The Society for Ancient Languages

Arthur: King or Plumber?

by Professor Ian Wood
reproduced here with his permission

     Imagine a castle built by Richard. The castle stands on a cliff, overlooking water. It is, in certain respects, a modern recreation. Its builder is interested in the Early Middle Ages. The Richard is, of course, Richard, Duke of Cornwall: the time in which he constructed his castle is the 1230's: the place is Tintagel, or rather the peninsula which is known as Tintagel Island, supposedly the site where King Arthur was conceived.
     This last supposition is, of course, an enormous one. Leaving aside the question of what Uther Pendragon and Ygerna did at Tintagel, assuming of course that there were such people, we are not even certain that Arthur existed, and if he did there is little to link him to Cornwall. It is, however, clear that the region, had something to do with Drustanus, son of Cunomorus, Tristan of the Arthurian legend cycle, for he is commemorated on a stone at Castle Dore, outside Fowey. There may even be a case for accepting the assocition of King Mark with Cornwall, though that depends on thinking that the ninth-century Life of Paul Aurelian contains genuine information when it identifies Mark and Cunomorus as the same person, and speaks of the saints' meeting him in the Fowey area.
     Regardless of who lived there, Tintagel was a site of importance in the sixth century. One of the most interesting types of post-Roman material to be found in the western parts of the British Isles is a type of pottery which came from the eastern Mediterranean. When it was first noticed, it was thought to be the remnants of wine imports, and the sites where it was found were interpreted as monasteries, on the grounds that they needed wine for communion -- though this seems a poor reason for identifying a site as monastic, for it implies that wine was only imported for communion, and that monks alone partook of the sacraments. In fact, it is now thought that if there was an ecclesiastical site at Tintagel it was not on the island, whose access was controlled by Duke Richard's castle, but in the vicinity of the old church on the mainland, where there are some interesting early medieval burials. The pottery, however, remains a tantalising indication of foreign contacts, even though until recently all the fragments found at Tintagel were described as representing no more pieces of tableware than could have been broken in a single session of washing-up.
     This situation, it must be said, has changed, but only because a local workman, who had been told to repair a path on the island, also happened to be an enthusiastic amateur archeologist. In one afternoon's work he discovered more fragments of Mediterranean ware than had previously been known from the site, and only because he had taken the trouble to learn what to look out for -- the tale is, one must admit, a cautionary one. One should, however, also note that even before the find, Tintagel boasted more fragments of imported pottery than all other sites in the British Isles put together. It would not have taken much washing-up to have accounted for all the fragments of Mediterranean pottery known from sixth-century British sites.
     Tintagel, then, was a site of importance, with better connections with the Mediterranean in the sixth century, than anywhere yet excavated -- which much at least say something about the significance of the harbour which lies to the east of the 'island', ideally protected from the prevailing westerly winds. There is, however, nothing to place Arthur here.
     If he existed, it is likely that he was a northerner: the earliest indications, according to Celticists, who have scoured the place names and the literature, put him in the vicinity of Carlisle, and if one were to associate him with Camlann, as did the ninth-century Welsh author of the Historia Brittonum, the obvious place is Camboglans (Castlesteads), on Hadrian's Wall, the next fort along from Banna (Birdoswald), which is now known to have been rebuilt in the post-Roman period. At present Camboglans is infinitely more likely to be the site of Camlann or Camelot than is South Cadbury or any of the other suggestions.
     The implications that this has for any ruler called Arthur are, of course, speculation. The court at Camelot was certainly not of the sort described in later Romances. A site on Hadrian's Wall would suggest a lord with Roman pretensions. He was probably fighting rivals -- who would have been Britons rather than Anglo-Saxons: and civil war is indeed something that is implied in the Arthurian Romances. His battles may have been relatively localised: if we accept the list of battles in which Arthur took part, according to the Historia Brittonum, then we have a list of place names, the majority of which (allowing for one very significant exception) can be linked to the Carlisle region, or the English Northwest. There are, however, alternative identifications which would make Arthur active throughout England -- the two sets of identifications suggest very different patterns of warfare, and it would contribute greatly to our understanding if we knew which was right, or indeed whether any one leader actually fought in all the battles listed. Badon, for instance, may have been associated with Arthur for no better reason than that it was a great battle mentioned by Gildas -- and I, for one, would tend to think that one of the hillforts around Bath is the most likely site for Badon, not least because the Historia Brittonum calls the springs at Bath fons Badonicus, while it calls Badon mons Badonicus.
     An Arthur living as the successor to a Roman commander on Hadrian's Wall would no doubt have had plenty of rivals. He may have been more successful than most: the only possible sixth-century reference to him (and it may date from much later) describes Gorddur, another warrior figure, with the phrase, "though he was not Arthur", which is not immediately very helpful, but does imply that he was thought of as a touchstone. When he does finally appear in a narrative source, it is in the Historia Brittonum, one recension of which was written in 829-30 at the court of King Merfyn of Gwynedd, on Anglesey, off the northwest coast of Wales. By that time he was already beginning to emerge as a symbol of British (or Welsh) survival against the English -- which is not to say that he really had fought successfully against the Saxons, or that he had conceived of himself as a leader in an ethnic war. In this respect, indeed, Arthur may well have been similar to the Cid: a warlord who worked with whichever party suited his immediate interest, but who came to be remembered as a hero fighting for the Christian Spaniards, or in Arthur's case, the Christian inhabitants of Britain. Arhtur is undoubtedly interesting as a symbol -- but as such he raises questions not about the sixth century, but about the periods in which he was recycled. Why did Gwynedd want tales of a heroic warrior in the ninth century? And why did the twelfth century make him the centre of a whole series of Romances?
     In any case, it was only in the twelfth century that Geoffrey of Monmouth chose to link Arthur with Tintagel, perhaps in order to please Robert of Gloucester, arguably his patron, whose main estates lay in England's West Country. A host of industries have been built on the back of Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Arthur, in his History of the Kings of Britain, not least the tourist industry of such sites as Tintagel.
     Imagine then the excitement when on the 6th of August last year, English Heritage, the body responsible for the guardianship of most of England's major historical ruins, announced that an inscription bearing Arthur's name had been found at Tintagel. Here, finally, was proof that Arthur really existed and, more important for the tourist industry, that there was a genuine Arthurian link with Tintagel. The inscription read "Pater Coli Avi Ficit Artognou", which may be translated as "Artognou, father of a descendant of Coll made [this]."
     The media hype inevitably obscured the problems of the find. Artognou is not impossible as a variant of Arthur -- though it need nost be the same name. Moreover the inscription does indubitably date approximately from the sixth century, because of the half uncial 'g' used. But that is about as far as one can go in linking Arthur with the inscription. The phrase "Pater Coli Avi...", "Father of a Descendant of Coll", if that is how the words are to be translated, which is uncertain, does not obviously link with anything in the Arthurian world. Who is Coll? And why this odd reference to a descendant of his?
     But there is a better reason still for thinking that an Arthurian interpretation of the slate is over the top. To say that the words constitute an inscription is optimistic. They are simply scratched on the stone. Indeed they are better seen as a graffito, or rather as a trial piece: two of the words, 'Coli' and 'Ficit' are repeated at the bottom of the stone. Moreover the stone itself has been reused, for there are the remains of larger, more deeply inscribed, letters on the slate. This then looks like a slate carrying an older inscription, which was then reused by a man called Artognou. Further, there is the find spot itself. The slate was discovered covering a drain, apparently of the sixth century. What we have, therefore, is an early medieval drain cover with a graffito which identifies something as being the work of Artognou.
     Now, it is certainly true that the graffito may antedate the drain cover, and that Artognou had nothing to do with the drain itself. Nevertheless I would suggest that by drawing our attention to the history of drainage in the Early Middle Ages, the Tintagel slate is almost as enlightening as it would have been had it added to our knowledge of Arthur.
     The history of drains has yet to be written. But everyone would agree that the Romans were good at building them. The Cloaca Maxima, or great drain, in Rome, was a remarkable piece of engineering. Even in as provincial a centre as York the Roman drains still survive underground, and are large enough for a man or woman to walk along. Drains, in a sense, are a mark of Roman civilisation. It used to be argued that one indication of the end of Roman Britain was the fact that bodies of victims of the fifth-century plague were left in a street drain of Roman Cirencester. Alas, we now know that the bodies in question are of a much later date, and tell us nothing about the collapse of life in a Romano-British town, and even less about the significance of the fifth-century plague, though its impact may have been considerable, if it were in any way comparable to the sixth-century plague, which does indeed seem to have had an impact on a scale similar to that of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Even without the evidence of Cirencester, however, it would be reasonable to argue that a man who kept the drains cleared was contributing to the comfort of the inhabitants of Tintagel.
     There was, however, a downside to the Roman system of plumbing, and that lay in the provision of water. Just as Roman drains are impressive feats of engineering, so too are Roman aqueducts and underground water channels. Their demise too has been seen as symptomatic of the end of Roman civilisation. The breaking of the aqueducts, in the course of the sieges of the city of Rome which took place during the sixth-century wars between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines, played a significant part in making much of the place uninhabitable. With its water-supplies broken and its drains in need of repair, large ares of Rome became marshy, and thus malarial.
     But the collapse of the aqueducts and the breakdown of the Roman drainage system in the sixth century was not the earliest of the problems associated with the water supply to hit the Roman Empire. In a sense it is the word 'plumber' which gives the name away. The word derives from plumbum, which is the Latin for lead. Roman water-pipes were made of lead: physiologically the build-up of lead in the body leads to physical degeneration: not surprisingly one of the explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire put forward has been that the population within the Empire became so physically degenerate that it was unable to face the barbarians.
     Now, it is certainly true that bone analysis of a number of Roman cemeteries has revealed that there was a build-up of lead in the bodies of members of the population of the Empire, and this may have led to physical weakness. On the other hand, such degeneration on its own will not explain the failure of the Roman army. Recruitment of Roman civilians to the army was in decline for a long while, and it had plenty of causes other than lead-poisoning. Long before the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the emperors had become dependent on barbarian recruits or federates. As for the barbarian peoples which entered the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, and subsequently destroyed imperial control in the West, it was not their intention to overthrow the emperor, merely to find a place in the sun. Lead-poisoning is a factor, but only one factor in the immensely complicated set of causes which contributed to the Fall of the Roman Empire.
     Arthur, Artognou, or whoever used the inscribed slate to cap a drain on Tintagel island, solves no historical problems. On the other hand, taken at face value he raises a series of speculations on daily life, which bring us much closer to the realities of the fith and sixth centuries that does the Arthur of Camelot or of Geoffry of Monmouth. Yet the Arthur of Camelot has his own importance for the historian -- but the historian of the periods in which he was talked about, not for the historian of the sub-Roman world. His Camelot tells us about as much about the sixth century as Grand Souci tells us about the European Middle Ages.

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