The Real Arthur: Warrior or King?

By Pamela Lamb

Arthur has been a source of fascination ever since he first emerged from the mists of the Dark Ages that followed the end of Roman rule in Britain. Was he a real man or is he just a legendary character around whom so many myths have been woven? Perhaps he was both. Perhaps Arthur was a famous warrior fighting against the Saxons in 6th century Britain. Perhaps his mythical character arose from the stories told about his exploits. Over time, myth overtook man until the reality of his existence became buried so deep it is difficult to drag it out into the open. In this book, I want to separate Arthur’s two characters - the real and the legendary - and show how, and why, one morphed into the other over the hundreds of years that separate us from those long-ago days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Lamb
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005056773

Pamela Lamb

Must ... stop ... writing ... Sometimes I really wish I could. It gets in the way of real life. At the weekend I prefer sitting in front of the computer with my pretend friends instead of going out with my real ones. It destroys my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I need to change one word in the paragraph I wrote the evening before - and I have to get up and do it. And it makes me a dangerous driver. Get me on the road and my characters start having conversations in my head. And why are they so much more lucid and logical then than when I attempt to scribble them down at the next red light?I write because I love language. I love English with its collection of mongrel words. It's like an enormous button box where you can pick between half a dozen languages each one of which holds the history of Britain at its heart. I love the shape of words and the sound of them. I love what you can make them do on the page. And what you can make them do to your readers. Laugh, cry, stay up at night.What I like best is having a conversation with a reader about one of my characters. The reader talks about my character as if s/he is a real person. Discusses the character's motivation. Speculates about what the character did after the end of the novel. And I think, but it's all made up. Every bit of it. Out of my head.Then I know it is all worthwhile. Bringing characters alive to walk on the page. Creating a world for them to live in. Immersing myself in the shape and rhythm of a novel in the making. It's exciting stuff. And it's even more exciting when the book is finished and I hand it over to you, the reader. Enjoy!

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The Real Arthur: Warrior or King?

Pamela Lamb

Published by Agneau Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2022 Pamela Lamb

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Arthur has been a source of fascination ever since he first emerged from the mists of the Dark Ages that followed the end of Roman rule in Britain. Was he a real man or is he just a legendary character around whom so many myths have been woven? Perhaps he was both. Perhaps Arthur was a famous warrior fighting against the Saxons in 6th century Britain. Perhaps his mythical character arose from the stories told about his exploits. Over time, myth overtook man until the reality of his existence became buried so deep it is difficult to drag it out into the open. In this book, I want to separate Arthur’s two characters - the real and the legendary - and show how, and why, one morphed into the other over the hundreds of years that separate us from those long-ago days. I will begin with Arthur the man.

THE MAN

The sources (and why we can’t rely on them)

If you are looking for evidence for Arthur the man among the sources available to us, you won’t find much. There are three early British writers whose work relates to the period in which Arthur lived. The first is Gildas who wrote his ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ in the mid-6th century, the second is Nennius who wrote his Historia Brittonum in the 9th century and the third, and best-known, is Geoffrey of Monmouth who completed his ‘The History of the Kings of Britain’ in 1136. And there are two tiny scraps in the ‘Annales Cambriae’ which are more frustrating than useful, as we shall see.

Of course, the greater the distance in time between a writer and the events he is attempting to record, the less reliable his work becomes. Therefore, we might expect the most veracity from Gildas who, while not necessarily an eye-witness to the events about which he wrote, was at least alive when, or just after, they happened

Gildas was a British monk born in the year 518 AD. He is the subject of two biographies. The first, known as the Rhuys Life was written in the 9th century by an unnamed monk in the monastery in Brittany founded by Gildas himself. The second, the Llancarfan Life, was written by Welshman Caradoc of Llancarfan in the 12th century. Although these writers agree on little else, both place Gildas’ birthplace in the north of Britain in what is Scotland today. The earlier biographer and the one more likely to be accurate, identifies the British kingdom of Alt Clut (later known as Strathclyde) as Gildas’ birthplace and the semi-legendary king Caunus, or Cawn as his father.

In the early 6th century, at the time of Gildas’ birth, the kingdom of Alt Clut encompassed the king’s stronghold on Dumbarton Rock on the north side of the Clyde, the land surrounding it and not much else. Most kingdoms in post-Roman Britain were like this. The king possessed a hall for his household, some land and animals, and a few families to tend them. These families gave the king their loyalty and the men and boys formed his war band on the frequent occasions he rode into his neighbours’ territory looking for trouble.

William Skene, a Scottish antiquarian writing in the 19th century disagrees with the writer of the Rhuys Life about Gildas’ birthplace. He places Gildas in the Caw Prydyn family, the members of which were descended from Ceredig Guledig, the founder of one of three groups of families listed in the Bonhed Gwyr y Gogledd or ‘Genealogies of the Men of the North,’ all of whom claimed petty kingdoms for themselves. The Caw family had its seat in the district of Strathgryf, now the county of Renfrew which lies along the south bank of the Clyde.

According to his 9th century biographer, Gildas was educated in a monastery at Cor Tewdws in today’s Glamorgan and was ordained as a monk. He served in Ireland and northern Britain before establishing a monastery at Rhuys in Brittany. Here he wrote his best-known work ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ and here he died in 570. Gildas’ purpose in writing ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ was to exhort five British kings to mend their unChristian behaviour or face a dreadful doom. There is a very good reason why Gildas believed Britain and her wicked kings were heading towards disaster which we will come to later.

Gildas prefaced his exhortation with a history of Britain which began with the Roman invasion of the island and ended at the time of his own birth. Gildas names his birth date as ‘the year of the siege of Badon Hill’. You don’t have to know much about Arthurian history to recognise that Badon Hill is believed to be the location of Arthur’s final and decisive battle against his Saxon foes.

What is important here is how did Gildas know about the battle of Badon Hill? Where did it take place that it was talked about or, more likely, sung about in his father’s hall in Strathgryf while his mother lay abed with her new son? Because this is a vital first clue to our understanding of Arthur the man. One hundred years after the departure of the Romans, Britain was breaking up under pressure from outsiders, its towns and cities lay deserted and travel by road was dreadful if not downright impossible. It is difficult to imagine news of a battle, decisive or otherwise, in another part of the island making its way to Strathgryf or being of interest to anyone there, even if it did. Does that mean the battle of Badon Hill took place in the north? How interesting. That is not what most people think!

Gildas’ birth date and its importance to Arthur’s story is a shred, no more than that, but it is worth clinging to because, apart from this battle which we have come to associate with Arthur, Gildas doesn’t mention our man AT ALL! The man he does mention is Ambrosius Aurelianus, a name which will also be familiar to Arthurian scholars. According to Gildas, Ambrosius Aurelianus (his British name was Emrys Wledig) was ‘a modest man’ and a Roman whose parents had been ‘adorned with the purple.’ Although this description seems a bit odd 100 years after the Romans withdrew from Britain, there is a good reason for it as we shall find out later. It was under the leadership of this man that the ‘poor remnants’ of the British people took arms against the Saxon scourge.

Another name mentioned by Gildas is that of Vortigern. He becomes a key figure in the stories subsequently told about Arthur but was he a real man? Although Gildas identifies Vortigern as ‘the British king’ and calls him ‘that proud tyrant’ it is possible to interpret the British word ‘vortigern’ as ‘leader’ rather than as the name of a particular individual. I believe this Vortigern - person or leader or both - led a confederacy of British kings whose territories lay along the old Roman border delineated by the rivers Clyde and Forth and by the Antonine Wall between them.

In the mid-5th century, some forty years after the Romans finally abandoned their province of Britannia, these border lords were fighting for their lives to protect their territory from the same people whose predations had caused the Romans to build the Antonine Wall in the first place. Gildas writes:

‘No sooner were they [the Romans] gone than the Picts and Scots ... hastily landed again from their canoes ... differing from one another in manners but inspired with the same avidity for blood and all more eager to shroud their villainous faces in bushy hair than to cover with decent clothing those parts of their body which required it.’

Who were these Picts and Scots against whom Romans and Britons alike had been fighting for hundreds of years? The Picts were a loose confederation of kingdoms that occupied the north and east of today’s Scotland and raided south whenever they had the opportunity. The Scots were raiders and sometimes settlers from Ireland.

For our British border lords, the Picts were of more immediate concern. Gildas writes that in the immediate post-Roman period, the Picts, emboldened by the legions’ departure seized ‘all the country towards the extreme north as far as the wall.’ It was not long before they mounted an attack on the wall itself. Gildas describes the desperate scene as the ill-prepared British warriors faced the Picts’ attack:

‘Meanwhile the hooked weapons of their enemies were not idle, and our wretched countrymen were dragged from the wall and dashed against the ground.’

At this point it important for us to understand that Gildas is talking about the Antonine Wall quite close to where he grew up rather than Hadrian’s Wall further south. Although his description of the Picts’ attack on the wall is vivid and dramatic, it is clear from his vague language that Gildas knew very little about Hadrian’s Wall further south. He writes that, as a final act before they marched away, the legions assisted the Britons to build a wall ‘different from the former’ and ‘of the same structure as walls generally’ in a straight line between ‘some cities’ which ‘by chance’ had been built.

There is no doubt Gildas is talking about Hadrian’s Wall here although it is unlikely he ever saw it for himself. Gildas was a well-travelled man but, in this era of poor or non-existent roads, his journeys would have been undertaken by sea. Of course, Hadrian’s Wall was built many years before the Romans withdrew from Britain but this is something else Gildas wasn’t clear about. Dates are not really his thing - the only one he mentions is the date of his own birth.

The Romans had not maintained a garrison on the Antonine Wall for 200 years, although their presence further south must have acted as a deterrent to Pictish ambition. Once they left, defending this scratch in the landscape against a ferocious foe became British business. Was the ‘useless and panic-struck company’ of British warriors that Gildas writes was placed on the wall to defend it against this attack by the Picts a permanent garrison or did the kings rush them in when their ancient enemy threatened to overrun their territory? The latter scenario is the more likely one. These British kings were incapable of joining together against a common foe. They much preferred their age-old pastime of fighting amongst themselves. As Gildas writes:

‘... it has always been a custom with our nation ... to be impotent in repelling foreign foes but bold and invincible in raising civil war.’

Once they had taken Antonine Wall, the Picts poured into British territory. Gildas writes of the Britons’ plight:

‘They left their cities, abandoned the protection of the wall and dispersed themselves in flight more desperately than before. The enemy, on the other hand, pursued them with more unrelenting cruelty than before, and butchered our countrymen like sheep ...’

For a while, the Britons had their hands full fighting their enemies. A famine added its blight to difficult times. Eventually, things settled down.

‘The audacious raiders [the Scots] ... return to their winter quarters, determined before long again to return and plunder. And then, too, the Picts for the first time seated themselves at the extremity of the island where they afterwards continued, occasionally plundering and wasting the country.’

Prosperity returned and the Britons were ‘deluged with a most extraordinary plenty of all things’. Sounds good, I know, but Gildas was not impressed because with luxury comes sin, especially the sin of kings which was, after all, the subject of his treatise.

It was against this backdrop of peace and plenty that ‘a vague rumour’ reached the ears of the Britons that their old enemies planned to renew their attack. Vortigern called a council of his fellow kings and the decision was made to call in ‘the fierce and impious Saxons ... to repel the invasions of the northern nations’. What’s going on here? Clearly there was nothing immediate or compelling about this threat from the north. Gildas mentions a rumour which is a long way away from hairy men dragging Britons off walls.

So did Vortigern and the other border lords really invite the Saxons in? Or, more likely, did they arrive in their ‘three ships of war’ and demand hospitality from the British kings who, according to Gildas, had gone soft in times of plenty. There must have been something in it for the kings - a few extra swords against their perennial enemy in the north would have been worth having at any time. After all, allowing wolves over the threshold to fight other wolves was a time-honoured strategy. The Romans did it for hundreds of years before the wolves became too much even for them.

And where did these Saxons come from? Gildas writes: ‘They first landed on the eastern side of the island ...’ Is he talking about the Saxons who, according to the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, landed in Ebbesfleet, Kent in 449? Well, no, because what would Gildas know or care about an event that happened at the furthest end of the island from his own home? And what would the Kentish king (whoever he was) know or care about the threat posed by the Picts so far to the north which is the reason given by the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ for inviting the Saxons in? Besides, there is very little historical veracity in the traditional story of the Saxons’ arrival in Britain. As we shall see.

Here’s another