Finding Arthur (19 page)

From then on, throughout the 560s, Aedan made himself useful in Manau, preparing the army, organizing the defense of the borders, gathering taxes, and administering justice—in other words, placing himself in positions where he could curry favor and gain supporters. Aedan was primarily a politician, not a warrior.

Aedan’s dates are muddled. He is said to have led the army of Manau against the Miathi Picts for thirteen years before he became king of Manau circa the year 569. Aedan is also said to have died in the thirty-eighth year of his reign. If 608 is the generally accepted date of his death, this means that Aedan became a king around 570, but where this happened is not clear. It is undisputed that he became king of the Scots in 574, and so if the record that says he died in the thirty-eighth year of his reign is correct, he must have been king of somewhere else for some four years before he became king of the Scots. This somewhere else was almost certainly Manau. (It is, of course, possible that Aedan did not die in the thirty-eighth year of his reign and that these timings are simply wrong—sixth- and seventh-century dates, like sixth- and seventh-century names are uncertain things.)

It seems likely, however, that Aedan spent the 560s strengthening his position in Manau, until in 570 he was strong enough to make himself king there. He had certain claims through his mother and his first wife, but his elevation was probably mainly because he was an adept and ruthless politician, backed up by military might. His son Arthur, a child in the 560s, must have grown up surrounded by ruthless ambition and terrifying uncertainty.

Aedan’s success in Manau is corroborated by
The Tripartite Life of Patrick
, which says Patrick prophesized that Aedan would take the throne of
Fortrenn
, the Pictish province of
Fortriu
, the land between Stirling and Perth. This may be accepted as true, not because Patrick prophesized it (he did not—Patrick could no more prophesy than anyone else) but because Patrick’s hagiographer, with the gift of hindsight,
said
Patrick prophesized it. It was common practice among clerics
determined to boost the status of whatever saint they happened to be promoting to take something that had happened after the saint was dead and say the saint had predicted it would happen. The writer of the
Tripartite Life
says that this prophecy—that Aedan would be king of the land between Stirling and Perth—was fulfilled in Aedan’s day.

The
Life of St. Berach
says Aedan gave Aberfoyle to Berach. This is also unlikely to be true, because Christians were always saying things like that to enhance their claims to property. This reference to Aberfoyle does however give some idea of the western bounds of Manau. Arthur’s boyhood and youth were spent in Manau in a world in which war was a constant threat and he was no doubt trained to arms from an early age. He was probably unable to read and write, but this would not have bothered a warrior born, as he was soon to prove to be.

K
NIGHTS AND
R
OUND
T
ABLES

Five years after Conall, not Aedan, became king of the Scots, Columba-Crimthann arrived in Scotland. One of the world’s Top-Ten saints, he is and was commonly called Columba, the dove of the church, but when he was a young man he was also known as Crimthann, the fox, and so, just as I use the name Merlin-Lailoken, I use the name Columba-Crimthann.

Columba-Crimthann is usually portrayed as a gentle monk, who came to the island of Iona to set up a community in which learning could thrive and from which a beneficent Christianity could be introduced to an all but barbarian Scotland. In reality he was a ruthless political operator determined to promote his personal interests by using his new religion to obliterate the Old Way of the druids.

Born in Ireland around the year 521, probably to an aristocratic family of the Old Way, Columba-Crimthann was socially well connected and all too conscious of his status. The “
Old Irish Life
” says that while other trainee monks had to grind their own corn Columba-Crimthann did not, because “An angel of the Lord used to grind Columba’s [corn] for him … ‘because of his nobility above all.’”
⁵
It is unlikely an angel ground Columba’s corn for him. It is more likely he got someone else to do it for him “because of his nobility above all.”

After he became a fully-fledged priest, Columba-Crimthann took steps to build a powerbase. To do this he needed books, because with books came knowledge, and with knowledge came power. So he borrowed a book from one of his fellow monks and then, without permission, made a copy to keep as his own. The matter came before Diarmid the king for judgment. Diarmid famously said, “To every cow belongs its calf, to every book its little book,” and ordered Columba-Crimthann to hand over his copy of the book to the owner of the original. Columba-Crimthann did what he was told to do but swore that he would be avenged upon Diarmid.

When the opportunity arose, Columba-Crimthann urged his Ui Neill kinsmen to war against Diarmid, a man of the Old Way, and so unleashed a new and ferocious form of war in Ireland: religious war. The gratuitous slaughter that followed Diarmid’s defeat at the battle Cul Drebne in 561 shocked even Columba-Crimthann’s Ui Neill allies and led to his being exiled from Ireland.

In 563 at the age of forty-two, Columba-Crimthann, a tall, striking, powerfully built man with a dominating personality, sailed in the company of an entourage of monks from Ireland into exile in Argyll, where his kinsman Conall Mac Comgall was king of the Scots of Dalriada.

Arthur was about four years old when Columba-Crimthann arrived in Scotland, probably living with his father’s people in Manau or with his mother’s family in Strathclyde. Columba-Crimthann arrived at the central seat of power, Dunadd-Dunardry, and immediately began to work to win Conall over to his side. His plan was to convert the king and use royal power to impose his form of Christianity on the people of Dalriada. Conall the king was a weak character compared to the strong-willed Columba-Crimthann and was soon won over. Before long Christianity spread from the top down to the people, and from the center of Argyll out to its borders.

The Christian authorities had what they said was a revealed truth, which they did not question, and, when they had the power to impose their will, neither did anyone else. They were also prepared to support whoever happened to have secular power at any given time, no matter how unworthy that person might be and even
if this was contrary to the interests of the main mass of the people, provided only that they received reciprocal support when they turned against those who challenged their “religious” power. The end result was a people who did what they were told because they were afraid of real punishment in real life and of much worse imaginary punishments in life after death. In centuries to come this Church–State partnership was called Christendom. It was to last for a thousand years and more.

The Old Way did not offer similar benefits to rulers. Most of the people of the Old Way, like all of the Christians, believed in the supernatural, but they had not created a single all-important revelation and so the basis upon which their beliefs stood was more diffuse. This diffusion led people to ask questions about their world and to find answers for themselves. Most importantly, the druids had no inflexible all-pervasive power structure capable of imposing one way of thinking over another. This allowed individualism to flourish and so made the main mass of the people uneasy and unlikely “subjects,” especially if they did not have a say in how they were governed.

Conall must have known that Christianity was the coming thing in Europe and that its hierarchical system of authority offered kings like him a partner in power that complemented their secular authority. This would have made Conall, like almost any ruler, susceptible to Columba-Crimthann’s blandishments.

To begin with, the people of the Old Way did not see Columba-Crimthann as a threat. When, some years after he arrived in Argyll, Columba-Crimthann visited Bridei, the king of the Picts and a man of the Old Way of the druids, in Inverness, he received a tolerant hearing from the people of the Old Way. This suggests he would have received a similar broadminded reception when he first arrived in Argyll, especially since he was related to the king. The people of the Old Way would have had no good reason to harm or even hinder him, not at first. On the contrary they would have seen in the arrival of Columba-Crimthann’s Christian party an opportunity to debate and learn, even if they had no intention of becoming converts.

One of the tricks Columba-Crimthann used to win over Conall and his companions was to pretend that he had supernatural powers including, according to Adamnan, the ability to describe events that were taking place far away, while they were actually happening: “At the very hour when the Battle of
Móin Daire Lothair
was fought in Ireland, the saint [Columba-Crimthann] gave a full account of it in Britain, in the presence of King Conall.”
⁶
Of course, Columba-Crimthann had no such ability, but this would not have prevented his followers from bruiting it about that he did. Adamnan, writing generations later, promoted Columba-Crimthann’s claim of magical powers and had it fixed in the written record. This led subsequent generations to believe that Columba-Crimthann was a magician or, as Adamnan had it, a miracle-worker, which was exactly what Adamnan intended. In real life Columba-Crimthann had to rely upon more prosaic powers: his intellect and his power to persuade, coupled with the fanatical certainty he shared with almost everyone excited by a new religion.

Columba-Crimthann’s Christianity was authoritarian in the extreme, which made him an enticing partner for a king—particularly a weak king—trying to control a free-thinking people. Even without real magic, talk of the supernatural combined with the promise that working with Columba-Crimthann would bolster his kingship was enough to win over the gullible Conall. By the late 560s Columba-Crimthann had brought the same religious tensions to Scotland that had led to his exile from Ireland.

Being free-thinking men of the Old Way, some of Conall’s chiefs were resistant to the new deal the Christians presented and became restive when steps were taken to impose it upon them. In hindsight we can see that the chiefs who favored the Old Way were certain to fail, but this would not have been clear in the 560s, because Christianity was only at the beginning of its inexorable rise.

Columba-Crimthann set his sights on the island Lismore for his headquarters, but Lismore was the base of a druid called Muluag. (It is usually said that Muluag was a Christian saint, but this claim was made only after Muluag was dead. Muluag was marchmained.) Acting in concert, Conall and Columba-Crimthann pushed too hard and too fast as they strove to extend their influence north and west. The records written
by the Christian victors do not make clear what happened, but it appears that the chiefs of Angus on their outlying islands and the chiefs of Lorne in the borderlands of the north rejected the imposition of a religious system that brooked no alternatives. They rose in revolt. This revolt began in the late 560s on the islands of Islay and Seil and spread from there.

Conall was only able to put down this rebellion with the aid of foreign troops provided by the Irish king, Colmán Bec of Meath, but even then Conall and Columba-Crimthann’s victory was not absolute, and they had to settle for a compromise peace. Muluag kept Lismore. Columba-Crimthann had to settle for Iona. For the first time, religious tensions had been injected into the mix of family and tribal rivalries that until then had provided the Scots with sufficient reasons for fighting.

When Conall’s unhappy reign came to an end with his death in 573, the choice of the next king still involved the time-honored practices of the people of Dalriada, but for the first time a religious factor was part of the equation. This was to prove fundamentally incompatible with the traditional ways.

Until this time the choice of a king tended to favor one side of the royal family and then the other. This consensus tended to minimize the number of occasions when sons followed their fathers as king (a surefire way to end up with inadequate kings). After Columba-Crimthann became involved in politics in Dalriada, divisions appeared along religious lines. Parties came to be divided not between individual family members but between those who were Christians and those who were not. The result was civil war and the advent of a young warlord called Arthur.

T
HE
R
OUND
T
ABLE
is not a myth (well, not quite), and it is still there to be seen today (well, sort of).

There is no reason to believe that one person—Wace or anyone else—invented the idea of
The Table Round
, at least not from a standing start. Wace, Robert de Boron, and Malory were able to draw from a large body of first-millennium sources that included references to the
practices of the people of the Old Way, most of which are now lost to us. These sources would have been garbled by the time they became available to Wace and others in the twelfth century, but, even if they were not, being Celtic sources they would have been alien to writers of English adventures and French romances.

Wace, Robert de Boron, and Malory were all bound to provide stories that were acceptable to audiences steeped in the romances of the troubadours and, of course, stories that catered to the demands of the Christian Church. These audiences would not have been receptive to stories starring undiluted Celtic heroes from an unfamiliar culture, and so men like Malory invented stories involving medieval knights and their ladies, and Robert de Boron came up with his Round Table/Last Supper nonsense. Southern British and French writers reworked their sources to suit their audiences in the same way as, say, American film makers remake European films to please their audiences, using actors an American audience knows and American settings—this is just human nature.