| abstract
| - The Battle of Mount Badon was a major victory of the British over the Saxons, and has been part of the Arthurian narrative since the very beginning. The historicity of the actual battle is open for debate, but Badon nevertheless has an important place in the Arthurian literary tradition even prior to Geoffrey of Monmouth's popularization of Arthur. Gildas and Bede both wrote about the battle but it was Nennius who first wrote of King Arthur being involved. Nennius makes Badon the culmination of a series of twelve battles, even claiming that Arthur personally killed nine hundred and sixty Saxons in a single charge. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur and Cheldric agreed that the Saxons would leave Britain. The Saxons renege on the deal, changing course halfway to France and returning to wreak havoc on English shores. Arthur expresses his outrage at the insult to his honor, and abandons his campaign in Scotland to go down and vanquish the Saxon hordes. The early stories' account that the Saxons were thrown back around this time seems to be supported by archaeological evidence. Studies of cemeteries suggests the border shifted some time around 500 AD, a date agreed with by Gildas.
- The earliest mention of the Battle of Badon is Gildas' De Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain), written in the early-mid 6th century AD. In it, the Saxons are said to have "dipped [their] red and savage tongue in the western ocean" before Ambrosius Aurelianus organized a British resistance with the survivors of the initial Saxon onslaught. Gildas describes the period that followed Ambrosius' initial success: ... From that time, the citizens were sometimes victorious, sometimes the enemy, in order that the Lord, according to His wont, might try in this nation the Israel of to-day, whether it loves Him or not. This continued up to the year of the siege of Badon Hill (obsessionis Badonici montis), and of almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. And this commences, a fact I know, as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth. The Ruin of Britain is unclear as to whether Ambrosius is still leading the Britons at this point, but describes the battle as such an "unexpected recovery of the [island]" that it caused kings, nobles, priests, and commoners to "live orderly according to their several vocations" before the long peace degenerated into civil wars and the iniquity of Maelgwn Gwynedd. Passages of The Ruin of Britain that address Maelgwn directly are sometimes employed to date the work from accounts of the king's death by plague in the 540s, but such arguments ignore the obvious apostrophe employed in the passages and the possible years of composition involved in the final collected sermon. The battle is next mentioned in an 8th-century text of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It describes the "siege of Mount Badon, when they made no small slaughter of those invaders," as occurring 44 years after the arrival of the Saxons. Since Bede places that arrival during or just after the joint reign of Marcian and Valentinian in AD 449456, he must have considered Badon to have taken place between 493 and 500. Bede then puts off discussion of the battle "But more of this hereafter" only to seemingly never return to it. Bede does later include an extended account of Saint Germanus's victory over the Saxons and Picts in a mountain valley, which he credits with curbing the threat of invasion for a generation. However, as the victory is described as having been accomplished bloodlessly, it was presumably a different occasion from Badon. (Accepted at face value, St. Germanus's involvement would also place the battle around 430, although Bede's chronology shows no knowledge of this.)
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