Dun Beachaire
Dun Beachaire
In a recent blog piece, I explored the "horse" associations of the various Dark Age Arthurs:
An implication of that article, though hinted at, was not fully developed. And it is to that subject that I would like now to return.
In brief, if it is true that, as I once surmised, the Arthur who appears in the HISTORIA BRITTONUM in the context of Kent (Cendlond) is a reference to the 7th century Arthur son of Bicoir of Kintyre (Cindtire), a fact that would mean there never was a 5th-6th century Arthur fighting the Saxons, what do we make of Arthur son of Aedan (or of Aedan's son, Conaing) of Dalriada and Arthur son of Petr of Dyfed?
In other words, if we accept THE ARTHUR of legend as a chronologically and geographically displaced Arthur of Kintyre, and note the horse associations that exist between the Saxon founders of Kent, the Manannan-sired Mongan killed by the Kintyre Arthur, and the many equine attributes of the Kintyre and Pembroke peninsulas, where did the name Arthur originally come from?
Is it from the early 3rd century Romand eques L. Artorius Castus or does it come from another source?
Well, simply based on precedence, Arthur son of Aedan (or Conaing, from English king - maybe a son of Aedan, but also possibly a doublet for Aedan later wrongly taken to be a separate personage) comes first. We've seen that Aedan married the niece of a British king and that they had a daughter named Maithgemma (Irish "bear"). It is reasonable to suppose they also had a son whom they gave a British bear name to (or a name they happened to interpret as a bear name).
The Big Question, of course, is where did the uncle of Aedan's wife rule?
The most obvious answer would be adjacent Strathclyde. But as we know Sawyl Benisel of Ribchester took a princess of the Dal Fiatach to wife, and the Dal Fiatach were neighbors of the Dalriadans, we can't be sure Alclud's ruler was the man who gave his brother's daughter to Aedan.
So, just what kingdom did the name Arthur (a perceived bear name, hence the companion name Maithgemma) come from - and why was it honored there? And what, if anything, did it have to do with the Arthurian battles of the HB and AC?
Well, this takes us right back to the Roman name Artorius. While scholars are quick to point out that it was not an uncommon name and so could have been preserved in a noble or royal family anywhere in Britain, as we are justified in restricting the name to somewhere in the North we can look to those places where Roman members of the Artorii gens or descendents of such members would most likely be found.
Excepting L. Artorius Castus as the first British Arthur, we know there was a good concentration of Roman period Artorii in Dalmatia. True, Castus served as procurator there and died and was buried there, but other Artorii are attested in Salona, for example.
We have records of Dalmatian units in Roman Britain. One such garrisoned Carvoran on Hadrian's Wall. We find buried there a woman from Salona. We know such units, while created with Dalmatian troops, would later have contained soldiers drawn from other ethnicities. However, there is some evidence for continued recruitment from the homeland and the possibility of cultural elements being preserved beneath the veneer of Romanization. The name Artorius might well have been passed down through several generations of Romano-Britons at this fort.
Another unit garrisoned a command center somewhere in the vicinity of Castus' York. Dr. Roger Tomlin situates this center in that part of York's vicus on the other side of the River Ouse. The Artorius name could have been used by a family in York itself, once the base of Castus' Sixth Legion.
In the article cited above, I discussed Stanwix as Arthur's Fort (Arthuriburgum in the 1700s). The only problem with this late, antiquarian identification is that we have no way of accounting how the Artorius name would have gotten there. And, in fact, we might hypothesize that my earlier proposed Petriana connection with the Petrus of Dyfed here functions in an opposite sense, i.e. some memory of Stanwix as Petrianis had caused it to become wrongly associated through the ususl folkoristic processes with Petrus of Dyfed, father of an Arthur. I now think this is a more likely explanation for Arthur's placement at Stanwix.
The most attractive possibility for a northern home for the Dark Age Arthur name remains the Irthing Valley. I've detailed the reasons for this. First, the Birdoswald Dark Age hall complex is in the Irthing Valley, not far west across the Tyne-Irthing Gap from the Dalmatian-manned Carvoran fort. Second, Camboglanna/Castlesteads is also in the Irthing Valley. The river-name may well be from a Cumbric word meaning "Little Bear". I have further suggested that the Welsh Arthwys eponym in the North, a name representing an earlier Latin *Artenses or People of the Bear, may well have been a tribe inhabiting the Irthing Valley.
Given all of that, might the Arthur name, interpreted as a bear name, have come from Birdoswald? The same Birdoswald I have identified as the home of St. Patrick?
If so, how did the name get to Dalriada?
Well, here's where we plug in the British king who gave his niece to Aedan. She would be of the Artenses and the twin bear names Maithgemma and Arthur would make sense in this context. As the Dal Fiatach had formed a marriage alliance with a king from the region of the Roman period Segantii (Lancashire), there is no reason the Dalriadans could not have formed a comparable alliance with a chieftain of the Artenses.
Now, obviously, this once again begs the question as to whether the Artorius name had simply been passed down through a ruling family at Carvoran and/or Birdoswald or if we can still entertain the notion of a famous Dark Age Arthur in the Valley of the Little Bear.
The Arthurian battles of the HB and the AC do not look like Dark Age engagements. My detailed treatment of the HB Arthur's martial activity revealed a Roman campaign or campaigns, something which prompted me to favor L. Artorius Castus as the prototypical Arthur.
Is there any way out of this difficulty?
Perhaps. Most of us idealistic Arthurian enthusiasts resist "diluting" our hero. What I mean by that is we prefer to see in Arthur one man fighting gloriously against the Saxons in a dozen contests. We don't want to admit the possibility that over the centuries of legend-building several Arthurs may have been conflated, their various battles being thrown together under the aegis of a single imaginary figure.
True, this view of a monstrous amalgamation of Arthurs is not a new one and is readily accepted in some quarters. It runs distinctly counter to the romantic impulse and is just as impossible to prove as the opposite notion, i.e. that all the battles belong to only one man.
I suppose it all comes down to belief - and the dates for Arthur. An Arthur at Badon of the first quarter of the 6th century points to Buxton in the North. If Arthur is Castus, then Arthur's name was merely attached to Badon in heroic legend. The fact that at least two sources (the AC and "The Dream of Rhonabwy") identify Badon with the Liddington Badbury leads us away from Buxton. If the Welsh tradition supporting Liddington is a genuinely historical one, it is practically certain Arthur never fought there.
An Arthur dying at Camboglanna in the second quarter of the 6th century cannot, obviously, be a reference to Castus in the same place - unless, of course, as is quite plausible, Castus fought rebelling Brigantes at Castlesteads. The inclusion of St. Medard in the AC Camlan entry as "Medraut" does nothing to bolster our faith in the Camlann entry. In fact, it only serves to remind us of the many other chronological inconsistencies in the HB, not to mention the outright fiction of a British Ambrosius (a easily proven temporal and geographical displacement of a curious conflation of the Gallic prefect of that name and his saintly son).
But I think we can be somewhat confident that one of two things has happened: either just the Arthur name made its way to Dalriada from the Irthing Valley - a name possibly deriving from Castus - or Castus is the Arthur.
Either way, we must be able to reconcile the Arthurian battles of the HB and AC with who the famous Arthur really was.
The horse associations may point to eques Castus. Or Dyfed, being an Irish-based kingdom, may simply have borrowed Arthur from the Irish Dalriadans, in which case we need not invoke the ghost of Castus for Petrus' son.
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