So, I find myself with three rival theories, all contending for victory over the others.
How do I choose the winner?
Well, all three are actually, in a sense, very similar - at least in a couple of significant respects.
Firstly, the Arthurian battles, from one book to the other, remain essentially the same. The volume favoring L. Artorius Castus does not permit for Badon to be in the list, and while Camlann is present, obviously Castus did not die in that location. Both the other Arthurian candidates are Dark Age, not of the Roman period, and thus Badon and Camlan are allowed to stand.
Secondly, all three fulfill a vitally important requirement made necessary through the adoption of the Arthur name by the horse-worshipping, Irish-founded kingdoms of Dyfed and Dalriada: our original Arthur must be either a Roman eques (knight) or a descendent of a Roman military cavalry force.
Yes, Castus was an eques. But, as I've pointed before, there were a great many equites stationed over the centuries in Roman Britain. It's difficult to see what would have distinguished him to a sufficient degree. True, if he commanded his legionary troops in Britain, it is quite possible some cavalry may have been attached to those. But, again, there would have been nothing unusual about this.
On the other hand, a Dark Age Arthur who descended from a major cavalry garrison at a northern fort, who as a leader against the Saxons employed exclusively or primarily horse, might well have seemed an attractive figure to the rulers of Dyfed and Dalriada.
The two cavalry groups that come to mind are those at Stanwix on the west end of Hadrian's Wall and the Sarmatians at Ribchester.
In favor of the first is an 18th century tradition naming Stanwix as Arthur's fort. The name of the Ala Petriana unit there may also account for the stone motif that seems to be present in the persons of Arthur son of Bicoir (who kills Mongan with a stone, perhaps a folk reference to the huge standing stone at Dun Beachaire on Kintyre) and Arthur son of Pedr/Petrus. The Dalriadans may have gotten the name Arthur through marriage with the Britons of Alclud or Petra Cloithe, the Rock of Clyde. This Arthur candidate suffers from having no know father, his name having been manufactured from the mil uathmar of the Irish COMPERT MONGAN.
But the second Dark Age Arthur candidate - a son of Sawyl Benisel of Sarmatian Ribchester - has just gotten an unexpected boost from the linguists (see
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2026/02/eliwlad-flies-again-or-new-solution-to.html?m=1). This theory allows us to have a father for Arthur. And it has an advantage the Ala Petriana theory lacks: Sawyl married the daughter of Muiredach Muinderg of the Irish Dal Fiatach. This tribe was often at war with the Dalriadans, including Aedan, either the father or grandfather of an Arthur (although one marriage alliance between the Dal Fiatach and Dalriadans is recorded).
The drawbacks of the Sawyl theory?
It relies on an emendation to a single word of a medieval Welsh poem and a hypothetical etymology for the name of Arthur's nephew. It also depends on a confused memory on the part of the Welsh for the Matoc Ailithir son of Sawyl recorded in Irish sources. And we must look past the possibility that Sawyl - if it does indeed appear in the Uther elegy - could be merely a poetic metaphor. In other words, Uther is merely being compared to the Biblical Samuel and no actual identification of Uther with Sawyl Benisel is intended. Eliwlad may only superficially resemble an Irish aile-flaith and can instead be etymologized purely from a Welsh Eiliw/Eilyw-gwlad.
Thus the entire Sawyl theory, while compelling, may be nothing more than an imaginary construct. Except for one thing: the Sarmatian veteran settlement at Ribchester.
Unlike the Ala Petriana, which must surely have been withdrawn in its entirety when Rome left Britain, the Sarmatian veterans, having undoubtedly intermarried with the indigenous population, would have stayed where they owned land, farmed and, of course, raised horses. Some kind of ethnic continuity, one suspects, must have persisted into the sub-Roman period. [Although, the sub-Roman buildings at Birdoswald and what might have been similar structures at Stanwix demonstrate that local elites may for a time have sought to preserve a degree of Romanitas on Hadrian's Wall.]
I.A. Richmond, in his "The Sarmatae, Bremetennacvm Veteranorvm and the Regio Bremetennacensis", covers in some detail the rare and unusual nature of a veteran's settlement and why the Sarmatian veterans would not have returned to Sarmatae after their term of service was completed:
The Ravenna Cosmography, which not infrequently adds to the name of British towns or fortresses a designation defining their political status, names Bremetennacum as Bresnetenaci Veteranorum, thus classifying the fort as the centre of a veteran settlement. That such a settlement should be mentioned at all in a geographical list is itself an abnormality of considerable interest. By normal practice veterans who were not members of coloniae received lands which remained part of the territory of existing communities and were not differentiated from it except for taxation. The men themselves might, if sufficiently numerous, form a group of veterani, or veterani consistentes, with corporate status under a curator, normally a legionary of long service due for promotion to the centurionate. Groups of this kind are described on African stones, in such phrases as Iex decreto paganorum pagi Mercurialis [et] veteranorum Medelitanor(um) or cives Romani pagani veterani pagi Fortunalis or, again, ' veterani et pagani consistentes aput Rapidum ', further qualified as ' veterani et pagani intra eundem murum inhabitantes . But in these texts the emphasis is entirely upon political status, and the place-names of such mixed communities betray no hint of the presence of veterans there. Further, of the three places where allusion is made to the existence of veterans in the geography of the Roman world, the first, Scenae Veteranorum, in the Egyptian Delta, owed its name to the men of the ala Veteranorum on duty there and it is not a valid inference that Scenae was veterans' land. But at the second, Diana Veteranorum, a veteran settlement is certainly involved. Here inscriptions indicate that the whole district, of which the municipium of Diana was the centre, was settled by ex-soldier citizens, nearly all legionaries, though one man from an ala is mentioned. Again, Deultum Veteranorum, in Thrace, is specifically mentioned by the elder Pliny, with its marsh, as a veteran settlement. It is plain that, to justify the qualification, a veteran settlement something like a colonia in size, without the chartered status, was required. At Ribchester also there are special circumstances. The veterans can be brought into immediate connexion with the auxiliary garrison of the fort, the Sarmatae, for a particular reason of status which explains not only the settlement, but its rarity and the reason for the qualification ' veteranorum '. When these Sarmatae were transplanted to Britain by Marcus, they were dediticii, about to be brigaded in several numeri equitum Sarmatarum. The civic status accorded to such men upon their discharge from the army is not known, though a strong case has been propounded by Rowell for supposing that they received the status of ordinary provincial peregrini in reward for working their passage home. But, whatever their precise status, the fact remains that, when their military service was over, these Sarmatae were not in a position to return, as auxiliary soldiers commonly did, to a native canton within the Empire, there to exert the civilizing influence of men accustomed to disciplined life. For their homeland, Sarmatia, lay outside the Roman world. It was on the other hand, eminently in the Imperial interest that such trained men and their progeny should not be lost to the Roman world by allowing them to return to the uncertain welcome of a land outside the Empire. The Sarmatae in Britain thus presented a special case, important because they involved the veterans not merely of a single numerus, but of a huge levy of 5,500 picked men. The natural solution of the difficulty would be to settle them in a single district in the province of their adoption; and what district would be more suitable than Ribchester, where they would be associated with one of their own regiments ? A community of this size would very naturally, as at Diana Veteranorum, receive in the geography of the province the recognition of its special status implied by the title Bremetennacum Veteranorum. The difference between Diana and Bremetennacum is, however, as important as their similarity. Unlike Diana, Bremetennacum did not grow into a town. It always remained a fort, with the normal small extra-mural settlement or vicus. It is thus plain that the veterans at Bremetennacum were solely concerned with land development and knew nothing of urbanization. The organization of such granted lands had a model to hand in the Imperial domain- lands, where farms (praedia) or ranches (saltus) were grouped for administrative purposes as a regio. If we substitute the word fort ' for ' town ' Schulten's definition of the African regio will fit the British case ' ein Complex mehrerer angrenzender saltus, deren Centrum eine Stadt bildet, von der die regio den Namen fiihrt.' For large areas of cultivable land (praedia) or rich meadowlands for horse-breeding (saltus), in which the Sarmatians must have specialized, were available not far from Ribchester in the Fylde which is good champaign country and only requires drainage to develop its potentially fertile soil. Further, the fact that the Fylde was open to development in Roman times is attested by the Roman road which passes through it from Ribchester to Kirkham and thence north-westwards to the mouth of the Wyre. The area was thus accessible to exploitation, like the Fenland which it so much resembles; and it will be borne in mind that the Codex Iustinianus lays stress upon marshlands in connexion with soldier cultivators. Their systematic training in field-work made them excellent organizers, as at Deultum, of ditching and draining, and a pregnant passage in Tacitus reminds us that it was early an Imperial policy to develop such areas of potentially high productivity in this way. The Fylde therefore presents the most suitable land for settling the Sarmatae: there was hardly another area like it in Northern Britain, and its existence no doubt decided the site for the settlement. The date of establishment can hardly be in doubt. It must have been about A.D. 200, when the first discharge from service would be falling due for men who had been levied in A.D. I75. The unsettled state of Britain at the time, with the huge undertaking of the Severan reconstruction of the Northern frontier well,under way and the Caledonian campaigns still to come, may have delayed matters for a while, especially among men who were dediticii; but it can hardly have delayed the measure for more than ten to fifteen years, when the military activity was over. The arrangement of this block settlement differed, it should be observed, considerably from the new Severan army policy. From the time of Severus onwards, the legionaries received new civil rights, which permitted marriage and living-out to serving soldiers and changed their relation to the land. This phenomenon is first evident at Carnuntum, where lands were being leased to individual serving legionaries by A.D. 205. But a generation later the same privilege had been extended to serving frontier soldiers, that is, to the auxiliaries, to whom Severus Alexander was leasing lands taken from the enemy, ' ita ut eorum essent, si heredes eorum militarent, nec unquam ad privatos pertinerent ': and the practice is confirmed as extended to these auxiliaries by a third-century Diploma and by important rules in the legislation of the fifth century, which deal with a special class of old-established military lands styled 'terrae limitaneae vel castellorum ', whereof private ownership was rigorously forbidden, no matter what inconvenience might be involved. But it is evident, from the terms in which all these measures are described, that such leases or grants were individual. The Ribchester settlement, on the other hand, is a block settlement. It is thus apparent that, while from the time of the Severi onwards legionaries and auxiliaries were officially enabled to obtain land as serving soldiers, this treatment was not accorded to the dediticii of the numeri Sarmatarum, who were covered by a special block grant on completion of service only. The less privileged treatment is no doubt connected with their status as dediticii, just as, for example, dediticii were under disabilities arising out of the Constitutio Antoniniana on citizenship. The state of affairs may usefully be compared with yet another aspect of Severan policy. The block grant is the system detected by Rostovtzeff as operative in Thrace and Africa, where large groups of peasants were settled on domain lands, partly to cultivate them and partly to supply the army with new and sturdy blood. When their army service was over, that was virtually the category into which the Sarmatae dediticii fell, supposing they then received ordinary peregrine status.
Richmond also discusses the extremely close relationship that existed between Ribchester and York.
The name Artorius would likely have been imported from York:
"The Roman fort at Ribchester is one of the important strategic centres of Northern Britain, where a Roman road from south to north crossed the river Ribble, while another went eastwards to the legionary fortress at York through the Aire Gap...It is of some importance to recall that the cult of Maponus [found at Ribchester] is one patronized by legionary officers of the Sixth Legion, from which Antoninaus came, and, in particular, by so senior an officer as the praefectus castrorum [a rank held by LAC], since this stamps the cult as one centred in York rather than in the auxiliary forts... It is thus particularly significant for official policy that successive commandants of the Ribchester fort and settlement, men of education and social standing, both could and did draw generously upon the resources of craftsmanship and religious allegory available or current at the York headquarters in order to establish the shrine and monuments of the regional centre upon the basis of the best conventions that they knew. Indeed, it must be admitted that the policy can hardly have been without direct official inspiration, since it continued over a period of some forty years or more. It is evident that both during their military service and after their settlement in the regio as veterans, the men of the Sarmatian numeri, soldiers of the lowest standing in the army, were subjected to the stead influence of Roman religious culture, always one of the most powerful media of social education in the ancient world."
I suppose what it comes down to, in regards to the viability of the Ribchester theory for a Dark Age Arthur, is this: is it reasonable to assume that the Matoc Ailithir son of Sawyl Benisel of the Irish records was remembered in Welsh tradition as Eliwlad son of Madog? And can we accept Sawyl for kawyl as a probable reading in the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN, and then allow that emendation to be an actual identification of Uther with Sawyl?
Here's why I'm going to answer "No" to those questions...
Uther Pendragon, whether it really is or not, exhibits the format of name + epithet. As Sawyl Benisel displays the same format, we must ask ourselves why we aren't simply told that Arthur was the son of Sawyl. We don't need another descriptor for a man who was already called Benisel (or Penuchel). Had Sawyl been the "Chief Dragon" at Ribchester, we would naturally expect a formation Sawyl Pendragon.
Therefore, clever as the Ribchester theory may seem, I've decided to forsake it, once and for all.
Occam's Razor demands that we opt for one of the Welsh etymologies for Eliwlad. Not a translation-loan from an unattested Irish compound that is a semantic match to Ailithir. Grief-lord fits the description of the dead Lleu-eagle, whose state corresponds with a mournful darkness that spreads over the land. As Lord of Appearance(s), the shape-shifting quality of Arthur's nephew would have been emphasized.
And kawyl could be for can[n]wyll after all. In fact, there is a good reason for thinking that it does. Geoffrey of Monmouth has Uther transform into Gorlois, a character conjured from Uther's own gorlassar descriptor in the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN. But Geoffrey also says that the comet seen at Ambrosius' death represents Uther himself. Cannwyll had the transferred sense of "star, sun, moon", and I've previously suggested that Uther being transformed by God, becoming "like a star (eil canwyll) in the gloom", may well have supplied Geoffrey with the comet motif.
With the Ribchester theory dispensed with, I now have only two prevailing theories: Arthur as the Roman period L. Artorius Castus or Arthur as a Dark Age war-leader based at Petrianis. As good arguments can be made for both candidates, and no amount of fussing with either has yielded any new facts or strong arguments that would cause me to favor one or the other, I will leave both books out there for consideration.
From the standpoint of which candidate I want to believe in, well, that's easy: the Petrianis Arthur. But just because I want to believe in him does not make it so.
