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