Finding Arthur Read Online Free

image of the holy Mary, the everlasting Virgin, on his (shoulder or shield?) and the heathen were put to flight on that day, and there was a great slaughter upon them, through the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the holy Virgin Mary, his mother. 6 The ninth battle was fought in the city of the Legion. The tenth battle was fought on the bank of the river called Tryfrwyd [ Tribruit ]. The eleventh battle was on the hill called Agned. The twelfth battle was on Badon Hill and in it nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low save he alone; and he was victorious in all his campaigns. 7
    It is generally accepted that when Nennius said Arthur fought “together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle,” he meant Arthur was a leader of kings but that Arthur was not himself a king. A one-off manuscript discovered in the Vatican in the early nineteenth century makes this even clearer, in a version of the above passage that begins:

Then it was that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror. 8
    The two other references to Arthur in Nennius come under the heading “wonders.” The first is a paw print on a stone, said to have been put there by Arthur’s dog while hunting boar. Nennius says men may remove the stone and carry it away for the length of a day and a night but that the next day it will always be back in its former place. Wonder two is the grave of Arthur’s son Amr, and Nennius describes its miraculous qualities thus: “Men come to measure the tomb, and it is sometime six feet long, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen. At whatever measure you measure it on one occasion, you never find it again of the same measure…” 9 Needless to say, these wonders are not particularly helpful to someone looking for the historical Arthur.
    The Annales Cambriae , the Annals of Wales, were compiled in the tenth century and claim to be an annual record of events starting in 447. There are only twelve entries for the first hundred years, however, and they mainly record the births and the deaths of saints. The entry for the year 516 reads, “The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors.” The entry for the year 537 is as follows: “The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut [Mordred] fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.” 10 If these entries are accurate twenty-one years separated Arthur’s last two battles.
    The Annales Cambriae also contain one of the earliest references to the man called Merlin to survive. The entry for the year 573 reads, “The Battle of Arderydd between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell; Merlin went mad.” The Battle of Arderydd was not fought in Wales however, but at the fort Caer Gwenddolau, which would now be in the hamlet of Carwinley on the Scotland–England border.

    The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , started in the ninth century and considered to be England’s most important historical record of pre-Norman history, covers many events during the age of Arthur but has nothing to say about him. We are left then with only four sources of evidence of a historical Arthur: Aneirin’s Y Gododdin ; Gildas’s De Excidio ; Nennius’s Historia ; and the Annales Cambriae . After Nennius, Arthur becomes increasingly elusive as, in effect, he passes from history into legend.
    In the early seventh century the written word in the south of Britain was controlled by the Christian Church, which consequently was able to promote its own stories—predominantly tales from the lives of saints—to the exclusion of almost all others. This meant that