The ground swallowed them, never to return to earth;
Illtud believed when he had seen such acts;
"He who had been a soldier, subduing many strongholds,
Changed his warfare, seizing the highest crown;
Becoming a monk, he profited in diverse ways."
- Vita Sancti Cadoci
Illtud on the Samson Cross
Deep down, almost secretly, I've never relinquished the strong feeling (conviction?) that Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, is St. Illtud. By now my readers are doubtless tired of my constantly bringing this up. Most recently I wrote the following piece on the subject:
As I've just admitted in my newest article (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2026/09/badon-as-bath-final-proof.html) that I've been wrong in trying so hard to push the Liddington Badbury as Arthur's Badon, I thought I should take a look at Illtud in light of what seems a much more certain identification of Badon with Bath in Avon. And I had also not considered Illtud in light of the revelation that the Annales Cambriae's Camlann entry betrays major contamination in the person of Medraut (a metathesis of St. Medard of Noviomagus in Gaul; see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-selection-from-my-revised-making.html). This, too, needed to be considered in in connection with Illtud, as a very early church to the saint is found close to the Afon Gamlan in NW Wales, the traditional site of Arthur's last battle in later Welsh tradition.
But before I do any of that...
A quick summary of what I think the best candidate for Uther Pendragon remains St. Illtud - as long as we remember that Uther P. was later identified by Geoffrey of Monmouth with the 'terrible soldier' of the Irish COMPERT MONGAN, an act that gave us the entire marvelous story of Arthur's birth. I have elsewhere treated exhaustively of how this all worked out, with Gorlois of Cornwall being originally the gorlassar epithet Uther gives himself in the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN and Igerna being a mere truncation of Irish Caintigerna (and not Geoffrey's Latin form of Welsh Eigr, which is itself an adaption of Igerna), etc.
The Welsh PA GUR poem places Mabon servant of Uther Pendragon in the valley of the River Ely in Glamorgan. This was where Pawl Penychen ruled, and we know that Illtud commanded that prince's troops prior to becoming a saint. Illtud has Latin military titles/ranks applied to him in the hagiography that translated directly into Pendragon (magister militum, princeps militum), and appears after his death in spectral form as a 'terrible soldier.' These terms were easily combined at some point to form Uther ('the terrible') Pendragon (chief of warriors; see Bromwich's notes in her TRIADS).
Now the trick is accepting that at some point Uther Pendragon as a poetic descriptor for Illtud was wrongly taken as an entirely separate personage. This kind of thing could rather easily have happened over time, especially as the saint's martial attributes were considered undesirable from a Christian point of view. In the end, it was found necessary to convert (pun strictly intended) Uther Pendragon from being Arthur's father to being his uncle. Illtud thus became Arthur's cousin. The Bicanus made Illtud's father is a false patronymic derived from the Welsh Bicknor place-name, a site which like the Lydbrook, the real "Letavia/Llydaw" origin point of Illtud, is actually or English etymology. Everything about that Lydbrook origin point suggests Illtud hailed from the kingdom of Ercing, not from Brittany. Ercing is replete with early Arthurian associations.
Now, when I was fixated on the Liddington Badbury, I had supported my argument with what seemed a remarkable coincidence: the same English Bican- place-name and Lyd-/Lud- stream-name was present at Liddington. To me, this was sure and certain "evidence" that Illtud's localization in Ercing was itself a relocation from Liddington Castle. And, of course, in this line of reasoning, Badon could scarcely be anything other that the Liddington Badbury. The Liddington fort had been called Durocornovium in the Roman period, a name containing the tribal name Cornovii, identical with the later Welsh Cernyw, their word for Cornwall. Even better, just a short distance from Liddington along the ancient Ridgeway as Barbury Castle, the 'Bear's fort', a site I had often thought might have been named by the English for the 'bear' that was Arthur (W. arth = bear).
Of course, this all seemed too good to be true. And, as it turns out, that appears to be the case. If, that is, we accept my new findings regarding Badon as Bath.
In brief, Badon is absolutely beyond any doubt the Welsh form of English Bathum, and I've not found a single top Celtic or English linguist who disagrees with that verdict. I have in the piece cited above discussed the Sulis/Sulim hillfort at a Gildas/Gweltas site in Brittany, and that I now hold to my identification of Posentesbyrig as Pascent's fort (something approved of by Dr. Richard Coates) as a doublet for William of Malmesbury's Vortigern's burg, i.e. Bradford on Avon. The latter town is, of course, hard by Bath. Solsbury hillfort at Bath, despite the misgivings of some toponym experts, can be shown through a number of different developmental stages to have been named for Sulis, the presiding deity of Bath. My guess is that Gweltas at Sulis is a folk association of Gildas with Badon/Bath. This is especially so as most authorities see Gweltas as originally an entirely different saint with whome Gildas was wrongly identified.
Given these two apparent facts, it is supremely difficult to accept Badon as anything other than Bath.
However...
We modern scholars are always judging these matters on our own criteria. There is no reason why British peoples of the Dark Ages might not have accidentally or intentionally substituted a Bathum name for a Baddan- name (itself claimed to be from an otherwise unattested/proposed and difficult, if not impossible, to etymologize English Badda personal name). If this did happen at some point, perhaps due to influence from early English records on Bath like the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, then the Liddington Badbury might be able to be provisionally allowed to stand as Illtud's true home.
If we permit such an unprovable philological transgression, we still have two major problems to deal with: the HISTORIA BRITTONUM'S battle list (minus Badon) and the Annales Cambriae's Camlann battle.
The first is easy enough to dispense with. It would be either a totally fictional creation - a possibility that even believers cannot not wholly gainsay - or a reflection of the legendary campaigns of the Roman general Lucius Artorius Castus. Some of them could also have been taken from actions fought by Arthur son of Aedan. In any case, if we are talking about an Arthur who comes from either Ercing or Durocornovium, the northern battles do not work for him. And I am as certain as I can be that my identifications for the HB battles are quite valid. To date, no one has found better candidates for the HB battles, nor have they been able to come close to disproving my identifications.
Camlan of 537, if we go by the Medard intrusion into the AC entry, is the ASC's Cynemesora. This place was directly across The Solent from the Isle of Wight. Cerdic of Wessex had died in 534 right after conquering that island. It is not impossible that if an Arthur based at Liddington Castle were fighting the English in the SW that a deep thrust to the south into Hampshire did occur and that Arthur perished fighting not Medraut, but Cerdic. At least according to the rather dubious testimony of the ASC, Cerdic had made it up partway up the Hampshire Avon before continuing with battles farther to the south. Could we postulate that he was driven back down the Avon Valley and then killed at Cymenesora as he tried to make his way north a bit farther to the east?
Llanelltyd or the Church of Illtud near the Afon Gamlan in Merionethshire might tell us that a tradition grew up in the area that the Gamlan was the Camlann and so a church to Arthur's famous saintly father was erected there. If Cymenesora is not the right place, and the Afon Gamlan is, then we are dealing with the wrong Arthur. An Arthur perishing at the Gamlan looks to be the 7th century Arthur son of Petr of Dyfed. This makes a great deal of sense, as there was always warfare going on between Dyfed and Gwynedd. This is found in early stories in the Mabinogion and in later history.
Needless to say, the Camboglanna Roman fort not too far from the west end of Hadrian's Wall could have no bearing on an Arthur son of Illtud. It may have belonged to a Northern Arthur. The 537 date is suspect because of the Medard intrusion. As Badon's 516 in the AC looks to be wrong (with c. 490-500 being a better estimate), it is quite possible the real Camlann happened at a different time.
And that's about as good as I can do when it comes to Illtud as Arthur's father.
The problem with the theory is that it does not help us with the subsequent Arthurs, all of whom belonged to Irish-descended dynasties in western Britain (Dyfed and Dalriada). There is very good reason to believe that the Arthur name first came into the Dalriadan royal family through the Strathclyde Britons. We have no way of explaining how an Arthur son of Illtud from either Ercing or Liddington Castle would have been of any interest to the royal families of Dalriada and Dyfed. We would be stuck with saying, "Well, Arthur of Ercing or Liddington became famous fighting the English in southern or southwestern England and so the Strathclyde Britons quickly took up the name among themselves and passed it on through marriage to the Dalriadans. The Dyfed kingdom, who so far as we know had nothing to do with the Dalriadans, wanted to use a famous British name, so it took Arthur."
Unfortunately, that explanation is beyond lame, in my opinion. Instead, the preservation of the Arthur name in the North, and in particular in Strathclyde, can be traceable to a famous Artorius in the North, like the Roman general of that name from the early 3rd century. Had he achieved a mythical status by the 5th century, his name may well have been current in Strathclyde.
Given all of that, I'm more inclined at this point to let go of Uther Pendragon, assigning his identification as father of the famous Arthur to Geoffrey of Monmouth. For we must remember that nowhere in the pre-Galfridian Welsh sources is Arthur's father named, and Uther, in his few occurrences, is not described as Arthur's father.
If we must have all the northern battles together with Badon and Camlan, and are going to push a Dark Age hero, there are only a couple of ways I can think of to do this. I've outlined both in this recent blog post:
Right now, I'm favoring Ceredig Wledig of Strathclyde as Arthur's father. As the 'cruel tyrant' he could have yielded an Uther Pendragon independent of the Illtud identification. Otherwise, an unnamed chieftain at Petrianis on Hadrian's Wall is not a bad idea, although this last is supported only by very late, local folk belief.
Beyond this I am unable to go at the present time.
