Arthur and Mordred
In the nineteenth century, many historians were suspicious of anything about King Arthur. Arthur was mentioned in all sorts of Welsh medieval sources, but he seemed to be a largely fabulous character. Many historians agreed with John Milton who, in his History of Britain, had doubted whether Arthur had ever existed. That’s why there is no mention of Arthur in works like David Hume’s History of England.
Things changed very suddenly in 1878, however, when Henry Charles Coote published his book The Romans in Britain.
King Arthur had first been made famous in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain describes Arthur as the most important of all the British kings and as the conqueror of all the Saxons. Geoffrey’s book was so popular it created a kind of mania. Arthur started appearing in all sorts of historical works as if everything Geoffrey had written was true. Except that it clearly wasn’t.
Most of Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain is pseudo-historical. It starts with the Trojan exile Brutus settling in Britain and defeating all the giants who lived there – and that’s well before it gets to Merlin, Uther Pendragon and the lady Igraine. But Geoffrey’s book was a medieval bestseller and it launched the modern myth of Arthur.
Over the next few centuries, all sorts of historical works became infected by Geoffrey’s ideas, until a backlash ensued. By the early nineteenth century, many historians had come to the conclusion that Arthur had been made up. Any mention of Arthur in a medieval source was suspected to have been influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth even if it looked as if it had been composed well before the twelfth century.
Historians treated anything to do with Arthur suspiciously until Coote observed that Arthur’s name derived from the Roman clan name Artorius. In the years following the collapse of Roman rule in Britain, the Welsh, Cornish and Cumbrians had continued to often give their children Roman names and Arthur’s is no exception – it is typical of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Coote’s revelation made Sir John Rhys, the first Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford, recant his earlier assertion that Arthur was a myth. It was now clear to him that Arthur had really once existed, but that a myth had later grown up around him. Coote’s observation quickly led to the rehabilitation of Arthur as a historical figure.
All the leading authorities accepted that Arthur had a name of Roman origin. Understandings of linguistics had developed to such a stage that Coote’s derivation could be shown to be true. Arthur’s Roman name also squarely dated him to the period he had long been claimed to live in.
The earliest references to Arthur in medieval sources suddenly looked a lot more respectable. Arthur is recorded in two entries in an early set of Welsh annals and in the oldest Welsh historical compendium, the Historia Brittonum. These two sources are both centuries older than the time Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing in. It is now widely accepted they were the inspiration for much of Geoffrey’s fantasy.
The new understanding of Arthur was further reinforced in the first volume of the Oxford History of England. Archaeologists and historians revisited the early sources that mention Arthur to see what could safely be said about him. There wasn’t much to go on, but by the 1950s, most historians had come to accept that Arthur had really existed. He even appears in Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
In the 1970s, however, a reaction set in. A young historian set about to demolish the case for Arthur. The early sources for Arthur were unreliable he claimed, therefore it couldn’t be proved that Arthur had ever existed.
But the name Arthur is clearly a Celticised form of the Roman clan name Artorius. So how could he not have existed?
The clan, known in Latin as the gens Artoria, are not as famous as some of the great families of imperial Rome. But well over 100 members of the gens Artoria are known from ancient sources, from the fifth-century BC to the end of the Roman period. The idea that Arthur never existed looks pretty silly from this perspective.
A member of the clan is even known to have served as a prefect in the Roman army at York. Lucius Artorius Castus lived in the second century and is only known thanks to two inscriptions that commemorate him found in Podstrana in Croatia. Castus appears to have died there and to have made sure one of the memorials was set up. After serving as a centurion in several legions, Castus had been promoted to be a prefect at York and finally retired and became the treasurer of Liburnia, the Roman name for much of modern Croatia.
You can visit Podstrana today and see Castus’s memorial stone. Some American researchers have tried to convince everyone that Castus was the “real” King Arthur and the Croatian tourist industry has cottoned on – they’ve even had a big sword sculpture set up on the beach at Podstrana.
The first step in the Celtic development of Arthur’s name was the change of Artorius to Arturius. By the third century, Artorius would have begun to be pronounced Arturius in Britain. Latin inscriptions from that date regularly adopt similar spellings. Latin nomen ‘name’ is written as numen in British Latin inscriptions and Londinium (London) started being referred to as Lundinium.
Late in the fifth century, the Britons started leaving off the final syllables of names. An inscription from the period found in 1998 at Tintagel records a British name Artognou without the ending -us found in earlier spellings of British men’s names. By the early sixth century, the ancient Roman clan name must have been pronounced as Artur, and by the end of that century as Arthur.
But the young sceptic said “no”. That’s not enough evidence. Why Arthur’s name clearly being Roman was suddenly no longer considered enough evidence to be sure he once existed might seem something of a surprise. The evidence hadn’t changed, just the attitude to it. It occurred at the time of a broader backlash against the use of linguistic evidence in historical writing and it has remained popular among people who don’t show much sign of being interested in linguistics.
Just because Arthur has a Roman name doesn’t mean a British king called Arthur existed. It’s possible, but seems a bit of a stretch, to assume that a Roman name was just applied to a mythical king. Other people called Arthur are known from the sixth and seventh centuries – people associated with Ireland mainly. They must have been named after someone else – a famous Arthur – because the Irish usually didn’t use Roman names otherwise. But who was that someone else, that famous Arthur?
Arthur’s name being of Roman origin isn’t quite enough for sceptics. But what if there was more evidence of that type, evidence that was not known in the 1970s. Would that change the minds of sceptics? You’d like to think it would.
Since the 1990s it has been increasingly accepted that the name of Mordred is also Roman in origin. The first r in Mordred is a spelling mistake from the thirteenth century – he is called either Medraut or Modred in earlier accounts.
It’s also fairly clear how the two different spellings came about. Medraut is a slightly corrupted form. Both Medraut and Modred reflect the common Roman given name Moderatus.
The name Moderatus was widely used throughout the Roman Empire and it is even recorded as that of a centurion from Caerleon in Wales. Nothing else is known about the centurion Roesius Moderatus, but there were probably scores of people who bore the name Moderatus at one stage or another living in Roman Britain. Moderatus literally means ‘moderate’ in Latin and having a moderate temperament was considered a virtue by the Romans. The name remained in use after Roman times, too. There are two people recorded in ninth-century Breton called Modrot, and there’s a Cornish Modred too. The Domesday Book even records a place called Tremodret ‘Modret’s farm’ in Cornwall.
Modred and Arthur are also recorded in the Welsh annals as having died together in a battle at a place called Camlann. Geoffrey of Monmouth turned Camlann into Camblan, an old form of the name of the river Camel in Cornwall. But since the 1970s, most historians have accepted that Camlann was the Roman fort of Camboglanna on Hadrian’s Wall at what is now called Castlesteads, a site near Carlisle. There’s nothing above ground to see there today and the site is privately owned, so you can’t visit it even if you wanted to (and the beach is better at Podstrana).
So Arthur and Modred, two people with Celticised Roman names, are recorded dying at a site on Hadrian’s Wall in the Welsh annals. But sceptics claim that the records that mention Arthur in the Welsh annals can’t be trusted. They claim that they may have been snuck into the annals centuries after the sixth century, despite the record for 537 preserving the names of two people with typically sixth-century names dying at a well-known Roman site in the sixth century.
If Arthur’s name being of Roman origin was good enough evidence for Sir John Rhys to change his mind and accept that Arthur was a real person, you would like to think that the similar evidence that Modred’s name was also of Roman origin would make it twice as likely Arthur was a real person. Why wouldn’t it?
Think about how likely it would be that both Arthur and Modred were made up – that the record from 537 is a fake. The odds don’t look very good. Rhys understood that characters from Celtic mythology all have etymologically Celtic names. Guinevere seems likely to be a mythical figure because her name literally means ‘white ghost’ in Welsh. Uther Pendragon’s name means ‘fearsome head-dragon’ and he could also well be a made-up figure. But are Arthur and Modred likely to be mythical? One could perhaps be mythical, but both? What are the odds?
That historians have now identified where they think Arthur and Modred died would presumably make most people think that the chance of Arthur being a real figure was even more likely. Why wouldn’t it be?
So why wouldn’t the record of Arthur and Modred dying in 537 be likely to be true? Two people with names typical of the sixth century recorded dying at an old Roman fort – a place where there is quite likely to have been a battle – all sounds very reasonable. There is even evidence that people still lived at Castlesteads in the post-Roman period.
The only question should really be if Arthur and Modred were on the same side or fought against each other at Camlann. We know what Geoffrey of Monmouth thought happened, but the record from 537 (or at least its earliest attested version) does not say that Arthur and Modred killed each other at Castlesteads.
There is no linguistic or historical reason to doubt that the entry in the Welsh annals that records that Arthur and Modred died at Castlesteads in 537 is genuine now that both Arthur and Modred are known to have had names of Roman origin. Unless you are a university professor who has spent the last 30 years telling students otherwise of course.