One thing about Badon I have never doubted: the Second Battle of Badon, as mentioned in the ANNALES CAMBRIAE, was Liddington Castle at Badbury. What follows is my original treatment of that identification:
There is one possible clue to identifying Badon. It lies in a comparison of the Welsh Annals entry for the Second Battle of Badon and the narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The actual year entry for this Second Battle of Badon reads as follows:
665 The first celebration of Easter among the Saxons. The second battle of Badon. Morgan dies.
The "first celebration of Easter among the Saxons" is a reference to the Synod of Whitby of c. 664. While not directly mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, nor the Anglo-Saxon version of Bede, there is an indirect reference to this event:
664 … Colman with his companions went to his native land…
This is, of course, a reference to Colman's resigning of his see and leaving Lindisfarne with his monks for Iona. He did so because the Roman date for Easter had been accepted at the synod over the Celtic date.
While there is nothing in the ASC year entry 664 that helps with identifying Badon, if we go to the year entry 661, which is the entry found immediately prior to 664, an interesting passage occurs:
661 In this year, at Easter, Cenwalh [King of Wessex] fought at Posentesburh, and Wulfhere, son of Penda [King of Mercia], ravaged as far as [or "in", or "from"] Ashdown…
So, we have:
1) Easter, Badon
2) Easter, ravaging as far as or in or from Ashdown
Ashdown is here the place of that name in Berkshire. It is only a half dozen miles to the east of Badbury and Liddington Castle and about twice that distance to the south of Badbury Hill fort. A vague reference to ravaging in the neighborhood of Ashdown may well have been taken by someone who knew Badon was in the vicinity of Ashdown as a second battle at Badon. As the Mercian king was raiding into Wessex, it is entirely conceivable that his path took him through Liddington/Badbury or at least along the Roman road that ran immediately to the east of the area.
Ashdown's Proximity to Liddington Castle/Badbury and Badbury Hill
The problem with this nice, clean and pretty near certain identification was that it did not seem to be born out by the account of Caer Faddon in the MABINOGION's "The Dream of Rhonabwy" (the relevant portion of which I have pasted above). I have in the past theorized that Arthur's location at Cefn Digoll meant that Buxton was the Badon of the story
(see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2020/05/osla-or-ossa-big-knife-and-caer-faddon.html). But the more time went by, the more dissatisfied I became with this attempt.
A good discussion of Rhonabwy and its claim for the location of Badon can be found here:
The author's conclusion is apt:
"We are left to ponder if the author of the Dream of Rhonabwy consciously selected this location for the mustering of Arthur’s Great Army before the battle of Badon based on its historical setting for conflict between the English and Welsh; or did he hold some local knowledge of a now lost tradition of this being the site of Arthur’s greatest victory?"
In other words, the localization of Badon at/near Cefn Digoll or Long Mountain remained, for him, unresolved.
We can start with the place-name Cefn Digoll, which is not translated by the English Long Mountain. Welsh cefn is 'ridge', and digoll means in this context "unbroken", i.e. "continuous."
And it is with the Welsh meaning of the place-name that we can solve the mystery of Badon once and for all.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the Welsh storyteller has sought, either intentionally or through confusion, to relocate the Badon, i.e. Baddanbyrig, of the Ridgeway to a nonexistent site adjacent to Cefn Digoll. As there are a number of major forts in the vicinity of Cefn Digoll, as well as Offa's Dyke, this was not difficult to accomplish. But taken in conjunction with the testimony of the ANNALES CAMBRIAE, and knowing as I do that the Welsh had a tendency to pull people and events from long-conquered British lands into the 'Celtic Fringe', and accepting the purely literary nature of Rhonabwy, I personally have no trouble with Caer Faddon = Liddington Castle.
Unclear whether we can infer any kind of relationship between the Beacon Ring hillfort on Cefn Digoll and the Ivinghoe Beacon hillfort at one end of The Ridgeway:
Beacon Hill, however, is near Trelystan, and in the latter is a Badnage place-name. While I've not been able to find an etymology for this Powys place-name, I do have this on the Badnage in Herefordshire:
Badnage (Burghill). *Badsay [in or near Madley]. ' circ. 1 2 17 Baddeshage, Chart. 1267 Baddesawe, Inq. p.m. 1 3 17 Badesawe, Min. Ace. 1327 Badeshawe, Baddeshawe, Plac. de Banco. Badda's enclosure.'
We do have to be careful here, of course. There was another Ridgeway, a Roman road that ran from Sea Mills, the Roman Abona, not too far west of Bath, to Gloucester. Again from Victor Watts:
However, the Roman road from Bath to Sea Mills was some 35 miles long. This does not sound right for a Caer Faddon just below the ridge.
On the other hand, if we are operating anywhere near approximating relative scale (and aren't merely lost in poetic license territory), the Liddington Badbury is literally right next to the Ridgeway. In fact, the summit of the fort is at 277 meters, and down the slope to the north and northwest stands the Ridgeway at around 200 meters.
The Ridgeway is described thusly on the National Trails site:
"The Ridgeway is Britain’s oldest ‘road’, and follows the footsteps of travellers, herdsmen and soldiers, who used to walk the path over 5,000 years ago.
Starting in Wiltshire and ending in Buckinghamshire, the 87-mile (140 km) trail follows the chalk ridge from the North Wessex Downs, across Goring Gap and eastward over the rolling Chilterns."
If I'm right about this, i.e. that two Welsh sources identify Mount Badon as the Liddington Badbury, then we are immediately faced with two questions:
1) If Arthur was a northern chieftain, he did not fight at Liddington Castle. His name would have been applied to the battle simply because both battle and chieftain were famous and the name of the real victor of Badon had been forgotten.
2) If Arthur was a southern chieftain, then I must look once again to St. Illtud and the series of strange "coincidences" which seem to make him out to be an Uther Pendragon with a connection to Liddington Castle. For this, see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/01/illtuds-father-bicanus-and-his-llydaw.html and https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2024/06/a-request-to-review-st-illtuds-military.html, plus several other related blogs for details.
Finally, there is yet another possible identifier of Badon with Liddington Castle - one I discussed a very long time ago.
It is suspicious that Breguoin, a name identified by Celtic linguists with Bremenium at High Rochester, the Brewyn of the Urien poem, comes just before Badon in the HB battle list. The meaning of Bremenium derives from a British word meaning 'to roar'. It is preserved in modern Welsh brefu. Liddington, of Liddington Castle, derives from the name there of the Lid Brook, found in the early genitive form of Hlydan. The name means the 'loud (or roaring) stream.' I've recently had confirmation from English place-name specialist Dr. Richard Coates that brefu and hlud are, essentially, semantic matches when it comes to their application to stream-names. Example: W. breuer, breufer means 'loud, roaring', etc.
This does leave unsettled the meaning of Agned. That hill-name is found in the earliest MSS. of the HISTORIA BRITTONUM and scholars tend to give it precedence over Breguoin (or Bregomion or Bregion), which they tend to view as a gloss on the original name. Agned does seem to be for agued/angwedd, and I once suggested to Dr. Graham Isaac of Galway that it may refer either to the situation an army found itself in at Breguoin. Here is Isaac's take on that from http://www.facesofarthur.org.uk/articles/guestdan2c.htm:
“There are two places in the Hengerdd poetry, and one in the Laws, where there seems to be a word that would be written 'angwedd' today (see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru p. 69). The difficulty is that the contexts show clearly that it does not mean 'narrows, straits' in any geographical sense, but means rather something like 'dire straits, difficulty, anxiety' perhaps 'death'. As such it is, of course, completely unsuitable as a geographical name. (The word 'anxiety' from Latin ANXIETAS, contains the same ANG-; this is good Indo-European, nothing new there).
The poetic usages of ANGWEDD you find in Canu Aneirin line 1259 'twryf en agwed' (with an extensive note on the word p. 349), and Blodeugerdd Barddas o Ganu Crefyddol Cynnar (ed. Marged Haycock), p. 166, line 18 (= BT p. 4, line 9). They leave absolutely no room for us to think that there may have been a place called 'Angwedd'.
However, the poetic lines do open up another possibility. It has long been thought that the Arthur passage in HB represents a Latin retelling of an OW heroic poem, and with good reason (you know the arguments). Such a poem could have had a line in it like 'galon in agued', 'the enemy in dire straits, great difficulty' (like the Canu Aneirin line 'twryf en agwed' 'a host in dire straits'). It is conceivable that an author responsible for the Harleian Recension of the HB (who may not have been entirely versed in the diction of OW heroic poetry) may have mistaken this 'agued' for a place-name, and mistakenly placed the battle there: instead of 'the enemy in dire straits', he understood 'the enemy at Agued', easily miscopied at some point as 'Agned' as Breeze suggests. Under this interpretation, the only location for the battle that was ever correct was Breguoin. This analysis at least solves the problem of 'Where was Agned?' with the answer, 'There never was such a place', and so no need to look for it.”
I had discovered that the revised etymology and definition for agued no longer allowed for “death” as a meaning for this word. The listings for angwedd in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru 1 and 2, respectively, are as follows (information courtesy Manon Roberts) :
1 angwedd
2 [?yr un ang- ag yn ang `cul' neu angau+gwedd]
3 eb.
5 Angau:
6 death.
7 13g. A 25. 2-3, twryf en agwed. e rac meuwed.
7 13g. LlDW 31. 18-19, ay kadarnau ohonau yr acgued edath dyun ydau. ac
emae enteu en menet.
7 14g. T 4. 8-9, yn yg yn ehag yn ygwed. yg corff yn eneit yn hagwed.
1 angwedd, hangwedd
2 [?ang2, hang+gwedd1; ansicr yw prth. agued,
8 LlI 33]
3 e.
5 ?Cyfyngder, caledi:
6 ?straits, distress.
7 13g. A 25. 2-3, twryf en agwed. e rac meuwed.
7 14g. T 4. 8-9, yn yg yn ehag yn ygwed. yg corff yn eneit yn hagwed.
If agned/agued does belong properly to Breguoin, and Breguoin is a Welsh attempt to render the English Liddington, then Mount Agned aslso represent Mount Badon/Badbury/Liddington.
And now for the fly in the ointment...
We should not forget the Tribruit battle, which comes just before the sequence of three hills - Agned, Breguoin and Badon. I long ago showed that from a linguistic standpoint this Welsh word was the exact equivalent of Roman trajectus. While I have sought a trajectus in the North (at Queensferry, where the Welsh heroid poem PA GUR seems to place it), the only one we know of from the Roman period is the one situated at Bitton or environs.
Yes, the Bitton which is only several kilometeres WNW of Bath.
If Tribruit is the Trajectus in Avon near Bath, then as far as the compiler of the HB battle list was concerned, Badon was Bath - not the Liddington Badbury.
But when we look at the HB list, we have to remember (as I once showed when delving into a southern Arthur) all the battles in the list prior to Tribruit can be proven be Gewissei engagements drawn from the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.
My reading of this is simply that the similarly spelled Baddan- of Baddanbyrig was wrongly identified by the HB author with the 577 Bath battle of the ASC. Arthur did not fight the Saxons at Bath, even if we allow for considerable revision of the ASC dates. He might well have fought at Liddington Castle (near Durocornovium and Barbury Castle).
For Arthur's battles in the South, see
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