The Meaning of "Camlann"

I received a message from Moon Books today, telling me that the copyedited manuscript of The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion is ready for me to check.

It seems unlikely that the book will be available before the Scottish independence referendum in September.  I'll be keeping a close eye on the referendum: the vote takes place the day before my 12th wedding anniversary, and having got married on the Isle of Iona to a woman who is half-Scottish, as well as having gone to university in Glasgow, my sympathies lie very much with the "YES" campaign.

I was also interested to note that Le Monde published this piece, indicating that the pro-independence campaign is gaining ground.  The reporter had been in Alyth, Perthshire, to follow the debate.  Alyth, as I revealed in The King Arthur Conspiracy, is where Arthur fought his last battle.

How do I know this?  Lots of reasons, not least of all the fact that the place is name checked in a contemporary poem of the battle.

But wasn't Arthur's last battle fought at a place called Camlan?

Well, for a long while I wasn't so sure.  Now, though, I know that it was - sort of - and I explain why in my forthcoming book on The Grail.  But as that may not be out before the referendum, I hereby present this information as a gift to the "YES" campaign and in honour of a warrior who gave his life fighting for Scottish (and British) independence.

Many commentators refuse to accept that the place-name "Camlan" isn't Welsh.  The fact that Camlan is the Gaelic name for the old Roman fortifications at Camelon, near Falkirk in central Scotland, means nothing to them.  Arthur's "Camlan" was Welsh, and that's all it could have been.

Very silly - and utterly useless, in terms of trying to track down the site of that all-important battle.  If it was a Welsh place-name, it would have meant something like "Crooked Valley", which really doesn't help us very much.

The first literary reference to "Camlann" comes in the Annales Cambriae ("Welsh Annals") which mention Gueith cam lann - the "Strife of Camlann".  However, that reference cannot be traced back to an earlier date than the 10th century, hundreds of years after the time of Arthur.  The contemporary sources make no mention of "Camlann", and so it may be that the name didn't come into use until many years after Arthur's last battle was fought there.

The earliest literary reference to anyone called Arthur concerns an individual named Artur mac Aedain.  He was a son of Aedan mac Gabrain, who was "ordained" King of the Scots by St Columba in 574.  Accounts of the ordination ceremony indicate that Arthur son of Aedan was present on that occasion, and that St Columba predicted that Arthur would not succeed his father to the Scottish throne but would "fall in battle, slain by enemies."

Those same accounts tell us that Columba's prophecy came true: Artur mac Aedain died in a "battle of the Miathi", which means that he was killed fighting the Picts of central Scotland. 

The Irish Annals, which were compiled from notes made by the monks of Iona, inform us that the first recorded Arthur was killed in a "battle of Circenn", fought in about 594.  Circenn was the Pictish province immediately to the north of the Tay estuary - broadly, Angus and the Mearns - which was indeed the territory of the "Miathi".

Circenn might have been Pictish territory, but the name of the province is Gaelic.  It combines the word cir (meaning a "comb" or a "crest") and cenn, the genitive plural of a Gaelic noun meaning "head".  An appropriate translation of Circenn would therefore be "Comb-heads".

The Miathi Picts, like their compatriots in the Orkneys, appear to have modelled their appearance on their totem animal, the boar.  This meant that they shaved their heads in imitation of the boar's comb or crest - rather like the Mohawk tonsure, which we wrongly think of as a "Mohican".  Indeed, whilst we assume that the term "Pict" derived from the Latin picti, meaning "painted" or "tattooed", there are grounds for suspecting that it was actually a corruption of pecten, the Latin for a "comb" (hence the Old Scots word Pecht, meaning "Pict").

So where does "Camlann" fit into all this?

After Arthur's death, much of southern and central Scotland was invaded by the Angles, those forerunners of the English.  As a consequence, the Germanic language known as Northumbrian Old English was established in southern and central Scotland by the 7th century.  It eventually became the dialect called Lowland Scots.

In the Scots dialect, came, kem and camb all meant "comb".  And lan', laan and lann all meant "land".

The land in which Arthur's last battle had been fought - that is, the Pictish province of Angus - was soon speaking an early variant of the English language, or Lowland Scots.  The fact that the Pictish province of Circenn was named after its "Comb-heads", those Miathi warriors who cut their hair to resemble a boar's comb or crest, meant that the place became known by its early English equivalent: "Comb-land" or Camlann.

This was not, of course, the name that Arthur and his warrior-poets would have used for the place.  But then, the term "Camlann" didn't appear in any literary source for at least another three or four hundred years.  By the time the Welsh annalist came to interpolate the "Camlann" entry into the Annales Cambriae, the location had become known by its Old English/Lowland Scots name.  But that name was merely a variant of the older Gaelic name for the province - Circenn, or "Comb-heads".

And that is where the first recorded Arthur fell in battle, as St Columba had predicted.  Not in England or Wales or Brittany, but in Angus in Scotland.

The province of the Pictish "Comb-heads".  The region known as "Comb-land", cam lann.

Dem Bones

I now have a copy of The Last Days of Richard III by my History Press stable-mate, John Ashdown-Hill.  This was the book which led archaeologists to the car park in Leicester where Richard's remains were buried.  I'm looking forward to reading it, when I take a break from my research into Sir William Davenant.

Today, I came across this: A Bone to Pick with the Bard - Richard III was NOT a Hunchback.  It's a piece in the Independent which indicates that Richard "Crookback" did not have a crookback after all!

William Shakespeare appears to get the blame for the fact that we all thought he did.

Well, that's not entirely fair.  Shakespeare was a poet-playwright, not a historian.  And he had to make do with the information that was available to him.

The Tudor kings and queens were always slightly aware that their claim to the English throne was rather shaky.  Henry VII became king when he defeated Richard III in battle.  So, in typical Tudor style, they made up a pack of lies about Richard.  And because many historians are lazy and credulous, we all believed the lies.

The question, then, is this: did Shakespeare really believe the Tudor propaganda?  Or was he actually up to something much more subtle and clever when he portrayed Richard III with a hunchback and a club foot?

After all, Richard III wasn't the only king he seemingly maligned.  Historically speaking, Macbeth was one of the most successful and popular kings in medieval Scotland.  Macbeth's predecessor, King Duncan, was useless; Macbeth defeated him in battle and then ruled for 17 years, during which time he made a pilgrimage to Rome (only a king who knew that his country was safe would disappear overseas for two years).  So, once again, Shakespeare drew a portrait of a king that was wildly inaccurate.

Unless ...

Unless we accept that Shakespeare wasn't really writing about Macbeth but about a different Scottish king.  The one who, at that moment in time, occupied the English throne.  James I.

In Shakespeare's tragedy, written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Macbeth is a brave and steadfast lord who turns to the dark side - ambitious and greedy, he commits murders and goes paranoid.

There are very good reasons - some of them outlined in my book, Who Killed William Shakespeare? - to suspect that Shakespeare thought of James I in just these terms.  He was a promising monarch who broke his promises, choosing to become a veritable "Son of" [Gaelic - mac] Elizabeth, hence "Mac-beth".  King James had dropped heavy hints that England's Catholics would be allowed a degree of tolerance.  He then fell into the traps laid for him by his egregious secretary, Sir Robert Cecil (photo above), and colluded in the government fiction that was the Gunpowder Plot.  The treacherous slaying of King Duncan in the play was really Shakespeare's horrified reaction to the barbarous execution of Father Henry Garnet, SJ, the real target of the Cecil-masterminded "powder treason".

Which brings us back to Richard III.  So King Richard didn't have a hunchback after all.  But Sir Robert Cecil did.  A rhyme of the time described him thus:

Backed like a lute case
Bellied like a drum -
Like Jackanapes on horseback
Sits little Robin Thumb.

He was also known as the "Toad", and Robertus Diabolus - Robert the Devil.

The Cecil family claimed that Sir Robert (the second son of Elizabeth's chief minister, Lord Burghley) had been dropped on his head at birth.  He was certainly stunted and deformed, with a "crookback" and a splayed foot.  Queen Elizabeth called him her "elf", and so in Shakespeare's Richard III he became the "elvish, abortive, rooting hog", the evil "toad" who plots against and kills anybody who threatens to frustrate his ambitions.

It is, in all fairness, extremely simpleminded to imagine that Shakespeare was writing specifically about King Richard.  In reality, he was turning the Tudor propaganda into a weapon against the Court of Elizabeth I.  It was not Richard who was hunchbacked and splay-footed - it was her dangerous "elf", that inveterate and industrious plotter, Robert Cecil.

King James inherited the English throne on Elizabeth's death in 1603.  He also inherited the loathsome Robert Cecil, whom he repeatedly promoted.  And just as Shakespeare had transformed Robert Cecil, for his sins, into the diabolical Richard III, so he turned James I into the tyrannical butcher, Macbeth.

Of course, Shakespeare was so good at what he did that we all made the mistake of taking his words at face value.  But then, historians have been so inclined to swallow Protestant propaganda whole that nobody seems to have questioned Shakespeare's portrayals.  Perish the thought that our greatest wordsmith might have exposed the brutal corruption at the heart of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I! 

No, no, no - far better to assume that Shakespeare really was describing the historical Richard and Macbeth than to acknowledge who the real targets of his quill might have been.  Because that would require us to admit that dreadful people did dreadful things, ostensibly to turn England into a Protestant country, but really to make themselves incredibly rich.  And we really don't want to admit that, do we?

Pure Honey

Just found out today that one of the most popular posts ever on the excellent Historical Honey website was this one - All is True: Fire at the Globe Theatre - which was the first post I wrote for them last year.

Pretty pleased with that!

Oxford Mania

Any psychologists out there care to help me?

I'm wondering whether there's already a name for it - Something-or-other Syndrome - or whether we might actually be in a position to identify a previously uncategorised condition and give it a name ourselves.

Let me explain.

My wife, the Adorable Kim, sent me a link yesterday to the Spectator blog.  She drew my attention, in particular, to the comments beneath the post.

First, the post itself, which was titled - with breath-taking insouciance - Shakespeare was a nom de plume - get over it.  The author claimed to have found the smoking gun, that one clinching piece of evidence that people knew, even as far back as 1595, that Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare.  He provides a photo (above) of a detail from a page of William Covell's Polimanteia where, in the margin, we see a note:

All praise worthy. Lucrecia. Sweet Shakspeare.

But no.  That's not relevant.  Because, to the side of that, in the main text, Covell writes about Samuel Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra, remarking that -

"Oxford thou maist extoll thy courte-deare-verse happie Daniell"

Now, to the casual eye, this is a harmless enough piece.  Covell, a clergyman from Cambridge, notes that Samuel Daniel, who was educated at Oxford, could be admired and extolled by his old university.  Daniel was, in Covell's words, "court-dear-verse happy", which appears to suggest that his poetry pleased the royal court of Queen Elizabeth.  Meanwhile, in the margin, Covell adds "All praiseworthy" (probably in regard to Samuel Daniel) and then "Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare", on the grounds that Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra were published roundabout the same time as Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.

But maybe our eyes are too casual.  Because to the conspiracy nuts, that small snippet is PROOF that "Shakespeare" was really Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

See - beside the margin note (Sweet Shakspeare) we have the word "Oxford".  See?  And after Oxford we get the words "courte-deare-verse", which is OBVIOUSLY a clue, isn't it?  Can't you see it?  It says "Our De Vere"!

Or rather, it doesn't.

Now, if you click on the link to the Spectator blog, you'll see that this spectacularly irrelevant sample of conspiracy-fail is bigged up to the nth degree.  All us Stratfordians (i.e., those of us who pay attention to what people actually said about Shakespeare back in his day) are illiterate morons in the pay of dark forces determined to maintain a 400-year old fraud.

It gets worse when you look at the comments, and the unseemly slanging match of insult and aspersion.  My particular favourite - our whatever the opposite of "favourite" is - is this comment:

"Hopeless? Trying to fit a commoner - a petty thief from Stratford - into some supremely advantaged individual possessing rights of equality with a peer as published in quarto dedications. - The temerity of this commoner might be unique?
That he could influence English arts and culture and history by some kind of osmosis witht native fauna? - Are you for real?
First tell us the kind of excellence you seek in the defense of this Dumbness. Perhaps during those hard times you see Stratford men as a case for socioeconomic blindness? You see your literary comparatives defend - what? The poetry from the Stratford man's childhood?
Give us some merit to follow in at least a few of your arguments."

Setting aside the fact that the argument here is difficult to follow ("word salad", anyone?) let's be honest: the comment comes from someone who just hates William Shakespeare.  He was a "commoner" (ooh, steady on, old chap) and a "petty thief from Stratford" (evidence?  Oh yes, he supposedly poached a deer - see my book, where I deal with that).  So how could he possibly have possessed "rights of equality with a peer"? (that's an old argument, and shows a blind ignorance of what life was like in Shakespeare's day.  Ever heard of Ben Jonson?)

An astonishing outburst, which is a good 200-odd years out of date.  But then, something tells me that the individual who left this comment happens to believe that titled lords are the biz!  Please, bring back the aristocracy - they're the only people who can string a sentence together, and who deserve to be immortal and to "influence English arts and culture and history".  The rest of us are just trash living in our own middens.  Please, won't some grand Earl come along and show us the way, for we are mere scum?!

Nonsense.  Absolute nonsense.

There is no smoking gun.  There is NO evidence that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays,. and PLENTY of evidence that he did.  There is NO evidence that somebody else wrote them for him.  It is a silly story.

And yet, a certain kind of person clings to it with a kind of religious devotion ("Dear Lord [Oxford], give me the strength to serve you here in the midst of idolatry and evil ...").  That's what it's like.  A kind of religious mania ("Protect us, Lord Oxford; we who are persecuted for thy sake by the blind and the ignorant who have erected a commoner in thy place ...").

Look around, though, and you'll find many examples of such wayward extremism these days.  Climate Change Denial?  Check.  UKIP supporters?  Check.  People who don't like wind farms?  Check.  The Tea Party?  Check.  Etcetera, etcetera ...

They all use the same methods.  Weird claims, based on a fundamental refusal to read the evidence and a crazy belief in "smoking guns", coupled with outright abuse directed at anybody who challenges them.

Standards of debate are slipping.  Why?  Because these people never give in (it's a form of religious mania, remember).  You can beat them 100 times in a fair and open debate, and they'll just keep coming back with insults and wild, abusive, hysterical claims.  They are the only ones who know "The Truth", so be damned with you, and your evidence, and your facts.

So - any psychologists out there care to help me define this strange syndrome?  There seems to be something millenarian about it, as if the End of the World were nigh and we must all repent our sinful ways (admiring a commoner - you fools, you'll all burn in Hell!)  Can anyone in the know help me to put a name to this outrageous behaviour, this determination to shout down anyone with the facts at their disposal, this refusal to see things as they are?

What makes somebody leap to such an extreme?  What is their major malfunction?

And how do we stop them infecting the ether with their insanity?

Get in touch if you think you can help.

A Lovely Review

Off to Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival in a moment - but just had to post a link to this wonderful review of Who Killed William Shakespeare? which appeared only today on the Review Group blog.

This makes today feel very good indeed.

And if you follow the link, read the review and then leave a comment BTL, you'll automatically be entered in a prize draw for a free, signed, hardback copy of Who Killed Will!

Go on - you know you want to!

Shakespeare Week

Now you didn't think I'd forget Shakespeare's birthday, did you?

Not his 450th birthday, surely?

Of course not.

It's been a busy week.  And I've found myself biting my tongue quite a lot, as the media celebrates the Other Shakespeare - the Shakespeare who is really very little more than a Trademark.

It started for me with a fantastic afternoon at the Tree House Bookshop in Kenilworth, where I gave a talk about Who Killed William Shakespeare? and signed some books for the start of their Shakespeare Festival.  If you happen to be in the Kenilworth area, I can highly recommend a visit to the Tree House Bookshop - it's a lovely, relaxing place to browse second hand books, to lounge in their sofas, drinking tea or coffee.

Wednesday was, of course, Shakespeare's birthday.  And the "We Love Coventry and Warwickshire" website was kind enough to host a wee post of mine, entitled Two Years to Find Shakespeare.  Pretty self-explanatory, I'd hope.

I then had a piece published by my beloved Review Group on their wonderful blog, this one entitled - what else? - Happy Birthday, Shakespeare.

And now I'm looking forward to the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival, and my talk/book signing there this coming Tuesday on Who Killed Shakespeare?  Advance bookings appear to be pretty good, but if you are in or near Shakespeare's hometown on the afternoon of 29 April, come along - there's tea and cake!

So, you can't really accuse me of not celebrating Shakespeare's birthday.  But, as I hope my various talks and blogs have made it clear, we might not really be celebrating Shakespeare.  Not yet.  We're pretending we are, but we're still allowing the experts to keep us in the dark about him.

But that will change soon.  And I'll have a lot more to tell you about "Shakespeare's Son", Sir William Davenant, as my work on his biography progresses.

TTFN!

Paradigms Lost

It's the cruellest month, according to T.S. Eliot.  For me, though, it's a month of teaching, talking and signing.

The big one will be Stratford Literary Festival, where I'm appearing on Tuesday 29 April.  Naturally, I've been giving some thought to what I'll talk about on that occasion.

All being well, I'll be showing a lovely, large, blown-up poster of the "Wadlow" portrait, around which I based my paper given at Goldsmiths, University of London, last month (see left: we made Page 2 of the South London Press).  That, in itself, will probably be pretty controversial - introducing a "new" portrait of Shakespeare to the town.

But there'll be more to the talk than a discussion of the portrait.  I'm currently inclined to talk about the pendulum of history, and the way that a false view of history is often maintained for political reasons.

There are two major periods I'm tempted to analyse.  I opened my book Who Killed William Shakespeare? with an examination of the second half of the 18th century and the process by which Shakespeare was quite deliberately forgotten.  Of course, Shakespeare wasn't forgotten - we've all heard of him - but who he was, that was forgotten.

I'll talk about Shakespeare's mulberry, which was chopped down by an intolerant clergyman, who then went on to demolish New Place, Shakespeare's grand home in Stratford.  I'll talk about the discovery of the Jesuit Testament of the Soul, which had been signed by Shakespeare's father, John, and hidden among the rafters of the Shakespeare Birthplace (the testament vanished from the study of the Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone, probably because it's existence was somewhat embarrassing).  I'll also talk about David Garrick's farcical "Shakespeare Jubilee" and its impact on our understanding of Shakespeare - more than anything, the Jubilee established Shakespeare as the national poet, the "Immortal Bard", while simultaneously cutting him off from his roots - and raise the matter of the Rev. James Wilmot, a vicar who retired to a village near Stratford and first put forward the silly theory that somebody other than Shakespeare must have written the plays.

So - between 1755 and 1785, the real Shakespeare was forgotten, and a national myth erected in his place.  But there's another period I find interesting.

One hundred years on from the time in which the real Shakespeare was determinedly forgotten, attempts were being made to establish who he really was.  The death mask, found in Germany, which Professor Richard Owen, superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, concluded was the model for the Shakespeare funerary monument in Stratford, was exhibited in the town as Shakespeare's Death Mask on the 300th anniversary of his birth.  The discovery of the death mask had prompted numerous scholars to call for Shakespeare's grave to be opened, and his skull extracted so that it could be compared with the death mask.

At the height of this furore, Rev. Charles Jones Langston published his story of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found.  Found, that is, in the private family crypt beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley Church, 12 miles from Stratford.

The powers that be in Stratford currently refuse to discuss the death mask or the skull and pour scorn on the very idea that either might have anything to do with Shakespeare.

However, there is no evidence that anyone connected with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has taken the trouble to investigate the death mask (now in Darmstadt Castle) or the skull at Beoley.  To put it simply, they're not remotely interested in the death mask or the skull.  And they don't want anyone else to be interested in them either.

Rev. Charles Jones Langston published the first half of his extraordinary account of How Shakespeare's Skull Was Stolen in October 1879.  That same year, the Comedie Francaise came to London, bringing with them a play entitled Davenant.  The play was based on the long running rumour that Sir William Davenant was Will Shakespeare's natural son.

I find it odd, looking back, to see that some of the finest minds throughout Europe were so concerned with exploring possibilities - that the death mask was Shakespeare's, that the rogue skull in the crypt at Beoley was Shakespeare's, that Davenant was Shakespeare's son - and were willing and eager to put those possibilities to the test, scientifically-speaking.  I'm currently researching Sir William Davenant for a new biography (it'll be published by The History Press in 2016) and have just received a copy of a short book published in 1905; based on a dissertation he had written, John David Ellis Williams' book is entitled Sir William Davenant's Relation to Shakespeare: With an Analysis of the Chief Characters of Davenant's Plays.

At around the same time as Ellis wrote his dissertation, other experts were carefully studying and measuring the Darmstadt death mask and comparing their measurements - broadly successfully - with those of the Shakespeare effigy in his Stratford funerary monument.

There's such a huge sense of a missed opportunity.  The second half of the nineteenth century appeared to be edging close to several breakthroughs: the formal identification of the death mask, the (re-)discovery of Shakespeare's skull, the true nature of the Shakespeare-Davenant connection (as late as 1913, Arthur Acheson was confidently identifying Sir William Davenant's mother, Jane, as the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets).  All of these developments could and should have transformed the way we think about William Shakespeare.

But they didn't.  Something went wrong, and I suspect that something was the Great War.  England, desperate to preserve its sense of self, abandoned all the new research (a lot of which was German) and reverted to its comfy, cosy national myths.  In other words, the national myth of William Shakespeare - a humble, Protestant lad, beloved of that wonderful monarch, Elizabeth I - was reinstated.  All the advances of the previous decades were swept aside.  We went back to the reactionary view of Shakespeare as the national poet of a Protestant constitutional monarchy.  This was the Whig historian's notion of Shakespeare, and it was utterly unrelated to Shakespeare the man.

We've been stuck with that false idea of Shakespeare ever since.  The propagandist myth of Shakespeare, which was formulated in the late-18th century with the intent of removing any trace or taint of Catholicism in Shakespeare's background, has continued to be taught as if it was historically accurate - nay, as if it is the only known version of the Shakespeare story.  It is this Whiggish myth that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford propagates with ruthless determination.

As if those great minds of the late-19th century had never even considered the death mask, the skull, or the likelihood that Sir William Davenant was Shakespeare's son.  No; all that must be forgotten.  We were making progress, until the reactionaries took control.  And now generations of children, the world over, are subjected to an irrelevant and misleading account of Shakespeare's life.

It is time to resume the brilliant work done by so many scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the devastating tragedy of the First World War sent us all running back home to Mamma.

It is time to continue their efforts, to achieve the goals that they were making for, and to reveal the reality of Shakespeare and his world.

None of that will happen if the Shakespeare "experts" have their way.  But we owe it to Shakespeare, and to Stratford, and to every child who must encounter Shakespeare at school.  If we want to understand Shakespeare's words, we must understand his life.  And for that to happen, we must explode the asinine myth created in the late-18th century, and resurrected in the 20th century, and pick up where the genuine experts left off.

Now - how do we think a talk like that will go down in Stratford?