Finding Arthur (42 page)

It was also necessary that Hering-Lancelot should be a Christian or at least someone who could be passed off as a Christian. Hering probably was a Christian. He had so little else to recommend him that if he had not been a Christian, in an increasingly Christian world, someone else would probably have been chosen to be the new hero. It is ironic, but it seems likely that an incompetent waster, the historical Hering, became the foundation upon
which was built that byword for glamorous heroism, the almost wholly fictional Lancelot.

Of course the name Hering had to go, not only because it sounded like the name of a fish but because it was not his real name. It seems likely that
Hering
was a derogative nickname that originated among Aethelfrith’s German-speaking supporters. When Hering was pushed out of Bernicia, Aethelfrith’s supporters, quite naturally, would have called this son of the late king by a disparaging name, something like “the boy.” This would have fitted the little loser perfectly. The prefix
her
is from the same root as the modern German
herr
, meaning “lord,” “master,” or “sir.” The suffix
ing
means “belonging to.”
Atheling
, for example, means someone who belonged to a noble, usually royal, family; later it became a prince, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a Dauphin, the heir, someone who was not quite first rank. It also seems likely that
Hering
was a mocking nickname for a man who had not been tough enough to hold onto his throne in the face of the more mighty Aethelfrith and who, when he returned as a commander of someone else’s army, was soundly beaten and probably killed. Hering means, in effect, “Little Master” or “Sir-ling” (a word I have just invented). In Old English and in German, a
hering
is “a herring.” This fish connection would have made the nickname funnier. In time the Norman-French conquered England, and so in time Hering-Lancelot became a Frenchman, the Lancelot de Lac we know today.

The most remarkable thing about Lancelot, the one thing that makes him exceptional, is not that he was the best fighter or most noble knight (someone had to be), it is that he is said to have seduced Guinevere, Arthur’s wife. How did this story come about? The obvious answer is that when it proved impossible to eradicate Arthur in the common consciousness, it was decided to neuter his legend by having Arthur cuckolded by someone who was more acceptable to a southern audience. What prompted someone to think of that?

In Malory’s romance,
Le Morte d’Arthur
, Guinevere is a beautiful woman, loved first by Arthur and then by Lancelot, although, in the earlier
Alliterative Morte Arthure
and in Geoffrey’s work, it is Mordred not Lancelot who is the third point of the love-triangle. (Mordred’s approach involved abduction and not seduction.)

It is unlikely that Arthur, Lancelot, and Mordred all lusted after Guinevere just because she was the most attractive woman of her day. Life is just not like that. It is more likely to have been not personal but strictly business.

The
Triads
, Geoffrey, and Malory all say that “Guinevere” was the
casus belli
of the Camlann campaign in which Arthur was killed. These romanticized accounts involve either an attack on Guinevere’s virtue by Mordred or her seduction by Lancelot. These accounts are probably no more than romantic audience-winning nonsense. The truth is probably more prosaic. Unless we are to believe Guinevere really was super-attractive, which, while possible, is unlikely, there must have been some other reason why Arthur, then Lancelot, and then Mordred all wanted her.

Guinevere is to the Camlann campaign what Helen is to Trojan War: a way to allow a little romance into what was really an ugly business. The
Iliad
says the Greeks attacked Troy because of Helen. The legend of Arthur says the Battle of Camlann was fought because of Guinevere. Real life does not tend to be like that. It is more likely that Agamemnon’s Greeks attacked Priam’s Troy and that Mordred’s Gododdin attacked Arthur’s Manau for more selfish reasons—for fortune and glory.

According to the ways of the Picts, rights passed through the female line, and so it makes sense to suppose that Arthur, Lancelot, and Mordred were interested in Guinevere for other than romantic reasons. Pharaohs married their sisters, because through their sisters they gained the right to rule. Caesar and Anthony did not take up with Cleopatra because she was a non-smoker with a good sense of humor, but because of the power Cleopatra brought to them.

The
Triads
have a novel take on the story. They say the Camlann campaign arose because of competition between Arthur’s wife and Mordred’s wife. I already knew about Cywyllog, Mordred’s wife, because of the part she played in the death of Merlin-Lailoken.
²²
She was Cywyllog of the House of Caw of Cambuslang, sister of both Gildas and the warlord Hueil, the man Arthur had killed in single combat in the 570s. Cywyllog, being Gildas’s sister, was probably a Christian, and so even if Arthur had not killed her brother Hueil, she had reason to hate Arthur.

The idea that Guinevere and Cywyllog were rivals, however, is probably based upon something more prosaic. It is likely that Cywyllog, like her husband, simply coveted Guinevere’s land, although, of course, this does not rule out personal animosity. The prize that fell to the winner of Arthur’s last battle was not Guinevere’s love or person but the land and power that came to her husband, and so in a way Guinevere was the cause of Arthur’s last battle although only indirectly.

Arthur became increasingly famous in the eight years after Badon and before Camlann. The soldiers who had stood in the shield walls, stormed the forts, breached the enemy lines, and slaughtered the retreating Angles under his command were proud to say they had marched with Arthur as they as they sat about the fires in their halls and warmed themselves in his reflected glory. Not everyone shared these affectionate memories, however; many chiefs remembered with bitterness Arthur’s usurpation of the social order when he led men of higher rank in the Great Angle War. They had allowed him to be in charge at that time only because they were afraid of the Angles, and now remembering their fear they resented Arthur even more.

The Angles were no longer a threat in the 590s. They had been chastened by their defeats in the battles of the Great Angle War. It would be a generation before they were once again poised to strike north, and even then they lost their nerve and struck south instead. Around 615, they cut across Britain and won a battle at Chester or Carlisle and drove an Angle wedge between the Britons of Scotland and their British cousins in the south.

In the 590s, with the threat of Angle invasion lifted, the chiefs of Strathclyde and the Gododdin looked apprehensively at Arthur. In the Scots of Dalriada and Men of Manau, the
ArdAirighaich
, Arthur had the most effective military force in Britain. Many of these chiefs would have been happy to see Arthur defeated, but of course not one of them was prepared to take him on.

In the years immediately after the Great Angle War most people were happy just to be alive and wanted only to enjoy life. This did not please the Christians, especially Gildas, because carefree people did not make receptive audiences for their visions of hell and damnation. He wrote,

A great multitude has been lost, as people daily rush headlong to hell; and the rest [the Gildas Christians] are counted so small a number that, as they lie in her lap, the holy mother church … does not see them, though they are the only true sons she has left.
²³

In the words of Gildas many people had become “slaves of the belly … and of the devil.” that is, open to physical pleasure and non-Christian. These same people were however quite happy, and for a short time, perhaps seven or eight years, during which time Merlin-Lailoken was in the ascendant in Strathclyde, they were prosperous, although, “The cities of our land are not populated … as they once were.”
²⁴

Not everyone, especially typically optimistic young people, cared about Gildas’s Christianity. He said they were ignorant of past tribulations, having “experience only of the calm of the present.” It was to be the calm before the storm.

Mungo Kentigern had run away to Rome and stayed there during the Great Angle War. He only returned to Strathclyde when the war was over, bringing with him the imprimatur of Pope Gregory the Great, promises of papal preferment, and money for bribes. Mungo offered the aristocrats of Strathclyde a partnership with the Church, a partnership that would be predominant in Western Europe until the Renaissance and which came to be called Christendom. Many aristocrats of Strathclyde accepted what Mungo had to offer. By the mid-590s the Mungo Christians and their new allies had undermined Merlin-Lailoken’s position and were well on their way to taking control in Strathclyde.

Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, still had allies in Strathclyde: Merlin-Lailoken the chancellor; Rhydderch the king; and Languoreth, Merlin-Lailoken’s twin sister and Rhydderch’s queen. He could also call upon chiefs and warriors of Strathclyde who were resolute in the Old Way of the druids. The support of the people of the Old Way was a mixed blessing to Arthur in 596, because its corollary was that the Christian chiefs became his enemies. He also had the support of his nephews, Gawain, Gareth and Gaheris, his sister Anna’s children by
her first marriage, although this was counterbalanced by the children of her second marriage, Mordred and his siblings, the man and the woman who came to be called Agravain and Clarisant.

The scene was set for the Camlann campaign in which Arthur died.

In the aftermath of Camlann, Mordred controlled the eastern marches of Manau, and it would have been in his interest to marry Guinevere, or, and this is more likely, because Mordred was married to a ferocious woman called Cywyllog, to marry her off to one of his male relatives. Such a marriage to Guinevere would have legitimized Mordred’s de facto authority over Guinevere’s lands. He was to be disappointed.

Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, was killed at the Battle of Camlann, but Aedan was not and he had his own plans for Guinevere. Aedan had the now effectively landless princess, Guinevere, married to the effectively landless Hering. If Hering were to become king of the Angles in Aethelfrith’s place, he would then have the power and the motive to win back Manau’s eastern districts from the Gododdin and so put the border of Manau back where it was before Camlann. If Hering did not become king of the Angle-lands then no harm done: all Aedan would have lost was a landless princess. Aedan was a cynical man and a shrewd politician.

If Hering-Lancelot not only succeeded Arthur at the head of Aedan’s army in the Degaston campaign, fought some seven years after Camlann, but also married Arthur’s widow, Guinevere, this would explain the later, romanticized story that has Lancelot win Guinevere away from Arthur. Of course marrying someone’s widow is less dramatic than seducing someone’s wife, and so later writers deleted the fact that Hering-Lancelot married Arthur’s widow and substituted the famous seduction of Arthur’s wife. This provides a nonfictional foundation for the fictional love-triangle story, at least to the extent that Lancelot succeeded Arthur in Guinevere’s bed.

Some twenty years after the Battle of Camlann, according to the twelfth-century
Vita Merlini Silvestris
, Mordred is literally lording it over Dunipace, that is, over land that had once been in Arthur’s charge, including the lands about Camlann itself. Dunipace is close to what was
in the sixth century the border between Manau and the lands of the Gododdin. It seems most likely that Mordred took control of these lands in the aftermath of Camlann.

The
Alliterative Morte Arthure
, which has Mordred pursuing Guinevere, makes sense if the lands Mordred took possession of in the aftermath of Camlann were lands to which Arthur had right through his marriage to Guinevere. When Guinevere was married to Arthur, it would have been his duty to hold her lands secure. When Arthur died at Camlann, Guinevere’s lands were taken by Mordred. This is why romances such as the
Alliterative Morte Arthure
say Mordred tried to win Guinevere by force. It was not Guinevere Mordred was after, at least not primarily, it was her lands.

If Guinevere was married to Hering-Lancelot for political reasons, and if she knew that after the death of Hering-Lancelot at Degaston in 603 she was likely to be married off again to someone else, perhaps even someone chosen by Mordred, it would be understandable if Guinevere decided to move north where she would have been safe from the machinations of men like Mordred.

It is likely that sometime after Camlann, when her husband Arthur was killed, and after Degaston, when her second husband Hering-Lancelot was killed, that the twice widowed Guinevere retired to live with the family of her brother-in-law Gartnait near Perth. This would explain the Perthshire legend that says Guinevere died and was buried in Meigle and the eight-foot-high cross-slab stone, Meigle II, which is now in Meigle museum and which is said to have marked the place where she was buried. In isolation this oral tradition might be considered almost completely without weight, but if Arthur’s wife was a woman of the Picts, in the above circumstances it fits into the big picture.

Aedan was never to be as successful in war after the death of Arthur as he was when Arthur commanded his army. After he lost the best part of his army at Degaston he must have realized that his time was up. Although Columba-Crimthann had died the year after Arthur his Christians were growing increasingly powerful in the north and west and Mungo Kentigern’s Christians even more powerful in south and central Scotland, Aedan cannot have failed to remember the destruction
of the people of the Pen Dragons by an army marching under Christian banners (an army in which he had played a cynical part). He must have feared the same thing happening to Dalriada and Manau. He could have changed horses and become a Christian—that is what most people did—but he was probably too old, too proud, and too stubborn to take this course, and so the year after Degaston, around 604, Aedan abdicated in favor of his son Eochaid Buide and retired to Kilkerran on the south east tip of Kintyre.