History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to SwinburneLang, Andrew
History
History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne
Lang, Andrew
English literature -- History and criticism
Bede, the historian, writing about 700-730, _says nothing about
Arthur_, but he does speak briefly about the period (500-516) in which
Arthur, if there were such a prince, must have existed. Bede takes
from the Welsh writer in Latin, Gildas (about 550) the fact that,
up to the date of the siege of Badon Hill (516), forty-four years
after the Anglo-Saxons came into Britain, "the British (Welsh) had
considerable successes under Ambrosius Aurelianus," perhaps the last of
the Romans. "_But more of this later_," says Bede, who never returns
to the subject. He may have expected to get more information, and that
information might have included some account of Arthur, of whom Gildas
makes no mention. Bede says nothing of the fable of Brut, which may not
have been invented in his time, or, if known to him, was regarded by
him as fabulous. Next we have a book attributed to the Welsh Nennius, a
"History of the Britons," which is really a patchwork of several older
records, and there is the "Annales Cambriæ," annals of Wales. Nennius
(about 800?) makes Arthur ("the war-leader" _not the king_) win twelve
great battles, ending with Badon Hill.
The names of the battles are given, the first is on the river Glein.
Now one Glein is in Northumberland, the other in Ayrshire. Four battles
are "on the Douglas water in the country called Linnuis"; if "Linnuis"
is the Lennox, there are two Douglas waters there, which fall into Loch
Lomond, between them is _Ben Arthur._ The sixth battle was "by the
river Bassas," a "Bass" being a hill shaped like an artificial mound,
for example the isle called "the Bass" in the Firth of Forth. There are
two Basses on the river Carron, in Stirlingshire, and here may have
been the sixth battle. The seventh was "Cat Coit Celidon," "the battle
(_cat_) of the wood of Celyddon," that is Ettrick Forest, perhaps the
fight was on the upper Tweed. The eighth battle is thought to have been
waged at Wedale, in the strath of Gala water, a tributary of Tweed,
which it reaches at Galashiels; the ninth at Dumbarton, which means
"the castle of the Britons"; the tenth near Stirling, where a very late
writer says that Arthur kept the Round Table; the eleventh at "Agned
Hill"; that is Mynyd Agned--Edinburgh Castle rock; and the twelfth was
"the siege of Badon Hill," perhaps a hill on the Avon, near Linlithgow,
which has remains of strong fortifications, and is called "the Buden
Hill," or "Bouden Hill". (It is not easy, however, to see how the _a_
in Badon became the _u_ in Buden.) Finally the great battle of Camlon,
where Arthur fell, is taken to be at a place long called Camelon on the
Carron, in Stirlingshire, where Arthur met Saxons, Picts, and Scots,
under Medraut, (Modred), son of Llew, or Lothus, to whom Arthur had
granted Lothian. On the other side of the river was an ancient building
called, as far back as 1293, "Arthur's Oven"; it was destroyed by a
laird at the end of the eighteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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