The rapid advance of the Anglo-Saxons faltered soon after 500. A Romanised British warlord called Ambrosius Aurelianus united a large part of the Britons under his leadership and their combined forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the Anglo-Saxons at Mount Badon. The site of this famous battle has never been found, but Badbury or Baydon, both in Wiltshire, are possibilities as this area was at the western edge of the area controlled by the Anglo-Saxons. Bath is another possibility. The victory at Mount Badon was later credited to King Arthur, but there is actually no contemporary historical evidence whatsoever for this, or even that Arthur really existed at all. Gildas, who was writing within a generation of the battle, is quite clear that the British leader at Mount Badon was Ambrosius and he makes no mention of Arthur anywhere in his works. Arthur may simply be a folkloric figure who was historicised when real events became associated with his name. If Arthur did exist, then the most likely possibility is that he and Ambrosius are actually one and the same person: Arthur, which means ‘bearman’, being perhaps originally a nickname given to the tough warrior by his men. Badon probably gave the Britons their best chance to expel the Anglo-Saxons - and there is actually evidence that some Anglo-Saxons did return to Germany after the battle - but the unity of purpose achieved by Ambrosius was short-lived. Once the Anglo-Saxon advance had been halted, the feeling that they were a common threat to all Britons evaporated and the victory was not followed up. The Britons of the south-western kingdom of Dumnonia diverted their energy into overseas colonisation, in Brittany (see p. 146) and Galicia, where the little-known colony of Britonia flourished briefly in the sixth century.
Badon was clearly a serious reverse for the Anglo-Saxons, but their control over the south-east gave them great powers of recovery and they were able to resume their advance by c. 550, though more slowly than before. After their victory over the Britons at Dyrham in the Cotswolds in 577, the West Saxons captured Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. This left the British kingdom of Dumnonia cut off and isolated in the south-west. In the north. King Urien of Rheged tried to destroy the Angles who had seized control of the British kingdom of Bernicia, but he was killed while besieging their stronghold at Bamburgh c. 590. Soon after this the Bernicians took over the neighbouring Anglian kingdom of Deira, based on York, to form the powerful kingdom of Northumbria. An attempt by the Gododdin of Lothian to destroy Northumbria was crushed at the battle of Catraeth (Catterick) in Yorkshire, probably in 600. One of the survivors of the battle is thought to have been the poet Neirin (or Aneirin), who composed the epic poem Y Gododdin (‘The Gododdin’) in honour of the British dead. The Britons suffered a further blow when the Northumbrians captured Chester in 616. This drove a wedge between the Britons in Wales and those in Cumbria and Strathclyde in southern Scotland. The isolated British enclaves created by the Anglo-Saxon advance developed their own versions of the Brithonic language: Cumbric in the north, Welsh in the centre and Cornish in Dumnonia. The future for the north Britons looked bleak when the Northumbrians conquered the Gododdin c. 638 and Rheged a few years later, but their days of expansion at the expense of the Celts were ended by a defeat by the Piets in 685. The West Saxons kept Dumnonia under constant pressure and had overrun most of Devon by 700, but Cornwall (from Cornwalas, ‘the peninsular Welsh’), or West Wales as it was often called by the Anglo-Saxons, was not so easily subdued. It was only after 838, when the West Saxons defeated an allied Cornish-Viking force at the battle of Hingston Down, just west of the river Tamar, that Cornwall finally lost its independence. Even then Cornwall still kept its own vassal kings until at least 900 and the Cornish were not completely subdued until the reign of King Athelstan (924/5-39). The Midland Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia had expanded to the foothills of the Cambrian mountains some time before 700, but it made little progress after that: this is still more or less where the modern English-Welsh border runs.
World History
