St. Illtud's Church, Llantwit Major
Regardless where I put Arthur (chronologically or geographically), the only certain identification I've ever been able to make for his supposed father, Uther Pendragon, is one with St. Illtud.
I won't bore my readers with the many articles I wrote on this identification; they can look them up here themselves. But given that I recently seem to have uncovered a lot of evidence (or at least have developed a plausible argument) for Arthur being based on the Roman officer L. Artorius Castus, it it necessary for me to come to grips with what I have come to think of as "The Illtud Problem."
The "Problem" has its roots in traditions associated with Illtud that exist in the early Welsh heroic poetry and in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Place-name studies also contributed to the "Problem."
In brief, the Welsh PA GUR poem tells us that Mabon, one of the predatory birds of the River Ely in Glamorgan, was a servant (gwas) of Uther Pendragon. As St. Illtud, called the "terribilis miles", "magister militum", etc., in his Life, was commander of the troops in Penychen (either the Dinas Powys hillfort for the much grander Caerau, ancient oppidum of the Silures), and Mabon was present at Gileston (earlier Church of Mabon of the Vale), and the Glywysing of the region became confused with Gloucester, where Mabon in CULHWCH AC OLWEN is held prisoner, and Illtud in Geoffrey of Monmouth (Eldadus) is the bishop of Gloucester, I could draw no other conclusion than that Illtud = Uther.
[There is a lot more to it than that summary would suggest, of course; again, I urge interested readers to check out my other blogs on the subject.]
The "Problem" got worse when I realized the father Bicanus of Illtud, and his origin point of Llydaw (supposedly Brittany, which makes no sense, as traffic in the time period we are considering was in the opposite direction, i.e. Britons were bailing to Little Britain, not vice-versa) was actually Bicknor and Lydbrook in what had been the Kingdom of Ercing, which had several Arthurian associations. Welsh Bicknor's original name was that of the Church of Constantine, and that name in the Galfridain tradition is said to be the father of Uther.
Things got crazier still when I explored the Bicknor place-name. It is not Welsh, but English, based on an English personal name. I noticed that the same name was preserved at the Bican Dike at the Liddington Badbury. Liddington derives from the same Lyd- stream-name as Lydbrook hard by Bicknor. And the Welsh Annals (via the entry on the Second Battle of Badon) locates the famous Battle of Badon at Liddington Castle.
At this point in my Arthurian research I was rather ecstatic, and considered my work done. But my euphoria did not last long...
I had to place the Arthurian battles for a hero who seemed descended from the Roman period Dobunni. I couldn't do this without resorting to clever, but unconvincing identifications with the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE's Gewissei battles. I was also forced to search for a Camlan in any of several Cam- names in south-central England. There are some good candidates, but no way to prove any one of them should be preferred over the others.
So, I found myself stuck with the perfect candidate for Arthur, yet with an early list of battles (from the HB and AC) that definitely seemed properly placed in northern England and Scotland.
In an effort to reconcile the two apparent contradictions, I noticed what appeared to be a second problem. We can call this "The Sawyl/Samuel Problem." One amended reading of a line in the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN has Uther claim he was transformed into a 'second Sawyl.' This seemed to be reflected in a number of contexts in which Illtud was associated or confused/conflated with Sawyl of Ribchester in northern England (or the Illtud-Sawyl confusion/conflation had caused Sawyl of Ribchester to be relocated to southern Wales, as Sawyl of Ribchester had fathered several saints and could himself, conceivably, have eventually become a saint).
Sawyl's son Madog, called Ailithir in the Irish sources, looked a lot like Madog son of Uther and Madog's son, Eliwlad.
Going with Sawyl of Ribchester as the REAL FATHER OF ARTHUR, a man who came to be wrongly linked to Uther/Illtud, allowed me to have the northern battles. In fact, the Welsh tale THE DREAM OF RHONABWY situates Badon at Buxton of Bathamgate, and Camboglanna on Hadrian's Wall now again worked perfectly as the site of Arthur's death.
A couple minor problems remained. First, the most northernmost battles looked like they belonged to either Artur of Dalriada or even L. Artorius Castus. These were rather easily dismissed as mere intrusions into the Arthurian list - a list long suspected to contain a record of the battles of more than one Arthur.
A more serious issue had to do with the Artorius name (presumably from L. Artorius Castus) being preserved for a couple centuries in the Ribchester area. For the name to be famous enough to be used of a royal son at a site settled by Sarmatian veterans, it is reasonable to assume that the people there had some significant folk memory of Castus. If so, we could not have ARMENIOS on the L. Artorius Castus memorial stone, as that would mean Castus was in Britain before the Sarmatians arrived there. It seems unlikely the Arthur name would show up at Ribchester unless the Sarmatians had been utilized by Castus in some fashion. Yes, it is true York of Castus and his Sixth legion had a very close relationship with Ribchester and a name popular at the former place could later have been adopted by the nobility at the former. But, again, this does not seem very likely. ARMORICOS ( = action in the Deserters' War under Commodus) for the Castus inscription's ARM[...]S suddenly became more attractive.
After all that, why did I abandon Sawyl as Arthur's father?
Two reasons:
1) the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN line where kawyl is emended to sawyl was better replaced with canwyl, a word that could figuratively mean 'star.' This meaning not only matched a line occuring earlier in the poem, but would explain Geoffrey of Monmouth's claim that the dragon-star (comet) was Uther himself. Geoffrey had taken the gorlassar epithet of Uther in the elegy and invented Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, out of that.
2) The coincidence (?) of the Bicknor/Lydbrook and Bican/Liddington correspondence, along with the much earlier identification of Badon with Liddington in the AC (rather than relying on the very late literary tale from the MABINOGION for Buxton), pointed back to Illtud.
And that is where I sat with my Arthurian research until I began to wonder about (and doubt) whether the Welsh tradition regarding Uther was correct.
It was time, I decided, to look again at the Castus inscription's ARM[...]S. Could anything else be made to fit in that gap? The only recent effort, the proposed ARMATOS (Dr. Linda A. Malcor, Antonio Trinchese and Alessandro Faggiani), had been critically savaged from all quarters. I had not been receptive of the new idea, either.
A related question concerned what would have to be done to read the three legions command clause of the inscription as being literal, rather than implying vexillations. The only way for that to happen, I reasoned, was if the legionary force were being led inside Britain.
I was drawn to an inscription I perceived as being similar to that of Castus and discussed this in detail later, once I had proposed the ARM.GENTES reading:
In Roger Tomlin's phrase, the location of these traitors and rebels is "geographically imprecise." He described the inscription thusly:
"It is a statue base erected when he was governor of Lower Pannonia detailing his earlier career which included the command of Leg I Minervia in Lower Germany when he commanded detachments taken from both Germanies 'against defectors and rebels'."
We might assume, then, that the trouble was somewhere in or immediately adjacent to Germania Superior or Inferior.
ARMATAS GENTES, 'armed tribes', is no different. The Sixth Legion was the guardian of the limes in Britain. Its emphasis was always oriented northwards. Given that Castus was a prefect of the Sixth when he became dux of the legions, any armed tribes he took that force against must have been in northern Britain. At least, I don't see how anyone reading his stone could interpret such a phrase any other way.
Once I had confirmed that such a reading was possible through precedents, and indeed, was deemed acceptable by scholars such as Benet Salway, I realized I had a new problem on my hand - a problem that once again involved the HB Arthurian battles.
For these battles were arranged in the North exactly as one would expect the Severan battles to be.
Additional work on the Celidon Wood battle and those of the Tribruit (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/tribruit-of-arthur-trajectus-of.html) and Bassas (never mind York as the City of the Legion) forced me to the conclusion that the legendary Arthur might be Castus after all. When I discounted Badon (always problematic when it comes to the place being assigned to an already famous Arthur), and presented a decent argument for Camlan being a relocation of the Miathi battle of Artur of Dalriada (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/camlan-as-folk-relocation-of-dalriadan.html ), the Welsh tradition for Illtud or Sawyl - or anyone else for that matter - began to lose its allure. It began to feel more and more like spurious tradition. The possibility that Uther was merely a place-holder name for a hero whose father wasn't known became more credible.
I was even able to suggest a mechanism by which we could explain how Castus could have been projected forward in time (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/two-lupi-two-severi-mechanism-by-which.html).
My decision at this point in my Arthurian "career" is whether to back my new reading of ARM.GENTES or to play it safe and go with one of the more established readings. If I do go with "armed tribes", then I can't confidently continue to argue for a Dark Age British Arthur. The correspondence of the HB battle list with a Roman dux under Severus is just too strong. We would have to propose a Dark Age Arthur who was fighting in the exact same places as Severus and that, I'm afraid, is absurd.
Clearly, I have some serious thinking to do before I can settle on who Arthur may - or may not - have been.
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