The campaign against the Romans, undertaken with an army of “eighty-three thousand two hundred, besides those on foot, who were not easy to reckon,” seems to have followed close upon the festivities at Caerleon.[80] The Romans were under the command of “Lucius Hiberius, procurator of the Commonwealth,” who, summoning to his aid “the kings of the East,” put into the field a host numbering “four hundred thousand one hundred and sixty.” It is unnecessary here to give any detailed account of the fighting, and of the final discomfiture of the Roman forces. It need only be said that the British triumph was obtained at heavy cost. Among the slain were the faithful Kay and Bedevere,--in death, as in life, not divided. Bedevere was buried at Bayeux, “his own city that was builded by Bedevere the first, his great-grandfather;” Kai was laid to rest near Chinon, “a town he himself had builded.” The chief disaster to the Romans was the loss of their leader Lucius, whose body Arthur “bade bear unto the Senate with a message to say that none other tribute was due from Britain.” Arthur designed to follow up this message by a march upon Rome itself, and he had actually begun to climb the passes of the Alps when news reached him that “his nephew Modred, unto whom he had committed the charge of Britain, had tyrannously and traitorously set the crown of the kingdom upon his own head, and had linked him in unhallowed union with Guenever the Queen in despite of her former marriage.” So ends Geoffrey’s tenth book. “Hereof” begins the eleventh, strangely enough,--but, of course, plainly referring to the affair of Guinevere,--“verily, most noble Earl, will Geoffrey of Monmouth say nought.” He will only treat of the battles which Arthur, after his return to Britain, fought with his nephew, according to the account given “in the British discourse aforementioned,” and what he “_hath heard_ from Walter of Oxford, a man of passing deep lore in many histories.”[81] The final, and fatal, battle did not take place all at once; it came at the end of a campaign of some length. Modred, retreating rapidly into Cornwall, is at last brought to bay on the river Camel, and is slain in a battle in which “well-nigh all the captains that were in command on both sides rushed into the press with their companies and fell.” And “even the renowned King Arthur himself was wounded deadly, and was borne thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds, where he gave up the crown of Britain unto his kinsman Constantine, son of Cador, duke of Cornwall, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord five hundred and forty-two.”