A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall

by S. Baring-Gould

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.

KING ARTHUR

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.

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.

The result of this union was a son, Arthur, and a daughter, Ann, who eventually became the wife of Lot, king of Lothian, and mother of Modred.

We have no means of checking this story and saying how much of it is fact and how much false. But it is worth pointing out that in Geoffrey’s account there is one significant thing mentioned that looks much like truth. He says that when Uthr was marching against him, Gorlois at once appealed for help from Ireland. Now, considering that all this district was colonised by Irish and half-Irish, this is just what a chieftain of the country would have done, but Geoffrey almost certainly knew nothing of this colonisation. Moreover, he had something to go upon with regard to Damelioc and Tintagel, unless, which is hardly likely, he had lived some time in North-eastern Cornwall, and had seen the earthworks of the former and the fortified headland of the latter, and so was able to use them up in his fabulous tale.

Damelioc is but five or six miles from Tintagel, and in Geoffrey’s story they are represented as at no great distance apart. Had Geoffrey been in this part of Cornwall and invented the whole story, he would have been more likely to make Gorlois take refuge in the far stronger and more commanding Helbury, occupying a conical height 700 feet above the sea, than Damelioc, 500 feet, only, on an extensive plateau.