Gidlow The Reign of Arthur

From History to Legend
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9515-6
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Did King Arthur really exist? The Reign of Arthur takes a fresh look at the early sources describing Arthur's career and compares them to the reality of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. It presents, for the first time, both the most up to date scholarship and a convincing case for the existence of a real sixth-century British general called Arthur. Where others speculate wildly or else avoid the issue, Gidlow, remaining faithful to the sources, deals directly with the central issue of interest to the general reader: does the Arthur that we read of in the ninth-century sources have any link to a real leader of the fifth or sixth century? Was Arthur a powerful king or a Dark Age general co-cordinating the British resistance to Saxon invaders? Detailed analysis of the key Arthurian sources, contemporary testimony and archaeology reveals the reality of fragmented British kingdoms uniting under a single military command to defeat the Saxons. There is plausible and convincing evidence for the existence of their war-leader, and, in this challenging and provocative work, Gidlow concludes that the Dark Age hypothesis of Arthur, War-leader of the Kings of the Britons, not only fits the facts, it is the only way of making sense of them.

CHRISTOPHER GIDLOW is the author of The Reign of Arthur. A life-long enthusiast for the Middle Ages and the Arthurian Legends, he studied history at Oxford and archaeology at Leicester. He is the live Interpretation Manager of Historic Royal Palaces, presenting the past in engaging ways at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gidlow, Christopher

Leseproben

TWO

Then Arthur fought against them in those days, with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was the leader in the battles. The first battle was towards the mouth of the river which is called Glein. The second and third and fourth and fifth were on another river, which is called Dubglas and is in the Linnuis region. The sixth battle was on the river which is called Bassas. The seventh battle was in the wood of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth battle was in Castellum Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of Saint Mary ever Virgin upon his shoulders, and the pagans were put to flight on that day and there was great slaughter upon them through the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the virtue of St. Mary the Virgin His Mother. The ninth battle was waged in the City of the Legion. He waged the tenth battle on the shore of the river which is called Tribuit. The eleventh battle was made on the hill which is called Agned. The twelfth battle was on the hill of Badon, in which 960 men fell in one day in one charge by Arthur. And no-one laid them low save he himself. And in all the battles he emerged the victor.

The source which first gives the military career of Arthur is (The History of the Britons). The earliest version is found in Harleian Manuscript 3859, so called because it once belonged to the eighteenth-century collector, Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford. In the Harleian Manuscript, the is anonymous, but other versions give its author as, variously, Nennius, a son of Urbacen, Mark the Anchorite or Gildas, a much earlier writer.

The Arthurian material in the is of vital importance, since it is the earliest record of the actual deeds of Arthur. Whether this material is historical or legendary is crucial to any argument about the reign of Arthur. We must therefore consider what kind of document the is.

Dumville, the current editor of the , is adamant that it is overwhelmingly of a legendary or ‘synthetic’ character. The ninth-century author has heavily edited his sources to fit them into a preconceived framework. Unfortunately, Dumville has yet to complete his publication of the work, meaning that for the past twenty-three years we have simply had to take his word for this. Historians have consciously avoided making any comments but have generally taken his assertions as full permission to ignore the Arthurian material. It is academic received wisdom that the is valueless as a historical source for the fifth/sixth centuries.

Popular works on the historical Arthur usually make no reference to this. In them it is generally assumed that the was written by a ninth-century Welsh monk called Nennius and that much of the material is presented at one remove, for instance by translating Welsh poems into Latin, from lost primary sources. This gulf of understanding is compounded by the version of ‘Nennius’ most accessible to amateur historians. This version (Morris 1980) is so inaccurate and inconsistent that it must be used with extreme caution. Its editor, John Morris (author of ), died before completing his work. What was published was the Harleian Recension, augmented with excerpts from other texts and with no indication as to the criteria used for selection. Other additions, such as a section identifying Badon as Bath, are not found here in any text whatever.

was copied numerous times in the Middle Ages. Its disjointed style made it easy for scribes to omit or add sections and update the material. These produced many variants, which we can group together in families called ‘recensions’. The recensions follow, more or less faithfully, a particular exemplar. The Harleian Recension, represented by the oldest surviving text, is generally considered the closest to the original. Whether this is actually true must await Dumville’s full publication. For the purposes of this book, we assume it is.

The Nennian Recension claims to be written by a certain Nennius. Its prologue continues: ‘I have undertaken to write down some of the extracts that the stupidity of the British cast out; for the scholars of the island of Britain had no skill, and set down no record in books. I have therefore made a heap of all that I have found, both from the annals of the Romans and from the chronicles of the Holy Fathers, and from the writings of the Irish and the English and out of the traditions of our elders.’

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the Nennian prologue was part of the original . If it had been, we might expect it to be reproduced in the other recensions as well. There is no reason to believe that the writer, although he may be passing down a true tradition of authorship, had any genuine knowledge of the author’s sources or intentions. Nevertheless, the name ‘Nennius’ is now conventional for the otherwise anonymous author. I use ‘Nennius’ when discussing the methods and intentions of the author, without committing myself to his actual identity.

Most commentators follow the Nennian prologue in assuming that the author simply gathered together excerpts from various books, mixed them with oral traditions and regurgitated them almost undigested in the . The ancient sources are therefore preserved at only one remove in a sort of historical scrapbook. Dumville, however, is convinced that the writer had worked over his sources in a comprehensive way to fit a chronological framework, leaving little material unaltered. This understanding is crucial to an appreciation of the .

covers a broad sweep of time, from the legendary founding of Britain after the Trojan War, through to the seventh century. About two-thirds of the book deal with the most recent 300 years of history. The author provides the approximate date of the book. At the start, he gives the present as AD 831. Later, he calculates that Patrick went to Ireland in AD 405, 421 years before the present (i.e. AD 826). In the same section, he gives Patrick’s date as 438, giving a date for the present of 859. Either an authorial or scribal error has resulted in two different dates for the same event, or the manuscript has been updated. Dumville suggests that Nennius intended a date of AD 829 for the present (IV in Dumville 1990).

Wonders of Britain

After the end of the , there is a gazetteer of Wonders of Britain, the . It is not clear whether this originally formed part of the work. The author seems to be a contemporary of Nennius and to share an interest in the same area of Britain. The wonders have been associated with the from early in the manuscript tradition, passing together into different recensions. I will treat them as the work of the same author, although if they are not, the fact that two ninth-century writers give supporting material on Arthur would strengthen my case.

‘Arthur’s Britain’.

Although the scope of the wonders is national, the fact that most of them are actually to be found in South Wales and the Severn Estuary points firmly to the author’s home area. In Buelt (Builth), he tells us, there is a pile of stones called Carn Cabal built by Arthur the Soldier. The topmost stone bears the footprint of Arthur’s dog Cabal, made when he was hunting the boar Troynt. In Ercing, 35 miles away in modern Herefordshire, is the wonder of Licat Anir. This Anir was the son of Arthur the Soldier, who killed him and built a tomb there. The author has personally tried to measure the tomb and found it impossible to obtain the same measurement twice. (The name of Arthur’s son is frequently given as Amr. I follow the reading of the current editor.) The only other wonder the author connects to a named individual is a tomb in a church built by St Illtud in Llwynarth, on the Gower peninsula, 50 miles away from the two Arthur wonders.

These wonders are important pieces of information. They tell us Arthur was a soldier, as we might have expected from , but locate him in South Wales. We know that, as was transmitted through the early Middle Ages, it acquired verses linking it to Welsh heroes. However, these emphasised the North Welsh Kingdom of Gwynedd, not Builth or Ercing. Moreover, we also know that the verse referring to Arthur pre-dated those interpolations.

Although the wonders are folkloric in character, this gives no reason to doubt that Arthur was real, any more than that Illtud was a real Dark Age cleric. Folklore and legend linked to real characters and events were in the idiom of even the most sober Dark Age historian. The wonders attributed to Arthur are no more than would be expected from a writer of Dark Age Britain. No one doubts Bede’s account of Oswald of Northumbria’s death at the battle of Maserfelth. Yet Bede devotes most of this account to describing wonders such as the cure of a sick horse which rolled onto the spot where Oswald was killed or the man whose house burnt down save for the beam where his cloak, touched by the mud from the site, had hung (EH IV 2). Even tombs of varying length were not considered impossible. The stone sarcophagus made for King Sebbi of the East Saxons was too short. ‘In the presence of the Bishop and of Sighard, son of the monk king . . . and a considerable number of men, the sarcophagus was suddenly found to be the correct length for the body.’ By contrast, although Anir’s tomb and the footprint of Cabal are wonders to the contemporary...