But that battle, according to Nennius, was the one of all the twelve recorded by him in which Arthur gave the most signal evidence of his individual prowess; before his single onset “nine hundred and sixty men” fell. Now Gildas, an unimpeachable sixth century authority, makes no reference whatever to Arthur’s achievements in this, or any other, encounter with the Saxons. This silence, so far as it affects the historicity of Arthur, is less disturbing than it appears to be, when account is taken of the character and motive of Gildas’s work as a whole. The De Excidio is not so much a history as a homily. Gildas belonged to a “Romanist” party, and what the more or less unorganised Britons sought to do for themselves, and their independence, was to him but a decline upon savagery and selfish native pride. It did not suit his purpose to celebrate the name and virtues of any British prince, and it is significant that, apart from Ambrosius,—by birth, apparently, no less than by his training and sympathies, a thorough-going “Roman,”—he does not mention by name a single British chieftain except as a target for his invective.
In the mirabilia attached to Nennius’s History Arthur is a mythical figure as remote and as elusive as he is in early Welsh poetry and triadic lore. In them, as in the earliest Welsh poems, he is pre-eminently Arthur “the warrior,” but he is known besides as the owner of a famous hound, and as the father of a son whose name had been given to one of the natural features of the country. The first “marvel,” in connection with which Arthur’s name occurs, is in the region of Buelt, or Builth. Here, we are told, is a mound of stones, on the top of which is one stone bearing the mark of a dog’s foot. This mark was made by Cabal, “the dog of Arthur the warrior” (Arthuri militis), when he was hunting “the boar Troit” (porcum Troit). The pile of stones was put together by Arthur, and is called Carn, or the Cairn of, Cabal. The marvel lay in the fact that, though men might come and carry away the top stone “for the space of a day and a night,” the stone was invariably found in its proper place the next day. Another marvel, described in immediate succession, belongs to “the region which is called Ercing,” or Archenfield. There may be found a tomb close by a spring which is called the Source of the Amir,—juxta fontem qui cognominatur Licat Amir, after the name of the man who was buried there. This Amir was the son of “Arthur the warrior,” who himself killed, and buried him, on that spot. The “marvellous” property of this tomb was that, when men came to measure it, at various times, they never found it of the same size; “and,” the writer ingenuously adds, “I have made proof of this by myself” (et ego solus probavi). These two miracula, as he calls them, are all that Nennius, or his authority, has to tell us of the mythical, as distinguished from the historical, Arthur.
These apparently casual records of Arthurian marvels are noteworthy, not only as indicating an early association of Arthurian traditions with the topography of Wales, but also as affording a connecting link between the earliest Latin documents in which Arthur’s name is found and one of the very oldest of the Welsh Arthurian tales. In the Welsh romance, or rather fairy-tale, of Kulhwch and Olwen,—the primitive literary form of which probably dates from the tenth century,[30]—the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth, or the Boar Trwyth (the porcus Troit of Nennius), forms one of the capital features. Now, in that hunt, as described in Kulhwch and Olwen, Arthur’s dog Cabal, or Cavall,—which is the Welsh form of the name,—takes part; he is led to the chase by Arthur’s faithful henchman, Bedwyr, or Bedivere.[31] Nor was it in bringing to bay “the boar Troit” alone that Cavall took part. He was conspicuous in the capture and the slaughter of another monster, who is called an Arch- or Head-Boar, bearing the fearsome name of “Yskithyrwyn Benbaedd.” “And Arthur,” we read,[32] “went himself to the chase, leading his own dog Cavall. And Kaw, of North Britain, mounted Arthur’s mare Llamrei, and was first in the attack. Then Kaw, of North Britain, wielded a mighty axe, and absolutely daring he came valiantly up to the boar, and clave his head in twain. And Kaw took away the tusk. Now the boar was not slain by the dogs that Yspaddaden had mentioned, but by Cavall, Arthur’s own dog.”[33]
The battle of Mount Badon, as we have seen, is recorded in the Annales Cambriæ, contained in a MS of the tenth century. Still more interesting is another record in that document under the year 537. In that year, we read, was fought “the battle of Camlan, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.” Although we hear nothing of Medraut’s treachery, or of his being Arthur’s nephew, here, so far as we know, is the first recorded allusion to what subsequently became one of the prime tragic features in Arthurian story. Medrod, or Modred, is the villain of the romances, and Camlan is that “dim, weird battle of the west,” where Arthur fought the “traitor of his house,” and
“Striking the last stroke with Excalibur
Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.”[34]
In Welsh prose romance we hear of Camlan both in Kulhwch and Olwen and in The Dream of Rhonabwy; it is also mentioned in the Triads, and there are two references to the place in the oldest Welsh poetry. In ‘The Verses of the Graves’ in The Black Book of Carmarthen, we are told that “the grave of the son of Osvran is in Camlan,”[35] and in a poem in The Red Book of Hergest, a nameless bard labouring under forebodings of coming tumult in his own day, prophesies that “Camlan will be heard again, scenes of groaning will again be seen, and dismal lamentations.”[36] Apart from these meagre references, Latin chronicles and early Welsh literature are alike altogether silent about what, in later romance and poetry, stands out as the most fateful battle in Arthur’s career. Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first to give us elaborate details about Arthur’s encounter with Modred, and his motley army of Saxons, Picts and Scots, on the banks of “the river Cambula,” or Camel. The river, according to Geoffrey, is in the west country, and the battle is popularly supposed to have been fought near Camelford,[37] in Cornwall.
When we come to examine the remaining chronicle literature of the pre-Norman period, we find no mention of Arthur’s name, and nothing but the briefest allusion to the campaigns in which he is supposed to have fought. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the dedicatory epistle prefacing his British History, expresses his surprise that Bede, in his “elegant treatise,” has nothing to say about Arthur. If Arthur was indeed widely known as a Christian champion, it is somewhat strange that an ecclesiastical writer of the first half of the eighth century should have passed over his deeds in silence. Moreover, Bede does mention Ambrosius as a successful leader against the Saxons, and knows of “the siege of Baddesdown-hill.” Bede’s silence about Arthur is not to be lightly ignored, nor easily explained away, in any critical discussion of the historicity of Arthur. Bede stands as the primary authority and the model of what Stubbs calls “the most ancient, the most fertile, the longest lived and the most widely spread” of all the “schools of English mediæval history,”[38]—the Northumbrian. The best and most trustworthy of the chroniclers who followed him—such, for example, as William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh (Geoffrey’s remorseless assailant)—pay their tributes to his industry, wisdom and integrity. His Ecclesiastical History is no mere desultory, or mechanical, record; it bears the impress of a great, and honest, personality. In his record of the Saxon invasions, it is true, he follows Gildas, even to the extent of largely reproducing his very words. There is no conclusive evidence that he knew anything of the documents from which Nennius compiled his History, although one cannot, of course, deny the probability of his knowledge of them. The only plausible explanation of his silence about Arthur is that he drew his materials solely from Saxon tradition and from Latin records, and that he was either ignorant of, or distrusted, the Celtic, or British, traditions concerning Arthur which had their origin and home in the West and in the then “farthest North.” If, on the other hand, stories of Arthur’s deeds were widely current in Lowland Scotland, it is surprising that a Northumbrian writer should apparently have known nothing of them.
Again, there is no mention whatever of Arthur in the Saxon Chronicle. The fact that the Chronicle contains no record of a fight, successful or otherwise, against the Britons for a long period after 527, or 530, seems to confirm Nennius’s account of the decisive check to the Saxon advance given in the battles with which he associates Arthur’s name. On the other hand, the battle at Badon Hill must, as we have seen, have been fought long before the year 527. There is no question about the superior trustworthiness of the Chronicle to Nennius’s narrative as a historical authority.[39] Here, again, the silence can only be explained on the assumption that the compilers of the Saxon Chronicle did not care much about recording British victories, and cared less, or knew nothing at all, about the British chieftains who won them. As against this assumption, it should be noted that the Chronicle does mention such British names as Vortigern and Natanleod,—the latter a “British king” slain in the year 508, just at the time when Arthur’s prowess, according to tradition, was at its height.
The meagreness of the pre-Norman Arthurian records which have been here reviewed stands in significant contrast to the amplitude and the range of the Arthurian matter which we find in the romantic productions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The contrast is so startling as to suggest at once that the coming of the Normans to Britain had much to do with what may be called the aggrandisation of Arthur. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth, as we shall see, writing under the direct auspices of a cultured Norman potentate, who did more than any other man to spread the renown of Arthur as a presumably historical character, and to give him for centuries an assured place in the chronicle literature of Britain. But Geoffrey could not have written “to order” such a book as his History had he not a large stock of popular traditions to draw upon. All the evidence seems to point to the period extending from the tenth to the twelfth centuries as that of the popular growth of an Arthurian legend, on a large scale, among “the Celtic fringe.” By the beginning of the twelfth century Arthurian stories were circulating freely in Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. It is only on this supposition that one can account, for example, for a tumult caused at Bodmin in the year 1113, by a certain monk from Laon who had the temerity to deny that Arthur still lived.[40] Later on in the same century, as Alanus de Insulis records,[41] belief in Arthur’s “return” was so firmly held in the country districts of Brittany that a denial of it might have cost a man his life. Moreover, two chroniclers of repute who wrote before Geoffrey bear clear testimony to the widespread currency of Arthurian traditions in their day, and to the curiosity aroused in serious historians concerning the deeds of the British king.