Finding Arthur (11 page)

The most famous story of Arthur and Merlin is the one in which Arthur is said to have taken a magic sword from a magic stone and so proved that he was the rightful king of “England.” Malory took a historical event and changed it to create the wonderful supernatural story everyone knows today (the stone from which Arthur really took a sword is still there to be seen—see chapter 6).

Malory did not dare allow the magic of the sword and the stone episode to be at the instigation of Merlin, and so he has his Merlin ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to lend his authority to the occasion. Choosing a king was an important matter and so it had to be seen to be controlled by the Church or, at least, by a Christian. Merlin was just too obviously not believable as a Christian to be in charge of this event.

Christianizing the stories was only part of the process. Arthur and Merlin also had to be made men of the south of Britain. The scene became London and the whole sword-in-stone episode was said to have taken place under the auspices of Merlin who was, of course, acting under the authority of a Christian Archbishop. The supernatural elements in these stories are obviously fictional. London, in Geoffrey’s day the capital of England, is an obvious anachronism. Merlin-Lailoken was a champion of the Old Way and an inveterate enemy of Christianity. He would never have acted under the authority of a Christian Archbishop. Besides, London was Saxon, and there were no Christian Archbishops about at any possible time when any of this might have happened in history.

The matter of romance leads us inevitably to the matter of sex, something the Christian authorities deplored almost above all things. Consequently, just as with films until the 1950s, if characters had to “do it,” particularly outside marriage and, worse still “enjoy it,” then they had to end up unhappy. So it was with Guinevere, who, according to Geoffrey, because of her adultery, “took her vows among the nuns,
promising to lead a chaste life.” That is, in effect, a warning against the dangers of promiscuity.
Let that be a lesson to you all
.

This adding of a Christian gloss to almost everything of importance for a thousand years served only to promote the Church and obscure what really happened, although not entirely. Over centuries the emphasis in the stories was to shift from the more Celtic Arthur to the more Anglicized, and later more Frenchified, Lancelot. It is, however, still possible to discover what really happened when Arthur took a sword from a stone; what Excalibur really was and where it came from; and where Guinevere really spent her last years.

The written word was restricted to a few compliant clerics who essentially did what they were told to do. For a millenium clerical apparatchiks—men like the monk Jocelyn in Glasgow, Saint Mungo Kentigern’s hagiographer—censored stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken to create the affront to history that is the legend of Arthur best known today. Remember Jocelyn in the twelfth century going out into the “streets and quarters” of Glasgow looking for source material to help him write a biography of Mungo Kentigern? Jocelyn was fortunate. He found a source that contained a truthful account of Mungo’s life. Most biographers would have been delighted by such a find but not Jocelyn, because the source he had found showed that Mungo’s Christianity was even further removed from the Christianity of his bishop than the original
Life of Kentigern
that had presented a problem in the first place.

Of course, Jocelyn, like almost all of his fellow clerics, ignored the evidence and wrote what suited the Church of his day. The original
Life of Mungo
and the even earlier source material Jocelyn found were allowed to disappear or (and this is more likely) were deliberately destroyed shortly after Jocelyn finished his new and authorized version. If even sources that related to Christian heroes like Mungo were deliberately warped or destroyed, it is even more likely that material that showed the people of the Old Way in a good light or that even showed them at all would not survive untouched, if it survived at all.

Men like Jocelyn and his bishop had both the means (almost complete control of the media) and the motive (maintaining that control)
to create a version of past events that suited their ends. For over a thousand years men like Jocelyn and his bishop made the changes they wanted to writings that contradicted their worldview. From the time of Columba-Crimthann and the Council of Drumceatt (the Wannsee Conference of the early Christian Church) people of the Old Way were marginalized, castigated, and on occasion exterminated. At first many went underground and many became the less threatening “bards.” Later most of the people who in another time would have been druids assimilated to a degree, thinking for themselves while going through the motions of the required rituals. They had to do this to survive. (It was more difficult for women. There was no place for educated women in the new Christian world.)

Is it any wonder that even a glimpse of the true story of Arthur has been lost to us for so long?

More recently, in 1599, the Indian Church of St. Thomas, said to have been founded in the mid-first century by Jesus’ disciple Thomas, held records that contradicted the professions of the more powerful Church of St. Peter in Rome. That year the Archbishop of the Roman Church, Menezes of Goa, following a synod at Diamper (Indian equivalent of Drumceatt) burned the books of the people of the Church of Thomas. Only four manuscripts from before 1599 are known to exist in India today. It is possible, indeed likely, indeed almost certain, that almost all of the work of Taliesin and Aneirin were similarly deliberately destroyed.

More than the works themselves were destroyed; the fact that they were destroyed and, more, the very fact that they had existed at all was nearly erased from the common consciousness.

T
HE
E
UREKA
M
OMENT

As a child I had never dreamed that Arthur wasn’t the southern English king I knew from books and films. It was only in July 1989, when I read Richard Barber’s
The Figure of Arthur
, that I realized there was a Scottish Arthur-candidate: Arthur Mac Aedan of Dalriada. I was fifteen years old when I read in
The Steps to the Empty Throne
, the first part of Nigel Tranter’s Robert Bruce trilogy of novels, that the Scottish
Gaelic for high king was
Ard Righ (righ
has the same root as
rex, roi, rui
, regal, etc.).

I was sure this had to be more than a mere coincidence and that there had to be a some connection between the hero king, Robert Bruce, and me. This was partly because
Ard Righ
and my surname, Ardrey, sounded somewhat similar, but this was mainly because I was fifteen years old. Until then all I had known about my second name was that it was uncommon in the extreme. I always had to repeat it and spell it out to people I met for the first time, and every Ardrey I knew or had heard of was related to me and there were very few of them.

My imagined royal connections quickly disappeared when reality clicked in. I had started out in life in a “room and kitchen” in Coatbridge, the “Iron Burgh,” in the dark heart of industrial Lanarkshire in central Scotland. I was also “good at school,” but neither of these things was consistent with royal connections. Besides, common sense told me that even if my name did mean high king in Gaelic this did not make me special in any way, because in real life I was only a wee bit Ardrey. I was just as much a Palmer, Watson, Thompson, Milligan, Hostler, Wood, Dunlop, McEwan, Justice, Neilson, Dempster, Mitchell, Judge, Brown, Walker, Comrie, Cross, Campbell, Brankin, Smith, and all the other countless other names borne by my ascendants. Even at age fifteen, I knew there were no such things as objectively special families.

When I became a lawyer and notary public I needed something akin to a motto to put on my official seal, and so I used my second name translated into Latin. When I asked a Gaelic scholar at Glasgow University to confirm that Ardrey was derived from
Ard Righ
and that it meant “high king,” I was told that Ardrey was actually derived from
Ard Airigh
and that
Ard Airigh
meant not high king but high pasture. I was going through a left-wing phase at the time and so this was fine by me.

My old Roman Law teacher translated high pasture into Latin for me and so
Ager Altus
—literally, high field—became my “motto.” I suspected Ardrey,
Ard Airigh
, high pasture, was a combination of an occupational name and a place name and that it had probably become attached to my ascendants because in the summer months
they had tended the stock that grazed on the shielings, the high summer pastures.

I assumed that they had been Campbells or MacDonalds or some other relatively common name, and that to distinguish themselves from others of the same name, they had added “of the high pasture” to their clan name and that addition had ended up as my second name.

Soon after my marriage I took my new wife, Dorothy-Anne, to visit a place called Ardery outside Strontian in Sunart in the north of Argyll. There we found a working steading and met a man called Jimmy “Ardery,” who told us that Ardery was not his real second name but, as he had always lived at Ardery, that is the name people called him by. This seemed to confirm what I had been thinking: that my people, living for much of the year on the high pastures, had lost their original second name and come to be called simply Ardrey. I was quite happy that my second name meant high pasture. If my family’s most distinguishing feature was that they spent a lot of time in the hills with sheep … well, it could have been much worse.

One thing gave me pause, however—something I came to think of as the
Righ-Airigh
conundrum. I could not understand how
righ
meant “king” and
airigh
meant “pasture” when the words
righ
and
airigh
had so much in common and “king” and “pasture” did not.

In the late 1990s Lucy Marshall of New Zealand, an Ardrey on her mother’s side, provided me with evidence that our common ascendants had lived in the Townland of Mullnahunch, County Tyrone, Ireland. I couldn’t find Mullnahunch on any map and mentioned this to an Irish friend, Eugene Creally, just before he went home to Ireland one Christmas. Eugene told his father this and his father, who happened to “know the Ardreys,” kindly sent me a map on which Mullnahunch was clearly marked. Unfortunately, when I visited Ireland in 2004 with my son Eliot I forgot to take Eugene’s father’s map with me, and so we drove by memory as near to Mullnahunch as we could before stopping at a petrol station to ask directions, just as a delivery van drove up. Delivery van drivers usually know where places are and so I asked the driver if he knew where Mullnahunch was and told him why we were looking for it. He knew exactly where it was because, as it turned out, he was an Ardrey on his mother’s side. All there is at Mullnahunch
today is a few fields, a few houses, and an Orange Hall (rebuilt after it was blown up in the religious troubles of the late twentieth century). My Ardreys had lived and run a little shop there in the nineteenth century and been buried in the churchyard of the Protestant Church of Upper Clonaneese nearby.

In 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, James VI, King of Scots and son of Mary Queen of Scots, became King of England too. He immediately set about quelling any notions of freedom and independence the majority of the people of Ireland might have harbored, by planting among them Protestants who were loyal to the Crown or, at least, antagonistic towards Roman Catholicism.

Over the next century most of those who settled in Ulster, the most northerly of Ireland’s four provinces, came from Scotland. A disproportionately high number of these were Scots from Argyll, although Scots had been going back and forth across the North Channel since time immemorial, and Antrim and Down were densely Scottish in population even before the plantation.

The fact that anyone living in the north of Ireland is Protestant strongly suggests Scottish roots, and as far as I knew my people had always been Protestants. This meant my people were almost certainly not native Irish; that is, they were not among those Scots who were living in Ireland before the influx of Protestant settlers in the early seventeenth century. All the evidence I found suggested that my people were part of the Protestant Plantation: Scots who had emigrated from Scotland to Ireland, probably in the late 1600s.

In 1665, a William Ardrey sailed to Virginia in the Americas. There is no record of his port of embarkation and so I cannot be sure that he was one of my people, but our second name was uncommon, even in the seventeenth century, and so it is probable that we are related, even though it is impossible to say in what degree. The political, religious, and economic pressures that drove this William from his home would have applied in equal measure to his extended family, and so it is possible that others, perhaps his siblings, left Scotland for Ireland at the same time. All that is certain is that by the late 1600s /early 1700s there were Ardreys of Scottish descent in Ireland.

The records for the year 1714 refer to George Ardree of Aghervilly;
Thomas Ardree of Lislea; and Mark and Matthew Ardry of Munburge, all County Armagh. In 1725 there was a John Ardrey at Glasger and in 1731 a John Ardree at Glaskerberg, both County Down. A Mary Ardrey was married in a Quaker ceremony at Charlemont on the Armagh-Tyrone border in 1733, and Robert Ardrey leased land in Banbridge, County Down, in 1755. On November 14, 1791, William and Sarah Arderley had their daughter Margaret Arderley baptized and registered in Donaghmore, the town that for administrative purposes covered the Townland of Mullnahunch. This William and Sarah were probably also the parents of John Ardrey, who was born in 1798 and who is the first person in my direct line I can put a name to with certainty.

John of 1798, my great-great-grandfather, was a farm laborer who lived and died in 1866, in Mullnahunch. He married Ann McCewan and they had five children: George, born in 1834; an anonymous daughter, who probably died young; Sarah Anne (date of birth unknown); John, born in 1843; and my great-grandfather David, born in 1846.