Faces of Arthur Index

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The first battle: at the mouth of the river Glein

It has long been recognized that there are only two extant Glen rivers which conform philologically to "Glein" and which could have been subject to Saxon attack from the Continent in the 5^th-6^th centuries AD, the Age of Arthur. These are the Glen of Lincolnshire and the Glen tributary of the Till in Northumberland.

The Glen of Lincolnshire has no distinctive features or strategic fortifications which would make it of any value to an invading force.  On the other hand, the Northumberland Glen is hard by the Yeavering Bell hill-fort, which prior to becoming a Saxon stronghold was the British Gefrin.  Gefrin, according to Eilert Ekwall (in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names), is from the Welsh word gafr ‘goat’ or a compound containing gafr plus Welsh bryn (mutated fryn), for “Goat-hill”.  I would remind the reader, however, of a Gaulish god conflated with Mercury called Gebrinius.  It is possible that Gefrin represents a British counterpart of this divine name.

Other hill-forts abound in the region: Wooler, Kyloe Hills, Dod Law forts at Doddington, the Old Bewick hill fort and the Ros Castle fort and settlement between Chillingham and Hepburn.  And, of course, the Roman road known as the Devil’s Causeway, a branch off of Dere Street, passes only a couple of miles to the east of the mouth of the Glen.

Scholars who argue in favor of the Lincolnshire or "Lindsey" Glen do so primarily because the following battle, that of the Dubglas, is put in a Linnuis region by the Historia Brittonum.  Linnuis, as we will see, is wrongly thought to represent the later regional name Lindsey. 

An actual battle at the mouth of the Lindsey or Lincolnshire Glen is scarcely possible, unless it were a battle of reconquest by Arthur and not a successful defensive engagement.  This is because we have archaeological evidence for Saxon cemetaries well north, west and south of the Lindsey Glen as early as c. 475 (see the distribution maps starting on p. 52 of N.J.Higham’s King Arthur: Myth-Making and History, London and New York, 2002). 

The next four battles: at the river Dubglas in the Linnuis region

Kenneth Jackson and others (see “Once Again Arthur’s Battles”) recognized that Old Welsh Linnuis “would come from Br.-Lat. *Lindensis, *Lindenses, or *Lindensia; and the identification with Lindsey is very reasonable.”  Lindsey, of course, was the early English name for what we know think of as Lincolnshire. 

The root of Lindensis, etc.,  is British *lindo-, “pool, lake”, now represented by Welsh llyn, “pond, lake” (A.L.F. Rivet and Colin Smith, in their The Place-Names of Roman Britain, under the entry for ‘Linda’).  The Roman name for the town of Lincoln – Lindum – is from the same root.  The “pool” or “lake” in question is believed to have been on the Witham River near the town. 

The problem is that there is no Dubglas or "Black Stream" (variants Douglas, Dawlish, Dowlish, Divelish, Devil’s Brook, Dalch, Dulais, Dulas, etc.) in Lindsey.  This has caused other place-name experts to situate the Dubglas battle either near Ptolemy’s Lindum of Loch Lomond in Scotland or near Ilchester in Somerset, the Roman period Lindinis, as there are Dubglas rivers in both places.  Unfortunately, neither of these candidates is satisfactory, because Arthur would not have been fighting Saxons at either location in the time period we are considering.

A site which has been overlooked, and which is an excellent candidate for Arthur’s Dubglas, is the Devil’s Water hard by the Hadrian Wall fort of Corbridge, which has upon it a place called Linnels. Allen Mawer, in his The Place-Names of Northumberland and Durham (1920), proposed that Linnels was from an unrecorded personal name. Professor Richard Coates of Sussex University (personal correspondence), upon looking at Linnels on the Ordnance Survey map, observed the "remarkable double elbow in the Devil’s Water, with a lake nearby" and concluded that Linnels was from a British *lindo-ol:in, "lake-elbow".

Geoffrey Watson in Goodwife Hat and Other Places: Northumberland’s Past and its Place Names (1970), guessed that the Devil’s Water stemmed from a Dilston Norman family, the D’Eivilles. But Coates, going by the earliest spelling of the Devil’s Water (Divelis c. 1230), has no reservations in saying that Watson’s etymology is incorrect and that Devil’s Water is certainly of the Dubglas river-name type.

Ekwall agrees, saying that the Northumberland Devil’s Water is "Identical with DALCH." Dalch is "A compound of Brit dubo- ‘black’ (welsh du) and OW gleis, Welsh glais, ‘stream’."

The Devil’s Water at Linnels is thus the only extant Dubglas river-name associated with a demonstrably Welsh lake-name that is geographically plausible as a battle site against Britons and Saxons during the period of Arthur.

Worth noting is the fact that the Roman Dere Street road at Corbridge splits immediately north of the Wall, the eastern branch or "Devil’s Causeway" continuing NNE, straight to the Northumberland Glen.

The Battle of Hexham was fought at Linnels on May 14, 1464.

The sixth battle: at the river Bassas

The Bassas river is the most problematic of the Arthurian battle sites, as no such stream name survives and we have no record other than this single instance in the Historia Brittonum of there ever having been a river so named. Conventional theory seeks to derive the first component of Bassas from W. bas, "shallow". The suffix of this supposed bas river-name has so far eluded analysis, bringing up the possibility that Bassas itself is a corrupt form.

Bas or "shallow" is not found as a place-name component on the Continent or in Britain, nor even in Wales. We can only say that the location of the Bassas may be somewhere in the same general region as the Glen and Devil's Water battles.  We will see below that the locations of the battles after that of the Bassas will support this notion.  Professor Hywel Wyn Owen of the University of Wales, Bangor, has this to say on the place-name Bassas:

The fact that it is not recorded elsewhere suggests that "shallow" is not a particularly dramatic feature for a river of any significance and therefore it is not surprising that it was superseded by another more meaningful name. On the other hand, perhaps the battle occurred at a place where some (un-named) river was relatively shallow, a fairly wide, gravelly, slow-moving stretch of some river or other. Bassas would then mean "the shallow place". That kind of one-off description need not have survived.

Some scholars have opted for a different origin for Bassas. They have pointed to Bass place names such as Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, The Bass at Inverurie in Aberdeenshire and Bass Hill at Dryburgh.

Alas, the etymology for bass is fairly recent. According to Dr. Peter Drummond of the Scottish Place-Name Society:

"In the Scottish national dictionary there is an entry under 'bass' as follows: A workman's tool basket; also a basket for carrying fish – known in Banff and Fife: on Lothian coast "bass" is a square straw basket about 2' by 2' used for carrying fish. I would suspect therefore that it was named by fisher folk due to its resemblance to that."

The Bass Burn or Bass "stream", a tributary of the Scar or Scaur Water approximately 15 miles NW of Dumfries and just south of Auchenhessnane, was originally called the Back Burn. To quote from Neil Moffat, Reference and Local Studies Department, Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, Information and Archives, Dumfries and
Galloway Council:

"Both the 1^st edition (1861) and 2nd edition (1899) Ordnance Survey maps name it as Back Burn. The 1955 edition names it as Bass Burn.  It is possible that either the original surveyors simply misheard what the local people called it, or that later surveyors did." 

Unfortunately, there are other Back Burns in Lowland Scotland, so the chances that this stream’s original name was Bass is slim.

A less desirable, but no less possible explanation for the name Bassas is that it records an OE personal name found in place-names, i.e. Bassa. We find Bassingas or "the people of Bassa" in several placenames in England, but there are only two such places in Lowland Scotland/Northumberland: Bassington at Cramlington and Bassington at Alnwick.

Bassington in Cramlington parish was a farmstead approximately 1 1/2 miles North West of the village. It appears on a map of 1769 and is probably a much older site.  In the present day town of Cramlington the site of Bassington Farm is on the Bassington Industrial Estate (information courtesy Helen McBurnie, Parish Secretary).  However, other than this Bassington's proximity to the Devil's Water at Linnels (approximately 20 miles as the crow flies), there is little to recommend it as the site of Arthur's Bassas River battle.

The "tun of Bassa’s people" on the Aln is not far east of a Roman road that connects Dere Street and the Devil’s Causeway.  This Bassington is also near the Roman fort of Alauna on the Aln at Low Learchild and is roughly equidistant between the Northumberland Glen and the Devil’s Water on Hadrian’s Wall. If the battle of Bassas had been fought in the vicinity of Bassington, one of the streams in the vicinity of this tun may well have been referred to as "Bassa’s" river. On the OE personal name Bassa, Dr. Graham R. Isaac of The University of Wales, Aberystwyth has the following to say (private correspondence):

"The ending -as in Bassas has no explanation in either Latin or Welsh grammar. But it does have an explanation in Old English grammar. The name is probably Old English. Just as Baschurch (Shropshire) is from Old English 'Basses cirice', i.e. 'Basse's church' (Eglwyseu Bassa in the Old Welsh poems), and Basford (Nottinghamshire) is Old English 'Basses ford', and Baslow Derbyshire) is Old English 'Basses hlaw', i.e. 'Basse's burial-mound'; so 'flumen quod uocatur Bassas' is easily understood as 'the river which is called Basse's', i.e. 'Basse's river'. (Basse is an Old English personal name). There is no river with exactly this name known; names do come and go. But there is a Basingbourne in Cambridgeshire, Old English Basingeburna, which is 'the stream of Basse's people', 'Basse's kin's stream'. I am not suggesting that that is the river meant in the Historia Brittonum, but you see that the interpretation of the name is perfectly plausible."

To argue that it makes no sense to have a Germanic name in the Arthurian battle list, I would only say this: for all we know, Arthur’s opponent at the Bassas River may have been a chieftain named Bassa. If this were so, it is quite possible the British themselves would have referred to the river as Bassa’s. Alternately, by the 9^th century date of the Historia Brittonum, the old British name of the stream may have been forgotten, and it was only known that Arthur had fought at a river, which was now called Bassas.

One must only imagine the Saxons coming up the Aln or its valley, with a mind towards reaching first the Alauna fort and then continuing west on the connecting Roman road that branched off of the Devils' Causeway to meet up with Dere Street. The Devil's Causeway runs north from the Alauna fort, eventually passing just a little east of the mouth of the Glen, the location of Arthur's first battle.

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From Glein to Camlann is Copyright © 2006, August Hunt. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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