Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/713

Rh Easter and Pentecost at Caerleon on the Usk, but as a little exalted monarch, a roi-bonhomme, asleep on his throne, while the chiefs of his following relate at their ease all their adventures. Here we find preserved the idea of the individual independence of all the Celtic chiefs, whose king, only primus inter pares, must necessarily have been as little of a sovereign as possible. After the legend has passed into France Arthur becomes a sort of rival Charlemagne, holding supreme and boundless sway, though never as a real feudal emperor (they were tired of that in France), but rather as a Marcus Aurelius, a monarch, half philosopher, ruling chiefly by his wisdom and subtlety, and still more a judge than a general over his people. The type is one which belongs essentially to the Celtic mind, more akin to the Greek than any other, and naturally as far removed from the Roman as from the Saxon turn of thought. Among the writers of the 17th and 18th centuries the historical existence of Arthur was, with a few rare excep tions, denied, and the Arthurian legend regarded purely as an invention of the worthy chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Pinkerton bestows a moment s notice on the king whose exploits fill all the poetry of the Middle Ages, and whose very existence is doubtful,&quot; and then passes on. The difficulty of establishing the filiation of Arthur perplexed Milton, who says, &quot; As to Arthur, more renowned in songs and romances than in true stories, who he was, and whether any such reigned in Britain, has been doubted heretofore, and may again with good reason. No less is in doubt who was his father ; and as we doubted of his parentage, so may we also of his puissance.&quot; Guin- guene&quot; settled everything by the unwarranted explanation, that English romancers had invented an Arthur out of jealousy of the French Charlemagne. English writers of Guinguend s calibre in mythical science replied, that Arthur was a French invention of Richard or Elie de Borron, or of the Anglo-Norman Mapes, basing the asser tion on an expression found in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Ampere, deficient here in his usual penetration, throws entire discredit on the good faith of Marie de France, who speaks of having seen and handled the original Celtic MS. Fauriel, and with him the other French savans, would fain have attributed the Arthurian legend to the troubadours rather than acknowledge its Welsh origin. He asked for the tests which have since been discovered by Mr Owen Jones and commented on by M. Hersart de la Villemarque&quot; with perhaps indiscreet zeal. Sir Walter Scott s excellent histori cal instinct had already exhibited a part of the truth in his edition of Thomas of Ercildoune s Rhymes. We may now. therefore, venture on being more positive than Southey, and less sceptical than Mr Thomas Wright, the two modern editors of the translation which Sir Thomas Malory made in 1G34 of the five Romances of the Round Table (he &quot; compiled the booke oute of certaine bookcs of Frensshe, and reduced it into Englysshe&quot;), and we may follow almost step by step the development of the legend, and of the various Arthurs, from the British Arthur of history to the mythical Arthur of Cambrian and Breton tradition, and lastly to the French Arthur, the rival of Charlemagne. We shall conclude by noticing the main features of the character of Arthur, and indicating their origin.

Historic Facts.—The general belief regarding Arthur has been that he was a leader of the Celtic tribes of the west of England against the Saxons. It is recorded that, about the middle of the 5th century, Kent, after suffering from famine and pestilence, was invaded by the Picts and Scots, while at the same time another struggle, longer and more keen, was taking place in West Britain against another Saxon invasion. The longer and braver resistance of the Western Celts is partly set down to the merit of their leaders, Aurelianus Ambrosius and Arthur. The men of Kent, however, after a vain appeal to ^Elius, prefect of the Gauls, were induced by Vortigern, their most important chief, not only to make peace with the Saxons, but to invoke their aid against the Picts and Scots. Hengist was appealed to, and the looked-for Saxon alliance became the Saxon invasion and conquest of Kent, after Hengist, here tofore a Heretogen, became a king. Whilst his immediate descendants were establishing themselves in succession to him, the contest in the plain of Arderidd took place, which occasioned Myrdhinn s frenzy. Arthur was slain in the battle called by historians the victory of Mountbadon near Bath, 520 A.D. [The historical Arthur is now regarded by many as having been a 6th century leader, Gulediy, or &quot; Dux Bellorum &quot; of the northern Cymry of Cumbria and Strathclyde against the encroaching Saxons of the east coast (Bernicia), and the Picts and Scots from beyond the Forth and Clyde. For such would appear to be the, at least, approximately certain result of recent researches, in opposition both to the scep ticism of the 17th and 18th centuries as to the existence of an historical Arthur, and to the popular notion of him as a West-of-England king, or king of Wales, or Cornwall. This conclusion had, however, been more or less distinctly suggested by Chalmers, by Sir Walter Scott, by a writer in the Gentleman s Magazine (1842), by Mr Nash, and by Dr Burton. Yet this result of special recent researches is still so far from being generally known and accepted, that it may be desirable briefly to indicate the arguments in support of it. First, then, we have the facts of the northern extension and conflicts of the Cymry in those five centuries, from the 6th to the 10th, which may be distinguished as the Pre- mediseval Period. For these facts our first authorities are the only premediseval British historians, Gildas and Nennius—the Historia and Epistola of the one having been com posed in the 6th, and the earliest of the works that go under the name of the other in the 7th century. Now, in the former there is, at least, nothing to favour that popular notion as to Arthur which is derived from the mediaeval chronicles; for the words in the Durham MS., "Quiprope Sabrinum ostium habetur," are now acknowledged to be an interpolation of the 13th century. And the latter is most naturally interpreted as positively affirming that Arthur s conflicts we^e with the Saxons of Bernicia (North umberland and the Lothians). It has been contended that this could not be meant, because the Teutonic settlers in the north were Angles. But, in answer to this, it can now be affirmed that the earlier Teutonic settlers in the north were Frisians, a tribe of Saxons ; and that the northern settlement of the Angles did not take place till 547, after the time of Arthur. Besides, the bards of the Gth century, to whom are attributed those historical poems, which do not, however, appear to have taken their earliest consistent shape farther back than the 7th century, and which have been recently edited by Mr Skene under the title of the Four Ancient Books of Wales, these Cymric bards Merlin, Taliessin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen are all connected with the north ; of a large proportion of their poems the scenery and events lie in the north ; these poems are, in fact, the literature of the Cymric inhabitants of Cumbria and Strathclyde before these kingdoms were subjugated by the Saxon king, Edmund of Wessex, and by him ceded to the Gaelic king, Malcolm king of Scots, in 946 ; the warriors, whose deeds are celebrated in these poems, were " Gwyr y Gogledd," or men of the north ; and the histori cal Arthur, who figures in five of them, is no southern king, but a Guledig, whose twelve battles are in the north. Ancl, finally, in evidence of the former northern extension of the Cymry, it is as Bretts and Welsh that the inhabi- 