Camlann

The oldest record of the battle could be written on a coin. The Annales Cambriae, the Welsh Annals, set against the year 537 four Latin words and no more: the Strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell. No cause, no sides, no victor; only that the two names went down together. The Welsh tradition that kept the memory called it exactly what it was. The Triads count it among the three futile battles of the Island of Britain, the worst of them, and one triad blames the whole catastrophe on a blow that Queen Gwenhwyfar struck her sister Gwenhwyfach, a private quarrel with a hundred thousand corpses. The old Stanzas of the Graves place the grave of Osfran's son at Camlann, after many a slaughter. For the Britons it was not a romance but the national wound, the day the flower of their people cut itself down.

Geoffrey of Monmouth gave it a narrative around 1136. While Arthur is across the Channel, Mordred, his nephew and regent, seizes the crown and takes Queen Guinevere to himself. Arthur turns home, fights his way ashore through Mordred's army, losing Gawain in the landing, and drives the usurper west. The last stand comes by the River Camblan in Cornwall, and Geoffrey's account of it is pure exhaustion: the two hosts spend the day destroying one another until Mordred is killed and Arthur, mortally wounded, is carried from the field to the isle of Avalon for the healing of his wounds, handing the crown to his kinsman Constantine in the year 542. Geoffrey fixes the essentials that never change afterwards: the traitor is Mordred, the wound is mortal, and the king does not die on the field but goes away wounded.

Malory gathers the whole cycle into the telling, and makes Camlann the day every debt came due. The chain runs from Tintagel: Mordred, Arthur's own son begotten in ignorance upon his half-sister, spreads forged letters reporting the king dead in France, has himself made king, and would have married Guinevere had she not barricaded herself in the Tower of London. Arthur lands at Dover through battle, and there Sir Gawain dies of the wound Lancelot had given him, forgiving Lancelot with his last letter and begging him to come. The armies meet upon a down beside Salisbury, and the night before, Gawain's ghost comes to Arthur in a dream with a company of ladies he once succoured, and warns him to fight not upon the morrow but to treat for a month, when Lancelot will arrive. So in the morning a treaty is made, four and twenty knights riding between the hosts under orders to charge if any sword is drawn. And an adder comes out of a little heath bush and stings a knight upon the foot, and he draws his sword to kill it, thinking of no other harm, and both armies see the blade. The trumpets blow, and the age ends by reflex. They fight from morning to nightfall, and a hundred thousand men lie dead upon that down. At evening Arthur stands with Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere alone, and spies Mordred leaning upon his sword among a great heap of the dead. Lucan begs him to let the traitor be, for the day is won; but the king answers, betide me life, betide me death, now I see him yonder alone he shall never escape my hands, and runs at him with a spear. He drives it through Mordred's body more than a fathom, and Mordred, feeling his death-wound, thrusts himself up the shaft and smites his father through the helm and the brain-pan, and both fall. Lucan dies of his own burst wounds lifting the king, and Bedivere is left to carry Arthur to the shore, to throw Excalibur into the lake, and to watch the black barge of weeping queens bear him away to the vale of Avalon.

Where it happened, no one knows, and the candidates map the whole legend. Geoffrey's Camblan points to the River Camel in Cornwall, and at Slaughterbridge near Camelford the old tradition runs deep, though the inscribed stone they show there is a 6th-century gravestone of one Latinus, not of the king. Wales offers the Afon Gamlan near Dolgellau, and Hadrian's Wall offers Camboglanna, the Roman fort at Birdoswald, whose ancient name, the crooked bank, is an exact philological match for Camlann. Malory's Salisbury downs and Somerset's Camel villages have their champions too. The name means no more than crooked bank or crooked enclosure, and Britain is full of both; the sites keep the hunger, not the answer.

What Camlann means has outgrown the search for its field. It is the battle that accident won, the proof that a realm held together by oaths can be ended by an adder and a misunderstanding, and that the sins of a whole cycle, the deception at Tintagel, the feud of the Orkneys, the queen's great love, all come to one field to be paid in a single day. Tennyson made it a chaos of death-white mist by the winter sea, the last, dim, weird battle of the west, where friend slays friend unknowing; Boorman's Excalibur fought it in fog at dawn. And it keeps its sting to the end: the king who fell there did not die there. He was carried away still breathing, which is why the battle that ended the age could not end the story.