Battle of Badon

Perhaps, therefore, he had succeeded to the position of the Roman official known as the Comes Brittannae, whose duty it was to hasten to the aid of the local governors in defending any part of the Britain where danger threatened.

At all events, under his leadership, the oppressed people defeated the Saxons in a desperate fight at Mons Badonicus, perhaps the little place in the Dorsetshire known as Bradbury, or it may be Bath itself, which is still called Baden by the Welsh.

After that victory, history has little to say about Arthur.

The stories tell that he was killed in a great battle in the west, but nowadays the wisest historians think it more probable that he met his death in a conflict near the River Forth.

And also to give it a historical context, so it's very clearly happening at the end of the 5th century, beginning of the 6th century.

Um, that is consistent with, there's some Welsh annals that dates the Battle of Badon, one of Arthur's great battles, to the, to the second decade of the 6th century.

And so this sort of is the moment when, when Arthur, Arthur's legend really takes off in a coherent way in text.

You know, it's-

The way Geoffrey of Monmouth tells it, it is like when Tolkien goes off on one about, uh, Saruman or like Sauron and like what was ha- what was happening thousands of years before.

Geoffrey of Monmouth has this, like, gigantic overview, and he, uh, goes into so much depth about the different battles that kings go into.

So that was a bit of a fun, a fun opportunity for me that, like, when, say, Arthur does fight the Battle of Badon, which I situate in Bath because that's what some chroniclers do in the Middle Ages- When they've won and they are, they, like, go to, into the city, and I sort of have them, like, using the baths in the city.

The, um, they, they tell the story of Bladud, which is a, an earlier story in The Brut Chronicle about the founding father of Bath, who was a necromancer, and he built the, the warm, the baths and the p-