Who was King Arthur?
The great question is –
If Arthur existed
then
where is he buried?
What if it is here in Neath ?
Bring Him Home
Many historians dismiss King Arthur as a myth – but we all know there is no smoke without fire and if Arthur was not leading the British against the Saxon invasion – who was?
Monks wrote much of our history; what if there was some motive or political agenda to stop people rallying to a flag, would they write someone out of our history?
Some historians purport that Arthur was none other than Vortigern, a cruel leader who had emerged when Britain was left to its own devices after the withdrawal of Roman troops. The Scots and the Picts had become invasive after the Romans left and Britain was defenceless. Each warlord/king/prince had to save his own skin and his own people.
Gildas one of the Monks who wrote our ancient history marks Vortigern as having hired mercenary Saxons to help him repel the Scots and Picts; as payment for this service the Saxons were given land by Vortigern. But the Saxons wanted more and more land, so they once again invaded and pushed the indigenous people of Britain across the channel and into the mountains and forests.
Monks were usually the only people who could read and write in our early recorded history. So would the Monks only write about what they were told to write by those who they were beholden to? This Island had been pagan, it had become Christian and much of the pagan customs were overwritten by the monks as Christian festivals. This was deliberate policy of the church to obliterate other religions. Is this what happened to Arthur?
All we know is that Arthur appears to be an enigma, but we must decide is that because our history has been corrupted by politics? It is stated in our history that Arthur was fighting battles in the 5th Century, such as the battle of Mount Badon (Mons Badonicus)(490-516). But Arthur taking part in this battle was not recorded until around 796, by a monk named Nennius, when he wrote the “Historia Brittonum”.
Bede had written his “History of England” around 731, but did not mention an Arthur. By 796 Arthur had appeared. So where was Arthur between the Battle of Mount Badon and 796?
One recognised fact in this perhaps, glaring omission, is that no other name has ever been recorded at the battle of Mount Badon, so Arthur being placed there, even though it took 300 years to appear in print, was as feasible as anyone else being there.
Prior to the written word, especially in areas such as Wales, where many of the ancient people who inhabited this island were pushed by invaders coming in on the Eastern and Southern shores, the Bardic tradition kept alive our history.
Robert Graves in "The White Goddess" tells us :-
“Wales however had two distinct types of Bards. There were the court-bards and the wandering minstrels of ancient Wales. The Welsh, or master-poets, like the Irish, had a professional tradition, embodied in a corpus of poems which, literally memorized and carefully weighed, they passed on to the pupils who came to study under them. The English poets of today, whose language began as a despised late mediaeval vernacular when Welsh poetry was already a hoary institution, may envy them in retrospect; the young poet was spared the curse of having doubtfully to build up his poetic lore for himself by haphazard reading, consultation with equally doubtful friends, and experimental writing.
Latterly, however, it was only in Ireland that a master-poet was expected, or even permitted, to write in an original style. When the Welsh poets were converted to orthodox Christianity and subjected to ecclesiastical discipline – a process completed by the tenth century, as the contemporary Welsh laws show – their tradition gradually ossified. Though a high degree of technical skill was still required of master-poets and the Chair of Poetry was hotly contested in the various Courts, they were pledged to avoid what the Church called “untruth”, meaning the dangerous exercise of poetic imagination, in myth or allegory. Only certain epithets and metaphors were authorised; themes were similarly restricted, meters fixed, and Cynghannedd, the repetitive use of consonantal sequences with variation of vowels, became a burdensome obsession. The master-poets had become court officials, their first obligation being to praise God, their second to praise the king or prince who had provided a Chair for them at his royal table. Even after the fall of the Welsh princes in the late 13th Century this barren poetic code was maintained by the family bards in noble houses.
The few indications which may be gathered from the works of the bards, down to the fall of the Welsh princes, imply that the system detailed in the Laws was preserved, but probably with progressive modification. The Llyfr Coch Hergest ( The Red Book of Hergest) metrical Code shows a still further development, which in the fifteenth century resulted in the Carmarthen Eisteddfodd….The subject tradition recorded in this Code, practically restricting the bards to the writing of eulogies and elegies, and excluding the narrative, is proved to have been observed by the Gogynfeirdd (court-bards). Their adherence to what they conceived to be historical truth was probably due to the early capture of their organization by ecclesiastics. They made practically no use of the traditional material contained in the popular Romances, and their knowledge of the names of mythical and quasi-historical characters was principally derived from the Triads…. Nature poetry and love poetry are only incidental in their works, and they show practically no development during the period….References to nature in the poems of the court-bards are brief and casual, and mostly limited to its more rugged aspects – the conflict of sea and strand, the violence of winter storms, the burning of spring growth on the mountains. The characters of their heroes are only indicated in epithets; no incident is completely described; battles are dismissed in a line or two at most. Their theory of poetry, particularly in the eulogy, seems to be that it should consist of epithets and allusions, resuming the bare facts of history, presumably known to their hearers. They never tell a story; they rarely even give anything approaching a coherent description of a single episode. Such, indeed, has been the character of most Welsh verse, outside the popular ballads, practically down to the present day.
The tales and Romances, on the other hand, are full of colour and incident; even characterization is not absent from them. In them, fancy, not affected by restrictions applying both to subject and form, develops into imagination
These tales were told by a guild of Welsh minstrels whose status was not regularized by the Laws, who counted no bishops or ministers of State among their associates, and who were at liberty to use whatever diction, themes and metres they pleased. Very little is known about their organization or history, but since they were popularly credited with divinatory and prophetic gifts and the power of injurious satire it is likely that they were descended from the original Welsh master-poets who either refused or who were refused court-patronage after the Cymric conquest of Wales. The Cymry who we think of as the real Welsh and from whom the proud court-bards were recruited, were a tribal aristocracy of Brythonic origin holding down a serf-class that was a mixture of Giodels, Brythons, Bronze Age and New Stone Age peoples and Aboriginals. They had invaded Wales from the North of England in the fifth century AD. The non-Cymric minstrels went from village to village, or farm house to farm house, entertaining under the trees or in the chimney corner according to the season. It was they who kept alive an astonishingly ancient literary tradition, mainly in the form of popular tales which preserved fragments of not only pre-Cymric, but of pre-Goidelic, myth some of which goes back as far as the Stone Age. Their poetic principles are summed up in a Triad in the Llyfr Coch Hergest :-
Three things that enrich the poet: Myths, poetic power, a store of ancient verse.”
(The White Goddess – Robert Graves 1948)
Due to the hostility of the Church as can be seen in the above narration by Robert Graves, many of our ancient poetic myths, which were related by Bards have been made out to be false. Many of the ancient bards would disguise our history in rhymes and riddles and many scholars decipher these rhymes but as so much time has passed, mythology and history have become corrupted and who now knows the truth?Is there a truth and is that truth still being denied? Read on and you could be amazed.
As W Llewellyn Williams MP MA DCL states in
“Another Hero of Glamorgan Capt Thomas Morgan, Llanrhymney”.
One is amazed at the indifference with which Welshmen have regarded their national story…………..If we cannot find a historian, why should we not get a novelist to do justice to our romantic history……..
End of Part 1
