The famous chapter on Arthur in the HISTORIA BRITTONUM contains some important information which is to be found previously in that work. I am referring, of course, to the following passage:
38. Hengist, after this, said to Vortigern, "I will be to you both a father and an adviser; despise not my counsels, and you shall have no reason to fear being conquered by any man or any nation whatever; for the people of my country are strong, warlike, and robust: if you approve, I will send for my son and his brother, both valiant men who at my invitation will fight against the Scots, and you can give them the countries in the north, near the wall called "Gual." The incautious sovereign having assented to this, Octa and Ebusa arrived with forty ships. In these they sailed round the country of the Picts, laid waste the Orkneys, and took possession of many regions, even to the Pictish confines.
Unfortunately, a great many amateur Arthurian scholars have taken this statement at face value. In doing so, they make a number of errors. To begin with, they must buy into the notion that Vortigern, the superbus tyrannus of Gildas, was a high king of sub-Roman Britain whose power extended over the whole of the island. This is an absurd notion - yet one that is still current in Arthurian circles (outside of academia). Instead, there is every reason to hold to the view that Vortigern's very name (one found in several early Irish contexts, and preserved in a small kingdom in central Wales) provided the clerics recording the period's history with a scapegoat - a stock villain, if you will. Rather than offer to posterity the shameful picture of a Britain defeated by the Saxon invasion, it was far easier and more palatable to accept that a single evil man was responsible for inviting in the enemy. And that is what we have in Vortigern of the HB.
Needless to say, the real Vortigern (who seems to have been Hiberno-British) did not have any control of the northern part of the island. Even the Romans under Severus failed in the attempt to bring Highland Scotland under their sway. It is entirely possible that Scotland and the islands north of it (if these last had any inhabitants worth bothering with!) were subjected to independent Saxon raids. We might compare such with the later Viking incursions and the Norse colonization of the Orkneys and parts of Scotland. But these raiders were not mercenaries hired by a high-king of the British based in Wales.
Still, the story of Saxons at the Antonine Wall and in Highland Scotland is interesting in an Arthurian context, as that is exactly where Severus and his forces concentrated their efforts.
Which brings us to:
56 In illo tempore Saxones invalescebant in multitudine et crescebant in Brittannia. mortuo autem Hengisto Octha filius eius transivit de sinistrali parte Britanniae ad regnum Cantorum et de ipso orti sunt reges Cantorum. tunc Arthur pugnabat contra illos in illis diebus cum regibus Brittonum, sed ipse erat dux bellorum.
56. At that time, the Saxons grew strong by virtue of their large number and increased in power in Britain. Hengist having died, however, his son Octha crossed from the northern part of Britain to the kingdom of Kent and from him are descended the kings of Kent. Then Arthur along with the kings of Britain fought against them in those days, but Arthur himself was the military commander [also "dux erat bellorum"].
The language here is ambiguous. Just what Saxons did Arthur fight? The ones in the North? The Kentish ones? Or just Saxons in general? I received two slightly diverging opinions on this question, one from an expert in medieval Latin and the other who specializes in Classical Latin:
"Strictly-speaking from the structure of the Latin I don't believe it is possible to be sure whether 'contra illos' refers back to 'reges Cantorum' (kings of Kent) or further back to the 'Saxones'."
Professor Rosalind Love, FBA
Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon
Head of Department, Department of ASNC
"In strict grammar ILLOS could be taken to refer to its immediate antecedent, REGES CANTORVM. But it would be odd for Arthur to be fighting a series of 'kings of Kent', one after another. The reference to Octha founding this dynasty is surely parenthetical. There is no explicit references to the 'Saxons of Kent' here, and I would take the grammatical antecedent of ILLOS to be the SAXONES who head the paragraph, now 'growing in strength'.
In other words, the passage should be taken to mean that Arthur led the fight against the growing strength of the Saxons, not against the Saxons specifically in Kent."
Dr Roger Tomlin
Emeritus Lecturer in Late Roman History
Faculty of History
Univeristy of Oxford
But what happens if we look at Chapter 56 in the light of an Arthur who is a distant echo of L. Artorius Castus?
Well, we would then have an Arthur fighting enemies in the North, at the Wall and in Scotland, where the HB puts the Saxon mercenaries of Vortigern.
The HB also never calls Arthur a king. As has been pointed out many times, he is instead called merely a soldier. The term is used twice of the hero in the MIRABILIA:
73 Est aliud mirabile in regione quae dicitur Buelt. Est ibi cumulus lapidum, et unus lapis superpositus super congestum cum uestigio canis in eo. Quando venatus est porcum Troynt, impressit Cabal, qui erat canis Arturi militis, vestigium in lapidi, et Arthur postea congregauit congestum lapidum sub lapide in quo erat vestigium canis et uocatur Carn Cabal. Et veniunt homines uero et tollunt lapidem in un manibus suis per spatium diei et noctis, et in crastino die inuenitur super congestum suum.
There is another marvel in the region which is called Buelt. There is a mound of stones there and one stone placed above the pile with the pawprint of a dog in it. When Cabal, who was the dog of Arthur the soldier, was hunting the boar Troynt, he impressed his print in the stone, and afterwards Arthur assembled a stone mound under the stone with the print of his dog, and it is called the Carn Cabal. And men come and remove the stone in their hands for the length of a day and a night; and on the next day it is found on top of its mound.
Est aliud miraculum in region quae vocatur Ercing. habetur ibi sepulcrum iuxta fontem, qui cognominatur Licat Anir, et viri nomen, qui sepultus est in tumulo, sic vocabatur Anir: filius Arthuri militis erat et ipse occidit eum ibidem et sepelivit. et veniunt homines ad mensurandum tumulum in longitudine aliquando sex pedes, aliquando novem, aliquando duodecim, aliquando quidecim. in qua mensura metieris eum in ista vice, iterum non invenies eum in una mensura, et ego solus probavi.
There is another wonder in the region which is called Ercing. A tomb is located there next to a spring which is called Licat Amr; and the name of the man who is buried in the tomb was called thus: Amr. He was the son of Arthur the soldier, and Arthur himself killed and buried him in that very place. And men come to measure the grave and find it sometimes six feet in length, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen. At whatever length you might measure it at one time, a second time you will not find it to have the same length--and I myself have put this to the test.
The early date of the HB precludes us from being able to interpret militis as meaning "knight" in the later sense.
"KNIGHT
In continental Europe from the 10th cent. onwards, the term miles (knight) was applied to a mounted warrior usually dependent on a greater lord. Domesday evidence suggests that this definition is appropriate for the knights of Norman England. Over the next two centuries, knights were enfeoffed with land, becoming more fully involved in landed society. Although the term never lost its military connotation, it had become by the late 14th cent. a social rank below the nobility, but above the squirearchy."
What we have, then, in the militis of the HB, is just a soldier. And that is exactly what L. Artorius Castus was. Even once he had attained his rank of prefect of the Sixth Legion and then was given a temporary military command as a dux, he was still only a soldier. Not a king.
I find this to be rather sobering evidence that the later great king of Arthurian story, whether he be viewed as an over-king like Vortigern or simply a king allied with other kings of equal power, is most certainly a fiction.
And, indeed, the only option that I can see, if we still want to opt for a sub-Roman hero, is to assign him the role of a mercenary captain in the employ of different kings at different times. It is not likely that such a mercenary "leader of battles" would be put at the head of a combined force provided by several kings (all of whom were doubtless antagonistic towards each other). Instead, he would be going from job to job, so to speak, providing his services where and when they were needed. To have someone of true federate status, as happened under the Romans, we would need a centralized authority that was capable of providing federates with land, probably along the limes, in exchange for protection of the border region. We have no evidence such a centralized authority existed once the Romans withdrew from the island.
Given the extant of Saxon settlement during the supposed floruit of the Dark Age Arthur (see range maps at the top of this blog), and having identified the Arthurian battles as I have (see that map above for those as well; note that Buxton, a possible Badon, is not displayed), the only possible place for the traditional hero is the North. But the moment we try and situate such a chieftain there we run into problems. We need to assume that he was fighting along a front that stretched from York (or Buxton, if we wish to re-insert Badon there) in the south all the way to Caledonia. Yes, granted, there is the off-chance that the Celidon Wood should be placed in Lowland Scotland and I once made a case for that being at or near the Caddon Water for etymological and geographical reasons. Yet even so, we would be envisioning a mercenary captain or a sort of relic of the Roman period Dux Britanniarum fighting throughout the joint territories of the Brigantes and the Votadini (Gododdin). The battles at Dunipace (Bassas) and Queensferry (Tribruit), one might say (as in the PA GUR poem) at the 'border of Eidyn' or in Manau Gododdin, may be intrusions into the battle list, as one Irish source has Arthur son of Dalriada die fighting the Miathi. Dunipace is directly between the two Miathi forts.
It goes without saying that in this scenario the frontier zone between the Britons to the west and the Saxons to the east was Dere Street, as all the battles run up and down that main Roman arterial. Arthur, if he had any base at all, might find his home on the Wall (Birdoswald and Stanwix/"Arthuriburgum", which I have treated of at great length in my writings, are good candidates) or at York (where L. Artorius Castus was stationed, and adjacent to which there was probably a Dalmatian unit).
Uther Pendragon, whose tail I chased for many years, seems to have undergone several permutations in Welsh tradition prior to being recreated in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He has proven spectacularly unhelpful in being able to pin down Arthur - unless his being born on a litter through the North is a Severan motif (something I have discussed above) . If we ignore the layers of tradition embedded in the Welsh sources and accept the possibility that the 'dragon' of Pendragon, while utilized in Welsh poetry as a metaphor for a warrior, originated in the Roman draco, then it is tempting to place Arthur's father at Birdoswald, home of the Dacian garrison. I have theorized in the past that the Birdoswald fort was actually nicknamed the Aelian Dragon after its military unit. The name Arthur from Artorius may have been preserved among the population of the nearby Carvoran fort with its Dalmatian garrison. Finally, the River Irthing, a name possibly from a Cumbric word meaning 'Little Bear', could have been the home of the *Artenses or Bear-people, a northern tribe represented by the Welsh eponym Arthwys.
The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we think it more likely that an attested Roman general who may well have served under Severus in the greatest Roman invasion northern Britain had ever experienced is Arthur or whether we can safely propose instead an Arthur who is attested only in the HB and the AC and who, if I have the battles situated correctly, appears to mirror where L. Artorius Castus would have been active.
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