Arthurian Legends and the Strathclyde connection | AskHistorians Archive Observer

If it’s all right I’m going to explain a bit about the historiographical context before directly answering your question. Since the 1980s, historians of Dark Age Britain have typically avoided talking about Arthur. At one time, it was not uncommon for respected scholars to openly assume that there was a historical Arthur. An example of this can be found in Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain. However, historians and archaeologists became increasingly distrustful of the written sources, partly because of increasing focus on archaeological evidence, and partly because of David Dumville’s seminal 1976 thesis ‘The textual history of the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum’. The ninth-century Historia Brittonum is the earliest Arthurian source. By demonstrating the problems with this source, Dumville alerted people to its unreliability. Further studies pointed out the obviously legendary aspects of the text and its known inaccuracies, getting to a point where many Dark Age scholars have altogether rejected the Historia as a source for the period. This being the case, the party line is that there is no evidence for a historical Arthur. Academic works typically do not mention him at all, and popular histories such as Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages or Francis Pryor’s Britain A.D. assert that there is no evidence for Arthur. Guy Halsall’s Worlds of Arthur, which is both a popular history and a serious academic work, does address Arthur, but only to explain why the sources that mention him are unreliable. Occasionally an academic from another field, for example Miles Russell or Ilkka Syvänne, will write some kind of reappraisal of sources usually considered entirely fictional, but this is reliably rejected by most Dark Age scholars. There are also the books published by out-and-out Arthurians. These range from attempts to find a historical basis for elements invented by French poets in the twelfth century, to more serious studies such as Christopher Gidlow’s The Reign of Arthur. The latter, however, remain overly optimistic about the value of sources written six hundred years after Arthur is supposed to have lived.

What I’m doing here is explaining, in a very drawn-out way, that it’s hard to know what historians think about Arthur, because they don’t usually talk about it. I would say though, that they tend to fall into two groups. The first is made up of those who say there is no historical evidence and that Arthur is therefore a character of legend, not history. The second hold to a principle of ‘no smoke without fire’ (a label coined by Dumville) and believe that such a major legendary figure probably does have a historical basis. After all, there is nothing about the legendary Arthur that suggests he was not a real person, as opposed to Hengest and Horsa. It is probably also worth pointing out that more sceptical historians still tend to imagine that figures such as St David were in some way real, despite there being less evidence for them than there is for Arthur. One academic who thinks that Arthur probably did exist has told me that he reckons the only major thing that we might be able to work out is where Arthur was active, which is pertinent to your question.

The only academic I know to have actually attempted this in recent years is Caitlin Green who, in ‘Lincolnshire and the Arthurian Legend’ (which is available as a free PDF), argues that Lincolnshire is the most likely place of origin for historical elements in the Arthurian legends, it being the location of the first four battles the Historia Brittonum claims that Arthur fought. Personally, I don’t think that the Historia’s mention of Linnius (modern Lincolnshire) is much more useful than the other placenames in the battle-list, in that these battles could easily have been fought by other people at different times, or indeed be entirely fictional. Although the first four battles are in Linnius, greater emphasis is placed on the victories at the Guinnion fort and Badon Hill, though these may also be misattributed to Arthur. It should be noted that Green is an expert on Lincolnshire in particular (and is from there if I recall correctly), so she does have a dog in this fight as it were. But while it might be difficult to prove or disprove that the Arthur legend originates in Lincolnshire, there are substantive arguments that it does not originate in Strathclyde. The argument that Arthur was active in what is now southern Scotland partly rests on the ability to identify places in that region with the names given in the Historia Brittonum’s battle-list. The thing is, you can do this with pretty much any part of Britain, and people certainly have done, as you mention in your post. Green has placed Badon Hill in Lincolnshire, but others have put it in the East Riding. It is more commonly identified with Bath or the Badbury Rings, both in the West Country. And this might all be irrelevant, because it’s quite possible that Arthur (if he did exist) was not at Badon Hill, and only became associated with it in later legends. Furthermore, I would argue that attempts to use the battle-list to place Arthur in a specific part of Britain are based on the false assumption that Arthur would have only fought battles in the area surrounding the small polity he ruled or fought for. In fact, we know that British rulers in this period were entirely capable of long-range campaigning. Circa 470, a British ruler called Riothamus took an army, apparently numbering 12,000 and certainly large enough to fight the Gothic army in open battle, to Gaul to help the Romans in their war with Visigothic kingdom. Another thing to consider is the theory that Arthur was a professional soldier who served kings in different parts of Britain.