributed so much to this Agned-Edinburgh identification, albeit indirectly. Geoffrey referred to Alclud, literally Clyde Rock, in modern-day Dumbarton and then, in the same sentence, to Mount Agned, which, he said, “is now called the Maidens’ Castle.”
³⁰
Geoffrey did not say the Maidens’ Castle was in Edinburgh. However, about the same time as Geoffrey was writing his
History
(circa 1136), David I, King of Scots, in circa 1142 referred to Edinburgh Castle as
Castellum Puellaram
, Castle of the Maidens. This conjunction led to the association of Agned and Edinburgh, even by those who favored a southern Arthur.

If Agned was the Castle of the Maidens and if the Castle of the Maidens was Edinburgh then, it followed, Edinburgh was Agned. That was the reasoning. However, many more places than Edinburgh were called “Castle of the Maidens” and so the Edinburgh identification does not necessarily stand. Maiden references are quite common in Scottish place-names, especially “Nine Maidens” references.

It may, however, still be argued that there is corroboration for the Agned-Edinburgh connection. Skene says, “The eleventh battle was fought in
Mynydd Agned
, or Edinburgh, and here too the name is preserved in
Sedes Arthuri
or Arthur’s Seat.” Arthur’s Seat, the great volcanic rock that looms above the new Scottish Parliament, may well be connected with Arthur, but it does not necessarily follow that this has anything to do with the Battle of Agned. And of course the Arthur-was-a-man-of-the-south
diehards do not accept that Agned was in Scotland, irrespective of evidence. One even claimed that “Agned” was a spelling mistake made by a copyist who had really intended to place the battle in Gaul in the fifth century.

The alternative names, Breguoin and Bregion, used in the identification of Nennius’s eleventh battle in the Vatican-related manuscripts, and Bregomium, in the Gildensian manuscript, have inspired a range of variations that include Bravonium, Branonium, Bremenium, Brewyn and even Cathregonium, among many others. There are several suggested Breguoin-Bregion-Bregomium battle sites: Brent Knoll, Somerset; Ribchester, Lancashire; Cirencester, Gloucestershire; High Rochester, Northumberland. All are in England, and not one of these suggested sites comes with anything resembling a substantial evidential foundation.

Sometimes not even three common letters are needed—two will do—and so we have Roman place-names like Bravonium and Branonium put forward as possibilities. The
g
that appears in names like Breguoin is absent in these Roman names and in most of the others. This problem has been “solved” by the argument that
Breguoin
was a transcription error and what was really meant was “Bretagne” (Britain), which would make the eleventh battle the Battle of Britain. How Nennius in the ninth century could have used French is not clear, and, besides, if the eleventh battle was important enough to justify it being given the name of the whole island, would not this name be used in every manuscript, including the Vatican-related manuscripts? In any event, the “Battle of Britain” does not help identify an exact site.

Norma Lorre Goodrich puts forward a name that includes a
g
but she had to look to a very late source to find it. In
The Prose Lancelot
, written in Old French in the twelfth century, the name Breguoin is given as Bredigan. According to Goodrich the etymology of Bredigan is “astonishingly simple”:
bre
means “promontory,”
di
means “at,” and
gan
(or
llan
) means “a meadow” or “church enclosure.” This produces “the battle of the promontory at the meadow or church enclosure,” which seems an unlikely name for a battle. Whether this is so or not, as with
Bretagne
, this construction takes us no closer to finding an actual battle site.

The site of the Badon battlefield has also been disputed for centuries; Bowden Hill, Lothian; Dumbarton Rock, Strathclyde; Mynydd Baedan, Glamorgan; and Little Solway Hill, Somerset have all been suggested as sites of Mons Badonis. Every Badbury in England—in Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, and Lincolnshire—has its champion. However, those who prefer an English location for everything Arthurian generally recognize Bath as the site of the Battle of Badon, despite the fact that there is nothing to connect the all but hill-free Bath with any historical context within which a historical Arthur might have existed. There is no evidence of any battle at Bath at any time which might have involved an Arthur, far less of a battle that was the last in a campaign of twelve.

The Romans name for Bath was Aquae Sulis, the place of the waters of a local deity called Sul. It was not given the name Bath until after any possible southern Arthurian period. (According to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, Bath (
Baðanceaster
) was captured by Saxons in 577, although it was probably not given its new name until sometime after that.) But even if the Britons had defeated a Saxon army at Aquae Sulis—and there is no evidence that this ever happened—why would these Britons name the battle
Badon
, the word for “a bath” in the language of their defeated enemy? This makes little sense.

Those who would like Arthur to have been a man of the south probably picked Bath as the site of the Battle of Mount Badon because
Badon
was reminiscent of
Badonici
and
Badonis
: this despite the absence of any corroborative evidence and the fact that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Bath does not have a hill for starters: there is nothing a Scot would call a hill in or near Bath. Little Solsbury Hill, three miles north of Bath is usually said to be the site of the battle. Howard Reid, considering the site of the Battle of Badon (which, he pleasingly describes as “of no … fixed abode”), refers to how low the “hills” around Bath are, before writing, “Just to make matters worse it would be hard to argue honestly for any site [for Badon] in south-west England.”
³¹

If those who favor a southern Arthur were to allow that the Battles of the Caledonian Wood and of Agned-Breguoin, and the four Douglas battles were fought in Scotland, this would mean half of Nennius’s
twelve battles were fought in Scotland, which would stretch the idea of a southern Arthur to breaking point.

There is no consensus regarding the location of Arthur’s last battle, the Battle of Camlann. In the absence of any real evidence for a southern Camlann, southerners have relied overmuch on the battle-name itself until almost anywhere with “cam” in its name has its supporters. The Roman Fort of Camboglanna, now Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall; the River Cam, near Salisbury, Somerset; and Slaughterbridge, Camelford, Cornwall, have all been put forward as potential Camlanns, all in England. Only one, Slaughterbridge, is able to boast a possible battle (although recent archaeology has shown that this battle was fought in the ninth century, too late to have had anything to do with any possible historical Arthur).