Chaos is Come Again

There's a problem with history.  It's like quantum physics, in that the results you get tend to depend on where you happen to be standing.

In other words, history is all about perspective.

The historian Michael Wood wrote an interesting piece for the BBC News Magazine to accompany his new series about the history of Britain.  Like many historians, Wood starts his history with the Romans.

There is something of a perception among historians that the ancient Britons were useless.  They just sat around in the mud, scratching their backsides and waiting for the Romans to come along and show them how to do things.

Of course, the Britons rejected the advances of Julius Caesar in 55 BC.  But ninety years later, there were a fair few British chieftains - mostly in the south and east of Britain - who were familiar with life on the Continent and who saw the potential of being clients of Rome.  For the chieftains, this could mean new, undreamt-of levels of luxury, just as long as they consented to Roman domination.  So when Claudius mounted his invasion, there were some tribes who effectively welcomed them in and no doubt stood in awe as a squadron of elephants entered the country.

The Romans were less welcome in the west and the north, and they failed to subdue the Scottish Highlands.  The Roman soldiers coined a name for the tattooed tribesmen of the far north: they called them pictii - the Painted Ones.  In fact, the native Britons as a whole seem to have had a preference for tattoos, and for two or three centuries it is probable that the native population was divided into those who shaved (in the Roman style) and those who decorated their bodies.

In his piece for the BBC, Michael Wood compared the collapse of Roman rule, and the withdrawal of the legions - a process that was more or less completed by 409 AD - with the current economic crisis in Europe.  He made some salient points, one of them being about social inequality: 'in the 300s the big land-owning aristocrats who often had fantastic wealth, contributed much less than they had in the past to defence and government.'

There is indeed evidence that the wealthier members of Romano-British society resented paying for the privileges which their ancestors had sought.  A phenomenon we have seen much of in more recent times.

The Roman Empire collapsed - but rumours of Britain's demise were a tad premature.  Yes: hard times lay ahead.  As Wood points out, the population of Britain shrank from a high of about four million to just one million in the 500s, as a result of climate crises, famines, plague and warfare.  But Britain would remain Britain until many years after the Romans left.

Even in the south, which fell first to the waves of Germanic immigrants known, collectively, as the Saxons, the decisive blow didn't fall until the Battle of Dyrham in 577, when the Saxons fought their way through to the River Severn, cutting off the Britons of the south-west from those of the Midlands.  That was nearly 170 years after the last Roman legion withdrew from British shores.  It was also right in the middle of the lifetime of Arthur.

However, Arthur was not in the south (no matter how hard many scholars want him to have been).  He was in the North.  And the Men of the North were fighting back against the Anglian settlers of what is now Northumberland.

When the Saxons were breaking through to the Severn in the south, Arthur was battling against the Ulaid warriors of Ulster in central Scotland.  Three years later, he won a major victory over the southern Picts.  And by 590, his alliance of British and Irish warrior-princes had driven the encroaching Angles back to the sea.  A British army had the Germanic warriors pinned down at Lindisfarne while, a little further down the coast, an Irish contingent was besieging the Anglian stronghold of Bamburgh.

That was when treachery struck from within Arthur's own ranks.

Four years later, in 594, Arthur fought his last battle and was betrayed by those he trusted.  By the following year, the resurgent Angles had overrun much of the North.  Britain was finished.

This happened almost 200 years after the Romans departed - and so we should be wary of any claims that Britain descended into absolute chaos the moment the well-organised, militarised and bureaucratic Romans left us to our own devices.

One point Wood makes in his BBC piece is of enormous interest.  He refers to Edward Gibbon, the Victorian author of the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and notes that Gibbon - rather unusually, given the age he lived in - blamed the collapse of British society, not only on the barbaric invaders from across the North Sea, but on Christianity.  In Gibbon's view, by focussing on a better world, a future paradise, Christianity undermined the Britons' attempts to deal with the crisis they were actually caught up in.

There is something in that.  You will still hear those who - speaking from a rather imperialistic perspective - praise the Roman occupation and imagine that Christianity was thoroughly settled as the one and only religion in Britain by the time the Romans left.  This is the simplistic view of history: the Romans came, dragged us up out of the filth, and then Christianity finished off the job by making us civilised.  But it wasn't really like that.

At least where Arthur was concerned, the belligerence, intransigence and ambition of the early Church caused his downfall.  There is evidence that the early Church destroyed anything it could find relating to the Celtic intelligentsia - the 'Druids' - and rewrote history to make its own triumph seem inevitable.

The supporters of the early Church were, in many ways, the same people who had so admired the Roman Empire.  The antagonists of the early Church were, by and large, those who preferred the native traditions and saw Britain's future, not as a far-flung province of the reborn Empire (the Church of Rome) but as an independent nation in its own right.  As we know, the Church won.  It certainly played dirty, and then did everything it could to cover its tracks.

Hence, the Dark Ages - a period in British history when nobody really knows what was going on, because the Church controlled the information.  But the problem goes much further back than that.  The Roman occupation distorts our view of ancient Britain, and the rise of the Church distorts our view of post-Roman Britain.  Both have a tendency to silence the voices of the Britons.  And so we still have historians who believe that Britain was nothing until the Romans came, and then collapsed into nothingness again until the Church got a grip in the sixth and seventh centuries. What the average Briton actually thought, felt and believed is irrelevant - all that matters is that we celebrate the triumph of institutions (the Roman Empire, the Church of Rome) at the expense of the people.

So where does that leave us today?  Is Michael Wood right to see the Fall of the Roman Empire echoed in Europe's contemporary crises?

Let us first of all remember that trade existed between Britain and Continental Europe before the Romans marched into the land and imposed their own ideas on the Britons.  Maybe Julius Caesar had been right when he argued that Druidism - not so much a 'religion' as an intellectual system and a repository of knowledge - originated in Britain.  There are those who like to believe that the Romans stamped out Druidism when they destroyed a major college on Anglesey in AD 60, but that view is profoundly unrealistic.  Why should a centuries-old system of learning and wisdom vanish just because it was told to?

If there is a contemporary European parallel with the post-Roman Britain of Arthur's time, it is perhaps the appalling effect of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics, a kind of slash-and-burn policy which benefits the greedy.  This proved as attractive to certain individuals, mostly in the south and east of Britain, as the advent of Roman rule did nearly 2,000 years ago.  It offered a get-rich-quick opportunity, and the price we're paying is the destruction of local services (a phenomenon which, according to Michael Wood, matches the situation in post-Roman Britain).

The emergence of Scottish independence as a political issue in recent times is another reminder of the original Arthur, the son of the King of the Scots.  Arthur son of Aedan was born exactly 150 years after the departure of the last Roman legion, and at the very moment when the Germanic settlers were launching their conquest of North Britain.  By his example, he showed how the Britons could unite with their Celtic allies to mount a counterattack that, until it was brought down by treachery, proved remarkably successful.

The south had fallen, first of all to the attractions of Roman luxury, and then to the consequences of 'Anglo-Saxon' economics.  But the North held out, true to its traditions.  The problem, when it came, took the form of religious fundamentalism.

If we want to prevent the complete collapse of Britain - as happened in the immediate aftermath of Artuir mac Aedain's death in 594 - then we have to guard against the rise of religious intolerance and its attendant right-wing politics.  That was what destroyed Britain the first time around.  The apparent collapse of the European dream - symbolised by the Treaty of Rome - is not what will cause Britain's demise.  It is the (southern) love affair with easy money, and the consequent imposition of Germanic austerity, that has caused the problem which we now face.  Hard times lead to strange beliefs, and all it will take is the appearance of an ambitious and unscrupulous 'prophet' to plunge Britain back into the Dark Ages.

That's what happened in Arthur's day, and it could happen again.  But now, as then, the Scots (whose land includes much of what was British territory in Arthur's day) might be able to show us the way.

By remaining true to themselves, the Scots have been able to grow their economy (they currently contribute almost twice as much to the British Treasury as they get back in services), while England's economy is contracting, thanks to the southern fondness for Roman-style luxury and, latterly, the Germanic obsession with austerity.  There is, then, a Light in the North, very much as there was in Arthur's day.  What might snuff it out is religious fanaticism, selfishness, paranoia and intolerance.  Maybe even a figure like Donald Trump.

Arthur's New Jacket

I'm thrilled to be able to announce that one of my own photos has been incorporated into the jacket design for The King Arthur Conspiracy.  It was taken a little to the west of Arthur's grave and forms the main image on the rear of the dust jacket, as well as appearing on the inside of both flaps, above the book blurb and my own potted biography.

I can't take much credit for the jacket design, but I can point to the photo and say "I did that!"

The History Press have added this quote from the book to the rear of the dust jacket:

'The facts are that Arthur did exist and the island of his burial can be visited.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that all this was hidden for so many years because of a conspiracy: a conspiracy which began during Arthur's lifetime, and which led directly to the fall of Britain.'

If that has whetted your appetite, please feel free to pop over to the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-King-Arthur-Conspiracy-Scottish/dp/0752476858/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335979347&sr=1-2), where The King Arthur Conspiracy is already bobbing about in the charts.

It'll be out in the bookshops in a couple of months.

Happy Birthday, Will!

It's William Shakespeare's birthday.  Happy Birthday, Will!

Of course, there is an argument that we don't really know precisely when Will Shakespeare was born.  The register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, reveals that Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere was baptised on 26 April 1564.  William son of John Shakespeare could have been born anything up to a week before his baptism - although it was customary to baptise a newborn child within three days of the birth.  And so 23 April is essentially an educated guess.

At the same time, we know that Will Shakespeare died on 23 April.  This information is given on his funerary monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church.  He was buried on 25 April, his gravestone giving no name or dates, only the infamous four-line "curse".  But the funerary monument - which was installed within a few years of his death - is specific.  He died on 23 April 1616 at the age of 53.

This still doesn't answer the question of when, exactly, was he born.  He might have died on his fifty-third birthday - or perhaps he was born on 22 April 1564, in which case we invariably celebrate his birthday on the wrong day.  Okay, so 23 April is also the feast day of St George, the patron saint of England, and it therefore makes a certain sense to celebrate the birth of England's national poet on the 23rd.  But still, there is no hard evidence that Will was actually born on 23 April 1564.

Or is there?  If Shakespeare died on his birthday - 23 April 1616 - and in the town where he was born (Stratford-upon-Avon), then he successfully replicated the fate of one of his characters.

The 'lean and hungry' Cassius is the driving force behind the assassination of Caesar in Will's Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the play which opened the new Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames in the summer of 1599.  After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Cassius and his fellow conspirators are forced to flee the city of Rome.  Chased by an army led by the followers of Julius Caesar, the conspirators escape to Philippi in Macedonia, where the two sides prepare for battle.

Cassius was born in Philippi.  The climactic battle of the play takes place on his birthday, 'as this very day / Was Cassius born'.  He therefore prepares to die on his birthday, and in the place of his birth:

'This day I breathed first.  Time is come round,
And where I did begin, there shall I end.
My life is run his compass.'

Being chronically short-sighted, Cassius has difficulty keeping track of the battle.  When he believes, wrongly, that his friend has been taken captive, he turns to his slave Pindarus:

'Come hither, sirrah.  In Parthia did I take thee prisoner,
And then I swore thee, saving of thy life,
That whatsoever I did bid thee do
Thou shouldst attempt it.  Come now, keep thine oath.
Now be a freeman, and with his good sword
That ran through Caesar's bowels, search this bosom.
Stand not to answer.  Here, take thou the hilts,
And when my face is covered, as 'tis now,
Guide thou the sword.'

Cassius covers his face, and his slave Pindarus runs him through: 'So I am free, yet would not so have been / Durst I have done my will.'

Like Cassius, then, Will Shakespeare died on his birthday, and in the place where he was born.

Coincidence?  I think not.  And in the book I'm working on - Who Killed William Shakespeare? - I seek to prove that Shakespeare had his own 'slave', Pindarus, who did the dirty deed.  On Shakespeare's birthday.  And in the town where he was born.

What do you think?

Here's the proposed blurb for "The King Arthur Conspiracy", just in from the publisher:

Most of what we know - or think we know - about King Arthur came from the pen of one Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1137.  His account in a History of the Kings of Britain quickly became the accepted version of events.  It was, however, extremely wide of the mark.  With his story, Geoffrey created a myth and allowed the English to imagine that Arthur was one of their own.  Indeed, to visit the grey ruins of Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall is to feel as though one has stepped into the world of Arthur.  That feeling is illusory.  The castle did not exist when Geoffrey wrote his account of Arthur's birth.  It was built by the brother of Geoffrey's patron, who thereby created a sort of Arthurian theme-park in the wrong part of Britain.

A hero named Arthur undoubtedly existed, but his legend was stolen, uprooted from its proper place and time and transplanted to another country.  The scam of Arthur's grave and the subsequent myth that Glastonbury was the Isle of Avalon formed a further part of the early Church's conspiracy to reinvent Arthur as an English paragon.

So where is Avalon - the blessed isle on which Arthur was buried?  And who was the original King Arthur?  Simon Andrew Stirling here draws on a vast range of sources and new translations of early British and Gaelic literature to identify history's true Arthur, and to pinpoint his precise burial location on Avalon.

Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

New Contract

Apologies for the infrequency of the posts!  Things are a little hectic, just now.  The proofs for The King Arthur Conspiracy: How a Scottish Prince Became a Mythical Hero are expected shortly.  First press releases went out yesterday and there was an instant flurry of interest and excitement.  Three months still to go before publication!

In the meantime, I've just signed a contract with The History Press for my second book.  It's provisionally titled Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means and it should be out in 2013.  But what with beavering away on the manuscript for that one, and preparing to go through the proofs for the other one with a fine tooth comb, I'm afraid it's a case of pedal to the metal and nose to the grindstone.

Lots of thrilling things to share with you, but not much time to do it in.  But fear not: someday soon, this blog will (hopefully) be going a bit wild with news, updates, insights, breaking developments and oodles of controversy.

So - please stay tuned!!

He Should Be Stopped

How lucky am I, living so close to Stratford-upon-Avon?  It's a bus ride away - and a very pretty bus ride at that.

On Wednesday I hopped on the bus to go to the Shakespeare Centre on Henley Street, next to the Birthplace, to hear Ian Donaldson give a talk about his biography of Ben Jonson.

Donaldson's Life of Ben Jonson is the first proper biography of Will Shakespeare's greatest literary rival in some thirty years.  It's also an excellent biography: detailed, reasoned and readable.  And Ian Donaldson spoke very entertainingly about it.

Seeing as he was in Stratford, he concentrated on the various stories, legends, anecdotes and myths surrounding Jonson and Shakespeare.  There is, for example, a tradition that it was Shakespeare who gave Jonson his big break in the theatre.  Modern biographers don't care very much for these 'traditions', which is a shame because the people who originally passed them on might have been trying to tell us something.  We ignore them at our peril - if, that is, we're keen on knowing what was really going on.

Ian Donaldson also ran through some of the dramatic exchanges between the works of Shakespeare and Jonson.  Thus, in the original version of Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (which Shakespeare acted in), there is a jealous husband named Thorello.  This seems to have inspired the jealous husband in Shakespeare's Othello.  The crucial handkerchief of that play reappears in Jonson's Volpone (which seems to have been written as an answer to Shakespeare's Timon of Athens).  Donaldson also suggested that The Tempest was Shakespeare's response to Jonson's The Alchemist.  And so on.

One thing that modern critics turn a rather blind eye to is the long-running tradition of bitter and nasty rivalry between the two poet-playwrights.  Right through the 18th century it was widely accepted that Ben Jonson had attacked Shakespeare on every available occasion.  Today, though, the claim is made that they were good friends who indulged in a little gentle mockery from time to time but who admired each other enormously.  Ben's contributions to the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623 are cited as proof of his great love and utmost regard for Shakespeare's work.

This is unreasonable.  It overlooks a basic fact: that Jonson seldom praised any other human being unless he was after something.  Other poets of the time seem to have been in little doubt that Jonson's comments on Shakespeare were false, inspired by envy.  But, once again, it seems that contemporary evidence is overlooked by modern commentators.  Poets of the period didn't trust Ben Jonson.  So why should we?

When Jonson was 'helping' the long-term colleagues of Will Shakespeare - Heminges and Condell - to put together the First Folio of 1623, they seem to have had a disagreement about Shakespeare's merits.  The players remarked that Shakespeare 'never blotted out a line' (and they said as much in their dedicatory preface to the First Folio).  Ben Jonson snapped back, 'would that he had blotted out a thousand.'

The players didn't like this.  But Jonson later explained himself.  Shakespeare, he wrote, 'was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility, that it sometime was necessary he should be stopped.'

Adding a classical touch, Jonson then quoted Augustus Caesar: Sufflaminandus erat ('the brakes had to be applied').

Quite how chilling these remarks really are can best be shown by comparing them with the conclusion to a long note made by a secret service agent in 1593.  The Baines Note, as it is known, listed a host of accusations about another playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who, it was said, was a blaspheming atheist who enjoyed tobacco and boys.  The incriminating memorandum ended: 'I think all men of Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped.'

And it was.  Marlowe was murdered on 29 May 1593.  It is commonly believed that he died in a tavern brawl.  But it was hardly a brawl and it certainly wasn't a tavern.  It was the home of a respectable widow with connections at the highest level of the Elizabethan State.

Returning to Shakespeare's Othello, we find that when Desdemona is desperately trying to protest her innocence, she begs her husband to call Michael Cassio, who can explain the truth of the situation.  Othello's response is: 'No, his mouth is stopped.'  Othello mistakenly believes that Iago has killed Cassio.  Hence, 'his mouth is stopped' - like a wine bottle is stopped with a cork.

Jonson's remark that Shakespeare wrote so freely that 'sometime it was necessary he should be stopped' hasn't received much attention from critics.  Broadly, they presume that Will occasionally needed someone to intervene and calm him down, to bring a little discipline to his writing.  That's how much Jonson admired Shakespeare - he thought he wrote too much!

But, realistically, Jonson's remark has nothing innocent about it.  The contemporary meaning seems to have been pretty clear.  'His mouth is stopped' - Othello believes that Cassio is dead.  'The mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped' - someone needs to make Marlowe shut up, permanently.  'Sometime it was necessary he should be stopped' - sooner or later, Shakespeare was bound to go too far; he had to be silenced.

And so Shakespeare was 'stopped' - just like Christopher Marlowe.

Tunnel Vision

First of all - apologies, folks, for the lack of recent posts.  I'll soon be announcing some exciting news about my Shakespeare project.

But Arthur comes first.  Literally; The King Arthur Conspiracy - How a Scottish Prince Became a Mythical Hero is due out this summer.  I'm expecting the proofs to arrive in a matter of weeks.

Of course, there are many who will scoff at the very idea of a Scottish 'King' Arthur.  It's considered heretical in some quarters even to mention the possibility that Arthur was a Scot.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with history, though - only with the prejudices of the self-proclaimed Arthurian "experts".

Let me show you how it works.  We'll start by looking at the early sources for the legends of Arthur.

Gildas Sapiens ('Gildas the Wise', or St Gildas) wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae - 'On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain' - sometime around the year 550.  His open letter is something of a cornerstone in Arthur studies, even though Gildas made no mention at all of anyone called Arthur.  He did, however, refer to a 'siege of Badon Hill' (obsessionis Badonici montis), which took place in the year of his birth.  Scholars have failed to agree on when that might have been or where the siege might have taken place, but they generally assume that Arthur was there.

Nennius is the name given to a Welsh monk who compiled a 'History of the Britons' - Historia Brittonum- in about 820.  Nennius didn't just mention Arthur: he described him as dux bellorum ('Duke of Battles') and listed twelve victories which Arthur achieved against the Saxons.  The twelfth of these was fought on 'Mount Badon'.  There is no particularly good reason to think that the battle on Mount Badon referred to by Nennius was the same as the 'siege of Badon Hill' mentioned earlier by Gildas, but in the main scholars have leapt to that conclusion, and by doing so have confused matters no end.

Bede was a Northumbrian churchman who wrote the seminal 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People'.  Note that Bede's people were 'English' - the Angles, in other words, who were Arthur's enemies.  The Anglo-Saxons were not very fond of recollecting their defeats in battle.  Bede does not mention Arthur.

Annales Cambriae - the 'Annals of Wales' - were compiled by monks towards the end of the tenth century.  They are another source of rampant confusion.  Many years after the events, two entries were interpolated into the annals, and they both stick out like sore thumbs:

518 - The Battle of Badon in which Arthur carries the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and nights on his shoulders and the Britons were victors

539 - The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medrawt fell; and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.

Neither of those dates are in any way relevant to the historical Arthur.  They were invented, retrospectively, by Christian scribes.

And that, as they say, is that.  Everything else is medieval fantasy or guesswork.  These are the official early sources for Arthur - Gildas, Nennius, Bede and the Welsh Annals - and only two of those four even mention him by name!

Except that those are not the only documentary sources for the historical Arthur.  Far from it.

There is, for example, the Vita Sanctae Columbae ('Life of St Columba'), written by of Adomnan of Iona in about 697, one hundred years after the death of Columba.  Adomnan described the occasion when St Columba ordained Aedan mac Gabrain King of the Scots.  This happened in 574, and several sons of Aedan were there.  When Columba was asked which of these sons would follow his father onto the throne - would it be Artuir, or Domangart, or Eochaid Find? - the Irish saint answered, 'None of these three will be king; for they will fall in battles, slain by enemies.'

That is the first reference anywhere to a prince named Arthur (Irish, Artur or Artuir).

Adomnan added, naturally, that the Irish saint was right: Arthur and Eochaid Find were later killed in a 'battle with the Miathi' or southern Picts.  The precise location of this battle can in fact be pinpointed.

The Vita Sanctae Columbae was written on the Isle of Iona, off the coast of Scotland.  Columba's monastery was also the source for much of the information recorded in the Irish Annals.  Monasteries kept books in which they calculated the date of Easter each year, and the monks would occasionally add snippets of information relating to the important events of that year.  These were later transcribed into the various annals of the Irish Church, which took the snippets from the Easter Tables compiled on the Isle of Iona.

The Annals of Tigernach record the deaths of four sons of Aedan mac Gabrain - 'Bran & Domangart & Eochaid Find & Artur' - in a battle fought in 594 in Circenn, a Pictish province roughly contingent with modern-day Angus and Kincardineshire.

The Annals of Ulster date this same battle to 596 and mention only the deaths of Bran and Domangart.  Adomman, in his 'Life of St Columba', indicated that Domangart had actually died in a separate 'battle in England'.

So - three authentic early sources, two of which mention an Arthur by name.  Both tend to be completely ignored by Arthurian "experts", who simply don't want to admit that Arthur wasn't a man of southern Britain.

And then there's the poetry.  Y Gododdin ('The Gododdin'), for example, is a long and bitter elegy written in honour of the British and Irish warriors who perished in a catastrophic battle.  The poem was composed by Aneirin, a British poet-prince, sometime around the year 600, probably at Edinburgh (the Gododdin were the Britons of Lothian).  One of the two surviving versions of Y Gododdin mentions Arthur by name (in fact, the entire poem refers to Arthur by a variety of names and descriptions).

Again, scholars have got themselves hopelessly confused over Aneirin's poem, which happens to mention Catraeth (Cad - battle; traeth - shore).  The Welsh name for the North Yorkshire town of Catterick is Catraeth.  So, putting two and two together - much as they have done with the two separate references to battles of 'Badon' - the experts have pronounced that Y Gododdin must be about a British disaster at a battle which never happened somewhere near Catterick.  If the Angles had succeeded in wiping out the army of Lothian, they would have crowed about it.  But they never even mentioned it, partly because there was no British defeat at Catterick.  The poem in actuality describes Arthur's last battle - some of his friends and close relations are named, as are the landmarks which point to the precise location of the conflict, where Arthur and so many of his heroes fell.

Aneirin nods to Taliesin in his Y Gododdin poem.  Taliesin is perhaps one of the most vital sources for information about Arthur, not least of all because Taliesin knew him.  Arthur's name, and its variants, crops up repeatedly in Taliesin's poetry, alongside those of the other heroes who fought at the last battle and accompanied Arthur into the legends.  Taliesin's surviving poems are gathered together in several Welsh manuscripts of the Middle Ages.  The fact that they were transcribed - and probably 'improved' - by medieval monks does not mean that the originals weren't composed at the time of Arthur.

In his youth, Taliesin was associated with Maelgwyn of Gwynedd, who came in for ferocious criticism by St Gildas in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae.  The Welsh Annals indicate that Maelgwyn died of the 'yellow plague' in either 547 or 549.  Evidently, Gildas must have written his scathing open letter before the death of Maelgwyn.  But Arthur son of Aedan - the first Arthur to appear in any historical records - was not born until 559.  Doesn't that explain why Gildas failed to mention Arthur's name?  And why the 'siege of Badon Hill' spoken of by Gildas had absolutely nothing whatever to do with Arthur?

Like his fellow bard Aneirin, Taliesin spent most of his life in the Old North - the region which, in current terms, encompassed northern England and much of Scotland.  For that reason, as much as anything, scholars try to avoid including the poetry of Taliesin and Aneirin among the early historical sources for Arthur.

After all, we can't have anybody wondering whether Arthur might also have been based in the Old North, can we?  Even though so many of the legends in their earliest forms repeatedly have Arthur going 'into the north'.  No, we can't have that.

So, where does all this get us?  Well, what it means is that there is a great deal more in the way of early historical source material for Arthur than most scholars are prepared to admit.  And, in stark contrast to the sources that they do admit exist (and which they argue and fuss over endlessly), these other sources actually do mention Arthur.  Indeed, they tell us rather a lot about him.  They even allow us to reconstruct the circumstances of his last battle - fought in Angus in 594 - and to piece together a great deal more than that about his life and times.

But we do have to acknowledge that these sources exist, and that they relate to the historical Arthur (and not just to some random individual named after an earlier, more 'English' and thoroughly unidentifiable 'King Arthur'), before we can listen to what they have to say.

The majority of the self-styled Arthur "experts" don't want to listen to them, however, and so they pretend that they can't see them.  They know they're there.  But all the same, they don't want to look.

If they did, they might just find out who the real Arthur was.