If, in Caxton’s words, “such a king called Arthur” ever lived in these islands, he must have flourished during the period between the first coming of the Saxons and the middle of the sixth century. So much, at any rate, is clearly attested by the meagre historical records which profess to recount his deeds. Nothing, however, can be found in these records to warrant the belief that he ever became “king” of any part of Britain. His achievements as a warrior alone are mentioned, and all that we can gather besides from Welsh tradition only serves to emphasise the fact that his renown among the British people rested mainly upon his warlike prowess. His admission to the so-called “Celtic pantheon,” and his gradual evolution in Celtic tradition as a great mythological figure, are matters of purely speculative interest, and cannot be taken into account in an attempt to answer our first question—Who, and what, was the historical Arthur? In Welsh we read of an “emperor” Arthur,[8] but this title, as we shall see, implies nothing more than that he was a war-leader, or a commander-in-chief of a group of more or less celebrated generals. His kingship, and his state as the head of a great court, are entirely the creations of later romance.[9]

Little, if anything, of historical significance is to be deduced from the form of Arthur’s name. It appears in the Latin chronicles as Arturus, and is probably of Roman origin, derived from the form Artorius.[10] This is much more likely than that, as Rhys suggests, it was “a Celtic name belonging in the first instance to a god Arthur.” For the latter explanation, as readers of Rhys’s Arthurian Legend will know, carries us into the world of mythology, and is made the foundation of an ingenious hypothesis to account for Arthur’s Celtic fame. That hypothesis, so far as it bears upon the name, is thus summarised by its author. “The Latin Artôrius and the god’s name, which we have treated as early Brythonic Artor, genitive Artôros, would equally yield in Welsh the familiar form Arthur. In either case, the name would have to be regarded as an important factor in the identification or confusion of the man with the divinity. The latter, called Arthur by the Brythons, was called Airem by the Goidels, and he was probably the Artæan Mercury of the Allobroges of ancient Gaul. His rôle was that of Culture Hero, and his name allows one to suppose that he was once associated, in some special manner, with agriculture over the entire Celtic world of antiquity. On the one hand we have the man Arthur, whose position we have tried to define, and on the other a greater Arthur, a more colossal figure, of which we have, so to speak, but a torso rescued from the wreck of the Celtic pantheon.”[11] The mythological Arthur, as he appears in Welsh literature and tradition, will claim our attention in another chapter; here, our inquiry will be confined mainly to the Latin records in which we find, or should expect to find, the earliest authentic information about “the man Arthur.”

The oldest historical document in which Arthur is mentioned by name is the famous Historia Brittonum ascribed to Nennius. Parts of this work may have been put together as early as the seventh century,[12] but the compilation, as we now have it, was due to a Welshman named Nennius, or (in Welsh) Nynniaw, who lived about the year 800.[13] The work may be roughly divided into two parts,—the first, of sixty-six sections or chapters, professing to give a cursory sketch of the history of Britain from the earliest times down to the eighth century; the second containing a list of the twenty-eight “cities of Britain,” together with an account of certain “marvels” (mirabilia), or wonderful natural phenomena, of Britain, which, the compiler tells us, he “wrote as other scribes had done before him.” The quasi-historical part of the work contains much the fullest notice of Arthur’s military exploits to be found in any chronicle before that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, while from sundry allusions to Arthur in the section on the ‘marvels of Britain,’ we gather that legend was already busy with his name. The celebrated passage in which Arthur is mentioned in the Historia proper[14] runs as follows:—

“At that time, the Saxons increased and grew strong in Britain. After the death of Hengist, Octha his son came from the northern part of the kingdom to the men of Cantia, and from him are descended its kings. Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was leader in the battles.[15] The first battle was at the mouth of the river Glein; the second, third, fourth and fifth on the river Dubglas, in the region Linnuis; the sixth on the river Bassas; the seventh in the wood of Celidon, that is, Cat Coet Celidon[16]; the eighth at the castle of Guinnion, when Arthur bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders, and when the pagans were put to flight and a great slaughter made of them through the might of our Lord Jesus Christ and of Holy Mary his mother. The ninth battle was fought at the city of Legion, the tenth on the shore of the river, which is called Tribruit, and the eleventh on the mountain which is called Agned. The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon, where there fell nine hundred and sixty men before Arthur’s single onset; nor had any one but himself alone a share in their downfall, and in all the battles he was the victor. But the enemy, while they were overthrown in all their battles, sought help from Germany, and continually increased in number, and they brought kings from Germany to rule over those who were in Britain up to the time of the reign of Ida, who was the first king in Beornicia.”

One notes, in the very first words in which mention is here made of Arthur, that he is not called a “king,” but that he fought “together with the kings” of the Britons, not, seemingly, as their auxiliary, but as their commander-in-chief—sed ipse dux erat bellorum. It has been suggested,[17] with much plausibility, that the term dux bellorum in this passage implies that Arthur held, after the departure of the Romans, a military office similar to one of those established in the island during the later years of the Roman administration. Since the time of Severus Britain had been divided, for defensive purposes, into two districts. At first, most pressure came from the Picts and the Scots in the North, and the defence of Upper Britain was entrusted to a commander called dux Britanniarum. Later, when the Saxons began to threaten the eastern and southern shores, a second officer—comes littoris Saxonici—was appointed to command the armies of Lower Britain. Finally, a third officer, the comes Britanniæ, was given a general supervision over the other two, and the supreme charge of the defences of the entire country. Sir John Rhys discovers in Arthur the representative in the sixth century of this third officer of the Roman military organisation. This supposition undoubtedly helps to explain better than any other both Nennius’s description of Arthur as dux bellorum, and the seemingly wide range of country covered by the twelve battles which he is said to have fought.

It is, however, to be noted, as Rhys points out,[18] that while the title apparently given in early Welsh literature to those who succeeded to supreme power in Britain was gwledig, that name is never given to Arthur. The term gwledig, itself, means no more than “ruler” or “prince,” and is indiscriminately used in that sense in mediæval Welsh,[19] but there is good reason to believe that, as applied to certain warriors of the sixth century, the title was a Brythonic equivalent of the official military title, comes or dux. The most famous bearer of the title, Maxen Wledig, comes within the Roman period, and his renown is mainly due to romance[20]; three others who are so called, Cunedda, Ceredig and Emrys (the Ambrosius Aurelianus of Gildas), may very well have held one of the military offices in question. “Cunedda Wledig and Ceredig Wledig are connected with the north and appear to be guardians of the wall, while Emrys Wledig is the antagonist of the Saxons. Thus Cunedda and Ceredig may be regarded as Dukes of the Britains, while Emrys is a British Count of the Saxon shore.”[21] Arthur, on the other hand, is in Welsh literature yr amherawdyr Arthur, “the emperor Arthur,”[22] and so, as Rhys suggests, “it is not impossible that, when the Roman imperator ceased to have anything more to say to this country, the title was given to the highest officer in the island, namely, the Comes Britanniæ, and that in the words yr amherawdyr Arthur we have a remnant of our insular history.”[23]

An even more difficult problem than the determination of Arthur’s rank is the identification of the twelve battlefields mentioned in Nennius’s record. The twelfth century chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, tells us that, even in his own time, “all the places were unknown”; hence it is not surprising that those who have in our day sought to trace geographically the course of Arthur’s campaigns have not brought us much nearer certainty. The most plausible theory is that which would locate most, if not all, the places named by Nennius in the region of the Roman walls in the North,[24] a theory largely supported by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s elaboration of Nennius’s account, and by the fact that the names of several prominent characters connected with the early exploits of Arthur are localised in Lowland Scotland. On the other hand, it is contended that Mount Badon,[25] and Urbs Legionis, at least, must be in the South, and that Linnuis—which in Geoffrey appears as Lindisia (or Lindsey), “otherwise called Lindocolinum”—is in the East. The localisation of Arthur’s battlefields is of no great consequence as compared with the fact that the earliest record of them, however vague and fragmentary, clearly points to a long and victorious campaign conducted under his generalship against the Saxons and other enemies of the Britons in the sixth century. Two, at least, of the victories recorded by Nennius appear to have strongly seized the imagination of later writers of Arthurian story. It mattered less to them where “the castle of Guinnion” actually was than that in the battle fought there Arthur “bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders,” and thus established the tradition which ultimately exalted him into “the first and chief of the three best Christian kings.” Nennius’s brief statement is, of course, expanded and embroidered by Geoffrey[26] and other romantic chroniclers in turn, until the tradition becomes so firmly rooted as to make a modern poet like Wordsworth single out Arthur as a champion of the early British Church, and sing,

Hence, even Tennyson takes no very great liberty with Arthurian tradition when he converts “Arthur’s knighthood” into a Christian fellowship avowing that

The other battle, of those mentioned by Nennius, that looms large in subsequent Arthurian story is that of Mons Badonis, or Badon Hill. This battle is of exceptional interest because it is possible to assign to it an approximately certain date. The record in the Annales Cambriæ of the year 516 as its precise date is of less importance than the fact that Gildas, the celebrated sixth century scribe, expressly refers to the battle as having been fought in his natal year. In his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniæ, amid much vehement denunciation of the British people and their degenerate leaders, Gildas gives a short sketch of the history of Britain down to his own time. Coming to the Saxon invasions, he states that they were first successfully checked under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the last of the Romans, “a modest man, who alone of all his race chanced to survive the shocks” of that troubled time.

After this, he continues, the struggle went on with varying fortune “until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, and of almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. And this commences (a fact I know) as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth.”[29] So far as the date goes, this seems to mean that the year of the battle of Badon and of Gildas’s own birth was the forty-fourth from that in which he wrote. As the De Excidio must have been written before the death of Maelgwn Gwynedd—the Maglocunus against whom Gildas directs some of his choicest invective—in or about the year 547, the date of the fight at Badon Hill cannot well have been later than 504. At any rate, Gildas’s testimony is sufficient warrant that some time during the first decade of the sixth century a battle was fought against the Saxons at a place called Badon Hill, in which the Britons were the victors.

But that battle, according to Nennius, was the one of all the twelve recorded by him in which Arthur gave the most signal evidence of his individual prowess; before his single onset “nine hundred and sixty men” fell. Now Gildas, an unimpeachable sixth century authority, makes no reference whatever to Arthur’s achievements in this, or any other, encounter with the Saxons. This silence, so far as it affects the historicity of Arthur, is less disturbing than it appears to be, when account is taken of the character and motive of Gildas’s work as a whole. The De Excidio is not so much a history as a homily. Gildas belonged to a “Romanist” party, and what the more or less unorganised Britons sought to do for themselves, and their independence, was to him but a decline upon savagery and selfish native pride. It did not suit his purpose to celebrate the name and virtues of any British prince, and it is significant that, apart from Ambrosius,—by birth, apparently, no less than by his training and sympathies, a thorough-going “Roman,”—he does not mention by name a single British chieftain except as a target for his invective.

In the mirabilia attached to Nennius’s History Arthur is a mythical figure as remote and as elusive as he is in early Welsh poetry and triadic lore. In them, as in the earliest Welsh poems, he is pre-eminently Arthur “the warrior,” but he is known besides as the owner of a famous hound, and as the father of a son whose name had been given to one of the natural features of the country. The first “marvel,” in connection with which Arthur’s name occurs, is in the region of Buelt, or Builth. Here, we are told, is a mound of stones, on the top of which is one stone bearing the mark of a dog’s foot. This mark was made by Cabal, “the dog of Arthur the warrior” (Arthuri militis), when he was hunting “the boar Troit” (porcum Troit). The pile of stones was put together by Arthur, and is called Carn, or the Cairn of, Cabal. The marvel lay in the fact that, though men might come and carry away the top stone “for the space of a day and a night,” the stone was invariably found in its proper place the next day. Another marvel, described in immediate succession, belongs to “the region which is called Ercing,” or Archenfield. There may be found a tomb close by a spring which is called the Source of the Amir,—juxta fontem qui cognominatur Licat Amir, after the name of the man who was buried there. This Amir was the son of “Arthur the warrior,” who himself killed, and buried him, on that spot. The “marvellous” property of this tomb was that, when men came to measure it, at various times, they never found it of the same size; “and,” the writer ingenuously adds, “I have made proof of this by myself” (et ego solus probavi). These two miracula, as he calls them, are all that Nennius, or his authority, has to tell us of the mythical, as distinguished from the historical, Arthur.

These apparently casual records of Arthurian marvels are noteworthy, not only as indicating an early association of Arthurian traditions with the topography of Wales, but also as affording a connecting link between the earliest Latin documents in which Arthur’s name is found and one of the very oldest of the Welsh Arthurian tales. In the Welsh romance, or rather fairy-tale, of Kulhwch and Olwen,—the primitive literary form of which probably dates from the tenth century,[30]—the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth, or the Boar Trwyth (the porcus Troit of Nennius), forms one of the capital features. Now, in that hunt, as described in Kulhwch and Olwen, Arthur’s dog Cabal, or Cavall,—which is the Welsh form of the name,—takes part; he is led to the chase by Arthur’s faithful henchman, Bedwyr, or Bedivere.[31] Nor was it in bringing to bay “the boar Troit” alone that Cavall took part. He was conspicuous in the capture and the slaughter of another monster, who is called an Arch- or Head-Boar, bearing the fearsome name of “Yskithyrwyn Benbaedd.” “And Arthur,” we read,[32] “went himself to the chase, leading his own dog Cavall. And Kaw, of North Britain, mounted Arthur’s mare Llamrei, and was first in the attack. Then Kaw, of North Britain, wielded a mighty axe, and absolutely daring he came valiantly up to the boar, and clave his head in twain. And Kaw took away the tusk. Now the boar was not slain by the dogs that Yspaddaden had mentioned, but by Cavall, Arthur’s own dog.”[33]

The battle of Mount Badon, as we have seen, is recorded in the Annales Cambriæ, contained in a MS of the tenth century. Still more interesting is another record in that document under the year 537. In that year, we read, was fought “the battle of Camlan, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.” Although we hear nothing of Medraut’s treachery, or of his being Arthur’s nephew, here, so far as we know, is the first recorded allusion to what subsequently became one of the prime tragic features in Arthurian story. Medrod, or Modred, is the villain of the romances, and Camlan is that “dim, weird battle of the west,” where Arthur fought the “traitor of his house,” and

In Welsh prose romance we hear of Camlan both in Kulhwch and Olwen and in The Dream of Rhonabwy; it is also mentioned in the Triads, and there are two references to the place in the oldest Welsh poetry. In ‘The Verses of the Graves’ in The Black Book of Carmarthen, we are told that “the grave of the son of Osvran is in Camlan,”[35] and in a poem in The Red Book of Hergest, a nameless bard labouring under forebodings of coming tumult in his own day, prophesies that “Camlan will be heard again, scenes of groaning will again be seen, and dismal lamentations.”[36] Apart from these meagre references, Latin chronicles and early Welsh literature are alike altogether silent about what, in later romance and poetry, stands out as the most fateful battle in Arthur’s career. Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first to give us elaborate details about Arthur’s encounter with Modred, and his motley army of Saxons, Picts and Scots, on the banks of “the river Cambula,” or Camel. The river, according to Geoffrey, is in the west country, and the battle is popularly supposed to have been fought near Camelford,[37] in Cornwall.

When we come to examine the remaining chronicle literature of the pre-Norman period, we find no mention of Arthur’s name, and nothing but the briefest allusion to the campaigns in which he is supposed to have fought. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the dedicatory epistle prefacing his British History, expresses his surprise that Bede, in his “elegant treatise,” has nothing to say about Arthur. If Arthur was indeed widely known as a Christian champion, it is somewhat strange that an ecclesiastical writer of the first half of the eighth century should have passed over his deeds in silence. Moreover, Bede does mention Ambrosius as a successful leader against the Saxons, and knows of “the siege of Baddesdown-hill.” Bede’s silence about Arthur is not to be lightly ignored, nor easily explained away, in any critical discussion of the historicity of Arthur. Bede stands as the primary authority and the model of what Stubbs calls “the most ancient, the most fertile, the longest lived and the most widely spread” of all the “schools of English mediæval history,”[38]—the Northumbrian. The best and most trustworthy of the chroniclers who followed him—such, for example, as William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh (Geoffrey’s remorseless assailant)—pay their tributes to his industry, wisdom and integrity. His Ecclesiastical History is no mere desultory, or mechanical, record; it bears the impress of a great, and honest, personality. In his record of the Saxon invasions, it is true, he follows Gildas, even to the extent of largely reproducing his very words. There is no conclusive evidence that he knew anything of the documents from which Nennius compiled his History, although one cannot, of course, deny the probability of his knowledge of them. The only plausible explanation of his silence about Arthur is that he drew his materials solely from Saxon tradition and from Latin records, and that he was either ignorant of, or distrusted, the Celtic, or British, traditions concerning Arthur which had their origin and home in the West and in the then “farthest North.” If, on the other hand, stories of Arthur’s deeds were widely current in Lowland Scotland, it is surprising that a Northumbrian writer should apparently have known nothing of them.

Again, there is no mention whatever of Arthur in the Saxon Chronicle. The fact that the Chronicle contains no record of a fight, successful or otherwise, against the Britons for a long period after 527, or 530, seems to confirm Nennius’s account of the decisive check to the Saxon advance given in the battles with which he associates Arthur’s name. On the other hand, the battle at Badon Hill must, as we have seen, have been fought long before the year 527. There is no question about the superior trustworthiness of the Chronicle to Nennius’s narrative as a historical authority.[39] Here, again, the silence can only be explained on the assumption that the compilers of the Saxon Chronicle did not care much about recording British victories, and cared less, or knew nothing at all, about the British chieftains who won them. As against this assumption, it should be noted that the Chronicle does mention such British names as Vortigern and Natanleod,—the latter a “British king” slain in the year 508, just at the time when Arthur’s prowess, according to tradition, was at its height.

The meagreness of the pre-Norman Arthurian records which have been here reviewed stands in significant contrast to the amplitude and the range of the Arthurian matter which we find in the romantic productions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The contrast is so startling as to suggest at once that the coming of the Normans to Britain had much to do with what may be called the aggrandisation of Arthur. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth, as we shall see, writing under the direct auspices of a cultured Norman potentate, who did more than any other man to spread the renown of Arthur as a presumably historical character, and to give him for centuries an assured place in the chronicle literature of Britain. But Geoffrey could not have written “to order” such a book as his History had he not a large stock of popular traditions to draw upon. All the evidence seems to point to the period extending from the tenth to the twelfth centuries as that of the popular growth of an Arthurian legend, on a large scale, among “the Celtic fringe.” By the beginning of the twelfth century Arthurian stories were circulating freely in Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. It is only on this supposition that one can account, for example, for a tumult caused at Bodmin in the year 1113, by a certain monk from Laon who had the temerity to deny that Arthur still lived.[40] Later on in the same century, as Alanus de Insulis records,[41] belief in Arthur’s “return” was so firmly held in the country districts of Brittany that a denial of it might have cost a man his life. Moreover, two chroniclers of repute who wrote before Geoffrey bear clear testimony to the widespread currency of Arthurian traditions in their day, and to the curiosity aroused in serious historians concerning the deeds of the British king.

None of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers ranks higher as a trustworthy historical authority than William of Malmesbury,—the first great successor of Bede, whom he calls his master and exemplar. In the first chapter of his History of the Kings of England—the first version of which was completed in 1125—we find the following passage referring to the Saxon invasions in the sixth century:—

“When he (Vortimer) died, the British strength decayed, and all hope fled from them; and they would soon have perished altogether, had not Ambrosius, the sole survivor of the Romans, who became monarch after Vortigern, quelled the presumptuous barbarians by the powerful aid of the warlike Arthur. This is the Arthur of whom the idle tales of the Britons rave even unto this day; a man worthy to be celebrated not in the foolish dreams of deceitful fables, but in truthful histories. For he long sustained the declining fortunes of his native land, and roused the uncrushed spirit of the people to war.”

Then follows a reference, based upon Nennius’s narrative, to the battle of Mount Badon. This passage, although somewhat confused in its account of the relative positions of Vortigern, Ambrosius and Arthur in the events of their time, is significant as indicating not only Arthur’s fame as a fabled British hero in William’s day, but the historian’s own regret at the absence of authentic information about a warrior so worthy of lasting commemoration. Another noteworthy reference to Arthur in William of Malmesbury’s history occurs in his account of the discovery in Pembrokeshire of the grave of Gawain, “Arthur’s noble nephew.”[42] Gawain, we are told, “was driven from his kingdom by the brother and nephew of Hengist,” and “he deservedly shared, with his uncle, the praise of retarding for many years the calamity of his falling country. The grave of Arthur is nowhere to be seen; hence ancient songs fable that he is still to come.” Here we have positive evidence that, long before Geoffrey’s time, Arthur’s “return” was sung of by British bards whose compositions, with the solitary exception of the stanza in ‘The Songs of the Graves,’ already referred to, appear to have been irretrievably lost.

Henry of Huntingdon is not so trustworthy a chronicler as William of Malmesbury, and his account of Arthur is, substantially, borrowed, with embellishments, from Nennius. Henry’s place in a review of Arthurian records is due not to his History, but to a letter, addressed to a friend named Warinus,[43] which singularly attests the interest then felt in the history of Arthur. That letter recounts how Henry, while on a journey to Rome in the year 1139, stopped at the abbey of Bec in Normandy and was there shown by the chronicler, Robert of Torigni, a “great book,” written by one “Geoffrey Arthur,” containing a history of the early kings of Britain. The book in question was, almost certainly, an early draft of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famous Historia Regum Britanniæ. But it is curious to find that Henry’s abstract of the book, as given in the letter to Warinus, differs in one important respect—and that alone concerns us at this stage—from the text of Geoffrey’s History as given in all the MSS of that work in its final form. Geoffrey’s account of the “passing” of Arthur—an incident which offered to so imaginative a writer unrivalled opportunities of romantic decoration—is singularly devoid of ornament. Henry’s abstract of this part of the book which he found at Bec is, on the other hand, a highly-coloured piece of writing.

“When he (Arthur) was about to cross over the Alps, an envoy said unto him, ‘Modred, thy nephew, hath set thy crown upon his own head with the assistance of Cheldric, king of the English, and hath taken thy wife unto himself.’ Arthur, thereupon, seething over with wondrous wrath, returning into England, conquered Modred in battle, and after pursuing him as far as unto Cornwall, with a few men fell upon him in the midst of many, and when he saw that he could not turn back said, ‘Comrades, let us sell our death dear. I, for my part, will smite off the head of my nephew and my betrayer, after which death will be a delight unto me.’ Thus spake he, and hewing a way for himself with his sword through the press, dragged Modred by the helmet into the midst of his own men and cut through his mailed neck as through a straw. Natheless, as he went, and as he did the deed, so many wounds did he receive that he fell, albeit that his kinsmen the Britons deny that he is dead, and do even yet solemnly await his coming again. He was, indeed, the very first man of his time in warlike prowess, bounty and wit.”[44]

The vivid personal details of this narrative may be due to Henry’s own imagination, for it is well known that he, like Geoffrey, exercised that faculty largely in his treatment of history; but, even so, the passage is curiously significant in its bearing upon the martial fame of Arthur, and upon the belief in his “return” cherished by “his kinsmen the Britons,” in the first half of the twelfth century.

The review given in this chapter of the earliest Arthurian records,—all of which are in Latin,—as distinguished from Celtic song or fable, points clearly to the gradual growth, around the personality of a real British warrior of the sixth century, of a legend which by the twelfth century had assumed a form that arrested, though it might baffle, the leading historians of the day. Now, it so happened that the twelfth century was the seed-time of mediæval romance in Europe, and how effectively the legend of Arthur was thenceforth exploited for romantic purposes will be seen later on. It remains, however, for us, first, to give some account of what was known, or fabled, about Arthur among “his kinsmen the Britons” themselves, as recorded in their extant prose and poetry.