The Lost Land of King Arthur

by John Cuming Walters

From off the threshold of the realm, and crushed

The Idolaters, and made the people free.”

Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle]

THE ROCKY VALLEY, TINTAGEL

[To face p. 150

To this race Caerleon and Camelot became cities of magic splendour and magnificence, and the courts and camps of Arthur surpassed in strength and riches the luxurious home of Cæsar. The land was strewn with relics of Arthur’s power; the downs and plains were the scenes of his momentous victories; the hills were his chairs and footstools; the old encampments were the scenes of famous tourneys; the dark woods suggested the scenes of strange adventures for the knights; the holy wells, the rivers, and the places where Nature was brightest and most beautiful, were all associated with leading events and enterprises in the history of the king and his noble retinue. Particularly did the Cymri insist upon the successive and overwhelming defeats by Arthur of the Saxons, their traditional and most hated foe. And in their vauntings they gave Arthur the mastery of half Europe, claimed that the Roman Emperor became his vassal, and that upon his head the Pope himself placed a crown.

Arthur fought twelve great battles against the Saxons, the dates varying from 457 to 604.[21] Either names have been mixed, or the chroniclers have monstrously departed from fact, or else we must conclude that the British warrior was actually king of the greater part of England, Wales, and Scotland, for his victories extend from Cornwall to Lincoln, and from Caerleon in Wales to the Scotch Lowlands. The twelfth and greatest of his victories was at Mount Badon, where “in one bout,” we are told, “Arthur vanquished eight hundred and forty-one,” and “no man overthrew them but himself alone.” The identity of Mount Badon, where “our good Arthur broke once more the Pagan” has long been a matter of dispute. It has been contended that Bath was none other than Mons Badonicus, and that the actual battlefield was a spot known as Banner Down; but the claim has almost entirely been abandoned now that so much evidence is forthcoming in favour of another site. Bath seems to have been fixed upon as a likely place not only on account of its veritable antiquity and its early occupation by the Romans, but because it appeared to be a sort of translation or corruption of the word Badon. But this is an etymological blunder, for, as has been pointed out, a sixth century word cannot be elucidated in this free manner with the help of a word which had no existence until the tenth century. The authorities are now fairly well agreed that Badon must be identified with Badbury Rings, but again a difficulty arises, for there are two places called Badbury, not very far from each other, one in Wiltshire and the other in Dorset. There is also a Caer Badon in Berkshire which at least two historians have favoured as the scene of Arthur’s crucial contest with Cerdic. Our knowledge of the battle comes from the Welsh bards who celebrated it in vaunting songs, and from Gildas and Bede, but none of them assists us to establish where Badon was, or, for the matter of that, at what date the battle was fought. Lady Charlotte Guest reminds us that Gildas, who bore the name of Badonicus from being born in the year in which the battle was fought,[22] described Badon as being at the mouth of the Severn, but this passage has been declared an interpolation. Mr. Freeman, Mr. Stokes, and other modern historians give their vote for Badbury in Dorset, but without mentioning their reasons. The Badbury in Wiltshire seems to me to be the more likely place if for no other reason than that King Arthur is often mentioned as travelling through that county, and as being in the vicinity of Salisbury and Stonehenge, whereas Dorset seems to have been outside the sphere of his visits and operations. The Wiltshire Badbury is only a few miles from the gigantic and mysterious megalithic structure which had actually been attributed by Geoffrey of Monmouth and others to Aurelius Ambrosius, or Arthur. One tradition ran that it was a monument erected by the Britons on the spot where the massacre of the British nobles took place by order of Hengist. But in the light of science we learn that Stonehenge was an antiquity in the time of the Celts, and that its origin must have been as much a mystery to the contemporaries of King Arthur as it is to us of to-day. Stonehenge is not mentioned by the old chroniclers, but, remarkable to say, neither is Badon; but Salisbury is the subject of Merlin’s fateful prophecy of Arthur’s doom in the battle with Mordred. Mr. Joseph Ritson went exhaustively into the subject of Mons Badonicus, and after citing all that was recorded of it by Archbishop Usher, Matthew of Westminster, Gildas, Geoffrey, Sir John Prise, and many others, he still left the issue uncertain. What alone seems to be established is that the battle was a decisive triumph for the British against the Saxons under Cerdic, and that Arthur personally performed prodigies of valour. Tennyson has represented him charging at the head of his knights, and standing high on a heap of the slain watching the flying foe; and Drayton has sung—

“How he himself at Badon bore that day,

When at the glorious gole his British scepter lay;