EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT A BATTLE YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF.
So here it is. It's like 3900 words long, twelve pages, SEVEN SINGLE SPACED, WHUT. (Somehow the singled spaced thing is more shocking to me than any of the rest of it, idk.
From Gildas to Geoffrey: The Development of the Legend of Badon
Today, a British person is anyone who lives in England, Scotland or Wales and an English person is someone who lives in England specifically. However, that was not always the difference. Once, over fifteen hundred years ago, there was a big difference between the British and the English. The word ‘England’ is derived from the name of the Angles, the Germanic tribe, who along with their fellow Germans the Saxons, began invading the British Isles in the early to mid fifth century. Unsurprisingly, the native inhabitants of the land, called the Britons, fought against the Angles and Saxons with everything they had, desperately trying to hold on to their autonomy. In those days, there was a huge difference between the British and the English.
The Britons apparently referred to the Angles, Saxons and other Germanic tribes that were beginning to populate the island exclusively as Saxons, which is how the literature that is extant from Wales around this time addresses them. The British king Vortigern originally invited these tribes there. According to the chronicler who called himself Nennius, Hengist and Horsa, a pair of brothers, arrived in Vortigern’s kingdom and the king “ received them as friends” (Nennius 9) because they had agreed to help him fight against “the enemies of his kingdom” (Nennius 10) but, somewhat unsurprisingly, the brothers refused to give up their comfortable arrangement in Britain and return to Germany when Vortigern decided he was no longer in need of them. Thus began a struggle of the Britons against Germanic rule as well as a long tradition of painting Vortigern as the worst king imaginable. In the various chronicles of the time, he was called a “proud tyrant” (Gildas 9), and accused of marrying his daughter, “as if desirous of adding to the evils he had already occasioned” (Nennius 10).
But all the vilification could not negate the fact was that the Saxons were in Britain to stay and that, despite their efforts, the Britons simply did not have the means to force them out. For the most part, it appears that the Britons were largely unsuccessful in most of their military exploits against the Saxons invading their homeland and the Angles and the Saxons would become so associated with the British Isles that their inhabitants would come to be called Anglo-Saxon just as much as they are British. However, before things could go that far, the Britons do seem to have gotten one good victory in against their German rivals. This victory came at the Battle of Mount Badon (sometimes called Badon Hill or, in Latin, Mons Badonicus), which probably took place sometime in the decades before or after 500 AD. There has been a copious amount of scholarship done on this battle, with various theories on where the battle took place and who the individuals involved were, but all that is known for sure is that it was the last decisive victory the Britons had prior to the complete cultural assimilation that would soon follow between the two sides.
All the information we have about the Battle of Mount Badon comes from about four medieval texts. The first two, Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britannie (in English, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, attribute the British victory to a man named Ambrosius Aurelianus. However, the later two, Nennius’ Historia Brittonum (The History of Britain) and the Annales Cambriae (The Annals of Wales), attribute it to Arthur, making Badon of great interest to Arthurian scholars everywhere. And the commander is not the only difference found between these texts; every time someone new wrote about it, the legend of the battle shifted slightly, each author brought something different to the story. The way each author treats the battle not only tells us something about each author individually but also about how legends such as this change and form over time.
Gildas is the earliest source extant that discusses Badon. He appears to have been a very well respected monk, known among his peers as Gildas the Wise. Later, Gildas was sainted and by the time Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing, he had become almost as legendary as Arthur. By the twelfth century, he had two biographers of his own.
Writing sometime around 540, Gildas says that the battle occurred forty-four years before that, the year he was born. This makes Gildas the only one of these chroniclers who had access to first hand accounts, making his work invaluable to those who are trying to find out exactly what happened. To those of us who are not, that is still notable because it means that Gildas is writing about something his audience remembers, or at least has heard about because their parents remember. This is important to keep in mind.
The chronicle is a run down on all of what Gildas sees as the downfall of Britain’s greatness. On the battle, he writes:
After a time, when the cruel plunderers had gone home, God gave strength to the survivors. Wretched people fled to them from all directions, as eagerly as bees to the beehive when a storm threatens, and begged whole-heartedly, 'burdening heaven with unnumbered prayers', that they should not be altogether destroyed. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm: certainly his parents, who had worn the purple, were slain in it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather's excellence. Under him our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented, and the battle went their way.
26 From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not. This lasted right up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then has already passed. (Boyer)
Gildas sees Badon as the last time the Britons displayed their full potential. In his mind, Aurelianus was a great man and a worthy role model and writes that Aurelianus’ “progeny in these our days, although shamefully denigrated from the worthiness of their ancestors” (Gildas 10), as old men have been doing seemingly since the beginning of human history, lamenting that the younger generation just cannot live up to the standards set by their elders. He appears to be motivated to write about this battle primarily in order to use it to contrast what he sees as, as the title of his chronicle implies, the ruin of Britain. The section on Badon is immediately followed by this passage, which is clearly anti-Saxon propaganda:
27. BRITAIN has kings, but they are tyrants; she has judges, but unrighteous ones; generally engaged in plunder and rapine, but always preying on the innocents; whenever they exert themselves to avenge and protect, it is sure to be in favour of robbers and criminals; they have an abundance of wives, yet are they addicted to fornication and adultery, they are K ready to take oaths, and as often perjure themselves; they make a vow and almost immediately act falsely; they make war, but their wars are against their countrymen, and are unjust ones; they righteously persecute thieves throughout their country but those who sit at the table with them are robbers, and they not only cherish but reward them; they give alms plentifully, but in contrast to this is a whole pile of crimes which they have committed; they sit on the seat of justice, but rarely seek out the rule of right judgment; they despise the innocent and the humble, but seize every occasion of exalting to the utmost the bloody-minded; the proud, the murders, the combined and adulterers, enemies of God, who ought to be utterly destroyed and their names forgotten. (Gildas 11)
Whether the Saxon administrators were really this horrible will never be able to t proven, but it is hard to believe. However, it is undeniable that Gildas was writing during a period in which anti-Saxon sentiment which he is capitalizing on by harkening back to the memories of the British victory at a battle which the Britons would have at least been aware of.
And for the record, in Gildas, Badon is a hill, not a mountain, and the battle is a siege. Those details do not stay the same in later accounts.
The next author to mention Badon was a man named Bede, an English monk who completed his work the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from which the relevant passage is taken, in 731. Known throughout history as the Venerable Bede, the introduction of the Oxford Classic edition of the Ecclesiastical History says that he “may fairly be called the most famous of all medieval historians who wrote in Britain” and that the book “has been seen as the first real attempt at a national history” (Oxford ix). As his is a much broader work than Gildas’ (or, in fact, any of the other chronicles examined here) Bede does not spend time on Badon, but he does mention it. He says:
When the army of the enemy had exterminated or scattered the native peoples, they returned home and the Britons slowly began to recover strength and courage. They emerged from their hiding-places and with one accord they prayed for the help of God that they might not be completely annihilated. Their leader at that time was a certain Ambrosius Aurelianus, a discreet man, who was, as it happened, the sole member of the Roman race who had survived this storm in which his parents, who bore a royal and famous name, had perished. Under his leadership the Britons regained their strength, challenged their victors to battle, and, with God's help, won the day. From that time on, first the Britons won and then the enemy were victorious until the year of the siege of Mount Badon, when the Britons slaughtered no small number of their foes about forty-four years after their arrival in Britain. (Boyer)
Bede is clearly borrowing largely from Gildas and does not bring much of anything new to the legend. The battle is still a siege and Aurelianus is still the commander. The only thing that has changed is that Badon Hill has become Mount Badon.
Bede wrote about two hundred years after Gildas and after the battle, but in the meantime it seems that not many of the details had changed. Bede, being the man of God he was, attributes the British victory to the will of God, but for the most part it seems that Badon appears in the Ecclesiastical History or the sake of thoroughness.
It was not until Historia Brittonum was written around 796 that things began to change drastically. This chronicle is an anonymous work, but is usually attributed to a Welsh monk (Boyer), calling himself Nennius (or sometimes Neninius or Ninnius). Whoever he was, this man made some of the most influential innovations to the legend of Badon. This is what he had to say:
At that time the English increased their numbers and grew in Britain. On Hengest's death, his son Octha came down from the north of Britain to the kingdom of the Kentishmen, and from him are sprung the kings of the Kentishmen. Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle. […]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. (Boyer)
The most important and notable difference is that according to Nennius, the commander of the British is a solider named Arthur, not Aurelianus. Historia Brittonum is one of the earliest known documents that mentions Arthur by name and is often used by Arthurian scholars as evidence that the legendary king was a real historical figure (never mind the fact that his exploits in this document had previously been attributed to someone else entirely). Other than that major difference, Badon is a hill again, like it had been for Gildas, but the battle is no longer a siege and is instead the last in a series of twelve battles in which Arthur led the British army, whereas previously it had been an individual endeavor. Also, while previous accounts had put the focus of their tellings on the grace of God, which had allowed the Britons to win the day, God and religion is still present in Nennius but the focus is now on Arthur, an individual. And it would remain on him in all the subsequent incarnations of the battle.
But Historia Brittonum is not wholly about Badon. The rest of the chronicle is made up of short summaries of other notable moments in British history. It reads like a roll call of important characters in the Western literary tradition. In a segment that is nothing short of comical to modern ears in its disregard for the difference between fact and fiction, he recounts how the descendants of Aeneas had first populated the British Isles from Italy, then tells of how Julius Caesar conquered Britain for Rome, the recounts the life of St. Germanus and the story of how Vortigern welcomed the Saxons into Britain before finally getting to Arthur. In fact, Nennius only spends one relatively long paragraph about the military campaign Arthur waged leading up to Badon and only about a sentence on the battle itself.
The shift to Arthur as the commander heralds a major shift in the legend of Badon. One is that it becomes a legend. While it is worth studying since Nennius would certainly have had access to sources that have been lost to scholars today, any so-called historical document that treats Aeneas as though he were a real, living, non-fiction person can only be taken with a grain of salt in terms of how much truth there is to it. Nennius clearly was not worrying about whether or not what he was saying was true, or about instructing people in history on the greatness of God so much as he was writing to entertain. It appears that Nennius was stringing together a collection of stories that his audience, the people of Britain at the end of the eighth century, would have already been aware of. If this were not the case, he would have spent more time going into detail in each section rather than just giving them a general gloss.
Another source of information on Badon is the Annales Cambriae (the earliest known manuscript of which was actually found on the same parchment of the earliest known manuscript of Historia Brittonum). It is nothing more than a chronology with specific events listed next to the year in which . All that it has to say about Badon is this:
516 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. (Boyer)
This is largely like what Nennius said about it. Scholars trying to pin down exactly what happened at Badon focus on this document because it places the battle about twenty years later than Gildas, who is considered the most reliable source for dating it. Aside from that, however, it is interesting to note the fact that this document seems to highlight both Arthur and God at the same time, almost as though the anonymous author was trying to form some sort of balance between Nennius’ focus (which the author appears to have been aware of since he also credits Arthur-or that could just point to the fact that Arthur had already become commander at Badon in the popular consciousness) as well as Gildas and the rest of the people who came before them.
As a side note, Annales Cambriae is also notable to Arthurian scholars because it records that “The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell” took place in 537.
It was not until three hundred years after Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae, in the twelfth century, that Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Historia Regnum Brittaniae (in English, The History of the Kings of Britain), in large part standardized the legend of King Arthur and kicked off the golden age of Arthurian literature. In the centuries that followed Geoffrey’s book variation upon variation of Arthur’s life and the lives of the people who supposedly surrounded them were put down in books and spread by the bards to the people.
Geoffrey’s passage on Badon (which, interestingly, never explicitly calls the place of the battle takes place by name) is much too long to quote here in its entirety, but it is important to note that instead of the battle just being a matter of the Britons wanting to fend off the unwanted occupation of the Saxons, the Saxons have personally impeded on Arthur’s honor. The passage begins:
From thence they pursued their furious march to the town of Bath, and laid siege to it. When the king had intelligence of it, he was beyond measure surprised at their proceedings, and immediately gave orders for the execution of the hostages. […][Arthur] addressed himself to his followers in these words: "Since these impious and detestable Saxons have disdained to keep faith with me, I, to keep faith with God, will endeavour to revenge the blood of my countrymen this day upon them. To arms, soldiers, to arms, and courageously fall upon the perfidious wretches, over whom we shall, with Christ assisting us, undoubtedly obtain the victory." (Boyer)
Geoffrey did not just make that change so that the battle would be more personal for Arthur and make the audience sympathize with him. It is important to remember that Geoffrey was living in a completely new world than the one we have seen previously. Unlike his predecessors in chronicling Badon, Geoffrey was writing in a post-Norman Invasion world. The Saxons had long since assimilated into British life and the enemy of the Britons were now their French occupiers. The people of Britain would no longer be able to understand the vilification of the Saxons on the same level as they had been in the eighth century and before.
In fact, in the decade or so before Historia Regnum Brittaniae was completed, two other texts had revisited Badon and laid the groundwork for Geoffrey’s reworking of the subject. In Gesta Regnum Anglorum, William of Malmsbury does not refer to Arthur’s enemy as Saxons, but instead as “the English” (Boyer) (pointing to the fact that there was still a big difference between the English ad the British and that the difference was not entirely amicable):
With his decease the Britons' strength withered away, and their hopes dwindled and ebbed; at this point, in fact, they would have collapsed completely, had not Vortigern's successor Ambrosius, the sole surviving Roman, kept down the barbarian menace with the outstanding aid of the warlike Arthur. This Arthur is the hero of many wild tales among the Britons even in our own day, but assuredly deserves to be the subject of reliable history rather than of false and dreaming fable; for he was long the mainstay of his falling country, rousing to battle the broken spirit of his countrymen, and at length at the siege of Mount Badon, relying on the image of our Lord's Mother which he had fastened upon his arms, he attacked nine hundred of the enemy single-handed, and routed them with incredible slaughter. On the other side, the English, through the sport of Fortune's wheel, made good their wavering ranks by reinforcements of their fellow-countrymen, and more boldly rushed into the fray; so, little by little, as the natives retreated, they spread over the whole island, not without the favouring providence of God, in whose hand is every change of lordship. (Boyer)
It is also interesting to note as an aside that apparently by this time the legends of Aurelianus from the pre-Nennius depictions of Badon and Arthur had coalesced into one legend in which the two leaders work together to fend of the invasion.
And then just a few years before the completion of Historia Regnum Brittaniae, in 1133, a man called Henry of Huntington wrote Historia Anglorum, which heavily harkened back to Nennius when he reached the section on the twelve battles Arthur fought against the Saxons. On Badon, he says:
The twelfth was a hard-fought battle with the Saxons on Mount Badon, in which 440 of the Britons fell by the swords of their enemies in a single day, none of their host acting in concert, and Arthur alone receiving succour from the Lord. These battles and battle-fields are described by Gildas the historian, but in our times the places are unknown, the Providence of God, we consider, having so ordered it that popular applause and flattery, and transitory glory, might be of no account. At this period there were many wars, in which sometimes the Saxons, sometimes the Britons, were victors; but the more the Saxons were defeated, the more they recruited their forces by invitations sent to the people of all the neighbouring countries. (Boyer)
Clearly, apart from just borrowing Unlike William, Henry seems to have no qualms about calling the Saxons by their traditional name. The entire format of this section and what directly precedes it is clearly taken straight from Nennius and, like Nennius, the focus remains on the individual Arthur. Henry gives credit for the victory to the grace of God but Arthur is clearly the hero and the center of attention. Also, his complaint about the “popular applause and flattery” seems to suggest that the legends of Arthur and Badon were widespread even before Historia Regnum Brittaniae.
All in all, it boils down to this: fifteen hundred years ago, there was probably a battle at an unknown location in either Wales or England in which the Britons stood up to the Saxons and were successful for what may have been the last time before the Saxons got a firm hold on Britain that they would never let go. We will never be able to know for sure exactly what happened there, but it is clear that in the millennium and a half since the story of the Battle of Badon has morphed ad grown and taken on a life of its own. And because of Badon’s consistent presence in the literature pertaining to the development of the Arthuriania, it gives us a unique perspective on the development of those legends and others like it.
Today it is remembered from the line in the Monty Python film Holy Grail that describes “Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot…who had personally wet himself at the Battle of Badon Hill.” With a literary tradition as strong as Badon has, it would be difficult for it to ever fully leave the popular consciousness.
Bibliography
"Annales Cambriae 447-954 (The Annals of Wales)." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 21
Dec 2009. .
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999. Print.
Boyer, Sam. "The Battle of Mount Badon: Annotated Bibliography." The Battle of
Mount Badon. Spring 2004. University of Rochester, Web. 21 Dec 2009. .
Gildas. "Gildas (c. 504-570): Works." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 2 Dec 2009.
.
Nennius. "Historia Brittonum." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 2 Dec 2009.
.
From Gildas to Geoffrey: The Development of the Legend of Badon
Today, a British person is anyone who lives in England, Scotland or Wales and an English person is someone who lives in England specifically. However, that was not always the difference. Once, over fifteen hundred years ago, there was a big difference between the British and the English. The word ‘England’ is derived from the name of the Angles, the Germanic tribe, who along with their fellow Germans the Saxons, began invading the British Isles in the early to mid fifth century. Unsurprisingly, the native inhabitants of the land, called the Britons, fought against the Angles and Saxons with everything they had, desperately trying to hold on to their autonomy. In those days, there was a huge difference between the British and the English.
The Britons apparently referred to the Angles, Saxons and other Germanic tribes that were beginning to populate the island exclusively as Saxons, which is how the literature that is extant from Wales around this time addresses them. The British king Vortigern originally invited these tribes there. According to the chronicler who called himself Nennius, Hengist and Horsa, a pair of brothers, arrived in Vortigern’s kingdom and the king “ received them as friends” (Nennius 9) because they had agreed to help him fight against “the enemies of his kingdom” (Nennius 10) but, somewhat unsurprisingly, the brothers refused to give up their comfortable arrangement in Britain and return to Germany when Vortigern decided he was no longer in need of them. Thus began a struggle of the Britons against Germanic rule as well as a long tradition of painting Vortigern as the worst king imaginable. In the various chronicles of the time, he was called a “proud tyrant” (Gildas 9), and accused of marrying his daughter, “as if desirous of adding to the evils he had already occasioned” (Nennius 10).
But all the vilification could not negate the fact was that the Saxons were in Britain to stay and that, despite their efforts, the Britons simply did not have the means to force them out. For the most part, it appears that the Britons were largely unsuccessful in most of their military exploits against the Saxons invading their homeland and the Angles and the Saxons would become so associated with the British Isles that their inhabitants would come to be called Anglo-Saxon just as much as they are British. However, before things could go that far, the Britons do seem to have gotten one good victory in against their German rivals. This victory came at the Battle of Mount Badon (sometimes called Badon Hill or, in Latin, Mons Badonicus), which probably took place sometime in the decades before or after 500 AD. There has been a copious amount of scholarship done on this battle, with various theories on where the battle took place and who the individuals involved were, but all that is known for sure is that it was the last decisive victory the Britons had prior to the complete cultural assimilation that would soon follow between the two sides.
All the information we have about the Battle of Mount Badon comes from about four medieval texts. The first two, Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britannie (in English, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, attribute the British victory to a man named Ambrosius Aurelianus. However, the later two, Nennius’ Historia Brittonum (The History of Britain) and the Annales Cambriae (The Annals of Wales), attribute it to Arthur, making Badon of great interest to Arthurian scholars everywhere. And the commander is not the only difference found between these texts; every time someone new wrote about it, the legend of the battle shifted slightly, each author brought something different to the story. The way each author treats the battle not only tells us something about each author individually but also about how legends such as this change and form over time.
Gildas is the earliest source extant that discusses Badon. He appears to have been a very well respected monk, known among his peers as Gildas the Wise. Later, Gildas was sainted and by the time Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing, he had become almost as legendary as Arthur. By the twelfth century, he had two biographers of his own.
Writing sometime around 540, Gildas says that the battle occurred forty-four years before that, the year he was born. This makes Gildas the only one of these chroniclers who had access to first hand accounts, making his work invaluable to those who are trying to find out exactly what happened. To those of us who are not, that is still notable because it means that Gildas is writing about something his audience remembers, or at least has heard about because their parents remember. This is important to keep in mind.
The chronicle is a run down on all of what Gildas sees as the downfall of Britain’s greatness. On the battle, he writes:
After a time, when the cruel plunderers had gone home, God gave strength to the survivors. Wretched people fled to them from all directions, as eagerly as bees to the beehive when a storm threatens, and begged whole-heartedly, 'burdening heaven with unnumbered prayers', that they should not be altogether destroyed. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm: certainly his parents, who had worn the purple, were slain in it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather's excellence. Under him our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented, and the battle went their way.
26 From then on victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to) of his latter-day Israel to see whether it loves him or not. This lasted right up till the year of the siege of Badon Hill, pretty well the last defeat of the villains, and certainly not the least. That was the year of my birth; as I know, one month of the forty-fourth year since then has already passed. (Boyer)
Gildas sees Badon as the last time the Britons displayed their full potential. In his mind, Aurelianus was a great man and a worthy role model and writes that Aurelianus’ “progeny in these our days, although shamefully denigrated from the worthiness of their ancestors” (Gildas 10), as old men have been doing seemingly since the beginning of human history, lamenting that the younger generation just cannot live up to the standards set by their elders. He appears to be motivated to write about this battle primarily in order to use it to contrast what he sees as, as the title of his chronicle implies, the ruin of Britain. The section on Badon is immediately followed by this passage, which is clearly anti-Saxon propaganda:
27. BRITAIN has kings, but they are tyrants; she has judges, but unrighteous ones; generally engaged in plunder and rapine, but always preying on the innocents; whenever they exert themselves to avenge and protect, it is sure to be in favour of robbers and criminals; they have an abundance of wives, yet are they addicted to fornication and adultery, they are K ready to take oaths, and as often perjure themselves; they make a vow and almost immediately act falsely; they make war, but their wars are against their countrymen, and are unjust ones; they righteously persecute thieves throughout their country but those who sit at the table with them are robbers, and they not only cherish but reward them; they give alms plentifully, but in contrast to this is a whole pile of crimes which they have committed; they sit on the seat of justice, but rarely seek out the rule of right judgment; they despise the innocent and the humble, but seize every occasion of exalting to the utmost the bloody-minded; the proud, the murders, the combined and adulterers, enemies of God, who ought to be utterly destroyed and their names forgotten. (Gildas 11)
Whether the Saxon administrators were really this horrible will never be able to t proven, but it is hard to believe. However, it is undeniable that Gildas was writing during a period in which anti-Saxon sentiment which he is capitalizing on by harkening back to the memories of the British victory at a battle which the Britons would have at least been aware of.
And for the record, in Gildas, Badon is a hill, not a mountain, and the battle is a siege. Those details do not stay the same in later accounts.
The next author to mention Badon was a man named Bede, an English monk who completed his work the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from which the relevant passage is taken, in 731. Known throughout history as the Venerable Bede, the introduction of the Oxford Classic edition of the Ecclesiastical History says that he “may fairly be called the most famous of all medieval historians who wrote in Britain” and that the book “has been seen as the first real attempt at a national history” (Oxford ix). As his is a much broader work than Gildas’ (or, in fact, any of the other chronicles examined here) Bede does not spend time on Badon, but he does mention it. He says:
When the army of the enemy had exterminated or scattered the native peoples, they returned home and the Britons slowly began to recover strength and courage. They emerged from their hiding-places and with one accord they prayed for the help of God that they might not be completely annihilated. Their leader at that time was a certain Ambrosius Aurelianus, a discreet man, who was, as it happened, the sole member of the Roman race who had survived this storm in which his parents, who bore a royal and famous name, had perished. Under his leadership the Britons regained their strength, challenged their victors to battle, and, with God's help, won the day. From that time on, first the Britons won and then the enemy were victorious until the year of the siege of Mount Badon, when the Britons slaughtered no small number of their foes about forty-four years after their arrival in Britain. (Boyer)
Bede is clearly borrowing largely from Gildas and does not bring much of anything new to the legend. The battle is still a siege and Aurelianus is still the commander. The only thing that has changed is that Badon Hill has become Mount Badon.
Bede wrote about two hundred years after Gildas and after the battle, but in the meantime it seems that not many of the details had changed. Bede, being the man of God he was, attributes the British victory to the will of God, but for the most part it seems that Badon appears in the Ecclesiastical History or the sake of thoroughness.
It was not until Historia Brittonum was written around 796 that things began to change drastically. This chronicle is an anonymous work, but is usually attributed to a Welsh monk (Boyer), calling himself Nennius (or sometimes Neninius or Ninnius). Whoever he was, this man made some of the most influential innovations to the legend of Badon. This is what he had to say:
At that time the English increased their numbers and grew in Britain. On Hengest's death, his son Octha came down from the north of Britain to the kingdom of the Kentishmen, and from him are sprung the kings of the Kentishmen. Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle. […]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. (Boyer)
The most important and notable difference is that according to Nennius, the commander of the British is a solider named Arthur, not Aurelianus. Historia Brittonum is one of the earliest known documents that mentions Arthur by name and is often used by Arthurian scholars as evidence that the legendary king was a real historical figure (never mind the fact that his exploits in this document had previously been attributed to someone else entirely). Other than that major difference, Badon is a hill again, like it had been for Gildas, but the battle is no longer a siege and is instead the last in a series of twelve battles in which Arthur led the British army, whereas previously it had been an individual endeavor. Also, while previous accounts had put the focus of their tellings on the grace of God, which had allowed the Britons to win the day, God and religion is still present in Nennius but the focus is now on Arthur, an individual. And it would remain on him in all the subsequent incarnations of the battle.
But Historia Brittonum is not wholly about Badon. The rest of the chronicle is made up of short summaries of other notable moments in British history. It reads like a roll call of important characters in the Western literary tradition. In a segment that is nothing short of comical to modern ears in its disregard for the difference between fact and fiction, he recounts how the descendants of Aeneas had first populated the British Isles from Italy, then tells of how Julius Caesar conquered Britain for Rome, the recounts the life of St. Germanus and the story of how Vortigern welcomed the Saxons into Britain before finally getting to Arthur. In fact, Nennius only spends one relatively long paragraph about the military campaign Arthur waged leading up to Badon and only about a sentence on the battle itself.
The shift to Arthur as the commander heralds a major shift in the legend of Badon. One is that it becomes a legend. While it is worth studying since Nennius would certainly have had access to sources that have been lost to scholars today, any so-called historical document that treats Aeneas as though he were a real, living, non-fiction person can only be taken with a grain of salt in terms of how much truth there is to it. Nennius clearly was not worrying about whether or not what he was saying was true, or about instructing people in history on the greatness of God so much as he was writing to entertain. It appears that Nennius was stringing together a collection of stories that his audience, the people of Britain at the end of the eighth century, would have already been aware of. If this were not the case, he would have spent more time going into detail in each section rather than just giving them a general gloss.
Another source of information on Badon is the Annales Cambriae (the earliest known manuscript of which was actually found on the same parchment of the earliest known manuscript of Historia Brittonum). It is nothing more than a chronology with specific events listed next to the year in which . All that it has to say about Badon is this:
516 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. (Boyer)
This is largely like what Nennius said about it. Scholars trying to pin down exactly what happened at Badon focus on this document because it places the battle about twenty years later than Gildas, who is considered the most reliable source for dating it. Aside from that, however, it is interesting to note the fact that this document seems to highlight both Arthur and God at the same time, almost as though the anonymous author was trying to form some sort of balance between Nennius’ focus (which the author appears to have been aware of since he also credits Arthur-or that could just point to the fact that Arthur had already become commander at Badon in the popular consciousness) as well as Gildas and the rest of the people who came before them.
As a side note, Annales Cambriae is also notable to Arthurian scholars because it records that “The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell” took place in 537.
It was not until three hundred years after Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae, in the twelfth century, that Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Historia Regnum Brittaniae (in English, The History of the Kings of Britain), in large part standardized the legend of King Arthur and kicked off the golden age of Arthurian literature. In the centuries that followed Geoffrey’s book variation upon variation of Arthur’s life and the lives of the people who supposedly surrounded them were put down in books and spread by the bards to the people.
Geoffrey’s passage on Badon (which, interestingly, never explicitly calls the place of the battle takes place by name) is much too long to quote here in its entirety, but it is important to note that instead of the battle just being a matter of the Britons wanting to fend off the unwanted occupation of the Saxons, the Saxons have personally impeded on Arthur’s honor. The passage begins:
From thence they pursued their furious march to the town of Bath, and laid siege to it. When the king had intelligence of it, he was beyond measure surprised at their proceedings, and immediately gave orders for the execution of the hostages. […][Arthur] addressed himself to his followers in these words: "Since these impious and detestable Saxons have disdained to keep faith with me, I, to keep faith with God, will endeavour to revenge the blood of my countrymen this day upon them. To arms, soldiers, to arms, and courageously fall upon the perfidious wretches, over whom we shall, with Christ assisting us, undoubtedly obtain the victory." (Boyer)
Geoffrey did not just make that change so that the battle would be more personal for Arthur and make the audience sympathize with him. It is important to remember that Geoffrey was living in a completely new world than the one we have seen previously. Unlike his predecessors in chronicling Badon, Geoffrey was writing in a post-Norman Invasion world. The Saxons had long since assimilated into British life and the enemy of the Britons were now their French occupiers. The people of Britain would no longer be able to understand the vilification of the Saxons on the same level as they had been in the eighth century and before.
In fact, in the decade or so before Historia Regnum Brittaniae was completed, two other texts had revisited Badon and laid the groundwork for Geoffrey’s reworking of the subject. In Gesta Regnum Anglorum, William of Malmsbury does not refer to Arthur’s enemy as Saxons, but instead as “the English” (Boyer) (pointing to the fact that there was still a big difference between the English ad the British and that the difference was not entirely amicable):
With his decease the Britons' strength withered away, and their hopes dwindled and ebbed; at this point, in fact, they would have collapsed completely, had not Vortigern's successor Ambrosius, the sole surviving Roman, kept down the barbarian menace with the outstanding aid of the warlike Arthur. This Arthur is the hero of many wild tales among the Britons even in our own day, but assuredly deserves to be the subject of reliable history rather than of false and dreaming fable; for he was long the mainstay of his falling country, rousing to battle the broken spirit of his countrymen, and at length at the siege of Mount Badon, relying on the image of our Lord's Mother which he had fastened upon his arms, he attacked nine hundred of the enemy single-handed, and routed them with incredible slaughter. On the other side, the English, through the sport of Fortune's wheel, made good their wavering ranks by reinforcements of their fellow-countrymen, and more boldly rushed into the fray; so, little by little, as the natives retreated, they spread over the whole island, not without the favouring providence of God, in whose hand is every change of lordship. (Boyer)
It is also interesting to note as an aside that apparently by this time the legends of Aurelianus from the pre-Nennius depictions of Badon and Arthur had coalesced into one legend in which the two leaders work together to fend of the invasion.
And then just a few years before the completion of Historia Regnum Brittaniae, in 1133, a man called Henry of Huntington wrote Historia Anglorum, which heavily harkened back to Nennius when he reached the section on the twelve battles Arthur fought against the Saxons. On Badon, he says:
The twelfth was a hard-fought battle with the Saxons on Mount Badon, in which 440 of the Britons fell by the swords of their enemies in a single day, none of their host acting in concert, and Arthur alone receiving succour from the Lord. These battles and battle-fields are described by Gildas the historian, but in our times the places are unknown, the Providence of God, we consider, having so ordered it that popular applause and flattery, and transitory glory, might be of no account. At this period there were many wars, in which sometimes the Saxons, sometimes the Britons, were victors; but the more the Saxons were defeated, the more they recruited their forces by invitations sent to the people of all the neighbouring countries. (Boyer)
Clearly, apart from just borrowing Unlike William, Henry seems to have no qualms about calling the Saxons by their traditional name. The entire format of this section and what directly precedes it is clearly taken straight from Nennius and, like Nennius, the focus remains on the individual Arthur. Henry gives credit for the victory to the grace of God but Arthur is clearly the hero and the center of attention. Also, his complaint about the “popular applause and flattery” seems to suggest that the legends of Arthur and Badon were widespread even before Historia Regnum Brittaniae.
All in all, it boils down to this: fifteen hundred years ago, there was probably a battle at an unknown location in either Wales or England in which the Britons stood up to the Saxons and were successful for what may have been the last time before the Saxons got a firm hold on Britain that they would never let go. We will never be able to know for sure exactly what happened there, but it is clear that in the millennium and a half since the story of the Battle of Badon has morphed ad grown and taken on a life of its own. And because of Badon’s consistent presence in the literature pertaining to the development of the Arthuriania, it gives us a unique perspective on the development of those legends and others like it.
Today it is remembered from the line in the Monty Python film Holy Grail that describes “Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot…who had personally wet himself at the Battle of Badon Hill.” With a literary tradition as strong as Badon has, it would be difficult for it to ever fully leave the popular consciousness.
Bibliography
"Annales Cambriae 447-954 (The Annals of Wales)." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 21
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Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford: Oxford University
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Boyer, Sam. "The Battle of Mount Badon: Annotated Bibliography." The Battle of
Mount Badon. Spring 2004. University of Rochester, Web. 21 Dec 2009. .
Gildas. "Gildas (c. 504-570): Works." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 2 Dec 2009.
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Nennius. "Historia Brittonum." Medieval Sourcebook. Web. 2 Dec 2009.
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