Just a short time ago, I wrote this piece:
What I hadn't thought about was something that had been off my radar for many years - Little Solsbury Hill fort at Bath.
The name of this hillfort is believed to preserve the goddess Sulis name. She was the presiding deity at Bath.
Now, while there is some consensus that the Breton St. Gweltas may not originally have been St. Gildas, even if this were true it would be remarkable if a saint identified with Gildas in Brittany had been associated early on with a fortified Sulis hill. For such a hill would be a perfect counterpart to the British Solsbury.
It does not matter that Solsbury has so far failed to show sub-Roman use and appears to have been abandoned in the Iron Age. Any old hillfort might well have been repurposed for a single battle.
Badon and W. Caer Faddon are both Bath, linguistically speaking. They cannot be any other British or English place-name. Amateur historians who have not consulted the world's top Celtic language specialists continue to put forward new or old candidates. A good example is Mynydd Baeddan, which may derive from W. Baedd, "boar." These same amateurs are not aware of the fact that baedd has a diphthong /ai/, not the /a/ we see in Badon (Dr. Simon Rodway) or that even if we suggest that a Baedd-ON that went into Latin could have ended up Badon, ae could not come across as a. We would expect either Latin ae or Latin e (Prof. Peter Schrijver).
If we, then, finally accept Badon as Bath, we have only two problems remaining to consider.
The first is easy to resolve, and I long ago proposed the solution. Why would Gildas, who addressed King Maelgwn prior to the latter's death in 547, call the British victory by an English name?
Surely his parents would have told him about the battle that was fought when he was born. As the AC date of 516 has to be wrong (given Maelgwn's obit and Gildas's age of 44 years 1 month), and the proper date of Badon was probably between 490 and 500, and Bath was very far to the west, it could not possibly have yet been known by its English name.
I have suggested the work of Gildas originally had the British name, the hill of Sulis, but that at some point later a monkish copyist who found the pagan goddess name objectionable, substituted what was at his time the then English name of the place: Bathum, which regularly becomes Badon in the British.
Simple enough. Can't be demonstrated, of course, but it is a reasonable explanation.
Of more serious concern to us, of course, is the very early date for a battle against the Saxons at Little Solsbury Hill. And to that I shall return shortly.
But first, a bit on how the location of the AC's Second Battle of Badon (fought in 665) helps support my identification of the first Badon battle as an action at Bath.
The actual year entry for this Second Battle of Badon reads as follows:
665 The first celebration of Easter among the Saxons. The second battle of Badon. Morgan dies.
The "first celebration of Easter among the Saxons" is a reference to the Synod of Whitby of c. 664. While not directly mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, nor the Anglo-Saxon version of Bede, there is an indirect reference to this event:
664 … Colman with his companions went to his native land…
This is, of course, a reference to Colman's resigning of his see and leaving Lindisfarne with his monks for Iona. He did so because the Roman date for Easter had been accepted at the synod over the Celtic date.
While there is nothing in the ASC year entry 664 that helps with identifying Badon, if we go to the year entry 661, which is the entry found immediately prior to 664, an interesting passage occurs:
661 In this year, at Easter, Cenwalh [King of Wessex] fought at Posentesburh, and Wulfhere, son of Penda [King of Mercia], ravaged as far as [or "in", or "from"] Ashdown…
The regular northern boundary of Wessex in the west was the Bristol Avon. The Thames was the northern bounday farther east. I once used Penda's Ashdown near Liddington Castle/Badbury to identify Badon with the latter. But that ignores linguistics and Bradford On Avon's significance (see below).
I've recently identified Posentesbyrig as "Pascent's Burg". Leading English place-name authority Dr. Richard Coates had this to say when I asked him if this etymology worked:
"I see no absolute barrier to Posent – Pascent. Welsh <sc> is the cluster [sk], which would be rendered in OE as “esh” since OE had no cluster [sk] before a front vowel, even in the earliest times. “Esh” would normally also be spelt <sc>, but that’s a coincidence. It’s possible for “esh” to appear very occasionally as <s>, even before the conquest, as in Ryssebroc for Rushbrooke (Suffolk) in the mid-10th century."
William of Malmesbury seems to suggest that Bradford on Avon was once called Vortigern's Burg.
"William of Malmesbury, however, writes that Cenwalh: “totally defeated in two actions the Britons, furious with the recollection of their ancient liberty, and in consequence perpetually meditating resistance; first at a place called Wirtgernesburg [meaning “Vortigern’s stronghold”], and then at a mountain named Penne” (GR I §19). This seems to imply that Wirtgernesburg is synonymous with Bradford-on-Avon, and that the enemy was, therefore, the Britons. Æthelweard, though, in his rendition of the event (II, 7), uses the phrase “civil war”, which presumably means that he believed the battle to be an internal dispute, or, at least, against other Anglo-Saxons."
Bradford On Avon Near Bath
As Pascent was Vortigern's son, it makes sense to see Posentesbyrig or Pascent's fort as another nickname for the Vortigern's fort that was at or immediately adjacent to Bradford On Avon.
It is now thought possible that Vortigern's fort is the Budbury Hill camp at Bradford On Avon (see https://www.bradfordonavonmuseum.co.uk/iron-age).
Obviously, given all that, the best candidate for the Second Badon is Bath.
With Bath now convincingly identified as Badon, we need to return to our consideration of the chronology problem. To state that problem in succinct form, how can we account for a battle between Britons and Saxons at Bath as early as 490-500?
What comes to mind is the Gewissei battle at Dyrham in the ASC at 577. As a result of this victory, Bath was taken in the same year.
Well, I've proven pretty conclusively that the Gewissei were Irish or Hiberno-British federates from NW Wales. As some top historians like Barbara York have recently suggested, they may have been fighting for the Britons, not the Saxons. They might later have been co-opted by the English and converted into the founders of Wessex.
An alternative interpretation would be to see a high king at Viroconium employing both Saxon and Irish mercenaries against his fellow Britons in the South. Intertribal warfare certainly occurred once the Romans were gone.
I've also shown that the early Gewissei generations are reversed in the ASC. Ceawlin and Cynric of the ASC are to be identified with Cunedda Maquicoline and Cunorix, found on the famous Wroxeter Stone:
Cunorix/Cynric son of Cunedda Macquicoline/Ceawlin is dated 460 - 475.
My identification of Ceawlin with Cunedda goes way back, beginning with pieces like this:
This theory was developed more fully and correctly over several years on this blog. The end result was the published book CEREDIG SON OF CUNEDDA AND THE FOUNDING OF WESSEX:
Now, if Cunorix/Cynric is dated 460-475, and we allow him to have predeceased his father, it is possible for Ceawlin to have fought at Bath c. 490-500. Or at least some member of his immediate family might have done so. Cerdic of Wessex, presented as coming before Ceawlin in the ASC, is Cunedda's/Ceawlin's son in the Welsh sources. Specifically, he is the founder of the Welsh kingdom of Ceredigion.
In this revised scenario, of course, the dates of the ASC are seriously out of whack. But if I'm right about the Wroxeter Stone, we have archaeological proof to support such a contention.
Before I conclude this essay, given that Bath does appear to be Badon and that the battle was fought a decade or two prior to the AC date of 516, might we find a way to allow Arthur to have been at least one of the victors there?
Well, the only way in the past that I managed to place Arthur in the South was to identify him with Cerdic of Wessex. There were several reasons for attempting this, but I ultimately abandoned the notion. Still, there remains a slight possibility that the crippled son of Elafus/Elaphus in the Vita of St. Germanus of Auxerre may still be a reference to Arthur.
I refer my readers to the following old blog, advising them to ignore the references to Cerdic as Arthur:
And then check out this excellent study on Elafus:
If Elafus has properly been brought into connection with the ASC's Elesa, father of Cerdic, we are looking at a connection with the Gewissei. As has been known for some time (see Kenneth Sisam's Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies, for example), Elesa is a link inserted to bring the Wessex genealogy into accordance with northern AS genealogies. In reality, Cerdic is son of Cunedda/Ceawlin.
But it is not impossible that Elafus is someone else entirely - viz., an actual chieftain somewhere in Southern Britain.
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