Excalibur

HISTORICAL NOTE

Gildas, the historian who probably wrote his De Excidio et Con-questu Brittaniae (Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) within a generation of the Arthurian period, records that the Battle of Badonici Montis (usually translated today as Mount Badon) was a siege, but, tantalizingly, he does not mention that Arthur was present at the great victory which, he laments, ‘was the last defeat of the wretches’. The Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) which might or might not have been written by a man called Nennius, and which was compiled at least two centuries after the Arthurian period, is the first document to claim that Arthur was the British commander at ‘Mons Badonis’ where ‘in one day nine hundred and sixty men were killed by an attack of Arthur’s, and no one but himself laid them low’. In the tenth century some monks in western Wales compiled the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) where they record

‘the Battle of Badon in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the victors’. The Venerable Bede, a Saxon whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English) appeared in the eighth century, acknowledges the defeat, but does not mention Arthur, though that is hardly surprising because Bede seems to have taken most of his information from Gildas. Those four documents are just about our only early sources (and three of them are not early enough) for information on the battle. Did it happen? Historians, while reluctant to admit that the legendary Arthur ever existed, do seem to agree that sometime close to the year 500 AD the British fought and won a great battle against the encroaching Saxons at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Mons Badonis, or Badonici Montis, or Mynydd Baddon or Mount Badon or, simply, Badon. Further, they suggest that this was an important battle because it appears to have effectively checked the Saxon conquest of British land for a generation. It also, as Gildas laments, seems to have been the ‘last defeat of the wretches’, for in the two hundred years following that defeat the Saxons spread across what is now called England and so dispossessed the native Britons. In all the dark period of the darkest age of Britain’s history, this one battle stands out as an important event, but sadly we have no idea where it took place. There have been many suggestions. Liddington Castle in Wiltshire and Badbury Rings in Dorset are candidates for the site, while Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the twelfth century, places the battle at Bath, probably because Nennius describes the hot springs at Bath as balnea Badonis. Later historians have proposed Little Solsbury Hill, just west of Batheaston in the valley of the Avon near Bath, as the battlefield and I have adopted that suggestion for the site described in the novel. Was it a siege? No one really knows, any more than we can know who besieged whom. There just seems to be a general agreement that it is likely a battle took place at Mount Badon, wherever that is, that it may have been a siege, but may not, that it probably occurred very near the year 500 AD, though no historian would stake a reputation on that assertion, that the Saxons lost and that possibly Arthur was the architect of that great victory.

Nennius, if he was indeed the author of the Historia Brittonum, ascribes twelve battles to Arthur, most of them in unidentifiable locations, and he does not mention Camlann, the battle that traditionally ends Arthur’s tale. The Annales Cambriae are our earliest source for that battle, and those annals were written much too late to be authoritative. The Battle of Camlann, then, is even more mysterious than Mount Badon, and it is impossible to identify any location where it might have taken place, if indeed it happened at all. Geoffrey of Monmouth said it was fought beside the River Camel in Cornwall, while in the fifteenth century Sir Thomas Malory placed it on Salisbury Plain. Other writers have suggested Camlan in Merioneth in Wales, the River Cam which flows near South Cadbury (‘Caer Cadarn’), Hadrian’s Wall or even sites in Ireland. I placed it at Dawlish Warren, in South Devon, for no other reason than that I once kept a boat in the Exe estuary and reached the sea by sailing past the Warren. The name Camlann might mean ‘crooked river’, and the channel of the Exe estuary is as crooked as any, but my choice is plainly capricious.

The Annales Cambriae have only this to say of Camlann; ‘the battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut (Mordred) perished’. And so, perhaps, they did, but legend has ever insisted that Arthur survived his wounds and was carried to the magical isle of Avalon where he still sleeps with his warriors. We have clearly moved far beyond the realm where any self-respecting historian would venture, except to suggest that the belief in Arthur’s survival reflects a deep and popular nostalgia for a lost hero, and in all the isle of Britain no legend is more persistent than this notion that Arthur still lives. ‘A grave for Mark,’ the Black Book of Carmarthen records, ‘a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the red sword, but, perish the thought, a grave for Arthur.’ Arthur was probably no king, he may not have lived at all, but despite all the efforts of historians to deny his very existence, he is still, to millions of folk about the world, what a copyist called him in the fourteenth century, Arturus Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus: Arthur, our Once and Future King.