Finding Arthur (24 page)

The “sons of Eliffer” referred to in the 573 Arderydd entry in the
Annales Cambriae
, included Rhydderch, son of Tutgual, the king of Strathclyde, and Eliffer, daughter of a chief called Peredur who was based in southwest Scotland. This Rhydderch, the husband of Languoreth, was the commander of the army of Strathclyde and its allies at Arderydd.

There were three other sons of Eliffer. The eldest, Morcant the Wealthy, is all but unknown. He probably died before the Battle of Arderydd because it was Rhydderch, the second born, who commanded
the army of Strathclyde in that campaign. The third son has no part to play in this history but the fourth and youngest son does, because, his name, Ardderchddrud, is unique.

I said in
Finding Merlin
that Ardderchddrud is “a name with the same root as Arderydd,” that is, it is derived from
Ard Airigh
. There is, however, an alternative. In Welsh P-Celtic, as we have seen,
dd
can be pronounced “th,” and so Arderyth, two miles north of the town of Airdrie, is not only synonymous with Arderydd, it can sound the same. It follows that if
Ardderchddrud
stands to be pronounced “Artherchddrud,” then, it may be, this name is not derived from
Ard Airigh
but from the name Arthur itself.
⁷

As always it is all but impossible to tell exactly to what extent a name has been warped and whether this warping happened because it was misheard or misread or deliberately changed. We can only do what we can to make sense of the evidence we have, and must accept that, sometimes, there can be no definitive answer.

The only Arthur known to have lived at the same time as Ardderchddrud is Arthur Mac Aedan. They lived near each other and must have known each other. Ardderchddrud was also closely connected to Merlin-Lailoken. His brother, Rhydderch, was married to Merlin-Lailoken’s sister, Languoreth. It is possible that, like Coriolanus and Scipio Africanus, Ardderchddrud was given his name because he excelled at the Battle of Arderydd, but this is unlikely. It would have taken until at least the end of the Great Angle War, in which Arthur won his main fame, and probably until after Arthur’s death before Arthur’s first battle, the Battle of Arderydd, came to be associated with him and his famous war-band—this would have been too late for the battle-name Arderydd to be attached to Ardderchddrud. Besides, Ardderchddrud was the brother of Rhydderch, the prince who led the army of Strathclyde at the Battle of Arderydd, and Rhydderch was a generation older than Arthur. If Ardderchddrud too was a generation older than Arthur it would be unlikely that he would be named after Arthur, a man who was not much more than a boy at the time of the battle.

I think it is most likely that Ardderchddrud was given this name because he was later associated with Arthur Mac Aedan, the high
lord, and with Arthur’s war-band, the high lords or
Ard Airighaich
. If Ardderchddrud was a much younger “son of Eliffer” and so closer in age to Arthur, it may be that he, like many other “younger sons,” joined Arthur’s war-band seeking fortune and glory. Or, perhaps he was Strathclyde’s liaison officer in Arthur’s camp in the Great Angle War and became associated with the
ArdAirighaich
because of this connection.

There is another possibility, although it is speculative in the
extreme
, as opposed to the preceding possibilities which are only
very
speculative. It may be that Arthur was fostered out into Ardderchddrud’s house as a child and that, in later years, after Arthur became famous, Ardderchddrud was remembered with reference to this relationship and called Ardderchddrud for that reason. Who knows? I don’t know. There is not enough evidence to say with any certainty what exactly led to this man having this name.

Whatever the true meaning or backstory, Ardderchddrud is a link between the legendary Arthur and Arthur Mac Aedan. The legendary Arthur is said to have fought at the Battle of Arderydd (as did Arthur Mac Aedan), and the personal name Ardderchddrud is similar to the battle-name Arderydd. Ardderchddrud’s brother was Rhydderch, and so we may reasonably suppose that Ardderchddrud lived in the “Royal Town of Pertnech,” present-day Partick, Glasgow, where their father was king. This was less than a mile from where Merlin-Lailoken lived from 600 until his death almost twenty years later.

The legend of Merlin-Lailoken as a wild man of the woods was inspired by his exile after the Battle of Arderydd, in the great forest that covered the south of Scotland. This legend is illustrated in a fine stained glass window in Stobo Church near his old hiding place. This window, being in a church, shows Merlin-Lailoken as a rough, hairy penitent kneeling before a gracious, good-looking Saint Mungo Kentigern. It was inspired by a meeting between Merlin-Lailoken and Mungo to negotiate Merlin-Lailoken’s return that took place near Stobo, which is now called Merlindale. The exact meeting place was where the Pausayl Burn meets the River Tweed.

There is a similar stained glass window in the Chapel of Glasgow University. It shows a naked Merlin-Lailoken crouching at the feet of
an exultant Mungo Kentigern. The University Chapel window is about a mile east of Merlin-Lailoken’s home in the last few decades of his long life. Today this place echoes the Battle of Arderydd—it is called Ardery Street. The locations of these two windows are not just coincidental; they are both to be found close to where significant events happened in the real life of the real man called Merlin.

A
RDERYDD WAS THE
central point in the life of Merlin-Lailoken, who at thirty-three years of age and in the prime of his life was already a famous man in 573. The fact that Merlin-Lailoken was a leader of the people of the Old Way in 573 is the reason why he is prominent in the Arderydd cycle of poems. These poems were written by people of the Old Way for people of the Old Way. It was only later that they were recreated in the forms that have come down to us today.

The very fact that Arthur is not mentioned in the Arderydd poems lends some weight to their authority as historical sources. If they were purely fiction, it is likely, given that Merlin is prominent in these poems, that Arthur would have been included too. In reality, Arderydd did not play a major part in “Arthur’s story”—it was merely the prelude to it.

It is likely that Arthur, like the teenage Alexander at the Battle of Chaeronea, fought bravely and well at Arderydd. He would not have been made warlord of the Scots of Dalriada within the year if he had been a sluggard in the charge or less than stalwart in defense. Of course, he was the son of a king so his elevation was not necessarily based on merit, but Aedan had other sons and given Arthur’s later record we can safely assume he conducted himself with distinction at Arderydd.

In the years that followed, perhaps even many decades later after Arthur had become famous, it makes sense to suppose that the local people remembered and identified local sites with reference to Arthur. So we have the place-names, the Arthuret Hills and Arthur Seat, near the field where the Battle of Arderydd was fought.

It is hardly likely that a battle fought in a P-Celtic-speaking area and won by a predominantly P-Celtic speaking people would be given the Q-Celtic-Gaelic name,
Ard Airigh
. It is more likely that in the immediate aftermath of the battle it would have been called the Battle of Caer
Gwenddolau or, if the victors did not want to commemorate their defeated foe, the Battle of the Liddel Water, or some other such name, now forgotten. Then the poets, especially Arthur’s friend and personal bard, Aneirin of the Flowing Verse, Prince of Poets, took a hand and began to create the legend that we know today. In time, as the fame of Arthur eclipsed that of Rhydderch, Emrys, and Gwenddolau and, indeed, everyone else, the Battle of Arderydd came to be remembered with reference to Arthur, the
Ard Airigh
, and his men, the
Ard Airighaich
. For hundreds, if not quite a thousand years, everyone seems to have worked on the time-tested basis that, if you know the truth and you know the legend, print the legend. The truth was that Arthur was not a central figure at Arderydd, but, when later he became famous, his legend over-shadowed the truth.

Before long, probably within thirty years, the battle that we know as Arderydd began to be remembered, not with reference to its politico-religious significance (that was too boring), but with reference to Arthur and his famous warrior band, who had by then become famous in all of the kingdoms of the north. After the stories were taken south, Arderydd was thought of as a place-name when in fact it was a name connected to Arthur and his war-band. The fact that the majority of Arthur’s warriors were Scots and Men of Manau would, of course, have been commercially unacceptable in the south, and so would have been left out of the stories. In time, the real meaning of the name was lost (because it was not a P-Celtic Welsh word) and so we have ended up with ideas like the “battle of the weapon of the oak.”

The British and Scots were like the Greeks at the time of the Trojan and Persian wars; they remembered the deeds of individual warriors and bands of warriors. When, in later centuries, P-Celtic-speaking Britons from the lands of the Gododdin went south as refugees, they took stories of Arthur and the title
Ard Airigh
with them. In the south Arthur and his men, the
ArdAirighaich
were given a P-Celtic-Welsh-British twist in the P-Celtic adaptations of the stories that inspired the P-Celtic poems we know today. For example,
Ard Airigh
becomes Ardery, and with a Welsh
dd
ending we get Arderydd.

Some thirty years after the Battle of Arderydd, Merlin-Lailoken was pushed out of the Royal Town of Pertnech by the Mungo Christians
and went to live in a house his sister, Languoreth the queen, had built for him, where he lived for the last years of his long life. The name of Merlin-Lailoken’s house had an
Ard Airigh
connection. Even today, out of the 10,000 streets in Glasgow, only one has the name Ardery, and it is on the land where Merlin-Lailoken had his home. It is unlikely that Merlin-Lailoken called his home after Arthur or that people called Merlin-Lailoken’s home after Arthur, no matter how famous Arthur had become. It is more likely that Merlin-Lailoken’s home became a refuge for warriors of the Old Way, for the
Ard Airighaich
, and that through this connection it gained the name
Ard Airigh
, which still sounds in the name Ardery Street today.

Given the word
Airigh
’s special Ulster connections, the appellation
Ard Airigh
probably came from Ulster, perhaps with Fergus, Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, and was brought to Manau by Gabhran, Arthur’s grandfather.

Manau was located in the center of Scotland with four great powers around it: the Scots in the west; the Picts in the north; Strathclyde in the southwest; and the Gododdin in the southeast. It was border country and there was constant warring there. It was only natural that Manau would have attracted men from other places, men who were looking for a fight and the booty that successful fighting brought.

This sits comfortably beside the romantic picture painted by many medieval writers in which the best knights of all Christendom gathered at Camelot to compete with each other, to see who could do the best good deed. Reality was probably somewhat different. In reality men probably gathered in Manau because Manau was where there was fighting, and because Arthur was the most successful warlord of the day. Independent spirits; lordless men; second sons; outlaws; general roughs and toughs—these were the men who filled the rank and file of Arthur’s war-band. They were the high lords of Arthur, the
Ard Airighaich
.

The war-band of the Red Branch of Ulster came to be called the Red Branch Knights. This allows some insight into what might have happened to the name of Arthur Mac Aedan’s war-band. To begin with, they too may have been called a war-band and ended up being called knights: the Knights of the Round Table of the legendary Arthur.
Arthur Mac Aedan’s men may have assembled in a circle around the mound that was recently found at Stirling Castle but not around a table or, at least, not a particularly special table.

I emphasize that all of the above regarding the name of Arthur Mac Aedan’s war-band is speculative. All I can say is that it is consistent with the slight evidence available. This war-band of the
Ard Airighaich
probably increased in numbers when Gabhran was fighting the Picts and increased again when he went to Manau. It was this band of men that Arthur inherited when he became his father’s war chief.

Aedan was politically secure at the end of the Arderydd campaign. He had answered Strathclyde’s call to battle and shown the Britons that it was better to have him as an ally than as an enemy. Aedan could now expect Strathclyde to support him when he moved to take the throne of Dalriada and make himself king of the Scots. Arthur’s battles, the battles in which Arthur was in command, were about to begin.

When Conall Mac Comgall, king of the Scots, died in Kintyre in 573, two candidates stepped forward ready to succeed him. The first was his nephew, Arthur’s uncle, Éoganán Mac Gabhran, the tanist and so the establishment candidate. The second was Aedan Mac Gabhran, Arthur’s father.

Duncan, the late king Conall’s son, stepped aside in favor of Éoganán and was later to fight on Éoganán’s behalf in the civil war that followed Aedan’s accession as king. This was not because Duncan liked Éoganán but because he disliked Aedan; indeed, Éoganán’s support from all quarters was not so much pro-Éoganán as anti-Aedan.

The two previous choices of king had alternated between the houses of Comgall and Gabhran. Comgall was succeeded by his brother Gabhran and Gabhran was succeeded by Comgall’s son Conall. If this alternation were to continue the next king would come from the house of Gabhran, which would have ruled out Conall’s son, Duncan.

Éoganán, however, was Gabhran’s son by his second wife, a Scots princess of the house of Comgall, and so was of both the house of Gabhran and the house of Comgall. He was perfectly placed to garner support from both factions and to challenge Aedan’s candidacy.