Northern History

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Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37

Andrew Breeze

To cite this article: Andrew Breeze (2016) Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37,
Northern History, 53:2, 161-172, DOI: 10.1080/0078172X.2016.1195600

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Published online: 07 Sep 2016.

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Northern History, LIII:2, September 2016

ARTHUR’S BATTLES AND THE VOLCANIC WINTER

OF 536–37

Andrew Breeze
University of Navarre, Pamplona

A volcanic eruption in the Americas, producing both a world famine and a world cycle of
literature, is one of history’s stranger tricks, yet seemingly happened in the year 535. The
traditional suspect is in El Salvador, where Ilopango is thought that year to have exploded and
collapsed, leaving a crater ten miles long. Whatever its exact date, the paroxysm (amongst the
greatest in 200,000 years) was catastrophic for the local Mayas. Ilopango or another volcano
on the American Continent will further explain the famines of 536–37 noted by chroniclers
in Byzantium, Wales, Ireland and China. Starvation apparently came as well to North Britain,
prompting Arthur’s campaigns and thereby begetting a legend.
The reasoning for this is as follows. In 535–36 ash and sulphates from Ilopango or other
volcanoes in the Americas spread through the atmosphere, causing a prolonged volcanic winter.
It accounts for crop failure in British society at that date, which would bring civil unrest and
attempts to seize supplies of food from neighbouring peoples. The battles of Arthur listed by
the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, all (with one exception) locatable in southern Scotland
and Northumberland, would be owed to that. They will have been fought for meat to feed a
starving population, and not (as one might think) for land or gold. Cattle raids being endemic
amongst the Celts, Arthur was hence not the commander of Romanised cavalry-squadrons
combating the English (as often suggested), but a rustler, of heroic status, yet still with parallels
to one of Sir Walter Scott’s Highland reavers.
In this paper we thus do four things. We review the locations of Arthur’s battles in Scotland
and the Borders; set out evidence for famine immediately before 537, when Arthur met his
death at Camlan; describe raiding for cattle in Celtic society; and relate these to the extreme
weather events of 535–537 produced by the Ilopango Caldera (near San Salvador) or volcanoes
in Canada and the USA. Besides pinpointing Arthur’s original identity, we also shed light on
the early sixth century, amongst the obscurest periods of Scotland’s history.
First, the twelve battles of Arthur, fought on nine battlefields (there being four engagements
on the River Douglas) and named in Historia Brittonum. Because they have been discussed
at length in this journal, we here merely list them at their nine proposed locations.1

1
Andrew Breeze, ‘The Historical Arthur and Sixth-Century Scotland’, Northern History, lii (2015), 158–81.

© The University of Leeds, 2016 DOI: 10.1080/0078172X.2016.1195600

162 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

(1) ‘The mouth of the River Glen (Glein).’ The Glen (NT 9732) of Northumberland.
(2) ‘Another river, called the Douglas (Dubglas), which is in the country of Lindsey (Linnuis).’
Douglas Water (NS 8330), South Lanarkshire, reading Clutuis ‘Strathclyders’ for Linnuis.
(3) ‘On the river called Bassas.’ Either (reading Tarras) the Mouse Water (NS 9145) near
Carstairs (Casteltarras in 1172), South Lanarkshire, or Tarras Water (NY 3781), Dumfries
and Galloway.
(4) ‘Celyddon Forest.’ The vicinity of Beattock Summit (NS 9915), South Lanarkshire.
(5) ‘Guinnion Fort.’ Not Kirkgunzeon (NX 8666) in Dumfries and Galloway, as argued in
the text of the paper, but Carwinning (NS 2852), North Ayrshire, as suggested by Dr Tim
Clarkson in the caption to the map.
(6) ‘In the City of the Legion.’ With the Cumbric reading carrec legion ‘rock of the legion’,
the cliff by Kinneil House (NS 9880), Falkirk, on the Antonine Wall.
(7) ‘The river-bank called Tryfrwyd.’ Dreva (NT 1435), on the Upper Tweed, Borders.
(8) ‘On the hill called Agned.’ Reading Agheu ‘death’, this will be ‘Pennango’, former name
of a hill by Newmill (NT 4510), Borders.
(9) ‘On Badon Hill.’ Read Bradon; Ringsbury Hill (SU 0786), by Braydon Forest, Wiltshire.
This was not a battle of the historical Arthur, its attribution to him being late and spurious.2
Beside the twelve battles of Historia Brittonum are two others, figuring respectively in a
Vatican manuscript of the history and in Welsh annals.
(10) Brewyn. The Roman fort at High Rochester (NY 8398), Northumberland.
(11) Camlan. The Roman fort at Castlesteads (NY 5163), Cumbria.
The implication here is that Arthur was a North Briton, fighting not the English but other
North Britons; that these were the Gododdin of south-east Scotland and the men of Rheged
around Carlisle; and that he was therefore a Strathclyder, with his fame ultimately transmitted
to Wales from Strathclyde sources.
Having clarified Arthur’s northern connections, we move to our second part, on evidence
from his time for famine in North Britain, and on his death at Camlan in 537. Thanks to Geoffrey
of Monmouth (d. 1154/5), who located Arthur’s last battle on the River Camel in Cornwall,
scholars have long known of Camlan. Attempts to explain its name were made even in Henry
VIII’s day, when John Leland (d. 1552) took Cam(b)lan as a corruption of Alaunus or Allen,
formerly used of the Camel on its lower reaches, near Wadebridge. ‘Ego certe pene adducor
ut credam, Alaunum fluvium facile degenerasse vitio indoctorum librariorum in Camblan.’3
Modern research starts with publication in the nineteenth century of Annales Cambriae, where
its entry for 537, recording Arthur’s death in battle at Camlan, has an importance hard to
exaggerate. As a unique source on his dating and historicity, it is for Arthur what the aside
of Einhard (d. 840) on the combat of August 778 at Roncesvalles in Navarre is for Roland.
In the Rolls Series edition the entry reads ‘Gueith [battle of] Camlann, in qua Arthur
et Medraut corruere; et mortalitas in Brittania et in Hibernia fuit’.4 It was for many years
somewhat neglected. In judicious remarks on Arthur’s battles, Sir John Lloyd (1861–1947)
did not mention Camlan, despite his belief in Arthur’s existence and even his exercise of

2
Andrew Breeze, ‘The Arthurian Battle of Badon and Braydon Forest, Wiltshire’, Journal of Literary Onomastics, iv
(2015), 20–30.
3
John Leland, Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae (Londini, 1544), p. 37.
4
Annales Cambriae, ed. John Williams ab Ithel (1860), p. 4.
 Andrew Breeze 163

imperial functions.5 Hugh Williams (1843–1911) spoke of Camlan in the context of Geoffrey
of Monmouth, ‘who hardly ever ventures upon any date’, but put it in 542.6 William Watson
(1865–1948) of Edinburgh was, as often, perceptive to a remarkable degree. Placing in the
south the Ambrosius Aurelianus referred to by Gildas, and Arthur ‘as I believe, in the north’,
he then cited the Welsh annal for 537 on Camlan and Arthur’s death.7 Watson here towers
above present-day scholars, most of whom express no view on where Camlan was, remind-
ing us how understanding in the humanities ‘makes no steady and continuous progress, and
relapse accompanies advance’.8 The aphorism may be recalled when we come to recent books
on Arthur.
The annal for 537 was given again by Sir Edmund Chambers (1866–1954) after the editions
of Phillimore and Loth: ‘Gueith Camlann in qua Arthur et Medraut corruerunt; et mortalitas
in Brittannia et in Hibernia fuit’.9 Despite their brevity, these statements have been curiously
misunderstood, as we shall see. There have also been vacillations on the date. Yet fundamental
progress on Camlan came in 1935, when the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957)
identified it as Camboglanna, at the time taken as the fort of Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall,
but now regarded as Castlesteads seven miles to the west. Robin Collingwood (1889–1943)
thought Crawford’s hypothesis ‘convincing’.10 So, too, did Henry Lewis (1889–1968) of
Swansea: ‘yn y Gogledd yr oedd Camlan, mae’n bur debyg’.11 (The mortalitas, in contrast,
has been consistently overlooked, although we shall maintain that the conflict resulted from
it.) Crawford’s proposal was also accepted by Kenneth Jackson (1909–91) of Edinburgh.12
He was echoed by his pupil Rachel Bromwich (1915–2010), even if she hedged her bets with
an alternative in Snowdonia.13 (It may be dismissed, given the evidence for a northern Arthur
and lack of it for a Gwynedd one.) Jackson elsewhere indicated the importance of the annal,
remarking on the history of southern Scotland that for ‘the earlier sixth century our sources
are meagre indeed’, the main ones being Latin inscriptions, particularly those at Kirkmadrine
and Whithorn in south-west Scotland.14 If, however, we interpret the Annales Cambriae entry
correctly, those few resources will be supplemented.
Later writers accepted Crawford’s hypothesis, some with enthusiasm, some less so. Despite
life-long adherence to the southern Arthur, believing (rightly) that Badon was fought in
Wiltshire and (wrongly) that Arthur perhaps won it, Jackson again gave cautious acceptance
to Camlan as fought on Hadrian’s Wall, if preferring to date it to 522 x 527.15 Tolstoy’s study
of Arthur’s twelve victories, while important for northern locations, logically says nothing
on Camlan.16 It was Arthur’s Waterloo, and Historia Brittonum ignored it. It yet appears
on a standard map, at Birdoswald (now discredited) and with the date 537.17 D. P. Kirby
5
J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales (1911), p. 126.
6
Hugh Williams, Christianity in Early Britain (Oxford, 1912), p. 351.
7
W. J. Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), pp. 128–29.
8
M. Annaei Lucani Belli Civilis Libri Decem, ed. A. E. Housman (Oxonii, 1926), p. vi.
9
E. K. Chambers, Arthur of Britain (1927), p. 241.
10
R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1937), p. 324.
11
Brut Dingestow, ed. Henry Lewis (Caerdydd, 1942), p. 275.
12
K. H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), p. 437.
13
Rachel Bromwich, ‘The Character of the Early Welsh Tradition’, in Studies in Early British History, ed. N. K. Chadwick
(Cambridge, 1954), pp. 83–136.
14
K. H. Jackson, ‘The Britons in Southern Scotland’, Antiquity, xxix (1955), 77–88.
15
K. H. Jackson, ‘The Arthur of History’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959),
pp. 1–11.
16
Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘Nennius, Chapter Fifty-Six’, The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xix (1960–62), 118–62.
17
Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, 2nd edn (Southampton, 1966).
164 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

of Aberystwyth observed that, if correct, the location shows Arthur’s ‘attention to military
concerns on the northern frontier’.18 But, if Arthur was a Strathclyde general, Camlan was
on his southern border, not his northern one. In Kirby’s mind was the model of Arthur, the
Romano-British warlord, last defender of Roman Britain. Instigated by Collingwood and
reaching its ne plus ultra with John Morris (d. 1977) of London, this academic fashion was
a long time dying.
As regards Crawford’s hypothesis, Geoffrey Ashe was a Laodicean, referring to ‘three
proposed Camlans, Camboglanna in Cumberland being better than the other two etymolog-
ically but perhaps not historically’.19 On what he meant by those adverbs he declined to say.
Charles Thomas (b. 1928) began as a firm believer in the Hadrian’s Wall location, dating
the engagement to 537 or 539, and even supplying an aerial photograph of Birdoswald (its
Arthurian credentials now, however, discredited).20 His fellow archaeologist Leslie Alcock
likewise followed Crawford, if proposing a date as early as 511.21 Yet he then thought 539
possible, and doubted any link with the Wall.22
At this point, we make a first reference to Irish harvest failure in the 530s. ‘Between 536
and 825, on five occasions, the annals record the loss of the corn crop, owing to unfavourable
weather conditions. On two of these occasions at least, a famine resulted.’23 Despite its agree-
ment with the Welsh annal for 537, the significance of the 536 entry has passed unnoticed. We
recall those dates when reading John Morris on Camlan as perhaps on the Roman Wall but
possibly in north-west Wales, and occurring ‘a year or two either side of 515’.24
Views on the date of Camlan have thus veered widely. The word mortalitas has also tripped
historians up. Translating the entry for 537 as ‘The grim battle Camlan in which Arthur and
Modred fell, and there was a mortality in Britain and in Ireland’, one writer understood this
as ‘pestilence, plague’.25 This is unwarranted. Irish annals mention famine, and medieval
Latin mortalitas is used for sudden large-scale death of any kind (whether by disease, star-
vation or massacre). Sounder was Rachel Bromwich on Camlan’s fame. She demonstrated
how the Welsh bards never forgot the disaster, the word having for them the associations
of Armageddon, and she again accepted a possible location on Hadrian’s Wall.26 Camlan in
that contrasts with Badon, unknown in Welsh vernacular tradition until it was infected in the
twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s forgeries. The case for the modern identification
Camlan = Castlesteads was summed up by Rivet and Smith after M. W. C. Hassall, who
mentioned nearby Cam Beck as preserving the name.27 A convenient translation nevertheless
reveals pitfalls. John Morris rendered the entry for 537 as ‘The battle of Camlann, in which
Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland’, where ‘plague’ again
shows misplaced confidence.28

18
D. P. Kirby, The Making of Early England (1967), p. 20.
19
Geoffrey Ashe, ‘Extending the Map’, in The Quest for Arthur’s Britain, ed. Geoffrey Ashe (1968), pp. 149–61.
20
Charles Thomas, Britain and Ireland in Early Christian Times (1970), pp. 40–41.
21
Leslie Alcock, Arthur’s Britain (1971), pp. 55, 62, 67.
22
Leslie Alcock, ‘By South Cadbury is That Camelot’ (1972), p. 17.
23
Donncha Ó Corráin, Ireland Before the Normans (Dublin, 1972), pp. 50–51.
24
John Morris, The Age of Arthur (1973), p. 140.
25
John Cule, ‘Pestis Flava’, in Wales and Medicine, ed. John Cule (1975), pp. 141–55.
26
Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 2nd edn (Cardiff, 1978), pp. 160–62.
27
A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith, The Place-Names of Roman Britain (Princeton, 1979), pp. 293–94.
28
Nennius, British History and The Welsh Annals, ed. John Morris (Chichester, 1980), p. 45.
 Andrew Breeze 165

In the 1970s, the old Arthurian fashion began yielding to a new one. Collingwood had
promoted the romantic view of Arthur as a Romanised cavalry general, who engaged the
English up and down Britain. Despite terse objections from Kenneth Jackson, the notion was
taken up by Leslie Alcock (who later recanted) and John Morris (a believer to the end). The
historical pendulum then swung to the other extreme, with an orthodoxy that Arthur never
existed at all, all early references to him being unhistorical. We shall see how, from about
1980, a whole series of senior scholars began turning and dancing to a tune played for the
most part by Professor David Dumville (b. 1949) of Cambridge and Aberdeen.
So much appears in a semi-popular work. ‘Arthur’s existence, still less his position as one
of the greatest war-leaders of his day, is still a matter of dispute.’29 The writer presumably
meant not ‘still less’ but ‘still more’. If the phrasing is clumsy and the grammar muddled, the
implication is yet clear. Further misgivings are voiced elsewhere. So much doubt being thrown
on the Celtic sources for Arthur, a decision on whether he ever lived must ‘be held in abeyance
by historians’.30 Remarks of Charles Thomas indicate a shift between 1970, when he supplied
a picture of Camlan’s supposed site, and 1981, when he declared that it is ‘preferable, and
in the particular case of “Arthur” it is desirable, to construct models of fifth-century Britain
devoid of individual names altogether’.31 On the entry for 537, James Campbell (b. 1935) of
Oxford remarks that it fails to indicate whether Arthur was a king and is in any case ‘unlikely
to derive from contemporary materials’.32 Celticists, knowing full well that early Welsh sources
never call Arthur a king, will be unsurprised by the first observation. As for the second, the
entry’s authority will be vindicated if we can show its date as correct.
In flat contradiction to the doubts of Salway and Charles Thomas are the final words of John
Morris, as if from another world. Arthur’s prestige as ‘victor of Badon’ preserved his empire
for two decades, with a ‘bald notice’ reporting its fall. Neither ‘the place, the persons, nor the
cause’ of Camlan are known, Medrawd’s treachery being a ‘later tradition’. Yet its ‘underlying
causes’ are plain from the complaints of Gildas. ‘The British could not unite. When Arthur
fell, none succeeded him. His empire died with him.’33 Fantasy is here, alas, made and asserted
out of nothing. Different problems occur in a further Oxford history. Its chronological table
juxtaposes ‘536: Famine’ from the Irish annals with ‘537: Battle of Camlann in Britain; Arthur
killed by Medrawd; plague in Britain and Ireland’ from the Welsh ones.34 The scholarship is
defective. The source lacks the first ‘in Britain’; it says nothing on who killed Arthur (betrayal
by Medrawd being a late legend); and the translation ‘plague’ is tendentious.
The new unhelpful nescio on the whole question of Arthur’s existence and provenance
appears in a further paper of this period. Camlan is ‘unlocated’. The name could refer to ‘a
fort on Hadrian’s Wall, or to one of at least two places in Wales with the same name, or to
another, unknown, place’.35 In an edition of 1992, Arthur again meets chilly negativism, as
on Crawford’s placing of Camlan at Birdoswald. Editors declared the battle-site ‘impossible
to determine’, there being many ‘crooked banks’ throughout Britain.36 True. But Castlesteads

29
Stephen Johnson, Later Roman Britain (1980), p. 123.
30
Peter Salway, Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981), pp. 485, 501.
31
Charles Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to ad 500 (Berkeley, 1981), p. 245.
32
James Campbell, ‘The Lost Centuries’, in The Anglo-Saxons, ed. James Campbell (Oxford, 1982), pp. 20–44.
33
John Morris, Londinium (1982), p. 343.
34
A New History of Ireland: A Chronology of Irish History to 1976 (Oxford, 1982), p. 19.
35
O. J. Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Cornwall’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, viii (1984), 1–28.
36
Culhwch and Olwen, ed. Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans (Cardiff, 1992), p. 158.
166 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

(not Birdoswald, editors in the 1990s here remaining unaware of research from the 1970s)
was the only one possessing a stronghold, with a strategic value denied to other locations. It
was a military site, where fighting men might clash.
After Arthurian myth, mistranslation and doubt, a book that never mentions Arthur at all. It
yet directs us towards rationality, citing research by M. L. G. Baillie on Irish bog oak as dating
the Shang dynasty, because in the sixth century ‘dust in the atmosphere led to a sequence of
famine and then plague’.37 That dust is crucial. We shall return to it. In the meantime we note
how anti-Arthurians, who made Arthur out as a mere Celtic pixie or Will-o’-the-wisp devoid
of historical existence, had by the 1990s achieved ascendancy. Dr Oliver Padel (b. 1948) was
then quoting Thomas Charles-Edwards on the entry for 537 as little older than the middle of
the tenth century, when Annales Cambriae were compiled. He concludes that ‘it is unnecessary
to postulate a historical person behind the legend of Arthur as seen in our earliest sources’,
his final words being that, like the legendary Irish hero Finn, Arthur ‘was not historical to
start with’.38 The attack on Arthur, led by Professor Dumville and followed up by Dr Padel,
was decisive, at least for a while. For a white flag of defeat we refer to a last book by Leslie
Alcock, stating somewhat abjectly how
within the scholarly framework of the 1950s and 1960s, the Arthur/Camelot attribution seemed a reason-
able inference. The sustained minimalist criticism of the historicity of Arthur was only launched publicly
in the late 1970s (e.g., Dumville 1977; reprinted 1990), though the present author may reasonably point
out that he had rejected the historicity of Camelot by 1969.39
Yet when the Arthurian cause seemed lost, one perceptive critic pointed to cracks in the
anti-Arthurian case. Ken Dark of Reading reviewed evidence for Arthur’s name as given to
princes of North Britain in the later sixth century, with the implication (going back to Heinrich
Zimmer in 1893) that it would never have acquired such status without a real and heroic
Arthur in the recent past, and presumably the North.40 Though neglected by others, the name’s
temporary vogue is historical evidence, and difficult to explain if Arthur was a mere myth.
Why else should there be a brief fashion for Arthur’s name amongst northern dynasties, if not
from an admired northern champion? This the more so, as the form is a borrowed one, from
Latin Artorius. If Arthur had been a creature of purely Celtic magic and saga, why should he
have a Latin name, as if he had been called Agricola or Donatus or Liberalis, similarly used
by the Britons? To these objections the anti-Arthurians have no answer.
Words from an unexpected author, the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, in any
case give anti-Arthurianism its coup de grâce; for with his own eyes Procopius saw the ‘dust’
mentioned above. In book four of his History of the Wars of Justinian, describing campaigns
against the Vandals, he described how Belisarius spent the winter of 535–36 in Syracuse, when
the heavens began prophesying doom. There then ‘occurred an alarming portent, because all
that year the sun shone like the moon, without its rays, very much as if in an eclipse, giving off
its light dimly and not as it did usually’. Thereafter (he adds) war, famine and other calamities
brought men to their death.41 Shorn of his beams, the sun shed on half the nations a disastrous
twilight. The passage from Procopius is crucial. It will remove Morris’s hesitations on the

37
K. R. Dark, Civitas to Kingdom (Leicester, 1994), p. 241.
38
O. J. Padel, ‘The Nature of Arthur’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, xxvii (1994), 1–31.
39
Leslie Alcock, Cadbury Castle, Somerset (Cardiff, 1995), p. 6.
40
K. R. Dark, ‘A Famous Arthur in the Sixth Century?’, Reading Medieval Studies, xxvi (2000), 77–95.
41
Procopius, Historia de las Guerras, tr. J. A. Flores Rubio (Madrid, 2000), p. 271.
 Andrew Breeze 167

cause of Camlan; indirectly confirm Castlesteads as where it was fought; and help prove
beyond doubt that Arthur was a man of flesh and blood.
Before that, we attend to other commentators. There is much on Camlan in Nick Higham’s
study. He translates the entry of 537 as ‘The gweith [battle of] Camlann, in which Arthur
and Medraut fell, and there was a mortality [i.e., plague] in Britain and in Ireland’. Except
in assurance that mortalitas means ‘plague’, he is of the unbelievers. Citing John Koch of
Aberystwyth, he thinks that the similarity of Camlan and Camboglanna ‘should probably be
set aside as coincidental’; that there is ‘no good reason’ to think the annal’s source was ‘of
any great antiquity in the mid-tenth century’; and that the ‘entire story is best set aside as
unverifiable’ or even ‘entirely unhistorical’.42 Trooping in the same ruts is Professor Aurell of
Poitiers. He renders the annal, ‘Bataille de Camlan, où Arthur et Medrawd tombèrent; il y eut
une grande épidémie en Grand-Bretagne et en Irlande’. Remarking on how it is ‘difficile de
connaître la source de ces informations si précisements datées’, he comes down on the side
of a ‘plagiat tardif’, a tenth-century St Davids annalist having simply ‘copié les données sur
le héros mythique dans l’Histoire des Bretons du siècle antérior, attribuant arbitrairement à
ses hauts faits des dates qui lui semblaient convenir à l’époque dorée des grands saints insu-
laires’.43 But the annalist’s sober statement is not so easily shrugged off.
Such doubts notwithstanding, Camlan appears with a query at Castlesteads in Koch’s atlas.44
Others are of the Know-Nothing party. Dr Jankulak gives its location as obscure, ‘like that
of all Arthur’s purported battles’.45 So, too, Professor Higham. Translating the entry for 537
with mortalitas again as ‘plague’, he cries down what it says of Camlan, finding little reason
to accept its date as ‘chronologically accurate’ and remarking that its name ‘is not otherwise
known from early sources’, but might ‘be sought primarily in south-west Wales’, the chroni-
clers having refashioned Arthur as a Dyfed hero.46 There are various misconceptions in what he
says, but a chief one is that the Welsh never forgot Camlan as an overwhelming disaster. (Hence
its absence from Historia Brittonum, where it would have spoiled Arthur’s heroic gloss.) Had
so terrible an event occurred in Wales, the bards would have been sure to remember its exact
location. In a volume with sensational illustrations, Piero Favero (of Udine, Italy) supplies a
picture of one Camlan in Gwynedd: a green valley with forest and moorland mist above it.47
August Hunt of Oregon nevertheless accepts Camlan as Castlesteads, giving information on
local archaeology. So certain is he of its Arthurian links that he places Arthur’s headquarters
at a nearby stronghold.48
Now for three books of 2013, all by authors refusing to place Camlan or relate it to events
of the time. First is Professor Charles-Edwards (b. 1943). He does not mention Camlan at
all. In an excursus on Annales Cambriae, however, he follows Kathleen Hughes (1926–77)
and David Dumville on its earliest entries as having an Irish source.49 It may be that the 537
entry is likewise from an Irish chronicle, if not over-likely, Irish interest in Arthur or a battle
in North Britain being limited. With Professor Halsall of York we are on a different level.

42
N. J. Higham, King Arthur (2002), pp. 199, 208–09.
43
Martin Aurell, La Légende du Roi Arthur 550–1250 (Paris, 2007), p. 87.
44
J. T. Koch, An Atlas for Celtic Studies (Oxford, 2007), p. 97.
45
Karen Jankulak, Writers of Wales: Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cardiff, 2010), p. 72.
46
N. J. Higham, ‘The Chroniclers of Early Britain’, in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff,
2011), pp. 9–25.
47
Piero Favero, La Dea Veneta (Verona, 2012), pp. 178, 180.
48
August Hunt, The Arthur of History: A Reinterpretation of the Evidence (Charleston, 2012), pp. 211–16.
49
Thomas Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), p. 579.
168 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

‘Whether this tradition was any more trustworthy than those used by the Historia in its mirac-
ulous accounts of Arthur’s hound’s footprint and Amr’s grave is unknowable. There is no
good reason to suppose that it was.’50 To this we reply that the style of the entry is factual, not
miraculous; climatological records show it as trustworthy; there is excellent reason to accept
it. Finally, Dr Padel. In his book on Arthur, repaginated but with unaltered text (the author
imagining that nothing published in the previous thirteen years has ‘significantly affected the
discussions given here’), he declares that ‘there is no way of telling whether this battle was
thought to be located in Wales (where there are at least two known places called Camlan),
or further north, like some other locations mentioned in the Annals, or indeed elsewhere’.51
The present paper will, of course, fail in its purpose unless what Dr Padel claims in his book
is ‘significantly affected’ by it.
After this, one is agreeably surprised to find cogency in the remarks of Flint Johnson, an
independent scholar in Minnesota. Acknowledging that the 537 entry ‘has been heavily dis-
puted in recent years’, he observes that it ‘has a strong claim for being historical’, the clues
being ‘the terseness and phrasing of the line’, resembling others in the early part of Annales
Cambriae, where we find ‘only historical people in historical activities. It is therefore rela-
tively safe to assume that this figure and this action are historical’.52 We agree completely.
What official scholarship in England cannot explain, unofficial research in the USA does. Mr
Johnson’s book is to be commended for these and other pertinent comments on Camlan. Not
commendable is the most recent comment at hand, that ‘the battle happened, but Arthur and
Medrawd were added under the pressure of later legend’.53 There is no basis for this assertion.
The language of the entry is stark. It is devoid of ‘legendary’ accretion.
So our second part concludes in this way: the prevailing orthodoxy in British universities
and beyond is that Arthur did not exist, or that all early statements on him are unhistorical.
This despite the evidence of place-names (where even Jackson admitted evidence from North
Britain), the use of his name by sixth-century Northern dynasties, and the secure derivation
(also stated by Jackson) of Arthur from Latin Artorius. We now set out to annihilate this
Arthurian nihilism by reference to the annal for 537. Let us read it again. ‘Gueith Camlann
in qua Arthur et Medraut corruerunt; et mortalitas in Brittannia et in Hibernia fuit.’ Now,
Procopius describes a world darkened in 536–37 by what we know to be a cloud of volcanic
ash from Central or North America. Records of the Mayas and Chinese (the latter mentioning
snow in the middle of summer) reveal how crops failed to ripen and famine resulted. Irish
annals speak of famine in 536; Annales Cambriae of a mortalitas in 537 in both Britain and
Ireland. There can be no doubt that this mortalitas was not plague, as often stated. Irish records
prove that it was a great and calamitous hunger. Having established that, we shall see Arthur’s
battles (all fought with North British neighbours) in a new way.
When a people is starving, it thinks not of conquest or treasure, but food. In Celtic society,
an effective, if drastic, method of getting that was by theft. So we come to our third part, on
cattle-raiding as a Celtic custom going back to Indo-European days, and so with Homeric
equivalents. Book eleven of the Iliad mentions a cattle-raid made by the men of Pylos against
Elis; book nine of the Odyssey tells how its hero seized women and cattle from the Cicones.

50
Guy Halsall, Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages (Oxford, 2013), pp. 20, 73–74.
51
O. J. Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature, new edition (Cardiff, 2013), p. 9.
52
Flint F. Johnson, Evidence of Arthur (Jefferson, 2014), pp. 16–17.
53
Gerald Morgan, ‘The Early Welsh Cult of Arthur’, Res Celticae, i (2014), 133–45.
 Andrew Breeze 169

In their many tána or tales of cattle-raiding, the Irish resembled the Greeks, but there are
allusions, too, in Welsh poetry, while the work of Jordanes in the sixth century shows such
raids as ‘widely practised in the Teutonic Heroic Age’.54
Archaeology supplements our information on those lowing herds. Many animal bones
from an Early Christian site near Cardiff were of cattle, indicating stock-raising as the basis
of its economy, with beef and pork predominating. (Hunting was not important as a source of
food.) From these finds, statistics on the age when cattle were slaughtered can be calculated.
We know, too, that they were all of small size and of the shorthorn type, resembling the Bos
taurus longifrons of the Celtic Iron Age.55 Excavations, however, cannot show whether they
were raised by the local lord or stolen by him. For that, we need literary records. There are
many. A penitential attributed to Adhamhnán (d. 704) of Iona is here sturdily uncompromising.
Cattle seized in a raid are not to be taken by Christians whether in trade or as gifts: for what Christ
rejects, how shall the soldier of Christ receive? For the weeping of the robber’s victim would seem to
make void his alms.56
Quite different is Irish saga, showing how a warrior came of age at an arms-giving ceremony,
and would then ‘gather his men and lead them on a raid against the nearest hostile district,
returning if possible with spoils of cattle’.57 The expedition par excellence is that of The Cattle-
Raid of Cooley, Ireland’s national epic, telling of an attack by the Queen of Connacht on the
men of Ulster in order to carry off a prodigious bull from the Cooley Peninsula (north County
Louth).58 Cattle-reaving was also popular in North Britain. A poem on Urien Rheged, who
ruled the Carlisle region in the late sixth century, describes such a raid on Manaw Gododdin,
around Stirling. It starts with his
war-band, each one on horse-back, setting out for Manaw Gododdin. Their objective is to win booty.
Cattle (eight score of them) are mentioned as one item in the spoils of war, but there are references to
other treasures. Obviously the raid, if successful, would occasion joy to all concerned.59
Nothing here, one notes, on Adhamhnán’s ‘weeping of the robber’s victim’. Elegies on
­seventh-century Britons slain while campaigning against Northumbrians also speak of one
who attacked ‘for the cattle-herds of the East’ and of ‘a broken shield before the cattle of Beli
the boisterous’.60 The poem on Urien is now translated in full, with lines on torque-girt heroes
riding off north to rob a neighbour.
Each went on campaign,
Eager in combat,
His steed beneath him,
Set to raid Manaw
For the sake of wealth,
Profit in plenty,
Eight herds alike
Of calves and cattle,

54
H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature: The Ancient Literatures of Europe (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 91–93.
55
Leslie Alcock, Dinas Powys (Cardiff, 1963), pp. 34–39, 191–93.
56
The Irish Penitentials, ed. Ludwig Bieler (Dublin, 1963), p. 179.
57
K. H. Jackson, The Oldest Irish Tradition (Cambridge, 1964), p. 18.
58
Táin Bó Cúalnge, ed. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin, 1967), p. vii.
59
The Poems of Taliesin, ed. Ifor Williams (Dublin, 1968), p. l.
60
K. H. Jackson, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh, 1969), p. 132.
170 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

Milch cows and oxen,

And each one worthy.61
Poetry hence tells us much. So, too, do Irish legal and historical sources. If a subordinate
king withheld payment from him, his ‘over-king might invade his territory and take a “prey”
(crech) of sufficient stock to compensate him for his breach of fealty’.62 Such breaches may,
one feels, have been generously interpreted by the more powerful rulers. Of such practices,
on the other hand, we again get no inkling from agricultural history. Despite a recognition that
‘cattle-owning was a status symbol and one of the principal criteria of wealth’ amongst the
Celts, on which many data are supplied, there is yet no mention of reaving.63 A history of early
Ireland, with more awareness of chaos, has the observation on how conflict rarely involved
loss of territory, the normal procedure instead being to cross a frontier ‘with a hosting, seize
as many head of cattle and horses, and any other valuables lying around, as possible, and
return home’.64 Another agrees. ‘As tribute was usually reckoned in cattle, the “wars” tended
to be primarily cattle-raids. The expression táin bó “driving of cows” is a common title for
sagas.’65 It even appears in Middle Irish catalogues of tales, allowing Proinsias Mac Cana
(1926–2004) to discuss such forays in Greek and Indian epic and myth, as well amongst the
Nuer and Masai of Africa. He quotes observations on the Nuer of South Sudan by Sir Edward
Evans-Pritchard (1902–73), who described how they considered raiding as ‘the most noble,
as well as the most profitable, occupation’, the skill and courage of the warriors carrying it
out being ‘reckoned the highest virtues’.66 No surprise, then, if Arthur gained admiration
for actions which in later cattle-reavers would be less respected. So prevalent was rustling
in pre-Norman Wales that ‘it was occasion for comment when cattle fed freely in the fields,
without watchers’; we also have an Anglo-Saxon legal text on tracing stolen cattle in the
Welsh Marches.67 Again, one would know nothing of this from agricultural historians, despite
expert comments on early Celtic cattle as ‘relatively small’ by our standards, their modern
equivalent being the medium-legged Dexter, ‘a tough, powerful animal capable of thriving
on relatively poor pasture in challenging conditions’.68
Finally, a return to Welsh literature. The twelfth-century Mabinogi tale of King Math
describes the theft not of cows but supernatural pigs, leading to a heated pursuit from
Ceredigion to Gwynedd.69 There is also an entire poem on reaving in North Britain and Dyfed,
perhaps of the tenth century. It mentions heroes (some of the late sixth century) attacking
‘the cattle of Idno’s son’, men ‘mingling in front of the cattle of Rheged’, shields splintering
‘when Owain attacked for the sake of his father’s cattle’, and so on.70 As for the expedition to
Manaw Gododdin, Professor Clancy suggests that Taliesin’s poem shows Urien as ‘trying to
impose his overlordship, by engaging in punitive and profitable raiding’.71 Clancy writes as
Urien’s friend. Yet others might doubt if the operation had any colour of the legality implied
61
J. P. Clancy, The Earliest Welsh Poetry (1970), p. 27.
62
D. A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford, 1970), pp. 31–32.
63
S. Applebaum, ‘Roman Britain’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales: ad 43–1042, ed. H. P. R. Finberg
(Cambridge, 1972), pp. 1–278.
64
Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Ireland Before the Vikings (Dublin, 1972), p. 53.
65
F. J. Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings (1973), p. 46.
66
Proinsias Mac Cana, The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1980), pp. 79–80.
67
Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1982), p. 163.
68
Peter J. Reynolds, ‘Rural Life and Farming’, in The Celtic World, ed. Miranda Green (1995), pp. 176–209.
69
Andrew Breeze, The Origins of the ‘Four Branches of the Mabinogi’ (Leominster, 2009), pp. 47, 109.
70
Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, ed. Marged Haycock (Aberystwyth, 2013), pp. 61–82.
71
T. O. Clancy, ‘The Kingdoms of the North’, in Beyond the Gododdin, ed. Alex Woolf (St Andrews, 2013), pp. 153–75.
 Andrew Breeze 171

by ‘overlordship’. They might denounce it as arbitrary and lawless, like the piracy on the high
seas which filled European state-coffers in the early modern period.
After the joys of plundering livestock, we come to our fourth part, on how climatic events
from 535 put a new construction on the annal for 537. Research since the 1980s on bog-oak
in Ireland, ice-cores in Greenland, and carbon-dating in El Salvador here leaves no doubt.
Volcanic eruptions send prodigious amounts of ash and sulphates into the atmosphere, blocking
sunlight, reducing temperatures, and destroying crops. The scientific data are considered by
Petra Dark, who uses them to explain the ‘failure of bread’ of 536 mentioned by Irish annals.72
Further investigation has refined their implications with regard to Ilopango.73 The paper is
not referred to by one writer, who relates the ‘years without summer’ of 536–37, which have
‘quickened the pulse of scientists, historians, and even television audiences’, to ‘low solar
emissions’ or ‘an asteroid or comet’ or volcanic eruption, none of them yet ‘clearly evidenced
from the years in question’. He does, however, cite books by David Keys (on Krakatoa), M.
G. L. Baillie (on comet impact, and significantly mentioning Arthur), and Joel Gunn.74
But a recent article (for information on which the writer thanks Dan Hunt) by twenty-four
authors settles the matter. Ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic confirm the emission, in
late 535, of phenomenal amounts of ash and sulphate by volcanic activity in the Americans,
perhaps in California, British Columbia and Alaska rather than El Salvador. The resulting
cloud was observed in the Mediterranean as early as 24 March 536, and lasted for twelve to
eighteen months. It can be related directly to the crop failures which decimated European
and Chinese populations.75 Hence also the ruination of harvests in Ireland and Britain, with
dire consequences for local people. Hence, too, it seems, the battles of Arthur, fought either
in a quest for food supplies or in defending territory from the hosts of Gododdin or Rheged.
Arthur’s memory would not have been cherished or his name used by later dynasties in North
Britain if he had not helped his people survive a period of dire suffering.
If these conclusions are sound, they have important consequences. We can be sure that
Arthur existed, and that he met his death near Castlesteads in 537, the accuracy of the date
being confirmed by climatological research. We also have dramatic new information on fam-
ine and war in sixth-century Scotland, to be used with recent publications on them. Despite
reference in its title to ‘St Ninian’ (who did not exist), one volume assembles information on
North British graveyards of the period. It will be interesting to see if they confirm evidence
for the great famine of 536–37.76 We also see the sixth-century Christianity of the region in a
new way (although the ‘Rosnat’ or Magnum Monasterium mentioned in a lecture on it is not
Whithorn, but Old Kea, Cornwall).77 We add a source to those discussed in a ground-breaking
study of Britons in southern Scotland.78
In addition, early Arthurian material assumes a new aspect. Its Arthur is a brutal fighter,
monster-killer and defender of his people (but never called a king), who contrasts sharply with

72
Petra Dark, The Environment of Britain in the First Millennium (2000), pp. 22–25.
73
R. A. Dull, J. R. Southon and Payson Sheets, ‘Volcanism, Ecology, and Culture’, Latin American Antiquity, xii (2001),
25–44.
74
Peregrine Horden, ‘Mediterranean Plague’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, ed. Michael Maas
(Cambridge, 2005), pp. 134–60.
75
Michael Sigl et al., ‘Timing and Climatic Forcing of Volcanic Eruptions’, Nature, dxxiii (2015), 543–49.
76
D. C. Cowley, ‘Early Christian Cemeteries’, in St Ninian and the Earliest Christianity in Scotland, ed. Jane Murray
(Oxford, 2009), pp. 43–56.
77
Fiona Edmonds, Whithorn’s Renown in the Early Medieval Period (Whithorn, 2009).
78
Tim Clarkson, The Men of the North (Edinburgh, 2010).
172 ARTHUR’S BATTLES

the chivalrous monarch of late romance. If the original Arthur was a high-ranking ­cattle-reaver,
expert in appropriating the livestock of others, less surprise. Last of all, we have a counter-­
revolution in the academy. For nearly forty years, professional Celticists in British universities
have taken Arthur’s non-historicity for granted. But an ancient eruption in the Americas,
catastrophic for millions in the sixth century, is not without its effects on the twenty-first. It
must impair greatly the reputations of all those claiming that we know nothing of the historical
Arthur, not even whether he existed. It confirms the truth applicable to the humanities as a
whole: that the art of understanding makes no steady and continuous progress, and relapse
accompanies advance.
POSTSCRIPT. See now David Woods, ‘Gildas and the Mystery Cloud of 536-7’, Journal
of Theological Studies, lxi (2010), 226-34, and Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook
the World (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 248-59. The first of these allows dating of Gildas’s De
Excidio to the summer of 536, after the cloud could be seen but before it caused crop-failure
and famine (which Gildas would have been sure to mention); Gildas’s birth and the British
victory at Mount Badon were therefore in early 493, forty-three years and a month previous.
For this reference I thank Wayne Barham of Cwmbran.