Can We Justify Ignoring Illtud as Uther Pendragon in Favor of Sawyl Benisel?: Asking Some Hard Questions About Arthur's Origin

Durocornovium and Vicinity

Not long ago I wrote this piece -

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/02/sawyl-benisel-as-father-of-arthur-my.html

- in which I decided to fix on Sawyl Benisel of the North as Arthur's real father.  However, in doing so, I had to, essentially, ignore what seemed a very good identification of Uther as St. Illtud.  And Illtud not only appeared attractive given his certain identification with Uther Pendragon, but because of his apparent connection with the Kingdom of Ercing and, through that entity, with Badbury Castle at Liddington and Durocornovium, the Fort of the Cornovii:

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/01/illtuds-father-bicanus-and-his-llydaw.html

My reasons for ultimately choosing Sawyl were obvious.  It allowed me to settle on a Northern candidate for Uther, which seemed to better fit the battle geography, and it allowed me to rather easily account for the transmission of the name Arthur from the Roman period to the Dark Ages. But as always seems to be the case when dealing with a speculative argument for a historical Arthur, opting for Sawyl Benisel left some rather uncomfortable questions unanswered.

Chief among these (and the one that bothers me the most), is the almost certain identification in the HISTORIA BRITTONUM of the Second Battle of Badon with the Liddington Badbury site:

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-second-battle-of-badon.html

While the HB has itself been pretty thoroughly discredited as reliable source material, it does date from the 9th century.  On the other hand, the identification of Badon with Buxton, found in the MABINOGION tale 'The Dream of Rhonabwy', is quite late - probably the 13th century.  Yet, ultimately, I used Buxton because it fit in much better with an Arthur whose birthplace was Ribchester.

There are some other less obvious problems with the Northern Arthur when it comes to the battle list of the HB.  For example, although the early Welsh poem the 'Pa Gur' firmly locates Tryfrwyd/Tribruit in the far North (at Queensferry, to be previse), the fact that it is a translation of Latin Trajectus could conceivably point to Bitton in Somerset, a place actually known by that name in the Roman period.  Some of the other battles can also be placed in the south - with some ingenuity.  I once had a discussion of the river Bassas with top Celtic linguist Graham Isaac, who had no problem with Bassas being a derivative of the English personal name Bassa.  There is only one known Bassa river in all of Britain, and that is Bassingbourn, the stream of Bassa's people, in Cambridgeshire.  Even the missing Dubglas in Lindsey can be accounted for by allowing for a simple confusion of the Witham in the Glen's Lindsey with the Witham in Essex, where we find the Blackwater. [Although this is a very poor substitute for the Devil's Water at Linnels near the Corbridge fort on Hadrian's Wall.] All of the battles can be placed in the south, in fact, even if doing so seems (to some of us, at least!) less satisfactory.  Some (like Celidon) can only be placed in the south through linguistic manipulation (as in going from one language to another with translations, some of them fanciful), the application of folkloristic principles or by permitting sheer poetic license on the part of the HB author. We also need to be willing to accept that some of the HB Arthurian battles may not have been fought against the English, but instead against other Britons or even the Irish.  

And the need to trace Arthur's name to the Roman period, and specifically to L. Artorius Castus of the North, is a strange obsession, and one we should probably dispense with.  As Roman expert Roger Tomlin has pointed out to me, Artorius was not a rare name at all, and just because we know of one such man who served in Britain does not mean there were not others.  There may, actually, have been several.  We simply don't have a record of their presence.  Were Arthur's name different, although of Latin derivation, and we did not have a figure like Castus available to us, would be waste any time on trying to trace where this particular Latin name came from?  No, of course not.  And we have plenty of examples in the early Welsh genealogies and in Dark Age British (and Irish) inscriptions of personages bearing Latin or Latinized Celtic names.  Do we seek their prototypes or exemplars?  We do not.  

It is no more compelling to try and link a man of the 5th-6th centuries to a 2nd century Roman soldier than it is to suggest that Barbury Castle, the Bear's Fort, near the Liddington Badbury and Durocornovium may have been called such by the English because Arthur belonged there. 

What we do know is this: Uther Pendragon is a title for St. Illtud.  Uther Pendragon is the only father claimed for the famous Arthur.  Are we, then, justified in assuming that Uther/Illtud was wrongly made the father of Arthur simply because he was metaphorically compared with the Biblical Samuel, and that comparison caused Sawyl (the Welsh form of Samuel) Benisel, the rightful father of Arthur, to be displaced in the tradition?

If we go solely by the Welsh tradition, we find Arthur being associated chiefly with two places: Ergyng and Cornwall.  This alone seems inconsistent or contradictory.  But if I am right and Llydaw and Bicanus are for Lydbrook and Bicknor in Ergyng, and these two places in turn are fairly standard relocations for Lidbrook and Bican Dic near Durocornovium at Wanborough, then we can efficiently reconcile the otherwise conflicting locations.  At the same time we settle once and for all the 'Badon Debate', as Liddington Castle becomes, automatically, the sole contender for the honor.  

In Illtud, then, we would have a chieftain who descended from the Dobunni who sought his fortune in southern Wales, eventually becoming head of the household troops of the lord of Dinas Powys.  At some point he was made a saint, but it is clear that for much of his life he was a soldier of some repute.  His son Arthur would have returned to Cernyw, in this case not Cornwall but Wanborough, to fight the Saxons. 

I have elsewhere discussed in great detail the various possible candidates for Camlann, where he perished.  Yes, it is noteworthy that a church of Illtud is found very close to the Afon Gamlan in NW Wales, and this was the traditional Welsh site for Camlann (as I was able to definitively prove).  However, Illtud as Eldad is placed in Gloucester by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the River Cam emptied into the Severn at Frampton On Severn just downstream from Gloucester. This river surrounded the great Uley hillfort, which had been a stronghold of the Dobunni, and was adjacent to the Uley shrine.  We must bear in mind that the Glywysing (later Morgannwg) where Illtud served as leader of the soldiers derives from the eponym Glywys, itself from a Latin *Glevenses, the people of Glevum or Gloucester.  So, as far as the tradition goes, Illtud being in Penychen in Glywysing may itself be a relocation for a man who was actually stationed originally at Gloucester.  

The River Cam and Uley

LLanelltyd and the Afon Gamlan

So what to do with all this?

On the face of it, I cannot deny the very strong possibility that Uther Pendragon/Illtud was, in truth, Arthur's father.  If he was, the saint's life was clearly a radical revision of that chieftain's military career.  To enhance his holiness, he was made to separate from his wife (a devilish temptation) and was thereby utterly deprived of children.  Any notion that he was the father of Arthur was effectively extinguished. Yet there are any number of purely military figures in the Dark Ages and in the later medieval period who were crafted into saints posthumously, or who only became religious at the end of their lives (sometimes because they were forced to do so by political rivals). Saints' Lives are not history; they are hagiography, replete with miracles and sundry nonsense.  

It would be foolish, then, to accept the Life of St. Illtud at face value.  Instead, we should take it with a boulder of salt. 

Does it follow that we should abandon my Sawyl theory?  Well, there are still things about Sawyl as Arthur's father which are incredibly appealing. At this point, I don't think the argument can convincingly be slanted in Illtud's favor.  Still, I will continue to return to the problem from time to time, hoping for more clarity.  Should I discover such, I will certaintly write about it here.

Otherwise, I stand by my book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF RIBCHESTER, available from Amazon.  for those who wish to read the entire argument for Sawyl as Arthur's father, I highly recommend this title.

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Leader-Ribchester-Definitive-Identification-Legendary/dp/B085RNKWT6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GVSLFPNBFI8K&keywords=the+battle+leader+of+ribchester+august+hunt&qid=1679670838&sprefix=the+battle-leader+of+ribchester%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1