What's the consensus on the supposed battle of Badon Hill?

by ILoveNomads
rimeroyal

You say “supposed,” so I’m going to try to answer this assuming you’re looking for whether or not the Battle of Badon Hill as we know of it from literary and chronicle sources took place.

To the best of my knowledge, we have no archaeological evidence of a battle between Brittonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples in the 6th century tied to any place called Badon Hill. The earliest reference to Badon comes from the British monk Gildas in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. He helpfully dates the battle to about 500 CE:

[The war between the Anglo-Saxons and Britons] continued up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill, and of almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. And this commences, a fact I know, as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth.

There are a lot of problems with Gildas as a source, like any monk, but some context helps. Gildas was a native British monk who, like the rest of the people living in Britain at the time, were being displaced by the invasive settlement of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who eventually became the English people. The invasion started around the middle of the 5th century at the earliest, and it continued for nearly two hundred years without slowing down. This was not a conquest meant to put Anglo-Saxon-Jutish rulers over the Brittonic people, it was a displacement—the invaders from the continent pushed the Brittonic peoples out of their homes and stopped at what we know today as Wales. The fact that English adopted virtually nothing from the Brittonic languages outside place-names is a testament to that, although the lack of Anglo-Saxon women in the archaeological record of the earliest waves of invasions might (might) suggest the Germanic men were taking Brittonic women as wives early on. Gildas was a Brittonic monk writing in the middle of all this, and so it should come as no surprise that his outlook in the rest of the chronicle is apocalyptic misery. In this context, as the Arthurian scholar Peter Field put it, it’s not hard to see how a story of a single great victory in the face of a multi-century losing war could quickly gain legendary status among its people. The Venerable Bede, writing from the 8th century, mentions a siege of Baddestown Hill Nennius, another Brittonic (or Welsh, by his time) monk, is the first to reference an Arthur leading a heroic charge at a Mount Badon in Historia Brittonum in the 9th century, and from there on, Arthur and Badon Hill travel together. In the 12th century, the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth made it famous in his Histora Regum Britanniae, which is sort of the convergence point in history where most of the “mainstream” parts of the Arthur-story that are popular today come from.

But you asked for a consensus—there isn’t one. All I’ve done here is given you a short literary lineage of the battle, because that’s all we really have. Scholars and enthusiasts have been trying to claim real-life places as the sites from Arthurian legend since Henry VIII’s time, and there’s never much agreement. I know respected historians who will make a 20-minute argument for the site of Camelot based on linguistic history and Roman roads, while others will flat-out say “well, that’s nice, but Arthur’s made up.” And in terms of what we work with here on AskHistorians, there isn’t any theory I can point to that offers anything concrete. Sure, you could say that a case has been made for the area around the modern city of Bath, based on the fact that the double-d in Baddon is pronounced as a th sound in the Welsh language and the on was dropped over time to make Baddon become Bath, but while it’s also true that although Camulodunum sounds an awful lot like Camelot, there are a lot of places in Britain with that name, and it doesn’t necessarily tie it to anything concrete. In short, the most that can be said from a historian’s perspective is that Badon was a legendary battle that emerged out of the folklore of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, and like plenty of other folklore elements, medieval authors adapted it over time. Without anything more concrete, trying to “pin the tail on the Arthurian location” is pseudohistory.