Click for Larger Image KeyWords: King Arthur Annales Cambriae Celtic sources Geoffrey Ashe Nicholas J. Higham David Dumville Battle of Camlann Gildas Merlin Lailoken Battle of Mt. Badon Brut y Tywysogion KeySources: Annales Cambriae Click Here to Read Online Click Here to Download PDF

"Annales Cambriae" (The Annals of Wales = AC), written in Latin, is a year by year account of Irish, Welsh and, later, English affairs. There exist three copies, today, referred to as A, B, and C. Copy A (pictured at right), believed to be the primary copy from which B and C were derived, is a manuscript (MS) in the British Museum's Harleian Collection, No. 3859.

Structure
The first eight year spaces are left blank and entries begin with year 447 (though some say 444) and run through 977 (the last 23 years are blank; the last actual entry, then, is 954, the death of the Welsh prince, Rhodri Mawr). Early entries are quite sparse; 12 in the first 100 years, and increase in frequency as time goes on. Physically, the annals are laid out in 3 columns; each year entry is headed with the letters 'an' (Latin abbreviation for annus = year) and followed by a punctuation mark similar to a semi-colon. The whole document has spaces for 533 years, with one space = one year. Most of the entries are quite brief.

Dating and Authorship
The AC most likely dates to the latter part of the tenth century, although some investigators give it an early 11th century date (Dumville, even later). That the date of the writing of the AC is late, is evident from the sketchiness of the early entries, indicating that the information was probably gleaned from earlier sources which were scarce at the time of writing. Additionally, it seems that no one, beginning an annalistic record would find nothing to write about for the first 8 years, so it is likely that it was written at a much later date when no records were available for those years.

The AC was included, without title or introduction, in the body of a MS of Nennius' "Historia Brittonum," and would later be used as the basis for the "Brut y Tywysogion," The Chronicle of the (Welsh) Princes." Apart from the value of the information it contains, the document's primary interest lies in the fact that, in what appears to be a mostly sober (i.e. non-legendary) historical record, under the dates 516 and 537, mention is made of Arthur fighting at Mt. Badon and at Camlann. We'll look at this in more detail, below.

Where the AC was written and by whom is not known for certain. It was probably compiled at the monastery at St. David's in Wales (Higham) in the period 960-70, with the copy now extant being produced in the 12th century (Alcock). Going against the grain, Dumville, citing the work of Kathleen Hughes of Cambridge University, states that it was probably "written at an unidentified Anglo-Norman centre c. 1100; there is nothing to suggest that this was in Wales." He does allow that the source materials used for the compilation were probably from St. David's, though.

Some Interesting Entries
As stated earlier, the entries in the AC seem to be, for the most part, free of blatantly legendary material. One curious early entry, though, does attract our attention,

" 501 Bishop Ebur rests in Christ, he was 350 years old.."

There was no known bishop by the name Ebur at that time and this entry may reflect a vague memory of a Bishop Eborius from the city of York who was recorded as having been an attender at a council held at Arles in Gaul, early in the 4th century (Marsh). In a masterpiece of understatement, about this entry Geoffrey Ashe has said that it, "hardly inspires confidence."

The entry for the year 547 indicates that there was a "great death" (i.e. plague) in which Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd died. If you'll recall, Maelgwn was one of the five British kings that Gildas castigated for his sins and who was alive at the time that Gildas wrote. This supports a pre-547 writing of Gildas' DE.

The AC's main items of interest to many are those entries dealing with Arthur:

"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."

"537 The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland."

The 516 entry is remarkable for a couple of things. First is its length. The AC is not known for excess verbiage (in fact, just the opposite) and this entry is positively verbose by the AC's normal, laconic standard. Second, Gildas, in the first recorded mention of a military event at Mt. Badon, called it a 'siege'. Nennius, called it one of Arthur's 12 'battles', and in the AC it is referred to as a 'battle', as well. Nennius, in the HB, said that Arthur carried the "image of holy Mary, the everlasting virgin" during his eighth battle at Guinnion Fort, and in this clearly legendary entry in the AC, Arthur is seen carrying the cross of Jesus. The similarities of the two accounts are obvious and it seems that the AC entry is derived directly from (or inspired by) Nennius and, therefore, cannot be of early authorship.

The author's use of "three days and three nights" also has a legendary quality to it and, despite certain similarities in the passage, he doesn't get this bit from Nennius. The HB, in telling of the battle of Guinnion Fort says,

". . .and the heathen were put to flight on that day (not three days and three nights), and great slaughter was made upon them . . .."

Wherever it came from, it indicates that by the time the AC was written, the Arthurian legendary tradition was well established.

The 537 entry is regarded as much more likely to be historically valuable, since it doesn't appear to have any of the normal legendary attachments to it. Geoffrey Ashe says that it "looks like a plain statement, free from legend." It may be, though, that the names (Arthur and Medraut [Mordred]) that are mentioned in this non-legendary way are, in fact, the very aspects of the passage that could be considered legendary. Apart from other legendary sources, neither Arthur nor Mordred had any historical substance, at the time the AC was written.

In an article in "The Arthurian Encyclopedia," Ashe contends that all people mentioned in the AC are real:

"Some of the entries are misdated or influenced by legend, but they never mention definitively fictitious persons."

The operative term, here, is "definitively fictitious" and while the entry about Bishop Ebur has a seriously legendary feel to it, since we can't conclusively prove that there was no such person as the good bishop (nor is it possible to prove that anyone 'never' existed), we must allow his contention to stand along with the concomitant implication that, therefore, Arthur 'may' be a real person, too.

The final point to be made about the 'Arthurian' entries has to do with dating. As has been shown in the paper on Gildas' DE, the date for the siege of Mt. Badon is somewhere between 491-5, so that makes the 516 entry twenty-one to twenty-five years after the actual fact. Scribal error when copying or inadvertent transposition of Roman numerals in an ancient record may account for the discrepancy, but the likelier case is that by the time the notice of the siege of Mt. Badon was entered into the chronicle, any contemporary record that might ever existed and provided a more precise date, had been lost. As it stands, it looks like an inaccurate guess.

The date for the Battle of Camlann, if such a battle ever happened at all, is entirely unknown and the only suggested dates for it are the AC's 537 and Geoffrey of Monmouth's date of 542. If, as tradition has it, that Arthur was born somewhere in the 460's, then either of these dates is far too late for his last battle. For them to be true, Arthur would've been still fighting at over 75 years old and even for an old warrior like him, that is far too long a time to be wielding a sword in battle. But any date for Camlann, a battle which seems to have taken place outside of time, is no more than a guess since there are no known historical dates with which to calibrate.

Historical Reliability
In the entry for 573, one version of the AC tells us that following a battle "Merlin went mad." Regarding the Merlin entry, Ford tells us that there was a real 10th century Merlin who was the illegitimate son of a monastic Royal Princess of Dyfed. But the Merlin of the 573 AC entry was created by Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Vita Merlini" c. 1151. This Merlin was a sixth century king and prophet who went mad following the Battle of Arfderydd (Arthuret) and fled into the forest. In Scottish folktales, there is a similar madman-in-the-woods figure by the name of Lailoken and it may be that Geoffrey modeled his Merlin on the Scottish Lailoken. This entry, then, is clearly dependent upon Geoffrey and, therefore, had to have been added after he wrote the "Vita Merlini."

It is also interesting to note that there are no references to the Saxons, their leaders, their conquests or their kingdoms until about 150 years after the first entry (and that was in one of the later versions) or the Britons' largely unsuccessful struggle against them (apart from the reference to Arthur, which was added much later). For the writers to have been unaware or to have intentionally ignored the events that so completely changed their country and their countrymen, casts suspicion on what they did choose to write about.

These two examples illustrate the point that these early chronicles were living documents, subject to change according to the whims or needs of the writer, the sponsor, the dedicatee and/or the times (Higham). Later entries rank as more reliable than early entries and, as with most other things, the AC can be trusted if it can be cross-checked against another, reliable source. But when it stands alone, with nothing else to support it, one must be very careful about using it to make final judgments about historical fact.

For Analysis of Other Arthurian Sources:
Geoffrey of Monmouth' "Historia Regum Britanniae"
Gildas' "De Excidio Britanniae"
Nennius' "De Excidio Britanniae"
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Bibliography:
Alcock, Leslie, "Arthur's Britain," Penguin, Middlesex, 1971 Chambers, E. K., "Arthur of Britain", Speculum Historiale, Cambridge, 1964 (original published in 1927

Dumville, David N., "Histories and Pseudo-histories of the Insular Middle Ages", Variorum, Aldershot, England, 1990

Fletcher, Robert Huntington, "The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles", Burt Franklin, New York, 1966 (2nd edition, original published in 1905)

Ford, David Nash, "Merlin", British History Club, http://www.britishhistoryclub.com/history/biographies/merlin.html, 2001 Higham, N. J., "King Arthur: Myth-making and History" Routledge, London, 2002

Lacy, Norris J., "The Arthurian Encyclopedia", Peter Bedrick, New York, 1986

Marsh, Henry, "Dark Age Britain: Sources of History", Dorset, New York, 1987

Morrris, John, ed., "Nennius: Arthurian Period Sources", History from the Sources, Volume 8, Phillimore, Chichester, 1980