THE CELTIC FRINGES AND A MARGINALIZED ARTHUR

When we Arthurian researchers look to place the famous Arthur somewhere, we are hampered by two overriding principles: 1) as Celtic Britain shrank, so, too, did its Arthurian borders and 2) purely legendary material, often incorporating traditions belonging to other, later Arthurs, often situates him all over island.

The result of these realities is that we are faced with an Arthur who is confined to Wales, Cornwall or Brittany, or whose activities stretch all the way from the far north of Scotland.  A good example of this last tendency is the PA GUR poem, which I have treated of in detail elsewhere (see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-pa-gur-battle-sites-revision.html).

Confining Arthur to the Celtic fringe marginalizes the hero.  We become uniquely myopic.  

Opening his theater of operation to literally everywhere brings about a serious deterioration in our faculty of discrimination. We go from having severely restricted territories to nonexistent boundaries.  Confinement versus no limits.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is simply this: if we are dealing with an Arthur of the 5th-6th centuries, then we must look to a man who was fighting the English on what was then the limes or frontier zone, i.e. that fluctuating boundary between the Britons and the invading Saxons.  Where was that in the time period we are referring to?

One of the best ways to see what was English in the 5th-6th centuries and what was not is by taking a look at cemeteries.   I am pasting here four maps from N.J. Higham's KING ARTHUR: MYTH-MAKING AND HISTORY:

Thus if Arthur had really been fighting the Saxons, we must look to the border region formed by an imaginary line drawn up along the cemetery sites from south to north.  That, in turn, would mean that Arthur himself would have to be based somewhere west of that line.  In the North, we are, essentially, looking at areas from roughly the Cheviots down to Hadrian's Wall and thence southward through the Pennines.  If in the South, we have Wales extending east to the boundary of the old Cornovii kingdom, and then along the Severn basis and, finally, across Wiltshire and Hampshire. 

One thing is undeniable: for whatever reason (perhaps because the Saxon federates had settled in the South during Roman times, and/or during the time of Vortigern), the North lasted far longer in the face of the Saxon onslaught.  The line of the AS cemeteries in the North matches, to an astonishing degree, my localization of the Arthurian battles sites along the ancient Roman Dere Street.  The Gewissei battles in the South, which appear to have been subjected to major temporal displacement, are much more difficult to reconcile with the archaeological landscape.

Badon, which strictly from a linguistic standpoint, has to be a Bath site, can not have been Bath in Avon.  Not, at least, in the time period in which Arthur was operating.  It could well have been the other bathum site, i.e. Buxton.  And, indeed, Welsh tradition identified the latter as Badon (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2020/05/osla-or-ossa-big-knife-and-caer-faddon.html).  While one of the Badburys could underlie Badon - if we assume the latter is an error for Baddan - and fit the geopolitical landscape, we cannot demonstrate that this, in fact, happened.  Buxton as Badon, needless to say, argues strongly for a Northern Arthur.

Other battles, like that of the Tribruit, are difficult if not impossible to put anywhere other than the North.  The PA GUR poem, while full of legendary material, pinpoints the battle at Queensferry west of Edinburgh (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2016/08/arthurs-tenth-battle-shore-of-river.html).  If we go by the PA GUR localization, we cannot look to the Roman period Trajectus near Bath in Avon.

Battles such as that of the Celyddon Wood must either be placed where they actually belong (the Welsh had moved Celyddon to the Scottish Lowlands, away from the original territory of the Caledonii in the Highlands) or creatively identified with a similar sounding place in the South or, even worse, analyzed according to its root meaning (in this case, W. caled, 'hard') and then associated with an English name of the same meaning.  This approach, needless to say, is extremely problematic.  

For Breguoin/Agned, we have the perfect correspondence with Urien's Brewyn, the Bremenium Roman fort at High Rochester.  Agned because the fort was rebuilt by a Roman governor named Egnatius.  All of this is approved by the best Celtic philologists.  Otherwise, we have to try to "fit" these names into English place-names in the South that involve the Gewissei.

It goes without saying that an Arthur in the North if England is not one we can confine to the Celtic fringes.  Accepting the Galfridian localizations, for example, such as those in remote Cornwall are, frankly, beyond ridiculous.  More like absurd.  

There is no better example of the "repositioning" of Arthur into the Celtic fringe than the tradition embodied by Welsh Triad 1. In this source we are told that Arthur's courts are St. David's in Pembrokeshire, Wales (or, in some MSS., Caerleon on Usk, reflecting later Galfridian influence), Celliwig in Cornwall and Pen Rhionydd (= The Rhinns of Galloway) in the North.  

I present this brief and rather simplistic (and perhaps overly obvious) blog post as a caution to those who would look for Arthur only in the Celtic fringes. In all likelihood, by the time the sources we have at our disaposal were created, the kingdom and martial arena of Arthur had long since succumbed to the English and was no longer in any sense British.