The Mammoth Book of King Arthur (17 page)

There is one other reference in this first part of Gildas’s work which is easily overlooked, but which will prove crucial to our later research. In his earlier discussion about Britain
under the Roman Empire, he refers to Britain’s martyrs: “St Alban of Verulam, Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of the Legions, and the others of both sexes who, in different
places, displayed the highest spirit in the battle-line of Christ.” In referring to their shrines, Gildas says, in §10:

In other words, in the time that Gildas was writing, the mid to late 530s, there was a partition between the British and the Saxons which denied the
British access to these sites. These shrines must have been in the east, because we know from both written and archaeological records that the Saxons had not advanced far to the west by this time.
Verulam (St Albans) was north-west of London. The City of the Legions, as we will discuss in Chapter 7, could apply to at least three sites, but as two of those, Caerleon and Chester, were in the
west, Gildas must have meant York. York was part of the Angle kingdom of Deira, later part of Northumbria, and Nennius tells us (
see
Chapter 6) that the start of this Saxon colony was in the
mid fifth century under Soemil. By Gildas’s time presumably Yffi, father of Aelle, was established as the ruler.

The two big questions are where this partition ran and when it came into being. Fitting York into the division is less of a problem than St Albans. It is known that there were significant
British enclaves in both London and St Albans throughout most of the fifth century, with no evident Saxon infiltration until the late sixth century. The battle of
Biedcanford
entered in the
ASC
for 571 shows that Cuthwulf succeeded in capturing the towns of Limbury, Aylesbury, Benson and Eynsham. If those locations are correct, then Cuthwulf captured a small British kingdom
known as Calchvynydd, usually treated as covering the Chilterns, mostly Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire (
see
Map 1
). Limbury, now part of Luton, was within 20km of St Albans, suggesting that St
Albans must have been right on this frontier. The resident population may have remained primarily British, hence the archaeological evidence, but under Saxon control, hence the access problem.

Normally one might expect divisions to be decided by rivers, but few rivers in eastern England flow north-south. However, there is another obvious boundary. The Roman road of Dere Street ran
from the eastern end of the Antonine Wall, past Hadrian’s Wall near Corbridge, continuing just west of York and on to Lincoln. From there, now renamed Ermine Street, it ran direct to London.
A confluence of roads there allows a switch along the Lower Icknield Way to St Albans, and from there south, skirting London to the west and terminating, presumably, at the Thames (
see
Map 3
).

This boundary, which follows the route of today’s Al trunk road, would contain all the nascent Anglo-Saxon settlements along the east coast. The kingdom of Kent,
tucked away at that time in the far south-east of the island, was to a large extent separated by the natural boundary of the Weald.

As to when, the obvious answer must be the Battle of Badon. That victory allowed the British to contain the Saxons within a fixed area, just as Alfred’s victory over the Danes resulted in
the same division, the Danelaw, four centuries later.

We will return to this partition in Chapter 7.

2. The Tyrants

We have not yet finished with Gildas. Having presented us with his understanding of the history of Britain, he then launches into an attack on five kings whom he sees as wicked
and the enemies of God. I will not transcribe these in full, colourful though they are, as his lengthy condemnation of their lives and actions adds little to our quest for Arthur. But there are
some factors that are relevant.

“Britain has kings, but they are tyrants,” Gildas begins (in §27). The first he castigates is Constantine, “tyrant whelp of the filthy lioness of Dumnonia”
(§28). Constantine is evidently alive at this time, as Gildas writes: “This same year after taking a dreadful oath not to work his wiles on our countrymen . . . he nevertheless, garbed
in the habit of a holy abbot, most cruelly tore the tender sides of two royal children and their two guardians.” Constantine apparently killed these children in a church, with sword and
spear, whilst they clung to the altar. Gildas also accuses Constantine of adultery and sodomy. Constantine appears in the Arthurian story as Arthur’s appointed successor, and he is described
as the son of Cador, duke of Cornwall. Dumnonia was the Celtic kingdom in south-west Britain, including Cornwall and Devon, although just to add to the confusion it was also the name of a province
in Brittany. When Gildas states that Constantine had sworn not to act against “our countrymen”, he could be talking about the men of Brittany. However, this Constantine does not feature
in the Welsh pedigrees and thus is not in Table 3.10, although he would be a contemporary of Geraint and Mark.

Geoffrey of Monmouth repeats this story, making the princes that Constantine kills the sons of Mordred. This happened soon after the battle of Camlann, which, as Gildas
tells us, had happened only within the last year. If Gildas was writing in the period 535–540, perhaps Camlann’s date really was 539, and not subject to the 19–year error. This
heightens the idea of an Arthurian Golden Age lasting from 500 to 540. Gildas seems to support this as in §26 he speaks of the “calm of the Present” and of “an age”
ignorant of past violence. This seems more like forty years than twenty.

The next king to be excoriated by Gildas is Aurelius Caninus, who, according to Geoffrey, later murdered Constantine. Gildas states that Caninus is “engulfed by the same
slime” as Constantine, and accuses him of “parricide, fornications, adulteries” and of being a warmonger (§30), but does not say where he ruled. Some authorities have equated
him with Cynan Garwyn (Cynan of the White Chariot, or Cynan the Cruel), a prince of Powys who was noted for his battles. However, this Cynan ruled towards the end of the sixth century and would not
be a contemporary of Gildas. There is also no indication that Cynan Garwyn killed his father, the famous Brochwel of the Tusks. Another Cynan appears in the genealogies, five generations in descent
from Vortigern, but he was a contemporary of Cynan Garwyn and was thus unlikely to have been born when Gildas was writing.

The name Caninus is more likely an epithet applied by Gildas. He was fond of nicknames, calling all of the kings he identified after animals. “Caninus”, or “little dog”,
would mean “the whelp”, and the king’s name was therefore Aurelius, suggesting that he may have been one of the grandchildren of Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas had described as
“greatly inferior” to their forebear. If this is so, the father that Aurelius Caninus killed was either Ambrosius’s son or son-in-law. Such an action would be sure to raise
Gildas’s wrath.

Aurelius may not have inherited a kingdom, but usurped one through murder. If so, this is likely to have been in the south, possibly in the Severn Valley.

It’s possible that Caninus is the same as Conmor, sometimes called Comorus, or Conomorus, the ruler of Leon in Armorica
and later usurper of the whole territory.
Conmor had killed the ruler, Ionas, forcibly married Ionas’s widow, and imprisoned their son, Iudwal. Conmor was an exact contemporary of Gildas – indeed the usurpation had happened
while Gildas was deliberating over writing
De Excidio
(he put it off for ten years). Conmor is sometimes identified with Mark (or March), a king of Dumnonia associated with the Tristan
legend. This may explain Gildas’s remark than Caninus was “engulfed by the same slime”, meaning that Caninus and Constantine ruled in the same territory. Interestingly, Conmor
called for a holy man, Paul, a pupil of Illtud, to spread the Christian faith through Brittany. This Paul is called Paul Aurelian, and though the epithet is believed by some to refer to the fact
that Paul’s remains were later moved to Orleans, it is possible that Paul was related to the Aurelian family.

The next to feel the bite of Gildas’s tongue was Vortipor, “tyrant of the Demetae” (§31). We know something about him because his tombstone was
discovered in 1895 in the churchyard at Castelldwyran in Dyfed. It bore the inscription
MEMORIA VOTEPORIGIS PROTICTORIS
. “Protector”, the title also given to
Coel, was a genuine title bestowed on barbarians who, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, helped patrol the Empire’s frontiers. Vortipor appears in the genealogies of Dyfed/Demetia as the
son of Aircol Lawhir (“the long-hand”). Aircol is the Brythonic version of Agricola, suggesting that Vortipor’s father was a Romano-Briton. Gildas clearly thought well of Aircol,
calling Vortipor the “bad son of a good king”. Vortipor is charged with having divorced and possibly even murdered his wife and then raping her daughter (presumably by a previous
marriage, though Gildas does not say). Vortipor may not have been all bad. Gildas calls him “spotted with wickedness”, and it is likely that he was a once strong king who descended into
wickedness in his final years. Gildas remarks that “the end of your life is gradually drawing near” and that his “head is already whitening”, so we may presume Vortipor was
well into his sixties. This is borne out by the analysis of the Demetian pedigree in Table 3.6, which suggests a lifetime for Vortipor of 470–540. If so then Vortipor would have been a young
man at the time of Arthur’s triumphs and his father,
Agricola, would certainly have known, and possibly fought alongside Ambrosious Aurelianus.

Incidentally, the name by which Vortipor is known in the Irish pedigrees is Gartbuir. If a later chronicler came across this written in Gaelic script as
Gartbuir
, might he have misread
the ‘b’ as an ‘h’ and red
Garthuir
? A thought.

The fourth of Gildas’s kings is Cuneglasus, the “tawny butcher” (§32). Cuneglasus’s sin, in addition to waging war “with arms special to yourself”, was
to reject his wife and lust after her sister, a widow who had retired to a convent. This king is most likely Cynlas Goch, a cousin of Maelgwyn and ruler of the small cantref of Rhos (Table 3.8).
Gildas reports that Cuneglasus had been a wicked man ever since his youth, and refers to him as “driver of the chariot of the Bear’s Stronghold.” Knowing Gildas’s delight in
puns, we can interpret “Bear’s Stronghold” into Welsh as “Din-arth” (
din
for fortress and
arth
for bear); Dinarth is a small village near Llandrillo in
North Wales. Others have taken the reference to “the Bear” as relating to Arthur, as the prefix
Arth
means “the Bear”, and have suggested that Cuneglasus was
Arthur’s charioteer or even Arthur himself.

What did Gildas mean by referring to Cuneglasus as having “arms special to yourself”? What did he have that no one else did? A specially trained army, perhaps, or a huge arsenal of
weapons? Yet Gildas’s phrase sounds more personal, as if Cuneglasus had his own particular weapon. It makes one think of Excalibur. Would a sword that invoked awe and wonder, and which the
owner believed protected him, be “special”? Probably, but unless Cuneglasus had somehow acquired Arthur’s own sword, I find it hard to believe that Cuneglasus, a violent,
psychotic despot, could ever be remembered as the heroic Arthur.

Gildas saves the worst for last: Maglocunus, better known as Maelgwyn, whom Gildas refers to as “first in evil.” The catalogue of Maelgwyn’s crimes takes up
as much space as all the others put together. In his youth, Maelgwyn murdered his uncle, the king. This might have been Owain Danwyn (“white-tooth”), ruler of Rhos and father of
Cuneglasus, but according to Peter Bartrum in
A Welsh Classical Dictionary
, the word used for uncle,
avunculus
, means strictly “his mother’s brother”. We
do not know who his mother’s brother was, so cannot be sure which kingdom Maelgwyn usurped. He seems to have repented and sought penance in a monastery. But this was
short-lived. He subsequently murdered his wife, and, determined to marry his nephew’s wife, had his nephew murdered as well.

Gildas must have felt very sure of himself. Castigating one or other of the first four kings was risky enough, but to take on Maelgwyn was like Thomas More taking on Henry VIII. As Gildas
describes him, Maelgwyn was “dragon of the island”, the Pendragon or High King. Arthur was also described as the Pendragon, a title steeped in historical lore which I shall explore
later. Maelgwyn was the most important ruler in Britain, although Gildas did not see it this way: “The King of all kings has made you higher than almost all the generals of Britain, in your
kingdom as in your physique.” (§33). Maelgwyn was called “the Tall”, and we can imagine him as a well built, powerful man, towering over all others. Gildas does not say what
he means by “almost all the generals,” but he clearly believed that there was one more powerful than Maelgwyn in Britain. Gildas had decried most of the kings of Wales and the West and
had made no comment on the kings of the North. Perhaps he is alluding to one of them. Or perhaps this is Gildas’s one cryptic reference to Arthur. We know the names of most of
Maelgwyn’s contemporaries, and possibly only Eliffer of the Great Host or his sons Peredur and Gwrgi might otherwise be classified as great generals. Once again Gildas masks his facts.

As the best attested ruler mentioned by Gildas, Maelgwyn’s reign has been used to help date when Gildas wrote
De Excidio.
I have already used other factors to deduce that it must
have been written in the mid to late 530s. The
Welsh Annals
note the death of “Mailcun” in 549, and Maelwgyn’s reign is usually allocated to 534–549. This suggests
that Gildas was writing early in Maelgwyn’s reign, but the catalogue of crimes Gildas lists, including three marriages, suggests a good few years have passed. However 534 relates to the death
of Cadwallon and that date is far from certain, and Cadwallon could have died in the 520s. Also the throne Maelgwyn usurped by murdering an uncle relates to a smaller chiefdom, not the main line of
Gwynedd that he later inherited. In all probability, Maelgwyn’s post-monastic
catalogue of crimes began in the 520s, perhaps even earlier, allowing plenty of opportunity
for Gildas to vilify him in the late 530s.