A Book of Cornwall

by S. Baring-Gould

Itha never was herself in Cornwall, her great foundation was Kill-eedy in Limerick, and she was taken as the tutelary saint or patroness of Hy-Conaill, but there were establishments, daughters of the parent house, what the Irish called daltha (i.e. pupil) churches, enjoying much the same rights as the mother house.

Camelford has by some been supposed to be the Gavulford where the last battle was fought between the West Welsh and Athelstan; but there was no reason for his advancing into Cornwall this way, where all was bleak, and by no old road.

There is, however, a Slaughter Bridge on the Camel, but this is taken to have acquired its name from having been the scene of the fight between King Arthur and his rebellious nephew Mordred, circ. 537.

King Arthur is a personage who has had hard measure dealt out to him. That there was such an individual one can hardly doubt. There is a good deal of evidence towards establishing his existence. He was chief king over all the Britons from Cornwall to Strathclyde (i.e. the region from the Firth of Clyde to Cumberland). He was constantly engaged, first in one part, then in another, against the Saxons; but his principal battles were fought in Scotland. He occurs in the Welsh accounts of the saints, but never as a hero, always as a despot and tyrant. His immediate predecessor, Geraint, in like manner is met with, mainly in Cornwall, but also in Wales, where he had a church, and in Herefordshire. He had to keep the frontier against the Saxons.

What played the mischief with Arthur was that Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph in 1152, published, about 1140, his fabulous History of the Britons, which elevated Arthur into a hero. Geoffrey had an object in view when he wrote this wonderful romance. The period was one in which the Welsh had been horribly maltreated, dispossessed of their lands, their churches taken from them and given to Normans, who neither understood their language nor regarded their traditions. The foreigners had castles planted over the country filled with Norman soldiery, tormenting, plundering, insulting the natives. Poor Wales wept tears of blood. Now Henry I. had received the beautiful Nest, daughter of Rhys, king of South Wales, as a hostage when her father had fallen in battle, and, instead of respecting his trust, he had wronged her in her defenceless condition in a cruel manner, and had by her a son, Robert, who was raised by him to be Duke of Gloucester. To this Robert, half Welsh, Geoffrey dedicated his book, a glorification of the British kings, a book that surrounded the past history of the Welsh with a halo of glory. The book at once seized on the imagination of English and Normans, and a change took place in the way in which the Welsh were regarded. The triumph of the Saxon over the Briton came to be viewed in an entirely new light, as that of brutality over heroic virtue.

Geoffrey succeeded in his object, but he produced bewilderment among chroniclers and historians, and seriously influenced them when they began to write on the history of England.

KING ARTHUR

Now, although all the early portion of Geoffrey's work is a tour de force of pure imagination, yet he was cautious enough as he drew near to historic times, of which records were still extant, to use historic facts and work them into his narrative, so that in the latter portion all is not unadulterated fable; it is a hotch-potch of fact and fiction, with a preponderance of the latter, indeed, but not without some genuine history mixed up with it. The difficulty his book presents now is to discriminate between the false and the true.

As far as can be judged, it is true that Arthur was son of Uthr, who was Pendragon, or chief king of the Britons, and of Igerna, wife of the Duke of Cornwall, whom Geoffrey calls Gorlois, but who is otherwise unknown. Uthr saw Igerna at a court feast, and "continually served her with tit-bits, and sent her golden cups, and bestowed on her all his smiles, and to her addressed his whole discourse." Gorlois naturally objected, and removed his wife into Cornwall, and refused to attend the king when summoned to do so. Uthr now marched against him. The Duke placed Igerna in the cliff-castle of Tintagel, but himself retreated into Damelioc, a strong caer, that remains almost intact, in the parish of S. Kew. Uthr invested Damelioc, and whilst Gorlois was thus hemmed in he went to Tintagel and obtained admission by an artifice. Gorlois was killed in a sally, Damelioc was taken and plundered, and Uthr made Igerna his wife. It was the old story over again of David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.