Arthur's Battles
... what about Camlan?
Castlesteads/Camboglanna
And that is the sticking point.
Sure, I can drop Badon from the list for the reasons I've expressed before. And then allow the ARM.GENTES reading for the Castus inscription's lacuna.
That would do the trick - if we could explain Camlan away. Which I cannot.
Or we can allow Arthur to be the son of the northern Dumnonian king, Ceredig Wledig, the crudelisque tyranni/Uther Pendragon, and follow the HISTORIA BRITTONUM's description of Arthur as leading other British kings in war. The transfer of Arthur in legend from the Northern Dumnonii to the southern tribe of the same name (whose territory contained Cornwall) is not difficult to account for. And the Dalriadan royal house is most likely to have gotten the name Arthur from intermarriage with the Strathclyde Britons. Pedr or "Petrus" the Rock of Dyfed named his son Arthur after the famous Arthur of Alclud, the Rock of Clyde, called Petra Cloithe by Adamnan.
Such an Arthur, originating at Alclud in Strathclyde might well have fought in Caledonia, the Forth Basin, Manau Gododdin, as well as all the sites down through the old Brigantian kingdom and even to Buxton/Bathum itself. Not all sites would have witnessed action against Saxons, it goes without saying.
Let's explore how this might have worked.
We know from the HB that the later Strathcylde king, Rhydderch, fought against the Saxons with other powerful British kings. Whether we can say they fought as an alliance is u certain, but we do know that one of these other kings - Morgan Fwlch of the Tyne Gap - killed Urien, Rhydderch's contemporary, out of envy over the latter's power. The killing occurred on the coast opposite Lindisfarne.
We could, then, see in Arthur someone like Rhydderch. Only he was the son of the dominant chieftain of the North, Ceredig, and was acting in his father's stead as a commander of the forces of kingdoms that were subject to Strathclyde. In other words, Ceredig was a sort of high king of the North.
Clearly, as Arthur does not appear in the Strathclyde king list, he did not survive long enough to become king.
But it is surely possible that he marshalled an alliance of British kingdoms under his father's flag and may even have won a resounding victory in southernmost Brigantian territory at Buxton. While the Welsh seem to put the Badon battle in the South at the Liddington Badbury, the spelling of Badon and even the spelling of the Welsh form of Badon points to a Bathum site.
Is this view of Arthur prohibitively far-fetched? I don't think so. In fact, it seems a great deal more credible than seeing in a 6th century hero a folktale ghost from the early 3rd.
To circle back to Camlan... what happened there, exactly?
Well, it is possible the Saxons defeated Arthur and Moderatus there. Or we may have a foreshadowing of the later conflict between Morgan and Urien.
This approach represents THE ONLY THEORY I'VE COME UP WITH THAT EXPLAINS EVERY FACET OF THE EARLY ARTHURIAN SOURCES.
And it is the one I will be going with in my final nonfiction book on Arthur.
NOTE: It is still possible the name Arthur found its way to Strathclyde via L. Artorius Castus. But as Professor Roger Tomlin has observed, Artorius was not a rare name, and Roman names would have been plentiful in Britain in the sub-Roman period. If Arthur son of Ceredig of Strathclyde works for the famous Dark Age hero, I'm no longer much concerned about where his name ultimately came from.
