The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

THE LAST BATTLE

The site of the last battle, Camlann, has been discussed endlessly. Every author who has written about Arthur has their own favored site. I have discussed elsewhere the reasons for thinking that the likeliest place is Pont ar Gamlan: a boulder-strewn fording-place at the confluence of the Eden and Mawddach rivers a few miles north of Dolgellau in North Wales. A third river, the Gamlan, flows down the steep mountainside from the west to join the Mawddach close by. It flows down through an oak forest and over some impressive waterfalls: the Black Falls, just above Ganllwyd. The name “Gamlan” is very close to the traditional name of the last battle, and in Welsh a cadgamlan is an utter rout, a complete massacre, and this is likely to be the original meaning of the battle’s name, now commemorated in the name of the river.

This may seem an odd place for Arthur to be fighting a battle in that the threat from the Saxons was from the east. But the various traditions about the last battle have in common the idea that it was a fight amongst the British. Arthur was betrayed by a relative, perhaps a nephew, called Modred or Medraut. With that in mind, the final battle might have been fought well inside the frontiers of Britannia Prima, in Devon, Cornwall, or anywhere in Wales.

The North Wales location suggests that Arthur was making his way north into the kingdom of Gwynedd along the major south–north Roman road known as Sarn Helen. The King of Gwynedd was Maelgwn, and his fortress was Castell Degannwy, perched on a rocky, twin-peaked hilltop overlooking the Conwy estuary. Like many other Dark Age strongholds, this was a refortified Iron Age fort. The site has yielded sixth-century pottery and there is a tradition that it was the seat of Maelgwn, though, like Arthur, Maelgwn had a less conspicuous refuge residence, at Aberffraw on the west coast of Anglesey. Degannwy was Maelgwn’s frontline fortress, and this was where Arthur was heading. The last battle took place in an atmosphere of distrust and civil war, and Arthur was probably hoping to deal with Maelgwn’s disloyalty.

Maelgwn had a reputation for ruthlessness. We know from the outright condemnation of him by Gildas that he murdered his own uncle in order to become King of Gwynedd; now he was envious of Arthur’s High Kingship and determined to get it for himself. Maelgwn was Arthur’s enemy; the king who was destabilizing the British confederation and who wanted him dead so that he could be dux bellorum himself.

Whether Arthur and his war-band rode into Gwynedd to quell an overt rebellion and open and anticipated hostility or were lured there by some guile of Maelgwn’s and fell unsuspecting into a trap at Ganllwyd cannot be determined from the existing evidence. Certainly the site, confined by steep valley sides and dense forests, is ideal for an ambush.

Two things are known for certain: Maelgwn did gain the High Kingship shortly after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur’s disappearance—in 546, according to one version—and gained it by deception. There is also the tradition that Arthur was in the end the victim of treachery at Camlann: perhaps the treachery was Maelgwn’s, not Modred’s. And just possibly Arthur was the murdered “uncle” mentioned by Gildas.

If Maelgwn was indeed responsible for the death of Arthur and for bringing the Arthurian peace to an end, Gildas’s extraordinary hatred and condemnation of Maelgwn’s many-sided wickedness becomes understandable. Arthur was behind the golden years of relative stability and justice between the Battles of Badon and Camlann, and those years came to an end with his final defeat. Gildas mentions specifically that Maelgwn removed and killed many tyrants (meaning kings, not necessarily tyrants in the modern sense), that Maelgwn was “last in my list but first in evil,” and that Maegwn “cruelly despatched the king your uncle.” Here, too, is the uncle-slaying regicide motif that would later be attributed, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and possibly mistakenly, to Modred.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ARTHUR

What happened to Arthur after the Battle of Camlann is shrouded in mystery. One version of the story is that he was carried from the battlefield mortally wounded and either died elsewhere or simply disappeared. One explanation is that locally the truth of the matter was known—that Arthur had died on or near the battlefield—and this tradition was preserved and passed on through Welsh families, like the details about the few fellow warriors who survived the battle. Meanwhile, Arthur’s subjects in Cornwall had less detailed information about what had happened to the king. All they really knew was that he had not returned. In the days and weeks following the Battle of Camlann, all kinds of misinformation and rumor may have circulated.

Writing in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth was aware of the uncertainties. In his version of Arthur’s disappearance he describes him as “mortally wounded” on the battlefield, yet moved to Avalon “to have his wounds healed.” Some scholars have argued persuasively that Geoffrey was deliberately ambiguous about what had happened because he had on his desk two different versions of the king’s fate: one originating in Wales and giving Arthur as killed in battle; the other from Cornish or Breton sources and giving Arthur as surviving the battle and being transported elsewhere to recover or die.

This is persuasive and goes a long way toward explaining the post-Camlann confusion, but it may be that the contradictory stories carried a different clash of scenarios. It may have been known, to a privileged few in Wales, that Arthur had been wounded, rescued from the battlefield, and taken north to a place of safety; meanwhile, in Cornwall, the story was that Arthur was “missing presumed dead.”

Great play has been made of the absence of a grave for Arthur. The sixth or seventh-century poem Songs of the Graves gives the locations of many Dark Age heroes, for instance:

The grave of Owain ap Urien in a secluded part of the world,

Under the grass at Llan Morvad;

In Aberech, that of Rhydderch Hael. (Stanza 13)…

The wonder of the world, a grave for Arthur. (Stanza 44)

The missing grave became a major element in the mystique surrounding the vanished king. If Arthur was the great overking, chief of the kings of Britain and dux bellorum, we might expect to find an impressive monument of some kind raised over his grave, or at any rate for its location to have been remembered, but there is nothing. On the other hand, where is the grave of Aelle, the first Saxon bretwalda? Where is Vortigern’s mausoleum? Even the whereabouts of the tombs of King Alfred and King Harold are uncertain. So perhaps we should not be surprised that we have no grave for Arthur.

There is a tradition that he was buried secretly. The Life of St. Illtud credits Illtud with being the priest who conducted the secret funeral. Probably only those who were actually present—perhaps only ten people altogether—ever knew where the king was buried, and as likely as not those ten took the secret with them to their own separate graves.

One question naturally arises: why should those close to Arthur have wished to bury him in secret? Obviously his death was disastrous to the British cause. If he had succeeded only recently in re-cementing the loyalty of the kings of southern and central Wales to a common cause, the news of his death could have precipitated immediate fragmentation, laying Wales open to attack from the east; alternatively, and equally dangerously, it could have exposed Powys and the southern kingdoms to attack from Gwynedd first, rendering them powerless to resist Saxon incursion from the east. The continuing expansion of Gwynedd a century or two later seems to show that this was an ever-present danger. If news of Arthur’s death had reached the Saxons, who had been held at bay by his power for 20 years, they would have pushed westward with confidence and ease; if it had spread widely among the Britons, they would have been demoralized and given in under the renewed Saxon onslaught. In every way and for every reason it was important to conceal the death of Arthur, and those close to him may have hoped to hide the catastrophic truth long enough for a successor to be found and for him to establish his position as overking before too many people realized what had happened.

It may be that an alternative fate was concealed, but for the same reasons. If Arthur was not killed at Camlann but so badly wounded that he was going to be unfit to fight or even ride for a long time, he would have been forced to retire. It was common for Dark Age kings to retire when they became physically incapable of fighting through age or infirmity. They withdrew from public life completely by entering monasteries.

Several examples are known from these times. In around 580 Tewdrig or Theodoric, King of Glevissig (Glamorgan) abdicated in favor of his son Meurig and retired to a religious house at Tintern. He made the mistake of coming out of retirement in about 584, when his son engaged the Saxons in battle nearby, and was mortally wounded in the battle. Pabo Pillar of Britain, King of the Pennines, similarly abdicated in favor of his sons and went to live in seclusion in a remote monastery in Gwynedd, far from his own kingdom; he later died and was buried there, in the church at Llanbabo in Anglesey. A link between the Pennine kingdom and Gwynedd is suggested by another example. In the church at Llanaelhaearn on the Lleyn Peninsula is a fifth or sixth-century memorial stone inscribed with the words “Aliortus, a man from Elmet, lies here.”

There are hints in the medieval genealogies that a much earlier Dumnonian king, Coel Godebog, also retired a long way from home: he died and was buried in the far north, in York, in 300.

Did Arthur, now aged 62 and badly wounded, decide to abdicate and retire immediately after Camlann? The Legend of St. Goeznovius, a Breton saint, includes some information that is corroborated in other sources, such as the migration of British saints to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries. It may overstate Arthur’s achievement, in boasting that the Saxons were largely cleared from Britain by “the great Arthur, King of the Britons” but, in a telling phrase, it relates how Arthur’s career ended when he “was summoned from human activity.” This is equivocal, in that it holds back from saying that Arthur died, even if most of us reading the story would infer that that was meant. The expression might equally be taken to mean that Arthur withdrew from secular, worldly affairs in order to lead a purely religious life.

If Arthur’s reign ended at Camlann but he lived on in retirement, it could explain the discrepancy between the date of 537 or 539 given in the Welsh Annals for Arthur’s fall at Camlann and the date of 542 given by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Perhaps Geoffrey had access to a tradition of Arthur living on for another five years after the battle (see Places: Avalon).

The idea that Arthur did not die but somehow lived on and will one day return may seem to remove Arthur completely from history and place him safely in the world of myth and mysticism. Yet Arthur is but one of many great charismatic leaders, many of them kings, who were believed to have lived on after their “official” deaths. The last Saxon King of England, Harold Godwinson, officially died at the Battle of Hastings close to the site of the high altar of Battle Abbey and his remains were buried at the same spot. The Bayeux Tapestry is unambiguous—“Harold interfectus est”—but even in 1066 doubts were circulated about the official story. The Norman chronicler William of Poitiers reported that the Conqueror contemptuously ordered Harold’s body to be buried on the beach. More uncertainty arose because of the mutilation of the corpse, so even a burial in Battle Abbey might have been that of another battle victim. By the thirteenth century an Icelandic story was told of Harold being found alive on the battlefield by two peasants who were looting corpses the night after the battle. They took him home with them and it was suggested that he should rally the English once more, but Harold knew that many would have sworn fealty to William and he did not want to compromise them. He would retire to a hermitage at Canterbury. Three years later, when Harold died, William was told and he saw that Harold was given a royal burial. Gerald of Wales, writing in 1191, also affirmed that the Saxons clung to the belief that Harold was alive; as a hermit, deeply scarred and blinded in the left eye, he is said to have lived for a long time in a cell at Chester, where he was visited by Henry I.

Similar survival stories have been told about other historical figures: the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, Richard II, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Alexander I of Russia, Holger Danske, Sebastian of Portugal. These were real people, yet elaborate stories adding layers of mystery to their deaths are still told. The mystery elements added to Arthur’s life do not mean that he never existed at all.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF ARTHUR

Why did this particular king so fascinate his contemporaries and those who came after? The most immediate reason is that his military prowess halted the westward progress of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of southern Britain for 20 years. His time would afterward be remembered as the sunset of Celtic England. A distinctive feature of the Celts is dwelling on defeats; there is wailing, keening, lamentation, and nostalgia. A. L. Rouse commented, “It was the hero of the losing side, King Arthur, who imposed himself on the imagination.” Arthur became a symbol of the glory of Britain as it once was and might yet have been, but for its destruction by the Saxon invaders. He was the perfect symbol of a kingdom and a culture lost.

The image of the king hung over the aristocracy of the Middle Ages like a faded, tattered, war-torn battle standard hanging in a royal chapel, redolent of past greatness and signifying virtues that could never be matched by the living. The idea of Arthur became a force in politics. Henry II wanted to prove that Arthur was dead in order to remove any hopes the Celts may have nursed that he would rise again to do battle against the Plantagenets. It was probably for this reason that in 1190 Henry II arranged for Arthur’s coffin to be “discovered” at Glastonbury and exhumed. We know that, when Henry II visited Pembrokeshire in 1179 and met the bard who told him where Arthur’s grave was, he was also told of the tradition that Arthur would ride once more. If Henry could produce Arthur’s bones, even the most superstitious would be able to see that there was no chance of Arthur riding again.

King Edward III identified himself as Arthur’s successor when he contemplated re-establishing the Round Table as an order of chivalry. In the end, in 1348, he founded the Order of the Garter instead, but still in imitation of King Arthur’s order of Round Table knights.

ARVERNI

An Iron Age Gaulish tribe, with its main center at Gergovia: a hillfort on a plateau in the Puy-de-Dome. In the second century BC, under King Luernios, they were the most powerful tribe in Gaul. Luernios was known for scattering gold and silver coins to his followers from his chariot. When his son Bituitus was defeated by the Romans in 121 BC, the power of the Arverni was diminished and the Aedui and Sequani became the leading tribes in Gaul. The Arverni were able to negotiate a peace treaty with the Romans that preserved their independence, though in the end they lost territory. No more kings are mentioned.

ATREBATES

An Iron Age British tribe in central southern England. Their territory occupied the modern counties of West Sussex, West Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, and north-east Wiltshire.

The Atrebates in England had strong ties with the Atrebates of north-west Gaul, where Commius was king under Julius Caesar. When Commius fled from Gaul, he went across the Channel to join the British Atrebates; and it was there that he had his new coins struck.

BARDS

A class of poets, like the minstrels of the Middle Ages, specializing in popular and non-religious subjects. They were distinct from ovates or vates, a class of priest with a focus on composing and performing prophetic poetry. Bards had a particular and recognized place in society.

Posidonius describes an incident involving a bard:

When at length he fixed a day for the ending of the feast, one of their barbarian poets arrived too late. The poet met Luernius [or Luernios, King of the Arverni] and composed a song magnifying his greatness and deploring his own late arrival. Luernius was delighted and asked for a bag of gold and threw it to the poet who ran beside his chariot. The poet picked it up and sang another song saying that the very tracks made by his chariot on the ground gave gold and blessings to mankind.

The bards also had a public role in disseminating myths and genealogies amongst the ordinary people. There were different grades of bard, the lowest of which was the novice, or Mabinog.

BARINTHUS

The Navigator, also known as Barrfind and Barrindus, who guided Merlin and Taliesin on their voyage to the Otherworld with the wounded Arthur; Barinthus was the ferryman of the dead.

Barinthus also accompanied Ternoc on a voyage to the Land of Promise and reported his experience to Brendan.

BARRFIND

See Barinthus.

BARRINDUS

See Barinthus.

BATTERSEA SHIELD

See Art.

BELLOVACI

An Iron Age Gaulish tribe with its capital at Beauvais. The Bellovaci intended to expand their territory and Julius Caesar saw this as a threat to his plan to control the whole of Gaul. He confronted the Bellovaci under their leader Correus. They were taken by surprise, but Caesar was intimidated by the size of the enemy force. At first there were only skirmishes and the Bellovaci retreated into their camp. When Correus attempted an ambush of Roman troops, the Bellovaci were defeated and Correus himself was killed. Caesar treated the Bellovaci leniently, as a result of the intercession of Diviciacus.

BENIGNUS OF ARMAGH

Pupil and successor of St. Patrick in 468.

BERACHUS

Berachus of Kilbarry in Roscommon was a pupil of Dagaeus and lived in the sixth century. He acquired Kilberry from a “minister” by a miracle, and was prosecuted by a royal wizard who claimed inheritance by hereditary law (See Magicians). The case was referred to Aedan, King of Dal Riada, who passed it on to Aed Dubh of Brefni and Aedh of Tethba. The wizard was struck dumb and fled; he was later killed. An attempt by the wizard’s heirs to set fire to the monastery was thwarted by a miracle.

Aedan granted Berachus a fort to use as a monastery at Aberfoyle, commanding the northern road from Loch Lomond to the upper Forth: the only route usable by Dal Riada armies to reach the southern Picts without violating Alcluith territory. The site was of enormous strategic value to the kings of Dal Riada, so granting it implies a great favor from Aedan, who must have thought highly of Berachus.

BERNACUS

See Brynach.

BEUNO

Welsh saint, son of Bugi, and born in the kingdom of Powys. He studied under Tangusius at Caerwent during the old age of King Ynyr Gwent and was granted Berriew near Welshpool by Mawn, son of Brochmail, King of Powys. He heard Saxons shouting “Ker Gia,” apparently calling to their hunting dogs, but perhaps abusing the Welsh. After this, he withdrew westward, staying with Tyssilio at Meifod. He founded a church, but was later expelled by the sons of Selyf, son of Kynan.

One of his miracles was replacing the head of Teuyth’s daughter Wenefred, after it was severed by a nobleman whose advances she had spurned. Wenefred lived to a great age as an abbess, patroness of Holywell, Flint.

Beuno also brought back to life the daughter of Ynyr Gwent, who had been murdered by her husband, an artisan from Aberffraw who had been employed at the court of Caerwent. Her brother Idon came to Caernarvon to reclaim her dowry. He also decapitated the murderous husband, but Beuno again replaced the head.

BITUITUS

See Arverni.

BITURIGES

An Iron Age Celtic tribe in Gaul, with its main center at Avaricum (Bourges). When the Romans arrived to conquer Gaul, the Bituriges were politically one of the main tribes; their Druids in particular held great power. As Julius Caesar reduced the power of the Druids, the power of the Bituriges also declined.

Vercingetorix pursued a scorched earth policy, burning Gaulish towns as the Roman legions advanced. But Avaricum was not burned—an indication of the importance of the Bituriges. The Romans destroyed it instead (See Redones).

BOATS

See Ships and Boats; Symbols: Boat.

BOECIUS

Boecius of Monasterboice, a great monastic center which he founded, was Irish by birth, but studied in Italy under Abbot Tilianus. From there he sailed to the land of the Picts with what are described as 60 “German” saints (presumably Saxons).

Boecius resuscitated King Nectan (ruled 462–86), who gave him a castellum. Then he crossed to Irish Dal Riada and resuscitated the daughter of the king. Boecius died in 521.

THE BOOK OF KELLS

See Art.

BOUDICCA

Queen of the Iceni tribe. Boudicca was born in about AD 25 and lived at Thetford in Norfolk at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. She married Prasutagus in AD 48, when she was about 23 and he was perhaps ten years older. He was King of the Iceni, one of three Celtic tribes to have treaty arrangements with Rome; the others were the Regnenses and the Brigantes. Boudicca gave birth to two daughters: one in AD 49 and one in 50. On the death of Prasutagus, in AD 60, she became regent.