The Roman Ribchester Fort (Artist Peter Dunn)
Only a short time ago I wrote this blog post:
The gist of it was this: feeling quite confident that the province of Liburnia was formed in the late 160s by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, I then decided that the foundation date was the most likely time for L. Artorius Castus to have been made procurator of that new administrative region. And from that it naturally followed that Castus must have fought in Armenia, making ARMENIOS the preferred reading for the fragmentary ARM[...]S on his memorial stone.
Having reached those conclusions it was a simple matter to fall back on my earlier book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF THE NORTH, which proposed a historical Arthur candidate based on Hadrian's Wall, rather than one whose origin lay at the Sarmatian veteran fort of Ribchester. Why? Well, for the simple reason that if Castus had fought in Armenia, having gone there with Statius Priscus, he was never in Britain when the Sarmatians were there. Any connection with Ribchester was irrevocably lost.
But the other day I realized that something Dr. Linda Malcor had said to me in private conversation needed to be listened to: just because Liburnia seems to have been founded early does not mean that Castus had to be its first procurator. He could have been appointed there later.
And as so often happens when I'm rudely jolted out of a certain, fixed mindset, a little quaking fear crept into my consciousness: WHAT ABOUT THE 1,500 BRITISH TROOPS CASSIUS DIO SAYS CAME TO THE CONTINENT DURING THE REIGN OF COMMODUS? Why had this dread coiled up in my brain like a sleeping dragon, to be awakened once a treasured assumption came into question?
BECAUSE IN ADOPTING A NON-RIBCHESTER GENESIS FOR ARTHUR, I HAD LITERALLY DECIDED, AT SOME INSIDIOUS LEVEL, TO REFUSE TO TREAT OF DIO'S ACCOUNT. In fact, I went so far as to completely and utterly ignore it, as if it had suddenly and magically become devoid of all merit or had vanished entirely. I think a part of me was "okay" with saying, "Oh, it doesn't matter. It was probably just someone else who, at about the right time for LAC, happened to have led the exact equivalent of three legionary detachments from Britain."
That's how easy it is to deceive oneself when adopting a belief not properly supported by evidence. In this case, the evidence is Dio's account itself. And while we could say it's not actually evidence (as there are a couple of other accounts of the fall of Perennis - although, as I showed, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive; see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/02/reconciling-l-artorius-castus.html), it really is, as for the time period in question and as the only literary record of such a British force going anywhere it perfectly dovetails with what Castus has on his stone. He commanded (as dux) three legionary vexillations against ARM[...]S. With the Deserters' War going on all over northern and western Europe, including in Gallia Lugdunensis, and with ARMORICOS fitting just fine on the stone, it would be practicing very poor scholaship indeed not to accept the Dio story as a possible explanation for the inscription. As, in fact, have several much better (and professional) scholars before me.
Now, if we follow the dictates of intellectual honesty and consider Dio's account of the 1,500 men as a possible explanation for what we find on LAC's memorial stone, then Sawyl, a name used for Uther in the 'Marwnat Vthyr Pen', comes back into play. There is no doubt in my mind that it is indeed Sawyl that occurs in the elegy. For some details on this, please see the following blog posts:
I'm also fairly confident that Sawyl, as a man of the North, belonged near Ribchester (as my treatment of the place-name Samlesbury bears this out). If he did, then he was a descendent of Britons and Sarmatians who resided at and in the vicinity of the fort there. LAC would undoubtedly have employed Sarmatian cavalry in Britain and it is conceivable that some of them accompanied him to the Continent. His name, therefore, could well have become famous among them and was preserved in their memory, being passed down through the generations to the famous Arthur of the 5th-6th centuries.
It is not debatable whether we can associate the Sarmatians with the draco; this is a well-established fact. We need only, then, satisfy ourselves that the Sawyl name attached to Uther Pendragon in the poem is an actual allusion to Sawyl of the North and not merely a poetic metaphor. There is also the problem of Uther Pendragon's apparent identificaton with the warrior monk St. Illtud to consider.
Let's deal with this problem step by step.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, either accidentally or intentionally, got things wrong. He has Uther transformed not into 'a second [i.e. Old Testament] Sawyl/Samuel', but into Gorlois. He got the latter from the gorlassar epithet provided for Uther at the beginning of the elegy. But Geoffrey does compare St. Illtud (his Eldad) to Samuel. I've pointed out that in the Life of St. Cadog, Illtud is replaced in one context with a Sawyl.
So what is going on here? As I've pointed out before, Illtud is said to have been the commander of the household troops of a chieftain residing at Dinas Powys in south Wales. We are told that when he became a religious, he put away his wife. He is not credited with children, although he is said to be Arthur's cousin.
My idea is that the Northern Sawyl, who was the original Uther Pendragon due to his relationship with the continued veneration of the draco standard among the elite at Ribchester, came to be confused for or conflated with Illtud because the latter held several Latin titles/ranks (as evinced in his VITA) that could easily have been rendered 'the terrible chief-warrior/chief of warriors' in the Welsh. In this sense, Illtud was not Arthur's father - Sawyl of the North held that distinction instead. During the usual haphazard development of folklore and heroic legend, differing strands of tradition must have existed at various times, and sometimes side by side. We ended up with a Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall from gorlassar, 'the very blue', a description of Uther's blue-enamelled armor and/or weapons (or his being tattooed with woad?), and St. Illtud as Sawyl.
Suffice it to say that it is not at all impossible for Uther Pendragon, Arthur's father, to originally have been Sawyl of the North. It was this Sawyl who, like Uther, had a son named Madog. Sawyl's son Madog was called by the Irish Ailithir, 'pilgrim', a word derived from elements meaning, literally, 'other land.' Uther's grandson through Madog was Eli[g]wlad, a name which semantically means exactly the same thing as Ailithir. Sawyl of the North had married an Irish princess, and this would account nicely for the fact that all subsequent Arthurs belong to Irish-descended dynasties in Britain - something no one has been able to account for as yet. And, of course, there is the Sarmatian draco and the credible connection between the Sarmatians who had settled at Ribchester and L. Artorius Castus. The Arthurian battles are all in the North, along a line running roughly up and down the old Roman Dere Street. Ribchester is perfectly positioned to have been the base of operations for these battles, especially given the town's close relationship to York and to the Sixth Legion in the Roman period.
CONCLUSION
If we allow for L. Artorius Castus to have been made procurator of Liburnia later rather than earlier, and acknowledge the uniqueness of the account in Dio of the movement of British troops to the Continent under Commodus, then our best candidate for Uther Pendragon, the father of Arthur, is Sawyl of Ribchester.
It goes without saying that if we opt for a Castus who served as Liburnian procurator earlier, and who went to Armenia with Statius Priscus, the Sawyl problem becomes unsolvable. We would have to accept that Sawyl as it appears in the 'Marwnat Vthyr Pen' is nothing more than a poetic metaphor, a way of comparing Uther (whoever he might be!) with the famous Biblical figure. We can even try to see Uther as Illtud. But I have tried that already, and the effort was a spectacular failure.
But if we reject Sawyl of the North, we lose everything we otherwise gain through him as Arthur's real father. We are stuck fumbling and scrambling for some way of situating Arthur in the North. My "default position" was the known sub-Roman/Dark Age royal hall at Birdoswald, which had a draco-bearing Dacian garrison. I can go so far in that direction as to very tentatively propose that Ceidio son of Arthwys (Arthwys being an eponym for the 'People of the Bear', perhaps of the Irthing Valley), whose full name may have been something like 'Battle-leader' in the Cumbric, was our Arthur. I can point to Camboglanna/Camlann in the Irthing Valley just west of Birdoswald, and to Aballava/Avalan/'Avalon' a few miles further west. That all looks great, but is really no more than a guess. It might well be that Arthur was not defending his home on the Wall, but instead fought opponents there, as Eliffer of York's sons Peredur and Gwrci would do (at Carrawburgh [1] and Arthuret) in the following generation.
Myself, I now feel that there is a little bit too much going on in favor of Sawyl to let him go so easily.
[1]
Eliffer's sons Peredur and Gwrgi are recorded as fighting at a place called Caer Greu (‘Fort Greu’) and at Arfderydd/Arthuret just NW of Carlisle.
Greu has been tentatively related to W. creu, ‘blood’. I would propose that Caer Greu/Creu is
Carrawburgh, i.e. the Roman fort of Brocolitia, on Hadrian’s Wall. English 'Carrawburgh' could easily reflect something like very early Old Welsh
*'Cair Carrou'. The extant form of 'Caer Greu' could be the regular Middle Welsh reflex of this.
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