Liddington Castle (Badbury/Mount Badon)
If Arthur, perhaps Cerdic of Wessex/Ceredig son of Cunedda, died at The Cams in Hampshire, can his famous Badon battle be saved? And by that I mean can we make a decent case for Arthur actually being a victor at Badon and not simply have been assigned the battle because he was otherwise a famous war-leader?
For my final decision on The Cams as Camlan, please see the following two new blog posts:
As for Badon, there are three "proofs" for its proper identification with the Liddington Badbury:
[Illtud was a prime candidate for Uther, Arthur's father. While I have stepped away from that idea, this warrior-saint may still have hailed from Liddington Castle.]
And this is so despite the fact that linguistically, Badon remains a perfect British reflection of the English Bathum. It is this derivation of the hill-name that may well have contributed to its being confused with Bath in Avon, a known Anglo-Saxon Chronicle battle that supposedly happened as late as 577.
But what we need to do is look at Badon in light of the possibility that Cerdic of the Gewissei is Arthur, and that Arthur's later association with Cornwall may be due to the Durocornovium name anciently applied to Liddington Castle. And we need to allow for Barbury Castle or the Bear's Fort near Liddington having been named for Arthur, whose name was thought to contain Welsh arth, 'bear.'
The real question at the heart of the 'Badon Problem' has always been the date of the battle and how that is to be fit into what we know of the situation in southern Britain during Arthur's floruit. And all wrapped up with the date of the battle is the Historia Brittonum's battle list, one that ends with the great victory at Mount Badon. I have always favored a Northern arrangement of the battles, but have also identified them - if somewhat creatively - with locations in the South, i.e. with places where the Gewissei are said to have fought.
The starting point for treating of Badon in the context of the HB battle list are the sites from Tribruit on. Tribruit, as I've adequately demonstrated, is simply a Welsh rendering of the Latin trajectus, a word used to designate a water crossing-point. The Northern one, which seems to fit the description provided in the Welsh poem Pa Gur, is almost certainly Queensferry. But the only Trajectus we know of from the Classical period is the one that crossed from Bath's Avon to Caerwent in Wales. Although I have done what I can with the susequent hill-names - Agned, Breguoin and Badon - there is no denying that given a Tribruit terminal at/near Bitton (see Rivet and Smith) that looks to be a Welsh rendering of the ASC's Dyrham battle of 577 - the following three hill sites might naturally correspond to the three towns captured by the Gewissei following the victory at Dyrham: Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath.
Alas, Agned and Breguoin (the best of the forms that also include Bregion and Bregomion) do not represent either Cirencester or Gloucester. Agned is for agued, a rare word found used in The Gododdin for Catterick. Breguoin is exactly what we need for Brewyn, found listed in the Taliesin poems as one of the battles of the great Urien of Rheged.
Thus Tribruit, if it belongs in the same context, obviously is Queensferry and not Bitton.
All of the HISTORIA BRITTONUM battles sites - with the exception of Badon - are British place-names. True, we could opt for the Bassas as an English Bassa name, but as Dunipace between the two Maeatae forts and hard by the site of Arthur's Oven is a perfect candidate for a bas name at a river-ford there is no reason to resort to the former. Even getting rather desperate (as I have in the past) by selecting Buxton (given its association with Bathamgate Roman road) for Badon is unsatisfactory. How do we have a sub-Roman chieftain fighting in Derbyshire and in the territory of the Maeatae - never mind in the Caledonian Wood?
Granted, there has always been a debate about which group of battles we can trust as being actual engagements and which are to be interpreted as borrowed or purely fictional military actions. Some scholars have preferred to accept Camlan and Badon as real, while others have argued for the veracity of the HB battles and think poorly of the historicity of the two found in the Annales Cambriae.
On the face of it, I've lost all confidence in Arthur being the victor of the Badon battle. Firstly, although the ASC oddly reverses some of the generations of the Gewissei and archaeologists see the English as coming up the Thames valley before they came up the Hampshire Avon, Cerdic of Wessex's martial activities are restricted to Hampshire and Wight. The only site in the ASC mentioned at Cerdic's time and in that region which bears any resemblance whatsoever to Badon is Bedenham, which I take to be the site where we find the Bieda personal name preserved. A battle was fought there - although not by Cerdic - in 501. If a battle at Liddington Castle/Badbury took place, it must have been just after the one fought in 560 at Barbury Castle (a battle the English are not said to have won). This chronology is seriously out of whack for an Arthur said to perish in 537 (or even in 545 or thereabouts). I have pointed out before that there is a huge gap in battles in Wiltshire in the ASC, but this might be accounted for by supposing that the arrangement of battles for the foundation of Wessex was specifically designed to delineate the boundaries of the nascent kingdom. Thus any battles fought inside Wiltshire would not have appeared in this schema.
Going back now to Camlan, a site whose location seems to be confined to the old kingdom of the Regni. This is assuming, of course, we accept the Medrawd = Medard equation and use that to fix the context near Chichester. The trouble with this idea is that such an entry may be just as much an artificial construction as the ASC's "mapping out of Wessex" I alluded to in the previous paragraph.
Here, in a nutshell, is my problem with Camlan: it's very name. The Camboglanna Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall is ever-present when we consider Arthur and his possible relationship to L. Artorius Castus. The latter served in the North, and if my reading of his stone is correct he led three legions against the Maeatae and Caledonii under Severus.
I'm posting yet again the following selection from Simon Elliott's Septimius Severus in Scotland:
I've also posted before Anthony Birley's suggestion that the Brigantes became involved in these troubles, and if so, Camboglanna may well have been the site of battle and later rebuilding. We know rebuilding took place under Severus and Caracalla at nearby Birdoswald.
Thus as is the case with the HB battles (excluding Badon), Camlan is easy to place in the North in a known historical context at a time when a man who bore the name Arthur (Artorius) was doubtless present.
With Medrawd standing in for Medard, we can really only say that whoever recorded (or conjured) the AC Camlan entry was using Medard of Noviomagus to localize Camlan. We can't say at all that there was actually an Arthur somewhere in the vicinity of Chichester. Later Welsh tradition situated Camlan at the Afon Gamlan in Merionethshire. I don't think that is correct, either.
My conclusion is pretty much inevitable, if I strictly follow the chain of logic:
The famous Arthur of the HISTORIA BRITTONUM battle list, excepting Badon, is L. Artorius Castus. And the Badon of the ANNALES CAMBRIAE does not belong to Arthur at all, while the AC's Camlan is a reflection of Roman period action at Camboglanna in the North, which also saw Castus as the actual agent involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.