The King's Cavalry (15 page)
Read The King's Cavalry Online
Authors: Paul Bannister
It was the instrument, Myrddin said, that could induce the return of Britain’s old gods, and that was how I was supposed to use it. I had no idea how I would do that and wondered if it would be simpler than turning back the waves of Saxons and Germans I knew were coming.
For them, I had my sword and the world’s finest heavy cavalry. For the gods, I had the ancient treasure of Britain. All I could do for now was to take a deep breath and face the future. “I’ll need a Druid or two,” I said.
This series is only a work of fiction, but it attempts to put the Arthur of confusing myth and legend into a plausible set of historical circumstances. I suggest that Arthur was a Romano-British lord of war (see the ‘Arthur-Carausius’ references below). We do know that any real Arthur would not have been the courtly medieval knight of Mallory’s invention, he would have been alive many hundreds of years before as a Romanised or Celtic warrior.
We cannot know exactly what the history was, but we can collect, assess and interpret the evidence. If Arthur existed, his legend may well be rooted in the actions of the burly, bearded military man Carausius who usurped a throne and defied Rome for nearly a decade. Carausius could claim to be the fath
er of the British navy and the ‘Dux Bellorum’ (war leader) who brought peace to the island kingdom and united the tribes at a time when Christianity was first being introduced to Britain.
These are historical facts, but if he is the source of the legends, we’ll probably never know.
Milvian
Bridge
The battle of the Milvian Bridge was a hinge of history. The outcome of the final battle of Diocletian’s tetrachy was a watershed both for the Roman Empire and for the modern world, as it was the conquest that converted Rome and ushered in Christianity as the state religion. Almost incredibly, scholars suggest the battle’s outcome could have been shaped by a rock from space.
In the hours before the battle, a meteor hit central Italy with the force of a small nuclear explosion, probably creating the circular Cratere del Sirente and its 30 or so smaller impact craters.
The space rock would have crossed the skies in smoke and flame, impacted with a mushroom cloud and shattering explosion and would have been highly visible to both awed armies as a line of fire in the sky.
Recent radiocarbon dating shows it struck Italy around the time of the 312 CE battle, and records show that the village of Superaequum was destroyed just then. Also at that time, there is evidence of a public disaster in the unusual number of bodies piled hastily in Christian catacombs.
Constantine is reported by the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who was a notable historian who went on to synchronise the history of Rome with the legends of Greece, the Ol
d Testament and the Near East, to have seen a blazing light in the heavens on the day before the battle. It declared: “By this sign you shall conquer,” and he used the vision to inspire his troops to victory, saying they had god’s backing. Later, in the triumphal arch Constantine erected, he attributed his victory to divine assistance (without specifying which religion).
The battle itself went much as this book suggests, although the presence of Arthur and his heavy cavalry to sway the conflict at a critical time is a fiction. Certainly the use of heavy cavalry would have been a fine weapon, as useful as Constantine’s shrewd use of the heavenly sign to confirm to his troops the support of the gods.
Nobody knows just why Maxentius came out from behind the vast walls of Aurelius to fight at the bridge. He had prepared for a siege, but may well have been indecisive over his choices. At his orders, the stone bridge was partially destroyed before the battle, and the pontoon bridge was equipped with a drawbridge, which implies Maxentius’ uncertainty of victory, as he made provision to retreat if things did not go well.
Things did not go well, he could not deploy his troops in the cramped position he had taken and Constantine’s admirable generalship defeated his rival for the empire. It is another fact that Maxentius drowned while crossing the river, and that his corpse was a difficult one to retrieve, thanks to his heavy armour.
Travel
Travel in the Roman empire could be surprisingly fast. On good military roads and in fair weather, a courier who changed to a fresh horse every 10 – 15 miles could routinely cover 60-plus miles a day, and with replacement riders as well as horses, a message could be carried 100 or more miles a day.
The legions’ usual pace was 25 miles a day and over a long journey the footsoldiers could out-march horses, which did not have the trained humans’ endurance for repeated long days of travel. On a forced march, the footslogging Mules of Marius were easily capable of 40 miles a day, and Caesar sometimes moved his troops 100 miles in a single day, although he had to march away from his slow-moving baggage train to cover that distance.
Sailing was the best way to travel long distances, with a galley quite capable of covering 120 miles a day or even more in fair conditions, and the Romans used the great waterways of Europe to move troops across the continent. There are records of Roman ladies in Britain receiving letters from friends in Rome only a week or so after their dispatch – meaning a rapid voyage for the missives, as only imperial or government mail would go by swift courier.
Arthur
&
Carausius
There are connections between Carausius and many of the traditional Arthurian sites, and Carausius’ triumphs are closely echoed in the legends of Arthur. The monk Gildas (circa 500-570AD) created Britain’s earliest written history and described a ‘lord of battles’ and ‘outstanding ruler’ whose triumph at Mount Badon was the decisive, culminating victory to rout the Saxon invaders.
The triumph was so celebrated that Gildas did not bother to identify the location of Badon or even to name the victor, noting only that ‘Arth’ – Celtic for ‘The Bear’ - was such a great overlord that King Cuneglasus of Powys humbly acted as his master’s charioteer.
Gildas was writing a century or two after the events and muddled his calendar. He wrongly dated the construction of the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus by two centuries, but he likely got the sequence right: the walls were built, the invaders came, a leader arose and drove them away. It suggests that Arthur may have lived earlier than believed, at a date that fits with the actual reign of Carausius. Many scholars think that the Badon battlefield may be at the Iron Age hillfort at Cadbury South, (‘Caros’ Camp,’) some think it could be Buxton, in Derbyshire.
There’s a great poverty in the era’s history and some of it was written 800 years after the event, but folklore often holds remarkably accurate memories. One such tale is that the Pict Ossian’s son Oscar was killed when he attacked the emperor “Caros” as he rebuilt Hadrian’s Wall.
Carausius’ image on his fine coinage shows him as a thick-necked, bear-like man and the British for ‘bear-king’ is ‘Arto-rig,’ and language experts say there are links b
etween ‘Caros’ and ‘Artorius.’ Even the hill fort at South Cadbury that tradition says was the castle of King Arthur was once ‘Cado’s Fort.’ Certainly, there was once a mass slaughter there, and there are stone foundations of a palace on the site.
A significant part of Arthur’s legend is his Christianity. Welsh tradition holds that Arthur ‘carried the cross of Christ on his shield,’ and was mortally wounded at Camlann. That conflict site has been placed in Gwynedd, where a very early Welsh ‘Stanza of the Graves’ says Arthur was buried. In the 19th century an antiquarian described the discovery of a Roman grave there at the head of a pass, a place where a ruler might be buried, overlooking his lands.
The headstone is inscribed ‘Carausius lies here in this cairn of stones,’ and carries the staurogram, (monogram of the cross) or third century tau-rho cross of a Christian, the earliest ‘sign of the Lord’ found in Wales and one of only a dozen found in Britain. (Early Christians used this cross as their symbol, the current crucifix cross being regarded as a shameful symbol of punishment.)
The man memorialis
ed in that cairn was so important that the stone and maybe the bones were moved to the nearby church of St Tudclud, in Penmachno, which is an important early Christian site and the reputed burial place of Iorweth ab Owain Gwynedd, father of Wales’ greatest king. This, then is a royal graveyard. The fact that Carausius was so famous that he needed no ‘Soldier of the XXth’ style of identification could therefore be highly significant.
The only other known memorial to the Lost Emperor is in the Tullie House museum in Carlisle, on a milestone that was inverted and reused. The buried portion concealed the honorifics the Romans elsewhere redacted after they
re-invaded Britain in 293 AD. That glorious title reads: ‘Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Mauseus Carausius, Dutiful, Fortunate, the Unconquered Augustus.” It should add: ‘The Forgotten.’
Not
Forgotten
This book and the
others in the series (
Arthur Britannicus
,
Arthur Imperator
and
Arthur Invictus
) owe their existence to the skilled, professional staff of Endeavour Press, London, to editors Matt Lynn and Richard Foreman and especially to the publisher at the spearhead of it all, Amy Durant.
I am also indebted for the maps in this and previous works to my friend the West Country and Hollywood artist Kelvin Jones, who produced the meticulous cartog
raphy in this series of books. I also owe great gratitude to my publishing professional, daughter Rachel Williams for her vital input, and to my daughter Claire Bannister for legal guidance as clear as her name implies.
Most of all is the debt I owe to my wife Jennie, maligned as the model for the pagan witch Guinevia. It was easy to write about her in the role, as all I had to do was reverse some of her gentle, caring characteristics. No emperor, Roman or British, could have greater treasure than such a spouse.
Paul Bannister
Oregon, 2014.
If you enjoyed
The King’s Cavalry
by Paul Bannister you might be interested in
Wolves of Rome
by Christopher Lee Buckner, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from
Wolves of Rome
by Christopher Lee Buckner
