It is, however, to be noted, as Rhys points out,[18] that while the title apparently given in early Welsh literature to those who succeeded to supreme power in Britain was gwledig, that name is never given to Arthur. The term gwledig, itself, means no more than “ruler” or “prince,” and is indiscriminately used in that sense in mediæval Welsh,[19] but there is good reason to believe that, as applied to certain warriors of the sixth century, the title was a Brythonic equivalent of the official military title, comes or dux. The most famous bearer of the title, Maxen Wledig, comes within the Roman period, and his renown is mainly due to romance[20]; three others who are so called, Cunedda, Ceredig and Emrys (the Ambrosius Aurelianus of Gildas), may very well have held one of the military offices in question. “Cunedda Wledig and Ceredig Wledig are connected with the north and appear to be guardians of the wall, while Emrys Wledig is the antagonist of the Saxons. Thus Cunedda and Ceredig may be regarded as Dukes of the Britains, while Emrys is a British Count of the Saxon shore.”[21] Arthur, on the other hand, is in Welsh literature yr amherawdyr Arthur, “the emperor Arthur,”[22] and so, as Rhys suggests, “it is not impossible that, when the Roman imperator ceased to have anything more to say to this country, the title was given to the highest officer in the island, namely, the Comes Britanniæ, and that in the words yr amherawdyr Arthur we have a remnant of our insular history.”[23]
An even more difficult problem than the determination of Arthur’s rank is the identification of the twelve battlefields mentioned in Nennius’s record. The twelfth century chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, tells us that, even in his own time, “all the places were unknown”; hence it is not surprising that those who have in our day sought to trace geographically the course of Arthur’s campaigns have not brought us much nearer certainty. The most plausible theory is that which would locate most, if not all, the places named by Nennius in the region of the Roman walls in the North,[24] a theory largely supported by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s elaboration of Nennius’s account, and by the fact that the names of several prominent characters connected with the early exploits of Arthur are localised in Lowland Scotland. On the other hand, it is contended that Mount Badon,[25] and Urbs Legionis, at least, must be in the South, and that Linnuis—which in Geoffrey appears as Lindisia (or Lindsey), “otherwise called Lindocolinum”—is in the East. The localisation of Arthur’s battlefields is of no great consequence as compared with the fact that the earliest record of them, however vague and fragmentary, clearly points to a long and victorious campaign conducted under his generalship against the Saxons and other enemies of the Britons in the sixth century. Two, at least, of the victories recorded by Nennius appear to have strongly seized the imagination of later writers of Arthurian story. It mattered less to them where “the castle of Guinnion” actually was than that in the battle fought there Arthur “bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders,” and thus established the tradition which ultimately exalted him into “the first and chief of the three best Christian kings.” Nennius’s brief statement is, of course, expanded and embroidered by Geoffrey[26] and other romantic chroniclers in turn, until the tradition becomes so firmly rooted as to make a modern poet like Wordsworth single out Arthur as a champion of the early British Church, and sing,
“Amazement runs before the towering casque
Of Arthur, bearing through the stormy field
The Virgin sculptured on his Christian shield.”[27]
Hence, even Tennyson takes no very great liberty with Arthurian tradition when he converts “Arthur’s knighthood” into a Christian fellowship avowing that
“The King will follow Christ, and we the King,
In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.”[28]
The other battle, of those mentioned by Nennius, that looms large in subsequent Arthurian story is that of Mons Badonis, or Badon Hill. This battle is of exceptional interest because it is possible to assign to it an approximately certain date. The record in the Annales Cambriæ of the year 516 as its precise date is of less importance than the fact that Gildas, the celebrated sixth century scribe, expressly refers to the battle as having been fought in his natal year. In his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniæ, amid much vehement denunciation of the British people and their degenerate leaders, Gildas gives a short sketch of the history of Britain down to his own time. Coming to the Saxon invasions, he states that they were first successfully checked under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the last of the Romans, “a modest man, who alone of all his race chanced to survive the shocks” of that troubled time.
After this, he continues, the struggle went on with varying fortune “until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, and of almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. And this commences (a fact I know) as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth.”[29] So far as the date goes, this seems to mean that the year of the battle of Badon and of Gildas’s own birth was the forty-fourth from that in which he wrote. As the De Excidio must have been written before the death of Maelgwn Gwynedd—the Maglocunus against whom Gildas directs some of his choicest invective—in or about the year 547, the date of the fight at Badon Hill cannot well have been later than 504. At any rate, Gildas’s testimony is sufficient warrant that some time during the first decade of the sixth century a battle was fought against the Saxons at a place called Badon Hill, in which the Britons were the victors.