On the bonny, bonny banks ...

One of the benefits of writing The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion for Moon Books is that I'm going back through so much of my research into Arthur and discovering new things.

Take his battles.  A list of twelve victories won by Arthur in his capacity of dux bellorum - 'duke of battles' - was included in the Historia Brittonum or 'History of the Britons' (see right), compiled in about 829, possibly by a monk called Nennius.

Battles 2, 3, 4 and 5 were fought on a river 'which is called Dubglas ['dark-grey'] and is in the region of Linnuis'.

This 'region of Linnuis', it is usually assumed, relates to Lindum.  The 2nd-century Roman geographer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, identified two places in Britain as Lindum.  One was Lincoln, the other by Loch Lomond, in the Scottish district of Lennox.

Now, I once had a thoroughly ridiculous discussion with an Arthurian 'scholar' about Linnuis.  He insisted that only the Lincoln Lindum could have been known as Linnuis.  I asked him why the Lindum by Loch Lomond could not have been known as Linnuis.  But apparently, only Lincoln could have been the Linnuis where Arthur fought his battles.

I then pointed out that Loch Lomond has got a very big, triple-peaked mountain called Ben Arthur.  And that there are four waters in the Lennox area that are called Douglas (from dub-glas).  And that there are records of four historical battles fought in the region during the lifetime of Artuir mac Aedain, the first 'Arthur' to appear in the records.  And that these battles involved historical figures who accompanied Arthur into the legends (two of these - Lleenog of Lennox and his son, Gwallog the Battle-Horseman - became the 'Lancelot of the Lake' and his son, 'Sir Galahad', of the later romances).

Oh, and I also pointed out that Geoffrey of Monmouth knew that Arthur had fought battles at Dumbarton and around Loch Lomond, since he said as much in his History of the Kings of Britain (c 1137) and the Life of Merlin (c 1150).

So what has Lincoln got that Lennox hasn't, I wondered.

'The right name, for a start', said my pig-headed interlocutor.

Writing about Arthur's battles again, something struck me.  The most dominant geographical feature in Lennox is Loch Lomond - the biggest lake in Britain.  The Welsh word for a 'lake' is llyn.

Hmmnn ... Could llyn actually have been the first part of Linnuis?  If so, what might the rest of Linnuis have meant?  The most obvious answer is that it came from gwys - a 'summons'.

I then consulted W.J. Watson's wonderful book, The Celtic Placenames of Scotland.  Watson himself quoted Nennius:

'De magno lacu Lummonu, qui Anglice vocatur Lochleuen in regione Pictorum.' - 'Of the great lake Lummonu, which is called in English Loch Leven, in the region of the Picts.'

Watson states that 'lake Lummonu' would be Llyn Llumonwy in modern Welsh, from llumon, a 'chimney' or 'beacon'.  He then points to a bit of genuine Arthurian literature, the old tale of Culhwch ac Olwen, in which 'Kai and Bedwyr sat on a beacon cairn on the summit of Plynlymon.'

So - Loch Lomond was, once-upon-a-time, the 'Lake of the Signal-Beacon', with Lomond in fact coming from the Welsh llumon, a 'beacon' (compare lluman - a 'banner' or 'flag').

An alternative form of that name would be Llynwys - the 'Lake of the Summons'.

Llynwys would be Latinised as Linnuis.  Arguably, then, the 'region of Linnuis' was not named after Lindum at all.  It was named after Loch Lomond, the great lake of the Beacon.

So what has Lincoln got that Lennox hasn't?

A totally spurious claim to Arthur, for a start.

Occam's Razor

Well, it was only to be expected.  My article on Arthur and the Church, which was published in the August 2012 issue of History Today magazine, prompted a response.  A letter came in which, lucid and reasonable though it was in many ways, repeated two of the most common misconceptions about King Arthur.  The first being that he was a king.

Thus, the correspondent pointed out that Artuir mac Aedain (the original Arthur - read The King Arthur Conspiracy to find out more) was only "a minor prince, not a king".

In fact, the legendary Arthur was never a king.  Not until the later storytellers got to work on the tales.

For a start, the word "King" didn't exist; besides which, it is of Germanic origin, and would have meant nothing to Arthur and his people.  But Arthur's contemporaries didn't even claim that he was the Celtic equivalent of a "king".

Take Nennius, the name commonly applied to the author or compiler of the Historia Brittonum ('History of the Britons'), who provides us with one of the earliest historical references to Arthur.  According to Nennius, the "maganimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons ...

And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander [dux bellorum- 'duke of battles'], and was as often conqueror.

Now, most people would agree that you can't get much more noble than a king.  And yet Arthur, according to one of our earliest sources, was far from being the noblest in his alliance.  There were "many more noble" than he was.  Wouldn't that, in itself, suggest that Arthur was not a king - rather, kings served with him, and probably under him, but Arthur himself was something else?  A military commander or dux bellorum.

And, indeed, we find in the early literature - most of it Welsh, but that includes poetry emanating from what is now southern Scotland - that Arthur is not called "king".  The word used for him is ymerawdwr or "Emperor".

Unlike "king", which is of Germanic orginin, and therefore came in with Arthur's enemies, the "Emperor" title was a legacy of the Roman occupation of Britain.  The Latin imperator was usually applied to a successful military champion or general.  In the early poems and tales, Arthur is repeatedly referred to as the "Emperor Arthur".  Not a king.

And so, the simple fact that Artuir mac Aedain was a prince, and not a "king" as such, is irrelevant in terms of the quest for the historical Arthur.  Anyone looking for a historical King Arthur will fail, because there weren't any.  To go looking for a king is to go looking for the wrong thing altogether.  He was not a king.  He was a military commander, one who was less noble than many of those he led.

Having made the rather common mistake of assuming that Arthur must have been a king (because, much later on, storytellers started referring to him as "King Arthur"), the correspondent to History Today magazine then invoked Occam's razor.

Named after the 14th-century English friar, William of Occam, the famous "Occam's razor" principle argues that the best theory is the one which relies on the fewest assumptions.

The letter-writer claimed that, according to the rules of Occam's razor, the original King Arthur was probably an earlier hero after whom Artuir mac Aedain ("a minor prince, not a king") was named.

This is, in fact, the standard argument flung at anyone who points to Artuir mac Aedain.  Artuir cannot have been Arthur (presumably, because he was of Scottish descent, and therefore not quite "English" enough to have been a proper Arthur), and so he must have been named after an earlier Arthur, who has since been completely forgotten.

Artuir mac Aedain is, without doubt, the earliest historical individual to appear in the records with the name Arthur (Artuir being a Gaelic approximation of the British/Welsh Arthwr).  So, the claims of an earlier Arthur - about whom nothing is known - fail the first Occam's razor test, because they require an assumption.  We know that Artuir mac Aedain existed, because he appears in the Irish Annals and the Life of St Columba, written in about 697 AD.  The assumption that he must have been named after an earlier, more famous Arthur, is just that - an assumption.

The fact that many of the individuals who followed "King" Arthur into the legends were contemporaries, kinsmen and near-neighbours of Artuir mac Aedain would also require some sort of explanation from the advocates of the unknown Earlier Arthur.  At which point, Occam's razor gets thrown out of the window.  The standard response is - there was an earlier Arthur, whom nobody can identify, and then, some years later, along came another Arthur (Artuir), named after the first, who happened to be around at the same time as several Arthurian heroes were active in North Britain.

See the problem here?  The Occam's razor principle actually supports Artuir's candidacy for the role of the historical Arthur - because many more assumptions have to be made in order to advance the claim that he was named after an earlier Arthur, who everyone then forgot all about!

Whoever this "earlier Arthur" might have been, he certainly didn't trouble the historical records.  The first Arthur on record is Artuir mac Aedain, and it was during, and shortly after, his lifetime (roughly, 559 - 594 AD) that the name Arthur started to become popular.

And whoever the mythical Earlier Arthur was, he can't have achieved very much.  The best that could be said of him was that he managed to hold the encroaching Saxons back for a while, giving the Britons a breathing space, but it made no difference because the Saxons won in the end.

Now, I don't know about you, but any hero or military champion - whether a "king" or not - whose claim to fame was that he achieved a temporary victory, is not necessarily going to be remembered for all time.  One who scored several victories, leading to the near-annihilation of the foe, only to be betrayed, and whose death spelled the end to an independent Britain - well, someone like that might be remembered.  But a mysterious stranger who won a short-term victory and then vanished, leaving not a trace ... hmmnn, not so sure.

The only thing that the advocates of the Earlier Arthur school have to stand upon is a couple of later interpolations in the Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals), which offer the dates of 518 and 539 for the Arthurian battles of Badon and Camlan.  Neither of these dates fell within the lifetime of Artuir mac Aedain.  Neither date matches any known battle.  Both dates are essentially meaningless.

St Gildas, sometime around the middle of the sixth century, referred to a "siege of Badon Hill" as having been fought in the year of his birth.  This siege was a success for the native Britons, and brought about a temporary peace with the Saxon settlers which lasted up until the time when Gildas wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae ('Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain').

According to the Welsh Annals, Arthur carried "the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and nights on his shoulders" at the Battle of Badon.  This would have made him just the sort of person St Gildas would have liked - a Christian.  And yet, Gildas made no mention at all of any Arthur and gave no hint that a catastrophic battle like Camlan had taken place since - which it must have, if Gildas was born in the year of the Badon siege and was writing prior to 550 AD.  But no, Gildas says nothing about Arthur or Camlan.  Quite simply, there had been no Battle of Camlan during that time.  Arthur had not even been born.

Once again, the advocates of the completely-vanished, completely-unidentifiable Earlier Arthur make the assumption that the "siege of Badon Hill" mentioned by St Gildas was the same as the "Battle of Mount Badon" which Nennius, writing nearly 300 years later, ascribed to Arthur, the "duke of battles".

So, again, we find that the Earlier Arthur theory fails the Occam's razor test.  It requires, quite simply, far too many assumptions, the main one being that somebody called Arthur appeared, did something that was only temporarily relevant and successful, and then vanished without a trace, before - some time later - the first historical Arthur appeared and the name suddenly became popular.

Seriously - if you're going to use Occam's razor, use it properly.  The least number of assumptions - and therefore, the better theory - suit the argument that Artuir mac Aedain was the original Arthur.  He is the first Arthur on record.  He was a contemporary of other Arthurian heroes.  He died in a battle which we can date to 594 AD.  He wasn't a king - but then, neither was Arthur. 

And when he died, Britain fell.  Simples.

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.

Camelot - City of the Legion

In the last blogpost we considered the information divulged by Lambert of St Omer in 1120 that the palace of Arthur the warrior was in 'Pictland'.  We noted that the massive Roman military encampment of Colania - now the Camelon suburb of Falkirk in Scotland - was known locally, at least as late as the eighteenth century, as "Camelot".

The earliest literary reference to Arthur's Camelot comes down to us from the romance of Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by the French poet, Chretien de Troyes:

Upon a certain Ascension Day King Arthur had come from Caerleon, and had held a very magnificent court at Camelot as was fitting on such a day.

Chretien seems to have based his vision of Camelot on the Roman city of Camulodunum, now Colchester in Essex, which had been the capital of Roman Britain in the first century AD and the first major settlement to be razed by Boudica's violent uprising of AD 60.  The name Camulodunum came from Camulos, a Celtic god of war, analogous to the Roman Mars.  The city of Camulodunum was also the site of a colonia - a sort of retirement home for Roman army officers.

It does not require too much imagination to see how Camulodunum could have been romanticised by a French poet of the twelfth century, becoming the fabled city of Camelot.  It is also not difficult to see how the Roman colonia at Colchester might have been confused with the Roman fort of Colania just north of the Antonine Wall.

Even more striking, though, is an age old association of the Colania encampment at Camelon (or 'Camelot') with a place called Camulodunum, the Fort of Camulos, the War-God.

George Buchanan was a Scottish historian of the sixteenth century and tutor to the future King James I of England.  Very much a figure of the Scottish Reformation - a dour, Calvinist affair - Buchanan was not a man to be carried away by romantic notions.  He wrote of the Antonine Wall which created a barrier across central Scotland, from the Forth to the Clyde, and noted that "where it touched the River Carron, [it] had a garrison or fortress which, by its situation and the termination of a number of roads there, had the appearance of a small city, which some of our writers falsely imagine to have been Camulodunum".  Buchanan preferred to think of this ancient "small city" as the city referred to by Bede, the eighth-century historian of the Angles, as Caer-Guidi: the City of the Men of the Forth.

But Buchanan's belief that the fortress beside the River Carron could not have been Camulodunum wasn't shared by everybody.  Robert Sibbald, in his Historical Inquiries of 1707, did wonder whether the ancient city couldn't have been "Camulodunum Brigantium, which the vulgar call at this day Camelon near Falkirk".  This is an interesting remark.  Sibbald seemed to be arguing that, while Buchanan had been right - Camelon was not Camulodunum, because that had been Colchester, many miles to the south - it was still possible that Camelon had been Camulodunum Brigantium or, if you prefer, the Camelot of the North.

Brigantia was a major mother-goddess, a sort of Celtic Venus.  She came to be venerated in Ireland as Brighid (later St Bridget) and in the Hebrides as Bride (pronounced "breed": the Hebrides were the "Islands of Bride").  She is similarly remembered throughout much of Britain in the various Bridewells and St Bride's, and she seems to have been the particular patron of the Britons of the Pennines, a tribal federation known in Roman times as the Brigantes.

If Sibbald was right, then the Camelon fortress - just nine miles south of Arthur's Round Table at Stirling, and very much on the front line of sixth-century Britain - was a remarkable fortified city dedicated to two Celtic war gods, Camulos and Brigantia.  It would also help to explain how Arthur's main military stronghold in central Scotland came to be thought of as "Camelot".  It was a Camulodunum in its own right, a mighty citadel as impressive as the other Camulodunum of Essex, only it was the mainstay of the North Britons and easily one of the most important military stations in the Old North.

Chretien, in his romance of Lancelot, seems to have implied that "Camelot" was another name for "Caerleon".  Here's where things tend to get confusing.  If Chretien modelled his Camelot on Colchester in Essex, then how could it have been the same place as Caerleon, which many scholars have assumed was the old Roman fortress of Isca, now Caerleon-on-Usk in south-east Wales?  The two places are simply too far apart to have been the same - and, what is more, neither is properly connected with the historical Arthur.

In fact, Caerleon simply meant the City or Fort of the Legion (Caerllion, in Welsh).  As we saw in the last blogpost, the Colania fortifications at Camelon had been constructed by a detachment of the XX Legion; it was there that (in the words of the Roman poet Claudian) the imperial legionaries had curbed the "savage Scot" and scanned the "lifeless patterns tattooed on the dying Picts".  Furthermore, the City of the Legion was remembered as the site of one of Arthur's major battles.  The Welsh monk Nennius, writing early in the eighth century, noted that Arthur's ninth victory was won in a battle "in the City of the Legion".

The likelihood is that this battle was triggered by an attempted invasion of Irish warriors from Ulster.  The Irish Annals record the "first expedition of the Ulaid to Manau" in 577.  Manau Gododdin was the western spur of the British-held territory of Lothian - that is, it was the volatile region around Stirling, immediately to the south of the River Forth.  The Ulaid, who gave their name to the province of Ulster, were the long-time enemies of Arthur's people (the tribe of Riata) in Ireland, and for some reason they decided in 577 to cross the Irish Sea and, under the leadership of their chieftain Baetan mac Cairill, to seek to wrest the strategic bulwark of Stirling and the borderland between the Britons and the Picts from Arthur and his family.

A few posts back, I showed that it was possible to date Arthur's twelfth battle ('Mount Badon') to the year 580, when Arthur successfully defended the Highland kingdom of his kinsman Bruide against an attack by the southern Picts.  The year 577 would therefore be about right for Arthur's ninth battle, fought in defence of his principle fort in Manau Gododdin, the enemy on this occasion being the warriors of Ulster and their king, Baetan, whom medieval genealogists in Ulster would cheerfully - if erroneously - describe as ri Erenn ocus Alban: "King of Ireland and Scotland".

Arthur's ninth battle at the "City of the Legion" - Caerleon, or Camelot, as Chretien de Troyes knew it was also called - was evidently a success for Arthur the warrior.  The warriors of the Ulaid returned to Ireland the following year (there appears to have been another battle fought between Arthur's coalition and the Ulaid in 578, probably at the Fords of Frew near Stirling, a few miles to the north of Camelon), and another enemy was chased out of North Britain.  It all added to Arthur's fame as a brilliant military commander, the land-holder of Manau, whose main stronghold stood between the Antonine Wall and the River Carron.

The place we came to know as Camelot.

Camelot - An Introduction

In the last blogpost we glanced at the argument that there is "no evidence" that Artuir mac Aedain (c. 559 - 594) was the original King Arthur.  It's completely untrue, of course.  There's quite an abundance of evidence that Artuir was Arthur 'the Emperor'.

Lambert of St Omer was a Benedictine monk, born in the latter half of the eleventh century, who in 1065 was chosen abbot by the monks of St-Bertin and the canons of St Omer in France.  He is best known for his Liber floridus or "Book of Flowers", which he completed in about 1120.  It is essentially a medieval encyclopedia, and it discloses some interesting information about Arthur.

Building on the work of the ninth-century Welsh monk known as Nennius, Lambert of St Omer wrote in his Liber floridus that -

"There is in Britain, in the land of the Picts, a palace of the warrior Arthur, built with marvellous art and variety, in which the history of all his exploits and wars is to be seen in sculpture.  He fought twelve battles against the Saxons who had occupied Britain."

One or two things immediately stand out from this statement.  Firstly, in referring to the 'palace of Arthur the warrior Arthur' (palatium ... Artuir militis) Lambert seems to have plumped for the Scottish spelling of Arthur's name - Artuir.  Secondly, he locates this palace firmly in the 'land of the Picts', or what we would now term Scotland.

It has long been suspected that the 'palace' referred to by Lambert was the structure known, at least since 1293, as 'Arthur's O'en' or Arthur's Oven (Furnum Arthuri).  This was a Romano-British temple, supposedly erected by Vespasian in honour of the Emperor Claudius, not far from Falkirk in central Scotland.  The circular temple was later described as 'an old building in the form of a sugar-loaf, built without lime and mortar', and though it was destroyed in the eighteenth century an exact replica can be found among the stables of Penicuik House in Edinburgh.

The assumption that Lambert's 'palace of Arthur the warrior' was the Arthur's Oven temple is quite probably wrong.  More likely, that 'palace' was a Pictish roundhouse which stood on raised tableland overlooking the River Carron a short distance away.  One manuscript based on the ninth-century work of Nennius claims that a Roman commander built 'upon the bank of Carron a round house of polished stone, erecting a Triumphal Arch in memorial of a victory'.  The same site seems to have been referred to by the sixteenth-century Scottish historian Hector Boece as the palace of one Cruthneus Cameloun, a supposed 'king of the Picts'.  Today, the place is known as Camelon.

In the middle of the second century AD, the Roman army constructed a turf-and-stone rampart across the pinched waist of Scotland, from the estuary of the Clyde to that of the Forth.  This wall, named after Antoninus Pius, passed a short distance to the south of the Pictish roundhouse which stood on the bank of the River Carron, and which would appear to have been commandered by Vespasian.  Around it, a detachment of the XX 'Valiant and Victorious' Legion built a large fortress, which eventually grew to include two large encampments and ten smaller marching camps.  The Romans called this place Colonia.  The imperial army abandoned these impressive fortifications later in the second century, and no doubt the great fortress of Colonia was gratefully occupied by the local Picts.

Much of this 'little ancient city' still existed in Arthur's day.  As late as the year 1720 it was recorded that 'We may still discern the track of the streets, foundations of buildings and subterranean vaults.  The country people call it Camelon or Camelot.'

Twenty-five years earlier, in 1695, Edward Gibson, Bishop of London, revising William Camden's earlier Britannia, had remarked of the Colonia site: 'There is yet a confused appearance of a little ancient city ... They [the 'common people' of the locality] call it Camelot.'

Clearly, the ancient fortifications at Camelon were also known as Camelot.  Camelon has two-syllables - 'came-lon' - and the place is known in the Scots dialect as Kemlin or Caimlin.  In Gaelic, it is Camlan, a place of unparalleled consequence in the legends of King Arthur.  The site of his last battle, in almost every telling of his tale, was Camlan.

It is also worth noting that the site of Arthur's Round Table, as explained in a previous post, was just nine miles away to the north, along what would once have been a Roman road.  This road led into the wild lands of the native Picts from the Antonine Wall, which passed to the south of the Colonia fortress.  The fortress had clearly been built to guard a ford across the River Carron, on what was at one time the very boundary of Pictish territory.  Here was where the legionaries of Rome had come face-to-face with the tattooed Picts.  An anonymous correspondent of 1697 provided the local knowledge that a paved (Roman) road had crossed the River Carron near this ancient fort.  At the end of this road stood 'a great castle, called by the country folks the Maiden Castle'.  The site was surveyed by General W. Roy in the eighteenth century: he noted that the 'town' must have been 'one of the most considerable stations belonging to the Romans in North Britain'.  The particular mound beside the River Carron as surveyed by Roy was excavated during the twentieth century, when it was discovered that the mound, which was fortified by a several ditches and a palisade, supported two circular houses of timber.  One of these was perhaps the 'palace of the Picts' described by Hector Boece in the sixteenth century; the other might have been the 'Maiden Castle' referred to in 1697.  Both formed part of what was known locally as 'Camelot'.

Let us suppose, then, that the 'palace of Arthur the warrior' mentioned by Lambert of St Omer in 1120 was not the Arthur's Oven temple but rather the fortified roundhouse or 'palace of the Picts' nearby, which was also 'one of the most considerable stations belonging to the Romans in North Britain'.  This was the very fortified enclosure or 'little ancient city' which was known locally, a thousand years after Arthur, as Camelot.

Lambert of St Omer's testimony concerning 'Artuir the warrior' in the land of the Picts is of great importance.  His "Book of Flowers" appeared nearly twenty years before Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.  Geoffrey's work can be thought of as the first Arthurian bestseller, but it played havoc with British history.  It is to Geoffrey that we owe the myth that King Arthur was born at Tintagel in Cornwall, and that the climactic battle of his career was fought nearby on the River Camel.  Geoffrey therefore placed his King Arthur a long way away from Pictland, although he did have Arthur fighting battles in and around the western end of the Antonine Wall.  Geoffrey's account was in many ways the inspiration for subsequent versions of the legends; Lambert's account, by way of contrast, is barely known.  But it is Lambert's reference to the Arthur's palace in the land of the Picts that is almost certainly the more accurate of the two.

The very obscurity of the Lambert reference is illustrative of the King Arthur conspiracy.  It puzzles scholars - "How could Arthur's palace be in the land of the Picts?" - but only because it is anathema to them to admit that there was an Arthur in Scotland.  Rather, they continue the false trails left by Geoffrey of Monmouth.  Lambert also mentioned the existence of stone sculptures depicting the twelve legendary battles of Arthur.  England - so far as I am aware - has nothing to compare with the many fantastic examples of Pictish stone carvings which display images of battle and which have been found over much of the Arthurian region in the province of the southern Picts, against whom Arthur would die fighting in 594.  It is quite possible that some of these magnificent Pictish stone carvings actually relate to the historical Arthur's battles in central Scotland (I'm looking forward very much to Iain Forbes's The Last of the Druids: The Mystery of the Pictish Symbol Stones, published shortly by Amberley, to see what light he is able to shed on these fascinating carvings).

Once again, though, we find evidence for an Arthur in Scotland when no such hard evidence exists for one further to the south.  Another plus for Artuir mac Aedain: the first, and probably the only, Arthur.

The Badon Conundrum

The King Arthur Conspiracy has a Facebook page which gives occasional updates on the book.  Someone went on there recently to leave a comment:

"King Arthur was never Scottish!!!!"

The only real answer to that confident, though unsupported, assertion was that Arthur's father was Scottish, but his mother and paternal grandmother were British - making him three-parts "Welsh".

But the insistence that "King Arthur was never Scottish" is an interesting one.  It keeps coming back in various forms.  One I've heard several times is: "There's no evidence that Artuir mac Aedain was the original Arthur."  In fact, there's no evidence for lots of things ... until you look.  Then the claim gets modified, becoming: "Artuir mac Aedain has been thoroughly investigated and there's no evidence that he was the original Arthur."  Well, that one's rather more dishonest.  I spent eight years investigating Artuir mac Aedain and came across very little evidence indeed that he had been "thoroughly investigated" by anybody.  What is more, those I discovered who had looked into his candidacy tended to have formed the opinion that he probably was the original Arthur.

It so happens that the earliest references to a man named Arthur (Gaelic Artuir) in the historical records belong to what we now call Scotland (specifically, those references occur in the Irish Annals and Adomnan's Life of St Columba, both of which ultimately originated on the Isle of Iona).  The earliest references to Arthur in early British poetry were made by sixth-century poets specifically associated with the North (Taliesin and Aneirin).  The early Welsh tales of the Mabinogion consistently associate Arthur with historical princes of sixth-century North Britain (Owain, Cynon, Caw, Peredur, etc.).  In Arthur's day, Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton were all British, and it is in those places that we find Arthur fighting.

By way of contrast, the ideas that Arthur was born at Tintagel in Cornwall and was buried at Glastonbury in Somerset didn't come along until five or six hundred years after he died.  And yet, there are those who insist that we should be looking for Arthur in those areas, rather than in the region where Arthur was first mentioned.  Because no Arthur has actually been discovered in the south, a whole list of candidates have been put forward for the coveted role of the "original" Arthur.  These candidates are all known by names other than Arthur and most of them did not originate in the British Isles.  Not one of them can be associated with any of the other heroes who accompanied Arthur into the legends.  They have been nominated, not because they are realistic candidates for the original Arthur, but because too many people stubbornly refuse to examine the credentials of Artuir mac Aedain, the historical prince of the North who also happens to have been the first Arthur on record.

There is only one piece of "evidence" which appears to link Arthur with the south.  This is his famous victory at the Battle of Badon.  We first hear of the "siege of Badon Hill" from St Gildas, who was writing in the middle of the sixth century.  He did not mention Arthur.  The next reference to a "Battle of Mount Badon" comes from Nennius, a Welsh monk writing early in the ninth century.  This battle was the twelfth of Arthur's epic victories.  There is nothing in Nennius's work to indicate that the "Battle of Mount Badon" was the same as the "siege of Badon Hill" mentioned by Gildas.

Next, scholars point to a couple of entries in the Welsh Annals.  The first of these purports to record the "Battle of Badon in which Arthur carries the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were victors" as having taken place in the year 518.  There are several problems with this entry.  First of all, it was obviously interpolated at a much later date.  Secondly, the date it gives for the battle - 518 - doesn't square with the testimony of St Gildas.  Gildas wrote that the battle had taken place 44 years before he was born.  If the entry in the Welsh Annals was correct, then Gildas would have been writing his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae in about 562.  But St Gildas went on to chastise a number of his contemporary British princes, including Maelgwyn of Gwynedd, who died in 547 (or 549).  So somebody got their dates wrong, and the balance of probabilities would suggest that it was the annalist who retrospectively added the entry for the "Battle of Badon" to the Welsh Annals who made it all up.

There can be little doubt that a "siege of Badon Hill" took place towards the end of the fifth century AD, probably in southern Britain.  The Welsh name for the city of Bath is Caerfaddon (from baddon, a 'bath'), and so that would seem a likely place for the siege mentioned by St Gildas.  This, though, was not the battle at which Arthur fought.  He had not even been born when that siege took place.

The "battle of Mount Badon" must have been a different battle.  Only the similarity of the names creates confusion.  It is as if somebody muddled up the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 with the Battle of Yorktown in 1862.  They sound alike, but they were completely different battles fought in completely different wars.

For Arthur's Mount Badon, we need to remember that the Gaelic bad is a common element in place-names.  It is easily confused with the Welsh bad or baddon - a 'bath' - but it means something else entirely: a grove or a thicket, a plain or a 'spot'.  The Irish records indicate that a battle was fought in 580 in the Angus region of Scotland, and that the loser was Galam Cennaleth, the leader of the southern Picts.  These same southern Picts were the sworn enemies of Arthur, and in the account left by Adomnan of Iona we find Arthur losing his life in 594 fighting against these very Picts.

The Picts in question inhabited the 'land of Circinn', a Pictish province designated by the term cir - a crest or a 'comb'.  The spearmen of this territory distinguished themselves by adopting the appearance of a boar, either by wearing their hair in Mohican style or donning the 'crest' of a boar.  One of the earliest Arthurian tales - Culhwch and Olwen - features a major boar-hunt at which one of Arthur's comrades comes to grief, being poisoned by the bristles of a dangerous boar.  The same legend is told of a valley in Angus, Scotland, where a great warrior is poisoned by a boar he has just killed.  Adjacent to that very valley is a hill called Badandun.  Badandun - or "Mount Badon" in English - reveals in its topography the name of the warrior who died while attacking the boar-warriors of Galam Cennaleth: his name was Fergus, and he was the constant companion of Arthur's nephew Drystan (St Drostan to the Scots, Sir Tristan to the medieval romancers).

The date of Arthur's battle at Badandun Hill - 580 - is rather revealing.  According to the Welsh Annals, Peredur of York (later to evolve into the romantic Sir Perceval) died in 580 (in fact, he died several years later).  The Spanish Anales Toledanos, meanwhile, state that the infamous Battle of Camlan was fought in 580.  Though this, too, is somewhat inaccurate, it does suggest that a memorable Arthurian battle was fought in 580 - and, second only to Camlan, the most memorable of all his battles was that of "Mount Badon".

Politically, the Battle of Badandun was fought to relieve pressure on Bruide son of Maelgwyn, a kinsman of Arthur's who was also the king of the northern Picts.  Arthur's half-brother Gartnait was poised to succeed Bruide as the High-King of the Highlands, and so by destroying the rebellious southern Picts and their boar-like chieftain Galam Cennaleth, Arthur was effectively securing the Highland throne for his half-brother.

The "siege of Badon Hill" in the south, meanwhile, continues to pose problems.  No one knows for sure when it was fought or even where.  The only near-contemporary reference to it fails to mention Arthur.  But the myth that King Arthur was a warlord of southern Britain is founded almost entirely on the assumption that this rather difficult-to-pin-down battle was also the "Battle of Mount Badon" at which Arthur fought.

As usual, the Scottish Arthur yields a great deal of information about the "Battle of Badon" while the "English" Arthur creates nothing but confusion and disagreement.  Still, we are continually being told that "King Arthur was never Scottish!!!!" and that there's "no evidence that Artuir mac Aedain was the original Arthur".  Yeah - and if you believe that, you'll believe anything.