What if the Britons had successfully defended themelves from the saxon invasion.

Is this Arthurian research really just recent speculation using the same sources that Morris had?

Not really, there has been a large increase of academic research on Old Welsh and its comparisons with Old Irish and Brittonic. Arthur is a character who frequently interacts with Saints and Kings in many of the legends, and until recently (the last fifteen years or so) there was not any general surveys of the pre-Geoffery of Monmouth Arthurian legends.

If anyone is interested I would suggest Arthur of The Welsh by OJ Paddel as an introduction to the field.
 
Always good to take Gildas, Bede, and a lot of Arturian history with a grain of salt. However, it does appear that:
- Some of the earliest Saxons were invited as mercenaries or a counter-balancing force
- Then Saxons, Angles, Jutes, etc came in repeated waves.
- The Britons had success for a period of time beating them back but were eventually overwhelmed, probably due to disunion.
The Britons were apparently also hit by a plague, spread from the Mediterranean by traders, which [perhaps] didn't hit the Saxons as hard because there was relatively little regular contact between the peoples at that stage.
 
The Britons were apparently also hit by a plague, spread from the Mediterranean by traders, which [perhaps] didn't hit the Saxons as hard because there was relatively little regular contact between the peoples at that stage.

Justinian's?
 
Anyone here ever hear of a ten year long meteorogical event called The Wasting and its effects on very late Arthurian Britain?:confused:
 
Giving a plausible explanation ,and a timeline for Arthurs /Arutha's rise

There IS some historical evidence for Arthur, but it's pretty fragmented and uncertain. He may have been a warlord with a strong band of cavalry as you note, but the whole set of Vortigern, Pendragon, Uther relations is uncertain. Many such things could be an interesting basis for a thread, but a lot of it would be a fairly week historical foundation to start from.

I Know its weak in actual historical facts .The idea was to set a plausible timeline and explanation.For Arthurs /Arutha's rise to power .That he would inherit Uthers warriors or a majority of them seems reasonable That his aunts ,sisters and half sisters Would also support his rise With the warriors of their husbands clans / tribes ,also to me seems quite reasonable .Especially as the saxons where pushing hard to secure more land As the titular head of what most probably was the most important ,and powerful family in Britain at the time ,and with a blood claim to the high kingship.It is also a plausible explanation for those not supporting him to rally to the strongest amongst them ,even if they thought it was only temporary.To throw back and defeat the saxon invasion. After im trying to set it up properly ,while not totally destroying the myth
 
Well, the leaders of Britain even in the mid-6th century were still fluent in Latin. Our friend Gildas is our testimony for that, because he didn't write a chronicle, he wrote a polemic that was clearly written to be disseminated to not only churchmen, but the aristocracy. And he wrote excellent Latin, clearer and more grammatically correct than his contemporary Gregory of Tours over in Gaul. What wasn't Roman was his worldview, what we can discern of the underpinning assumptions of his culture; that was pure Celtic. When he writes about the times right after the Roman armies left, when there must still have been remnants of their administration left in place, he has no concept of that. Sure, he doesn't write about Arthur, but on one hand, he seems to have had a family feud with him, and, on the other, again, he's not writing a chronicle, he's writing for contemporaries who knew all about that era. He doesn't need to spell it out for the maggots fighting over the carcass of the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Also, Christianity seems to be quite strong in post-roman Britain, with little pagan vestiges left, and it appears to be one major point of us-vs-them, separating the Britons from the Picts and Saxons.

My opinion is that there had been a (post-)roman 'Empire' in Britain and parts of northwestern Gaul (possibly even commanding the fealty of Sygrius' Gaul; a magister militum serves an emperor, and Syagrius certainly didn't serve the one in Ravenna). It almost collapsed in the rebellion of the Saxon foederati of the 440s, after the British tried to weasel out of paying their Germanic troops that saved them from the picts, but was restored by Ambrosius Aurelianus with the help of semibarbarian northern tribes that even in Roman times had been the first line of defences against the picts. However, most of the leftover administration was destroyed, and the northern tribes were settled in various endangered areas (this state of affairs is fossilized in various placenames, spread over Britain, containing the elements wealh-, which denotes specifically Latin speakers in Germanic tongues, and cumber- which seems to refer to non-latinized northern Britons). One of those warlords, let's call him... well, Arthur, rebelled against and dethroned the Ambrosiad Emperor and formed a large but shortlived tribal confederacy operating on a large scale, in Britain, western Gaul (where Gregory of Tours is suspiciously silent even about his own city in that time), even northwestern Spain, possibly also some parts of Ireland. However, what seems certain is that he had no heirs, or they predeceased him. Medieval genealogy is three part myth to four parts propaganda and justifying land claims to one tiny kernel of truth, and while there were Welsh houses that claimed descent from even as reviled an ancestor as Vortigern, none -no one- claimed descent from either the Ambrosiads or Arthur. It must have been common knowledge that those lines were extinguished.
No contemporary writings about that Empire have survived, we have only the notices from Gildas contrasting the squabbles, diadochi fashion, of the British kinglets remaining with a past greatness he doesn't need to even mention, and from Gregory of Tours about similar struggles in Brittany after a time when no Merovingian seemed to operate much westwards of Paris.
 
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