MY FINAL TAKE ON ARTHUR'S BADON BATTLE

Liddington Castle, Wiltshire, England

Over the years I've spilled a lot of ink on the subject of Arthur's Badon battle.  Like so many others before me, I'd not been able to reach any kind of reasonably satisfying conclusion.  But now that I've proposed that as the father of the "Dobunnic" Uther he may have been present in the area of Liddington Castle/Badbury in Wiltshire, I feel that I should tackle this most difficult of Arthurian problems one last time.

Firstly, the Welsh Annal date of 516 A.D. for Badon forces us to accept a date c. 500.  Various scholars, mainly looking for a way to align the date with the birth of Gildas, have opted for dates +/-25 years from 500.  Dates outside this range are not very convincing.  

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a battle featuring Bieda being fought c. 501 A.D., and I have linked his name with Bedenham on Portchester Harbor.  In my opinion, this is the original battle being alluded to in the pages of Gildas.  Not a particularly important battle, that of Bedenham seems later to have become confused with Badon/Bathum, i.e. "Bath". According to the ASC, Bath was not taken by the Gewissei until 577.

Of major concern when discussing the ASC battles is what I call the "reversal of generations" among the Gewissei.  Simply put, the Welsh have Cunedda/Ceawlin as the father of Ceredig and Cynric.  But the ASC has Cerdic (for whom the Gewissei were actually named) as the father of Cynric, and presumably (at least by implication, and in terms of relative chronology) Cynric as the father of Ceawlin. It is, of course, tempting to trust the Welsh tradition here.  But if we do so, the assigning of members of the Gewissei to the various battles makes for a backwards arrangement, calling into question who really fought what and at what date.   Ceawlin is in on the taking of Bath in 577 and this is simply way too late for Cunedda to be participating in military actions.  The ordering of the ASC battles and the players traditionally attached to them appears to be seriously flawed.

The Badburys complicate the issue yet further.  No Badbury battle is recorded by the ASC - but, then, if it really did represent a massive slaughter and major defeat of the English, we would not expect to find it mentioned in a source that glorifies the exploits of the Gewissei and the founding of Wessex. If either the Faringdon Badbury Hill or Liddington Castle at Badbury were  Arthur's "Badon", when might such a battle have been fought?  Let us begin by looking at the battles in Wiltshire as these are to be found in the ASC. [NOTE: The following selection from my recent book THE KING OF STONEHENGE has been modified slightly to dovetail better with this post.]

"Let us look at the early battles in Wiltshire as these are found recorded in THE ANGLE-SAXON CHRONICLE.  We begin with the defeat of the British by Cynric at Old Sarum in 552. Four years later a battle is fought at Barbury Castle further north. 

Rather significantly, the Barbury battle of 556 is not said to be a victory.  We are merely told there was a battle there.  In 560, Ceawlin succeeds Cynric. After Barbury Castle there are no more battles against the Britons until 571 - 15 years later. And the theater of action has changed: the Gewissei are now coming up the Thames Valley.  In 577, the war theater changes again, this time to the west and north of Wiltshire (including the capturing of Bath).  In 584, there is a battle in Oxfordshire, well to the NE of Wiltshire. We do not return to Wiltshire until 592, when a great slaughter occurs at Adam's Grave near Alton Priors resulting in the expulsion of Ceawlin.  In the next year, Ceawlin perishes. 

From the Battle of Beranburh to that of Adam's Grave, 36 years had passed." 

My interpretation of this major time-gap after Barbury, allowing for Arthur being present at the 'Bear's Fort', is to postulate a near immediate follow-up battle at the Liddington Badbury.  There really is no other logical time frame for such a decisive battle, i.e. one that would have been a significant setback for the invading English.  

Alas, because of the "reversal of generations" issue, establishing a firm or even approximate date for a "Badon" at Liddington may be impossible.  We are told in the Welsh Annals that Arthur perished at Camlann (probably the Cams in Hampshire; see my book THE BEAR KING) c. 537.  Obviously, if this date is even close to being correct, then a battle at Liddington Castle would have to precede it.  Such a calculation does not even come close to matching that of the Barbury battle in 556.

Although all seems to be lost, archaeology may come to our rescue here:

http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/wessex.html

"The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex is popularly assumed to have originated around its later capital, Winchester.  In fact, its origins lie in the Upper Thames Valley, a region topographically bounded by the Cotswolds, Chilterns and Berkshire Downs.  Following the collapse of Roman authority in the 5th century, a new kingdom emerged around the Dorchester-on-Thames area during the late 6th and early 7th centuries."

This interesting trend in the field of archaeology in recent years, i.e. to see the founding of Wessex as having occurred in the Upper Thames Valley rather than in Hampshire, would fit well not only with an Arthur fighting at a Badbury near Barbury, but might also help make some sense out of the "reversal of generations" problem as I have outlined it above. 

Badbury Hill, Oxfordshire