Aneurin represents Caradoc as having fallen in
this battle.
It is possible that Caradon may take its name from him, and that it may have been Dun Caradock.
Caradoc and his true wife Tegau were laid hold of by the Anglo-Norman romancers. They could not understand his nickname, and rendered it "Brise-Bras," and supposed that his arm was wasted away, whereas the Celtic title implies that it was brawny. To explain the wasted arm they invented a story. They told of an enchanter who made a serpent attach itself to the arm of Caradoc, from whose wasting tooth he could never be relieved until she whom he loved best should consent to undergo the torture in his stead. The faithful Tegau, on hearing this, was not to be deterred from giving him this proof of her devotion. As, however, the serpent was in the act of springing from the wasted arm of the knight to the lily-white neck of the lady, her brother Cado, Earl of Cornwall, struck off its head with his sword, and thus dispelled the enchantment.[1]
If Tegau was actually the sister of Cado, then we may flatter ourselves that Cornwall presented the two noblest and purest types of womanhood at the Arthurian period—Tegau and Enid, the wife of Geraint.
Two miles out of Callington is the parish church—Southill—one of the many instances of an ecclesiastical settlement at a respectable distance from the secular caer or tribal centre, that each might live its own life and have its own independent organisation.
- ↑ Guest, Mabinogion, p. 227.
