Battle of Mons Badonicus

The Battle of Mons Badonicus ( Mount Badon / ˈbeɪdən / [sometimes also Badon Hill ] in English and Mynydd Baddon in Welsh ) was a military conflict that took place in the late 5th or early 6th century between one supposedly by Ambrosius Aurelianus (or after Tradition of the legendary Arthur ) led armed force of the Romano-British and an army of the Anglo-Saxons invading Britain should have taken place. According to medieval English and Welsh sources, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain is said to have suffered a temporary setback through the victory of the British. Because of the small number of early sources and their brief explanations, there is no certainty about the exact time, place or details of this dispute.

Since the research into the presumed historical background of the Arthurian legend , in which the battle plays a prominent role, is often carried out by lay scholars, there are also countless unproven and unprovable assumptions that make it difficult to identify the few indisputable facts and plausible hypotheses.

Early sources

The oldest mention of the battle of Mons Badonicus is found in Gildas' De Excidio et Conquestu Britaniae ( On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain ) , written in the first half of the 6th century . It is unclear whether Gildas assumes that Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom he praised, was the leader of the Romano-British in this battle.

Next, the battle of Beda Venerabilis is mentioned in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ( Church history of the English people ) written in the first third of the 8th century . The clerical historian explains that a great slaughter had been wrought among the Anglo-Saxon invaders.

In the two subsequent sources, the Historia Brittonum ascribed to Nennius , written around 830 and in the Welsh Annales Cambriae from the 10th century, Arthur is first named as the leader of the Romano-British. In its 56th chapter (Arthuriana), the Historia Brittonum provides a semi-historical catalog of twelve battles that Arthur, here characterized as dux bellorum (military leader), fought against the Anglo-Saxons. The last of these battles was that of Mons Badonicus, in which Arthur alone is said to have killed 960 opponents. According to the entry in the Annales Cambriae for this battle, Arthur carried the cross of Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights and the British were victorious. It can be calculated that the Annales Cambriae date this warlike event to the year 516.

The uncertain details

The location of the battle is just as controversial as the name of the Romano-British leader. Gildas, halfway a contemporary, who in his work De Excidio et Conquestu Britonum states that the battle took place in the year of his birth, neither gives the names of the commanders, nor does he provide any information that could help to determine the location of the battle. Perhaps he had Ambrosius Aurelianus in mind as the British leader.

place

A number of sites in Britain have been suggested over the past thousand years, from what is now the border between England and Scotland to the south end of the island. The most plausible place seems to be Bath , the city the Saxons knew as Badon . All suggestions, however, are based on guesswork resulting from the lack of facts, as the sources for British history between 410 and 600 are exceptionally poor.

For each proposed location, the following points must be considered:

The battlefield was believed to be on the border between the territories of the British (Roman-Celtic) inhabitants and the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
The Annales Cambriae , which were discovered in the Harleian edition of the Historia Brittonum , keep an entry of a second battle on Mons Badonicus under the year 665 , in which there is a dispute between two kingdoms of the 7th century. It is unclear which kingdoms are meant and whether this second battle may be mentioned in other records.

Attendees

The names of the participants (of the first battle) are also under discussion. The (late) Historia Brittonum passed on the name of the Romano-British commander with Artus (or Artorius ), while more recent scientific studies refer to Ambrosius Aurelianus, who seems to have played an important role during the defensive battles against the Anglo-Saxons. The commander of the Saxons is said to have been King Ælle . Taliesin refers in a poem that perhaps - but cannot be proven - from the year 546 or 547 to the battle of Badon with Arthur, the main donor of feasts [...] the battle that all men remember . In the historical context refers to the main donors of feasting ( chief giver of feasts ) the de facto top leader.

date

The exact date of the battle is also unclear. Gildas writes ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis ... quique quadragesimus quartus ut novi orditur annus mense iam uno emenso qui et meae nativitatis est , which usually coincides with the year of the Battle of Mount Badon ... which took place 44 years and a month ago, which the year of my birth was being translated. Since Gildas wrote this probably in 547 or shortly before (King Maelgwn of Gwynedd was still alive), he speaks of the year 503 or shortly before. There is an ambiguity in this passage, however, which Bede interprets to mean that the battle took place 44 years after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain. Then with the year 449, which Bede assumes for the arrival, the year 493 would be set for the battle. The later Annales Cambriae in turn name the year 516, which is accepted by only a few scholars (data in the Annales Cambriae after 525 were determined from contemporary tables for the date of Easter ; data before 525 are much more unreliable).

Indirect support for a date close to 493, at least closer to 503, comes from the hagiographies . The biographies of Dewi Sant ( Saint David ), Cadoc von Llancarfan and Gildas , written much later, report that Gildas had visited Ty Gwyn Abbey in 527 or 528, with David accusing him of being too young for his office. In hagiographies, mostly written in the 11th century, miracles may have been invented, exaggerated, or borrowed for propaganda purposes, or dates of death altered, but their authors had no reason to distort mundane facts such as dates and places of encounters. Apart from the fact that the life stories of the saints were recorded independently of each other, each in the abbey in which the respective saint lived - in St. David's to David, in Llancarfan to Cadoc and in Rhuys to Gildas.

In Rhygyfarch's biography of David, it is said that he was educated by Saint Paulinus Aurelianus (Pol de Léon) for ten years before becoming abbot of Ty Gwyn. David's birth can hardly have been after 514. Rhygyfarch also says that Gildas David's mother, Saint Non , preached while she was pregnant with him. If Gildas was 514 old enough to preach, it would be implausible to put the year of his birth, and thus the year of battle, later than 498.

Effects

According to the early sources, the advance of the Anglo-Saxons into Britain was halted for a number of years by their defeat on Mons Badonicus, although the Romano-British may also have suffered heavy losses. While the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not cover the battle, it clearly documents a gap of nearly 70 years between two major Anglo-Saxon leaders, or Bretwaldas : Ælle of Sussex and Ceawlin of Wessex in the 5th and 6th centuries.

The late antique historian Prokopios of Caesarea reports that around 550 he was told by a member of a diplomatic delegation of the Franks , who was accompanied by a group of Anglers , that a number of British and Anglo-Saxons had left their island because of overpopulation to themselves to settle in Northern Gaul . However, Prokop's accounts of Gaul and Britain should be treated with great caution, as they contain many implausible details. Other reports from the mid-6th century mention groups of Anglo-Saxons who left Britain to settle this side of the English Channel . Both pieces of information indicate that a negative development had set in with the spread of the Anglo-Saxons on the island.

Archaeological evidence from the pagan Anglo-Saxons' cemeteries suggests that a number of their settlements were abandoned and that the border between the invaders and British residents was shifted at the expense of the Anglo-Saxons around the year 500. The Anglo-Saxons on the one hand owned at that time the counties of Kent , Sussex , Norfolk and Suffolk as well as tracts of land on the Humber ; on the other hand, it is clear that the British not only controlled everything west of a line from the mouth of the Wiltshire Avon at Christchurch (Dorset) up to the Trent , then along this river to the Humber, and finally along the Derwent in Yorkshire to the North Sea , but also an enclave reaching north and west of London and south of Verulamium (the third largest Roman city in Britain, located at St Albans in Hertfordshire ), and stretching west to the border. The British defending this area could safely bring their troops down Watling Street to reinforce their garrisons in London or Verulamium, dividing the Anglo-Saxon territory, one south of the Weald in east Kent and one around the Wash .

If this theory is correct, one can assume that Cuthwulf, an ally of Ceawlin of Wessex , defeated the British in 571 at Bedcanford and then occupied the four places Limbury , Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire , Benson and Eynsham , creating the British wedge between the settlement areas of the The Anglo-Saxons had broken, and the fragile peace that had followed the important battle of Mons Badonicus was drawing to a close.

literature

Leslie Alcock: Arthur's Britain. History and archeology, AD 367-634. Allen Lane, London 1971, ISBN 0-7139-0245-0 .
Thomas D. O'Sullivan: The De Excidio of Gildas. Its Authenticity and Date (= Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition. Vol. 7). Brill, Leiden 1978, ISBN 90-04-05793-5 (also: New York NY, Columbia University, dissertation, 1973).