King Arthur in Cornwall

by W. Howship Dickinson

V

CONCLUSIONS

To piece together the dislocated fragments which are all that remain of the life of Arthur, they thus present themselves. Arthur, though unknown or unrecorded by the Saxon chroniclers of the invasion, who say nothing of what went on in the west and north, finds abundant mention among the Welsh bards and poets assigned to the sixth century, who speak of him by name, attribute to him great fame as a warrior, and briefly refer to certain details which connect him with places some of which can still be identified. This positive and detailed evidence is of more weight than the negative evidence, if so it can be called, which lies in the omission of Arthur’s name by Gildas and Bede, two ecclesiastics who touch only incidentally upon the wars of the sixth century and are satisfied with the mention of Ambrosius, who preceded Arthur, and apparently occupied a position more nearly approaching that of commander-in-chief, having regard to the whole country, than did the later champion.

But it is not my purpose now to recapitulate the writings to which I have already referred, but only to put together, with their help, some indications as to the probable biography of a personage who is at once so famous and so obscure.

We may look upon Tintagel as the birthplace of Arthur, and believe that he was the son or putative son of a petty Cornish king. The exact fitness of Tintagel and Damelioc for the story of which they are the scene lends probability to it: not that we need accept the narrative precisely as related. Time, verbal transmission, and Celtic imagination have to be allowed for; but we may without undue credulity believe that Gorlois was slain at Damelioc and Arthur born at Tintagel. We may presume that Arthur remained in possession and occupation of the country of his nativity. Tintagel Castle has been from time immemorial known as King Arthur’s; Kelliwic, which is mentioned in the earliest records in connection with Arthur, may with probability be identified with Kelly Rounds and placed near the estuary of the Camel; and Cardinam Castle, which credible though later tradition assigns to Arthur as a palace or residence, exists near Bodmin. Great interest, to my mind, attaches to these memorials. Military engineering is older than the corps of Royal Engineers; and it may be said that the most ancient history of our country is written in earth. These memorials, together with Tintagel, a fortification constructed by the hand of nature, indicate that King Arthur occupied the coast line from Tintagel to the Camel, and the inland country to the vicinity of Bodmin.

If we accept the evidence of names, that of Pentargon in particular, we must suppose Boscastle to be included in the Arthurian country, which would thus extend from the mouth of the Camel to the mouth of the Vallency. The town of Camelford lies within this district, and it is difficult not to think of Camelot as possibly on the Camel, though we have no indication, excepting the name, to justify the assumption, and other places compete for the distinction of supplying the site of this somewhat hypothetical creation.

We can speak with more confidence of Kelliwic, assuming that it is still with us under the name of Kelly Rounds. This lies 2½ miles from Wadebridge, where the Camel forms a practicable tidal harbour, and was no doubt used as such in the sixth century. The fortification covered the landing-place, at a convenient distance, and commanded what must have been the chief line of communication between Arthur’s Cornish domain, Wales, Ireland, and the north-west coast. The sea is a connection rather than a separation, and may have provided the lord of Kelliwic with an access to the north which would have been practically unattainable by other means.

It may be doubted whether in Arthur’s time the Saxons had reached Tintagel: it is clear that in the ninth century they were fighting on the Camel, apparently unsuccessfully, and that they never generally superseded the Celtic population much further to the west than the traditional territory of Arthur. That Arthur ever fought a great battle on this river is improbable; nor is it likely that the Saxons in his time got far enough to the west to assault his earthworks; but these at any rate may have served as places of retreat, and been used by him as Torres Vedras was by Wellington.

We may accept the statement of Nennius, who was apparently an historian of honest intentions, that Arthur was selected to command against the Saxons, and that in this capacity he fought many, perhaps twelve, battles. There must, it is certain, have been much fighting in the west and north as well as elsewhere, and we may give Arthur the credit of much of it, though details, if not entirely absent, are by no means explicit. It seems clear that he entered Scotland, perhaps more than once, became a prominent character in the Lowlands, as the dissemination of his name implies, and finally perished at Camelon or Camlan, near the Firth of Forth, fighting against a coalition of Saxons, or, strictly speaking, Angles, Picts, and Scots, or, according to another tradition, against one consisting of Picts, Scots, and revolted Britons. It is a far cry from Cornwall to Scotland, but the feat is not impossible. Agricola marched from the south of England to Scotland at an earlier date; but he had the resources of the Roman Empire behind him. Arthur must have been aided by his access to the sea, and probably found allies in the Celts of the west and north-west along the whole front of the Teutonic encroachments. His movements in the south and in the north were attended with a series of British victories in which the invaders were pushed back from the western parts of the island, and which contributed to the preservation of the Celtic race in the regions of Cornwall and Wales, where it still survives. Such achievements were enough to make Arthur famous from the Camel to the Forth, however little in those days of imperfect communication his reputation extended to the ‘Saxon shore.’ The places where above all others he was held in memory and where his name was handed down as a local tradition were his little inheritance in Cornwall, where he was born, and which we cannot doubt that he occupied—more or less; and the northern region, where he apparently did much fighting and where he ultimately perished. I need not repeat that if, as seems probable, Arthur’s last battle was in Scotland we must dissociate his death with the Camel and his burial with Glastonbury.

So much for what may be accepted as history. We might have had more had the Cornish language survived like the Welsh. I do not propose to deal with the superstructure of romance which in succeeding centuries collected about Arthur’s name. The magnitude of this echo, if so it may be called, is in some sort a measure of the impression produced by Arthur in his life time. The romance seems to have come chiefly from France. There was little communication in Arthur’s time between the west and east of England: even between Cornwall and Devonshire there seems to have been little. The chief connection between Cornwall and the rest of the world was by sea, and Wales, Britanny and Ireland were the countries in the most intimate association with this peninsula. Navigation is an ancient art, older than the mariner’s compass: in the comparatively late sixth century crossing the Channel and the narrow seas must have been familiar to our ancestors, whether Saxon or British. Britanny and Wales, countries within touch of Cornwall, were, like it, occupied by Celts, a race gifted with more imagination than has been granted to the practical and hard-headed Saxon. The fictions of which Arthur is the centre, constructed chiefly in France, but to a lesser extent in Wales, were brought to England in the twelfth and later centuries, and replaced history by myth. In these poetic regions this story attained a complicated development the like of which is not to be found in British history, though we can discern something like it in connection with the siege of Troy and the subsequent adventures of some of the persons supposed to have been concerned in it.