STONES AND HORSES: REACHING A FINAL DECISION ON WHETHER ARTHUR IS A ROMAN SOLDIER OR A SUB-ROMAN BRITON

[Dedicated to my friend Tony Sullivan (who urged me to reconsider my Sub-Roman Arthur)]

Last June I wrote the following piece as a sort of farewell to my dream of discovering a Dark Age Arthur:

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/06/my-purely-imaginary-northern-arthur.html

After that blog, I pretty much went "all in" with my Artorius theory, one based primarily on my proposed reading of ARM.GENTES for the lacuna of the L. Artorius Castus memorial inscription.  I've recently produced an entire book that argues for Castus = Arthur (LET NOT ANYONE ESCAPE FROM SHEER DESTRUCTION, https://a.co/d/9EDrUev). But there remain some things that bother me about that argument, clever and comprehensive though it appears.  

Chief among those things are the ANNALES CAMBRIAE dates given for Arthur (c. 516 and c. 537) and the inclusion of Badon and Camlan in the Arthurian list of battles. And I will get to my thinking on these matters in a bit.

But first I wish to concentrate on two odd characteristics that are present in the earliest tradition concerning the various Arthurs.  I talking here, of course, about the prevalence of stones and horses in the sources. I have discussed both motifs before. But I have come to feel that they may be more important than I previously made them out to be.  

As far as stones go... 

Arthur of Dyfed has as a father one Petrus, a Roman name meaning "rock, stone."  Arthur son of Bicoir kills the Irish prince Mongan with a stone.  This is in one source referred to as a dragon stone, by which is probably meant obsidian.  However, the stone in question may originally have come from a folklore reference to a large monolith at a possible Bicoir site (see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2024/11/arthur-son-of-bicoir-of-kintyre.html). In the 1700s, Stanwix (for Etterby) was known as Arthur's fort (Arthuriburgum), and the huge Roman fort there housed the thousand-strong cavalry force of the Petriana. Some scholars hold that Petrianis of the NOTITIA DIGNITATUM is an actual nickname for the place, not a ghost-name.  If so, it is interesting that the Petriana were named for a certain Titus Pomponius Petra. Petra, once again, is stone or rock. The Arthur name in Dalriada is often thought to have come from the adjacent British kingdom of Strathclyde, with its capital at Dumbarton or Alclud, the Rock of Clyde, called Petra Cloithe in Adamnan.  

While probably not relatable to the above, I've demonstrated that the name Uther Pendragon was derived from the "mil uathmar" and "chend" of the Irish story of Mongan's begetting. And those terms, in turn, arose from an Irish interpretation of an attested variant of the placename Degsastan (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2017/10/degsastan-and-origin-of-mil-uathmarfer.html?m=1, https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-new-and-certain-identification-of.html?m=1). Degsastan's second element is the AS word for "stone."

And here is where the horses tie in (pun strictly intended).  Arthur is first mentioned in the HISTORIA BRITTONUM in the context of Hengist's death.  Hengist is a Saxon name meaning "stallion", and I have suggested that Hengist and Horsa (transparently "Horse") are Germanized names formed from the earlier British rulers of Kent like Epillus. The Irish Dessi-founded kingdom of Dyfed is replete with horse-lore (Gwri Gwallt-Eurin, Rhiannon, Manawydan).  There is a horse-name at the head of the Dessi pedigree. The Dalriada of Kintyre was founded on the peninsula belonging to the British Epidii or Horse-people.  The Dalriadans themselves had a horse-name at the head of their royal genealogy.  Kent, called Cendlond in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, may well have been confused with Kintyre/Cindtire, 'Land's End/Head', where Arthur son of Bicoir is situated. The ruling center of Arthur son of Petr was in Pembroke, earlier Penbrog or 'Land's End/Head.'

Now, sure, all of that may simply be coincidence.  Or even just more spurious tradition.  But, alas, along with the Arthurian battles it is really all we have when it comes to being able to localize our hero somewhere.  The Arthurian birth story and the names of his parents are complete fiction (see 

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2017/10/degsastan-and-origin-of-mil-uathmarfer.html) and so are spectacularly unhelpful in trying to figure out who Arthur actually was.  The Arthurs who cluster about the Strathclyde kingdom, home of the Roman period Dumnonii, may account for the relocation of Arthur in legend to Dumnonia in SW Britain, where an identically named tribe existed.  

If we go with the earliest stratum of Arthurian lore, one that refers to him not as a king, but only as a soldier, and combine that with the pronounced equine element, we do end up with a figure who looks a lot like the eques/knight L. Artorius Castus.  But there are two problems with that conclusion.  First, there were a lot of members of the knight class in Britain during Rome's presence there.  And it was common for non-knights who happened to be cavalrymen to put eques on inscriptions.  We have a great many such examples.  To claim that Castus was famous as an eques and so his name Artorius (which would have been linked to the British and Irish words for "bear", in any event) became popular among horse-loving Celts centuries after his floruit seems unlikely.  Not impossible if Castus had achieved a quasi-mythical status in Britain, I suppose.

But when we toss the stone into the pond (!), the ripples that are created seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with Castus.  Instead, we are forced to look at a Dark Age Arthur at Petrianis, himself a descendent of the Ala Petriana. Naturally, the name preserved over the centuries there may have come ultimately from Castus. Or it may simply be the name Arthur, derived from another man of that name. As Dr. Roger Tomlin has pointed out to me, Artorius "was a not uncommon name" among the Romans.  We know that there were Artorii in the Dalmatian province over which Castus was procurator and some very good scholars think Castus may have not only have died in Dalmatia, but may well have been born there.  We had Dalmatian units serving in Britain next to Castus's York and at the Carvoran fort on Hadrian's Wall. The British name of Carvoran was Magnis, "Stone, Rock."  The Birdoswald Roman fort just to the west of Carvoran, with its Dark Age royal center, is in the Irthing Valley of the Camboglanna/Camlan fort.  Dr. Andrew Breeze thinks the etymology of the river-name Irthing is "Little Bear", and I have tentatively placed the *Artenses (see the Welsh eponym Arthwys) or "Bear-people" in that valley. 

However, it is important to note that neither Carvoran nor Birdoswald housed cavalry.  On the other hand, the Stanwix garrison was the largest horse unit in all of Britain.  

Petrianis also has some other points in favor of its being the Arthurian center during the Sub-Roman period.  It was quite close to the Aballava/Avalana/"Avalon" Roman fort on the Wall, with its Dea Latis or "Lake Goddess."  It was also near Concavata, a fort named for the raised bog in its vicinity (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2024/12/a-new-theory-on-concavata-name-for.html).  The dish known as a concavata was comparable to the gradalis/grail in medieval sources and I have proposed the fort at Drumburgh as the prototype for Arthur's Grail Castle.  Lastly, Camlan at Castlesteads on the Wall is not far to the east of Stanwix.  

In other words, Stanwix/Petrianis is the perfect locus in the context of other important Arthurian sites in the region.

This is the way it may have all worked: 

1) A famous horseman Arthur of the 6th century, a descendent of the largest cavalry group in all of Britain, the Ala Petriana, resides at Petrianis.  He fights a series of battles ranging from Buxton (Badon) at the southern edge of the old Brigantian territory all the way up to either a Caledonian Wood in Lowland Scotland or in Highland Caledonia itself.  Battles from the Wall south are explicable in what Dr. Ken Dark called a war-leader who was attempting to maintain the prerogatives of the Roman Dux

Britanniarum. Battles to the North - which, frankly, accord much better with L. Artorius Castus - could without too much of a strain be construed as being due to either Arthur's conquest of that area or his being in alliance with the Gododdin (Roman Votadini).  Remember, the HB does tell us Arthur was acting as a general in the wars of other British kings. 

I'm reminded of the great Welsh poem THE GODODDIN, which tells of the disastrous British battle against the English at Catterick in Yorkshire.  If such a force could come that far south from Edinburgh, then we might see Arthur doing something similar to help defend "Eidyn on the border" (see the PA GUR poem).  We know Urien of Rheged, who came after Arthur, fought at Bremenium/Brewyn/High Rochester (an Arthur site), but also at Catterick. 

The battles in the Manau Gododdin region, where we find the Roman period Maeatae (Miathi in the Irish sources), could belong to Castus or even to Arthur son of Aedan, who is said to die variously while fighting against the Miathi or in Circinn further north (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-discovery-of-ancient-pictish.html). It has always been deemed possible that the battles of several Arthurs have been combined to form the Arthurian list in the HISTORIA BRITTONUM, although the Badon and Camlan battles can only belong to the Dark Age British leader - especially if we hold fast to the dates in the AC.

2) The Dalriadans come into the Epidii territory, and the Dessi come into the Dyfed of Epona. Within a fairly short period of time, and after intermarriage with the indigenous Britons, they decide they are thoroughly British, or desperately want to be.  The Dyfed genealogy shows this, as the Irish version has the Irish names intact, while the Welsh version has stricken the Irish names and replaced them with Roman ones.  One of the best ways for these horse-loving Irish-descended dynaties in Britain to assert their "Britishness" was to give royal sons a name of a famous British horse warrior, i.e. Arthur.  The Petriana link inspired Petrus of Dyfed to name a son after this horse warrior of the Petriana.  The Strathclyde Britons of Petra Cloithe/Alclud, through a niece of the king who was married to Aedan, passed the Arthur name to the Scots who were merging with the Epidii.  Or it could have been the British Epidii themselves who passed along the Arthur name, with or without the "rock" connection (although we should not lose sight of the monolith at Dun Beachaire in Kintyre).  

To me, the above schema seems a decent construct.  Is it history?  Well, who knows? It's the best that I personally can do after a quarter of a century of Arthurian research.