[Chapter Fourteen: The Phaistos Disc and the Early Kings of Crete]

Part II: After the Sack of Rome

Chapter Fifteen: AD 429—The Rise of the Pendragons

But to pretend that he was the first whom poets have ever celebrated
as having performed these wonderful feats is,
despite St. Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or illiterate.
So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right
to call him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.
—Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Geoffrey glances at the doubt over Arthur's end,
but he is noncommittal. Folk belief went much further.
It affirmed that he never died,
and would return as a kind of messiah.
—Geoffrey Ashe, The Discovery of King Arthur

The original overall title of this work and now that of Part One reflects my original aim of elucidating the nature of the existing misalignment of biblically based and historically based chronological systems. Having noticed the pattern of cometary returns that appeared spontaneously from the data upon the successful completion of this task, however, it was obvious to me that the existence of this most important of chronological markers could be used to remove some of the mystery surrounding other, more recent, historical perplexities; for example, the problem of whether King Arthur of Britain was an historical personage or not and especially when he would have lived during the early centuries after the withdrawal of the military and political power of the Roman Empire from Britain.

The experts on King Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, cannot agree on whether he lived in the 5th or the 6th century. It has been suggested by some that he never existed at all. There is, however, one clue to the era of Arthur that takes its cue from the cometary cycle elaborated in the current work. Geoffrey of Monmouth, supposedly working from an earlier source obtained from his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, describes the events surrounding the ascension of Uther Pendragon:

During these transactions at Winchester, there appeared a star of wonderful magnitude and brightness, darting forth a ray, at the end of which was a globe of fire in form of a dragon, out of whose mouth issued forth two rays; one of which seemed to stretch out itself beyond the extent of Gaul, the other towards the Irish Sea, and ended in seven rays.

At the appearance of this star, a general fear and amazement seized the people; and even Uther, the king's brother, who was then upon his march with his army into Cambria, being not a little terrified at it, was very curious to know of the learned men, what it portended. Among others, he ordered Merlin to be called, who also attended in this expedition to give his advice in the management of the war; and who, being now presented before him, was commanded to discover to him the signification of the star. At this he burst into tears, and with a loud voice cried out, "O irreparable loss! O distressed people of Britain! Alas! the illustrious prince is departed! The renowned king of the Britons, Aurelius Ambrosius, is dead!"

This is from the translation by Aaron Thompson and J. A. Giles of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, available online.

Timeline of Alberic

This object would appear to be that same Comet of Typhon that marked the divisions of the Bronze Age. From the reconstruction in Chapter Eight the encounter of the comet with the earth during this period was in the year 429. Despite the attempt by Mike Baillie to align the later years of the reign of Arthur with the tree ring minimum of 536, this date is clearly too late for the coronation of Arthur's father Uther. Using the timeline, above, of the monk Alberic of Trois-Fontaines reproduced in The Discovery of King Arthur by Geoffrey Ashe, and placing the ascension of Uther at 429, we arrive at the following first approximation:

Timeline of Alberic Aligned with the Comet of 429

This table agrees with all of the references that Ashe finds to Arthur among the scraps of history that have survived from this period. It does not agree with the date of the passing of Riothamus, who operated in Gaul during the middle of the 5th century. Riothamus, with whom Ashe identifies Arthur, died near 470. So Riothamus was either a successor to Arthur operating in Brittany, he was wholly divorced from the line of British kings, or there is something wrong with the length of the reign of Arthur as found in Alberic. As we see below, the chronology of Geoffrey of Monmouth, when divorced from its absolute dates, fits perfectly with Ashe's contention that Arthur was Riothamus, except that it extends Arthur's reign beyond his exit from Gaul until 475 when he presumably died at the Battle of Camlann. It also agrees rather precisely with parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle when note is taken of an apparent 28-year shift in the dating; perhaps due to a spurious second conversion from the older crucifixion calendar beginning in AD 28 to the newer Anno Domini system, or more likely to the intentional removal of Arthur for political reasons:

Chronology of Early Post-Roman Britain

The advantage of this reconstruction is that, like the kingship of Solomon that we have previously shown to have followed directly upon the fall of the Egyptian 21st Dynasty, it begins the rule of Arthur's ancestor Constantine in the very year that the Romans ceded to the Britains the right to organize their own defense. Clearly, Geoffrey's sources understood the relationship of the return of Typhon to the appearance of Uther as king in Britain but got the absolute dating wrong. The description we are provided with of the comet is the best we have found so far and explains its continued association with dragons and serpents, an association carried to the very appellation of Uther himself, leaving little doubt that we are looking at his ascension to the position of overking during the early decades of the 5th century.

Constantine ruled for 10 years, according to Ashe, and upon his death at the hands of a Pict, his son Constans was convinced by a nobleman, Vortigern, to leave the monastery where he had been living and assume the throne in the year 420. Constans served as a puppet of Vortigern, who waited until 421 before arranging to have Constans murdered by his Pictish guard. Upon assuming the throne, Vortigern was attacked by the Picts and sought the aid of Hengest and Horsa, a pair of Saxon leaders, as suggested by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though the Chronicle places these events 28 years later, as it places the retreat of the Romans from Britain at 435, 25 years after it actually occurred. Shortly thereafter Vortigern married Rowena, the daughter of Hengest.

Sometime during his reign, Vortigern was replaced by his son Vortimer from an earlier marriage, who was later poisoned by his stepmother, after which Vortigern returned. Six years after he first became king, Vortigern found himself at war with Hengest and Horsa, again according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Horsa died, to be replaced by Hengest's son Esc, and about the same time Vortigern was replaced by Aurelius Ambrosius. Hengest and Esc, or Esc alone, continued to harry the Britains until Aurelius died in 429, the event identified by Geoffrey with our Comet of Typhon, to be replaced by Uther Pendragon. Arthur was born two years later in 431. By 446 Uther was dead and his son Arthur had become military ruler of Britain.

Much has been made of the lack of any reference to King Arthur, or even to his father Uther, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. That Arthur should be missing is not surprising. The Saxon bards were loathe to sing the praises of their most successful opponents. There is also a fairly transparent extension of the reigns of Vortigern and Hengest, when compared to the account found in Geoffrey. There are even vague references to victories of Hengest over the Britains and the Welsh, whether real or imagined, that serve to fill what would otherwise be an obvious gap in the narrative. The casual reader fails to notice this extension of the Saxon timeline because the last successor of Hengest to appear in the Chronicle is his own son Esc, and he only briefly at his installation. After this lonesome event, other Saxon rulers arrive to rule Kent, the seat of their power in Britain, so there is no need to truncate the later history of Saxon rule to fit later, better remembered, events. This is a bit more subtle device than the crude manipulation found in the Hebrew bible.

During 446 and 447, Arthur and what essentially was a large cavalry detachment, all wearing chain mail and carrying swords, fought a series of twelve pitched battles against the Saxons across a wide swathe of territory in Britain and in southern Scotland. According to the Annales Cambriae, the last of these, the Battle of Badon, occurred 21 years before his supposed death, which would make the latter synchronous with his departure from Gaul in 468. Arthur may not have ridden across Britain on horseback, though. All the battles of this period were accessible by ship, which the Saxons certainly had. Are we to assume that Arthur had none of these? After all, his father Uther sailed from Armorica with Aurelius when they overthrew Vortigern. Also in 447, Gildas, the author of The Ruin and Conquest of Britain, was born and the country began a period of 12 years of peace during which most of the British elements of any historical parts of the legend of Arthur may have unfolded.

Arthur's exploits must have been wildly successful, for the entire period from the poisoning of his father by the Saxons in 446 until and including the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the most important event in Europe for centuries before and after, has been excised from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the two ends crudely stitched together leaving the death of Octa and Eosa and earlier events seriously out of line with genuine history. Again, all mention of the battles of Glein and Dubglas through the battle at Badon are missing, and all mention of coronations and deaths at Rome and Constantinople are gone. Needless to say, the insertion of British military might into Brittany in 459 is nowhere to be found in the Chronicle of the Anglo-Saxons. Neither is Arthur's return to his island in 468 under mysterious circumstances that led to the story that he was mortally wounded and taken to Avalon. We find no mention of the war between the Britains under Arthur and the Romans under Glycerius, known to Geoffrey as Lucius Hiberius, five years later in 473, when Arthur again took his men for a brief period to the continent. Then, his return to Camlann near Tintagel in Britain in 475 has been removed from the Saxon record, and finally, we search in vain for any reference to Odovacar and his army that put an end to the death throes of the western empire, as Arthur might have done in 475 if he had not been distracted by British affairs, and as Attila had almost put an end to the eastern empire before dying rather conveniently in 453, another earth shaking event that the Chronicle has managed to overlook.

All of the varied attempts to find the "real" King Arthur in the 5th century have been based upon the distorted chronology of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before 477 and all of them are therefore defective. These attempts run the entire gamut from the disappointing to the ridiculous. A recent author has even managed to equate Arthur with Vortigern, the mortal enemy of the Pendragons—roughly equivalent to equating Hirohito with Franklin Roosevelt—based on the last appearance of Vortigern at 455 (and not 427) in the Chronicle. As for the statement in Geoffrey that Arthur died in the year 542, the basis of the various theories that the "real" Arthur lived in the 6th century, in contrast to every other last scrap of chronological evidence in the History of the Kings of Britain, this can be explained in much simpler terms than even Geoffrey Ashe has managed to present. What has happened is that someone has placed the death of Arthur squarely in the year of the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) rather than in the year given to us by Alberic (475) and then managed to make the mind-bogglingly catastrophic error of confusing the sack of Rome in 410 with the fall of Rome in 476. This distorted 66-year timeline begins with the removal of Roman forces from Britain not in 410 but in 476 and ends with Arthur's death in 542 rather than 476. The error in Geoffrey, thus, actually confirms the scale of his timeline rather than destroying its validity as some authors would have us believe. The implication of all of this is that someone is trying to tell us that it was actually Arthur who conquered Rome in 476 in accordance with the prediction of Merlin.

Alberic, on the other hand, has the date of Arthur's death at 475; he has the lengths of the reigns of his predecessors right (Vortigern, 6 years; Aurelius, 2 years; and Uther, 17 years); but he is missing any absolute date before Arthur and knows not how long he actually reigned. If he had known that Arthur ruled for 29 years, or that Uther's comet appeared in 429, he would have ended up with something very close to the above table. It should be noted that Arthur's 16-year reign, according to Alberic, places his accession in 459, the very year that Arthur/Riothamus arrived in Gaul, so that the precise error of Alberic or his source may have been that he managed to leave out Arthur's 13 years in Britain before sailing to Armorica—not quite absolute proof, but compelling evidence nonetheless.

Corrected Timeline of Alberic

Geoffrey Ashe (as distinguished from "Geoffrey," that is, Geoffrey of Monmouth) takes note of the statement of Gildas that he was born in the 44th year since the arrival of the Saxons in Britain, though he follows the alternate view that Gildas really meant that he wrote his Concerning the Ruin of Britain 44 years after he was born in the year of the Battle of Baden. In either case, Ashe fails to quite comprehend the implication of this statement, for he places Gildas firmly in the 6th century and thereby manages to remove the battle from the other eleven fought by Arthur early in his administration. Since Gildas tells us that he was born in the same year as Baden, we can see how this would lead Ashe to doubt the integrated nature of the battle sequence in Nennius and Geoffrey. When the birth of Gildas is placed in the second year of Arthur's rule, AD 447 according to the current reconstruction, we see that Gildas addressed his complaint to the kings of Britain sometime in the late 5th or early 6th century, a point that would have given him access to all of the events he describes, including the actions of Maelgwn, Geoffrey's Malgo, who began to rule in 484, again according to our reconstruction, and was still living when Gildas wrote. Surprisingly enough, this revision of the dating of Gildas tends to add credence to a life of Gildas written at Llancarfan by the monk Caradoc. According to Caradoc, Arthur executed Gildas' brother, Hueil. In short, according to his 12th century biographer, Gildas knew Arthur, though he did not much like him. Clearly, if Arthur died in 475, Gildas must have been already living before that date. If we place their encounter during the period of Arthur's return to Britain after his nine-year stay in Gaul, Gildas would have been somewhere between 21 and 26 years old at the time (between 468 and 473).

...

Realms of Arthur at their Greatest Extent

The Hebrews, in need of an ancient history, derived their earliest known ancestors from those of the Egyptians, as did the Assyrians. The Romans, in a similar position, derived their first kings from those of Troy. And Geoffrey of Monmouth, apparently aping the Romans, derived the early kings of Britain from the Trojans. Where the genuine history of British kings begins in this list remains in doubt. Modern scholarship is suspicious of Geoffrey's sources. I see no reason to be quite so doctrinaire.

The Kings of Britain according to Geoffrey

[Chapter Sixteen: Twilight—AD 536]

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