Sooo history: Gildas and Arthur 1

Sooo Gildas. I was reading his De Excidio, which is a starting place for some Arthurian enthusiasts, although I don’t know why I picked it up. At any rate, looking at it through lenses of other studies, I see a whole different animal from what you might think it is, based on fake TV histories claiming to be about the Arthurian period. One lens is the geographic information in Excidio and a Breton biography of Gildas written at a monastery named for him. Another is my studies of oral traditions and the writings that arise from them; that will be for another post and you can get a leg up from my Fact-Checking thread so you understand what I’m going to say. The final lens is what we know today about the 500s CE and about Britain itself.

First, we can’t rely on Gildas for describing Britain from a British or Welsh geographical viewpoint. From the start, when he describes Britain as being to the southwest, we know that he’s not in Wales or Ireland. The only places that can describe Britain as southwest, are Scandinavia and Lindisfarne. Scandinavia was not Christian in Gildas’ time. Saying that “Gildas” didn’t know what he was talking about requires proving that any of his supposed residences allow this statement. Without that evidence, we can suspect that nothing in Gildas is true, and we’re done. Below I’ll show some evidence that Gildas is right about this.

If you’re willing to keep going, think about “Gildas” describing his location as cold and bitter. We know that he’s talking either, once again, about Lindisfarne, or he’s talking about the 530s with the double eruption of Krakatau and Ilopango. I’ll deal with the second issue in the third post. The first issue confirms that the writer is in east Scotland, possibly between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.

Such a location feeds into his other complaint: that the cities have all been destroyed. Roman outposts at the walls had extensive settlements around them, both of soldiers’ families and of logistics services of various kinds. Archaeology has found relatively rich remains at outposts of Hadrian’s Wall. But once the Romans left, the outposts dissolved, along with larger cities like Bath and London. From “Gildas’” claustrophobic geographical viewpoint, he might have known nothing about Bath or London.

Gildas doesn’t mention Dal Riata, settled from Ireland, a Christian outpost on the west side of the big island. If Gildas is restricted to the east of Scotland, the difficulties of travel could have kept him from knowing about it. But its inhabitants were in their second or third generation in his time. For Gildas to have no news, or to ignore Dal Riata which also did not fight against the Angles, raises the issue whether our Scottish “Gildas” wrote after Dal Riata as a name disappeared – in the Christianization of Scotland.

Nor does he reference Evrawg. York, a Roman city, may have lost power, but it recovered to govern a thriving region – until William the Conqueror razed it and visited its surroundings with fire and sword. Being 150 miles south of Lindisfarne York, like Dal Riata, was out of Gildas’ ken. The Mabinogion story of Peredur, the precursor to Percival, tells about a prince of Evrawg in Arthurian legend, so if Gildas has anything to do with Arthurian times, it’s odd that he doesn’t refer to Evrawg. But if  Gildas is geographically distant from Arthur, then it isn’t odd at all.

The existence of these cities wouldn’t have meant anything to Gildas. He is feverishly, almost insanely, angry at five specific leaders from close to his viewpoint, and he hates the Angles. The rest of his so-called history is contradicted by other sources that don’t have his animus.

The oldest biography of Gildas, written at a monastery in Brittany that was named for him after he had been canonized, says he was born in Scotland. It also says that his first monastery stood on a thin barren island – a good description of Lindisfarne but without a name attached. Again, a cloistered monk in Brittany wouldn’t necessarily know the name of the place – and if he obtained his information from oral tradition, the place name would have evaporated out in 200 years. The same thing happened to place names in the Samaritan Pentateuch, after the Assyrians destroyed the politics of the northern kingdom and cast their iron curtain between Israel and Judea for 200 years. There’s no other place in the Celtic islands that has the same description as Lindisfarne, Mona being rather round than long. So the monk of Brittany didn’t have all the data to hand, just enough to tantalize us.

Gildas learned the Welsh rite of Christian worship used in Britain and Ireland. The biography says that Gildas was asked to reform the Irish church, but it was written in the 800s. In Gildas’ time and for centuries afterward, missions from Ireland educated Christian clergy in Europe, who had lost many precious documents in the pagan migrations from the east. For Gildas to be the traveller claimed by this biographer, makes it impossible for him to have the cloistered Scottish viewpoint we find in Excidio. It also would not allow him to know of Custennin or any of the other kings he names.

“Gildas’” history tells of three “kings” known from no other source. They would have been subordinates of Arthur, if Gildas had connections to Arthurian culture. His Constantine is known to Welsh tradition as Custennin; as a Damnonian, he would have been from Scotland. Once again, we are confined to a territory from which Britain is south and west.

Now, what about the statement that the siege of Mons Badonicus (usually identified as Braydon Hill) happened near the Severn ostium, “mouth”? The “mouth” would seem to be Bristol; it was a Roman harbor called Portus Abonae, which probably derives from avon. But the Severn river is Afon Hafren, and turning it into “Sabrina” requires an h-s conversion not normal for Latin; the Latin Segontium is derived from afon seiont. A language that has an “h” in it, will sometimes have a Latin cognate using “f”: ferrum in Latin becomes hierro in Spanish, so hafren should become favren, pronounced “fawren”.

So we’re looking for a river mouth that Gildas converted into Sabrina. And we run into a reference by Gildas to Morcant Bulc, who fought in a siege on Lindisfarne itself as part of a coalition, to keep the Angles in line. There was also a battle at Din Guardi, now known as Bamburgh Castle.

Bamburgh is 16 miles from Tweedmouth. (The Tweed was known to the Welsh as Duabs, a cognate.) Tweedmouth comes out exactly at Berwick-on-Tweed (Duabsissis); the region was once known as Bryneich, which is referenced in Historia Brittonum, and it was ruled from Bamburgh. There you have an explanation for the -brin- portion of what Gildas says; it doesn’t explain the sa- prefix, but it doesn’t conflict with what we know of conversions to or from Latin.

But while Duabsissis was at the mouth of the Duabs, Braydon Hill is miles from Portus Abonae. The “ostium” phrase naming the “Severn” is suspect.

Angles lived in Bryneich during the late Roman period and may have been used as mercenaries. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an Angle gained power here by 547, just before Gildas’ death. And there you have it. Excidio is an expression of the rage of a Christian living in Bryneich, over a pagan Angle gaining power in the region, probably as a reward for faithful service to the Welsh-speaking British. Morcant Bulc fought as many as three battles, at Din Guardi (Bamburgh), Medcaut (Lindisfarne) and Duabsissis (Berwick) and still this Angle got picked for a government post. In “Gildas’” viewpoint, that has to be a failure of government.

Unless Gildas was in Bryneich at the time (not in Brittany), he wouldn’t have known about Morcant Bulc. The monastery in Brittany may have been named for St. Gildas, but that doesn’t mean he lived there any more than the legend can be trusted, that says Joseph of Arimathea founded an abbey at Glastonbury.

The classic proposed “Badon” is miles from the ostium, Portus Abonae. “Badon” need not be in the southwest since there’s no necessary connection to the Severn. It’s more likely to be in the east where the Anglo-Saxons had their pale of settlement, and the Saxons got dumped on their asses at least once. And this severs Custennin from the argument that he was a Dumnonian, that is, Welsh; the rest of the evidence suggests he was a Damnonian, that is, from Bryneich.

So we have a Scots (Irish) Gildas writing on Lindisfarne in the 500s CE about events around his monastery that didn’t sit right with him. What does that have to do with Arthurian legend? That’s where I get into the other favorite ancient literature of Arthurians.