It struck me that what I said about Gildas didn’t mention one interpretation of his history that I’ve sometimes heard from good historians.
We sometimes read that Gildas names Ambrosius Aurelianus as the hero of Mount Badon. In fact Gildas is ambiguous. Since he does not tell us how or when the career of Ambrosius ended, we cannot say with certainty whether he was still leading the British by the time of Mount Badon; but it seems most likely that he was not, and that Gildas has simply reverted to his usual habit of giving us a vague outline of history without naming any of the participants.
Indeed, the best argument against the idea that Gildas names Ambrosius as the hero of Badon comes not from Gildas but from the later writers Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, both of whom were much closer in time and in spirit to Gildas than we are. Both made Arthur the hero of Badon; both made extensive use of Gildas as a source; both freely acknowledged their debt. But neither felt compelled to explain why Gildas had Ambrosius rather than Arthur as the hero of Badon. On the contrary, they both took it for granted that Gildas corroborated the stories they were telling.
The question is important because whole theories of the origin of the Arthurian legends have been based on the assumption that Gildas names Ambrosius as the hero of Mount Badon.
William of Malmesbury, who wrote in the early 1100s (six hundred years after Arthur ’s time), tells us that Ambrosius “quelled the presumptuous barbarians by the powerful aid of warlike Arthur.” That would make Arthur contemporary with Ambrosius—one of his generals, apparently. But William’s chronology is too demonstrably mixed up for us to rely on his word. It is not even clear whether his information comes from a lost source, or simply from a misreading of Gildas, Bede, and Nennius.
