Scholars of Arthurian literature—the tradition surrounding King Arthur and his knights—have long argued about whether the character of Arthur has any grounding in factual history. Those disputes were there almost from the beginning of the popularity of the tales, with William of Newburg (1136-1198) declaring that Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1095-ca. 1155) had simply fabricated the tales of Arthur—and almost everything else—in the Historia Regum Britanniae, despite Geoffrey relying upon an older tradition going back to the monks Gildas and Nennius, of the 6th and 9th centuries, respectively. By the 16th century, doubts about the historical basis of King Arthur led to a diminished respect for the tales, as the values of the day began to place a greater emphasis on the need for historical veracity. Those diminutions were reversed in the 18th and (especially) the 19th centuries, and neither the literature nor the scholarly discourse around it have waned since, with the debate taking place in countless scholarly articles, e-mail discussion lists, and books.
Now, another book has arrived in the ongoing search for the historical Arthur. Andrew Breeze, a professor of philology at the University of Navarra, spends roughly the first third of his new book—The Historical Arthur and the Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions—establishing the basis for an historical Arthur. The latter two-thirds of the book advance a candidate for the author of the 14th century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a chivalric romance of uncertain authorship, for which, hitherto, no broadly compelling authorial candidate has been offered. In both sections of his book, Breeze makes as persuasive a case as may be made today, in the absence of absolutely conclusive material evidence. Consequently, his work is of great importance for the field of Middle English literature, and his arguments must be given scholarly attention and addressed, whether one is persuaded by them or not.
On the authorship of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, addressed in the later and longer section of Breeze’s book, this author has less expertise. However, some brief comments seem to be in order following Richard Firth Green’s review in Arthuriana. In his review, Green argues that Breeze’s thesis—that Sir John Stanley of Storeton, in Chester, was the Gawain poet—is a hypothesis based upon another hypothesis, and hence speculative in the extreme. Certainly, it is hard to imagine what sort of evidence could fully answer the claim that an authorship argument is ‘hypothetical’ and thus open to critique. Shakespeare’s own colleagues and friends compiled the First Folio, and yet there are still arguments advanced today—ill-advised though they be—that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him by the very men who performed and published them. We shall never have something so conclusive for the establishing of the identity of the Gawain poet. If one is going to set about making and critiquing claims of authorial attribution, or indeed anything else about the past, a willingness to accept at least some hypothetical uncertainty seems to be a necessary part of the enterprise.
Green goes on to present Breeze’s argument somewhat reductively as a syllogism, and then argues that it is fallacious on the grounds of being an example of the undistributed middle. Here, Green is on slightly firmer ground, but only because Breeze makes his case quite forcefully at times, with the use of words like “certainly,” expressing his thesis as if it were a matter of deduction rather than induction. As a matter of induction, there is nothing wrong with Breeze’s argument: in fact, the sheer number of modifiers that Green needs to use in order to present even his reductive version of Breeze’s argument—“Chesireman/layman/courtier/conservative/French-speaker”—suggests a fairly narrow range of candidates, and that before considering the other evidence which Breeze offers.
Moreover, the strength with which Breeze makes his claims should be understood as a rhetorical rather than an epistemically descriptive move: Breeze opens with the words of Sir Winston Churchill, and he quite evidently takes that great statesman and rhetorician’s forceful prose as a model. As much can be seen in his critique of the scholarship of Nick Higham, of which Breeze writes:
Not a word, however, in its 380 pages to indicate belief in Arthur as a historical figure, like Henry V or Robert E. Lee. This may, alas, in Churchill’s pithy utterance, be due to a “fear of being contradicted” which “leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.” An instance of this corrosive pusillanimity is Professor Higham’s remark on the Welsh annals as unable to bear “much historical or chronological weight.”
All this is as much to say that the arguments in the section on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may be, at times, rhetorically overstated as certainties rather than as the necessarily speculative enterprise of literary attribution some seven centuries removed. Breeze does offer a plausible candidate; his arguments do have an evidentiary basis; and, on the balance of probabilities, it would not be imprudent to accept his thesis until and unless other, better evidence should be presented. Therefore, any counterargument should be addressed at the evidentiary level, rather than by taking Breeze’s mode of rhetorical expression as licence to dismiss his entire Gawain enterprise out of hand.
With regard to the first section of the book, Breeze argues for the historical Arthur as belonging to the early 6th century: he was not a king himself, although he fought cum regibus Brittonum (‘alongside kings of the Britons’); instead, he was a dux bellorum (‘leader of battles’). This title was recorded in the 9th century Historia Brittonum, a work long (and probably correctly) attributed to Nennius. In the 56th chapter of his Historia, Nennius sets out the historical details about Arthur, with which Breeze generally agrees (but with some important exceptions):
At that time, the English increased their numbers and grew in Britain. On Hengest’s death, his son Octha came down from the north of Britain to the kingdom of the Kentishmen, and from him are sprung the kings of the Kentishmen. Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle. (trans. John Morris)
Nennius follows this by recording Arthur’s twelve great battles, including the last and greatest at Mount Badon, in which “Nine hundred and sixty men fell in one day, from a single charge of Arthur’s, and no one laid them low save he alone.” Breeze is right to observe that it is these twelve battles which have been “a notorious historical problem.” However, through undertaking not inconsiderable scholarship of his own and by relying upon the work of other scholars regarding certain battles, Breeze concludes that “every one of them can now be placed in southern Scotland or on its border, with the exception of Badon.” With regard to that latter battle, Breeze accepts a date of 493 before the active period of the historical Arthur—and suggests that victory at Mount Badon should be properly attributed to Aurelius Ambrosius instead:
If Arthur died near Carlisle in 537, his career is too late for him to have been at Badon in 493. So Mount Badon can be detached from his triumphs. The real victor was presumably the Ambrosius Aurelianus praised by Gildas, whose family had associations with the Gloucester-Cirencester area, his grandsons being mentioned (in negative terms) by Gildas.
This claim for the 493 date of Mount Badon is the occasion for this reviewer’s one minor point of concern with this otherwise provocative and persuasive section of the book. With regard to the dating of Mount Badon, Breeze relies upon a 2010 paper by David Woods published in The Journal of Theological Studies, in which that author argues for a 493 date because of a detail from the De Excidio of Gildas. Breeze summarises the argument as follows:
Badon is mentioned by the sixth-century writer Gildas, who says that the conflict occurred forty-three years and a month before his time. Later in his text, Gildas alludes to a strange dark cloud over the “whole island” of Britain. Woods proved from these allusions that Gildas wrote in early 536, when the northern hemisphere was covered by a volcanic cloud (following a mega-eruption in Central America) which was to produce a catastrophic dip in temperature, harvest failure, and famine. Gildas, a British Jeremiah, is yet curiously silent on this catastrophe. He therefore wrote before the effects of the volcanic winter were evident. This worldwide climatic disaster will date both Gildas and Badon. Now, 536 minus 43 = 493.
Volcanic ground is notoriously unstable, and here it proves a particularly shaky foundation for the argument of Woods (and hence Breeze). First, and least importantly, a 2010 paper and a 2019 paper (both published after Woods could have made use of their data) both argued for the cause of the volcanic winter of 536 eruption in Lake Ilopango—a location in Central America, as Breeze notes. However, subsequent research from 2020 places the eruption date sometime in 429-433. Modern research now suggests that the eruption (or eruptions) occurred in California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Aleutian Islands, not Central America. Obviously, the specific origin of the volcanic cloud is unimportant for my purposes: the volcanic winter of 536 is a well-attested and accepted fact, regardless of its origin. However, on this point it would have signalled an abundance of diligence had Breeze checked the 2010 argument of Woods against more recent research.
Somewhat more concerning is that Breeze seems to give Woods’ argument even more credence than Woods does himself. The passage in Gildas relating to the “dense cloud and black night” occurs in a passage inveighing against the “false priests” of the age, who refuse to fulfil the Christian commission to spread the Light of the Gospel into the world. That discussion should be understood in context:
Who then among the priests of today, plunged as they are in the blindness of ignorance, could shine like the light of the clearest lamp to all those in a house by night, with the glow of knowledge and good works? Who is there who is looked upon as a safe and obvious common refuge for all the sons of the church, as is a strong city, placed on the peak of a high mountain, for its citizens? But look at what follows: ‘Let your light so shine in the presence of men that they see your good works and glorify your father in heaven.’ Which of them can fulfil this even for a single day? Rather does a dense cloud and black night of their sin so loom over the whole island that it diverts almost all men from the straight way and makes them stray along the trackless and entangled paths of crime; and by their works, the heavenly father is intolerably blasphemed rather than praised. (trans. Michael Winterbottom)
Here, it is clear that Gildas is writing metaphorically, not literally, in parallel to the Biblical source (Matt. 5:13-16) that he quotes across his 93rd chapter. The “dense cloud and black night” is not a literal cloud but rather a cloud “of their sin.” Woods himself acknowledges as much when he indicates that the choice of metaphor is not remarkable:
In the context of such imagery, it is not particularly surprising, therefore, that Gildas should choose to describe the sinfulness of some of his contemporary priests as a dense cloud (densissima nebula) in language similar to his description of the heart of contemporary kings as surrounded by a thick cloud of vice (crassa … nube).
Woods goes on to argue that the selection of this particular metaphorical image—or rather its extent—is what indicates the date of composition: “It was by no means inevitable that he should compare the extent of their sinfulness to a thick cloud extending over the whole of the island of Britain.” This is true (“it was by no means inevitable”), but the inferred conclusion (that it must be caused by the volcanic effect) is highly speculative, especially given the context of Biblical metaphor. Undoubtedly aware of this, Woods introduces the topic of the volcanic winter of 536 by admitting, “Perhaps it is merely a coincidence.”
Perhaps it is because of his rhetorical mode that Breeze does not admit himself of Woods’ own caveat and, consequently, his wholehearted acceptance of Woods’ proposed dating for Mount Badon (“we can be certain that Gildas wrote after the cloud had appeared” (emphasis added)) seems imprudent, especially given that Woods himself occasionally offers a nod to the speculative nature of his enterprise throughout his own paper. As indicated above, this is likely a set of rhetorical choices, rather than an attempt by Breeze precisely to indicate a logically deductive relationship of his premises to his conclusion. However, by failing to acknowledge the very speculative context in which Woods’ argument is grounded, Breeze also opens the door to a critique along the line of that offered by Green, in this case, that the kinds of arguments he is using in support of his own are not as strong as he suggests.
With that said, the dating of Mount Badon to 493 does not seem to this reviewer to be essential to Breeze’s argument, which makes an admirable allowance for the realities of human scribes and authors. If Gildas could have been wrong in attributing it to Arthur rather than to Aurelius Ambrosius, he could also have been wrong about the date, the location, or any other detail without imperilling Breeze’s identification of the locations for the rest of the battles in the list; as P.J.C. Field notes in his review for Modern Language Review, the Annales Cambriae does require some scholarly finessing in order to reconcile its Arthurian dates. Moreover, the speculative nature of Woods’ argument about the 493 date does not mean that Wood is wrong, only that he is not necessarily right: the battle might well have happened in 493, after all. Whatever the case, it is worth remembering that the precision about the date seems only to be a matter of establishing the general historical veracity of the De Excidio, because Breeze accepts that the Arthurian attribution for that battle is an error by Gildas: right on the dates, wrong on the general in charge. For that reason, Breeze’s case might have been still more compelling had the 493 dating of Mount Badon not been advanced with such rhetorical verve.
It is a sign of the volume’s strength that its most ‘serious’ issue is one of mere rhetorical emphasis, whilst its contributions to scholarship are numerous and significant. Breeze’s treatment of the terms dux bellorum and penteulu are philologically valuable interventions in the literature and are important for Breeze’s identification of the historical Arthur. Field’s positive review, addressing the whole text, is right to single this out as a point of especial scholarly agreement. Together, Breeze’s historical and philological scholarship work to advance a compelling case of sufficient soundness that, barring new evidence, should be accepted as the most credible theory we have today. It is no mean feat, even for a scholar of high repute, to so potently address in a single book not one but two major issues in Middle English literature. But Andrew Breeze has gone one step better in doing so with admirably clear prose that is free of pretence and with a genuinely readable style that both edifies and delights the reader—a rare and fortunate volume, indeed.
