apart from this there is no real evidence for the presence of Cymry (or of any Britons) between the river Derwent and the river Dee further south than Cartmel below Windermere and the river Leven.[1] That there was a close connexion between the Cymry of ' Cumberland ' and those of Wales is amply evident, but it was maritime and not terrene.
Cadwallon was succeeded by his son Cadwaladr, whose fame is due not to any known merits of his own, but to the imaginative genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in his romantic History of the British Kings makes Cadwaladr the last of his list.[2] The reign of this king becomes in consequence the appropriate finale of a long and glorious era of Welsh history. All this of course is purely fictitious, as Cadwaladr's death marks no known break of any kind in the perfectly clear development of Welsh nationality. Geoffrey's Cadwaladr in fact is a composite personage created out of Geoffrey's own confusion of Cadwaladr and his father, Cadwallon, and Ceadwalla of Wessex . As there were kings in Wales before Cadwaladr, so there were kings, and far greater kings, after him. He died in the second year of the great plague of 664-5,[3] and was succeeded by his son Idwal. Of his
- ↑ In 685 Ecgfrid gave St. Cuthbert 'terramquae vocatur Cartmel et omnes Britannos cum eo '. Hist. de S. Cuthberto (Symeonis Dunel. Opera I. 141, 231. Surtees Society).
- ↑ Hist. Reg. Brit. XII. cc. 14-18.
- ↑ ' Dum ipse [Osguid filius Eadlfrid] regnabat venit mortalitas hominum Catgualart regnante apud Brittones post patrem suum et in ea periit.' Hist. Britt. c. 64 (Chr. Min. III. 208). Oswy reigned from 642 to 670, and the plague referred to raged in 664-5 (Bede's H. E. III. 27). The Ann. Camb. places the obit of Cadwaladr oppo- site Annus CCXXXVIII, which if calculated from 428, the true year of the Saxon Advent, gives 428 + 237 = A.D. 665. According to Geoffrey, Cadwaladr died in 689 (XII. 18), which historically is the year of the obit of Ceadwalla of Wessex in Rome (Bede's H. E. V. 7). Allowing one year for Geoffrey's aliquantulum temporis (XII. 17) and adding the eleven years of adversity (XII. 16), and also the twelve years of prosperity (XII. 14), we obtain 1 + 11 + 12 = 24 years as the length of Cadwaladr's reign, which brings us to the true date of Cadwaladr's death, viz. 689 - 24 = A.D. 665. As Cadwaladr succeeds his father Cadwallo[n] immediately, and as the latter is made to die on November 17, after a reign of forty-eight years (XII. 13), we obtain 665 -48 = A.D. 617 as the first year of Cadwallo[n]'s reign according to Geoffrey, which is historically the date of the Battle of Chester. Geoffrey, therefore, has clearly confounded the three kings, Cadwallon, Cadwaladr, and Ceadwalla ; and by making Cadwaladr die in the year of Ceadwalla's death, he has almost certainly given us the true deathday of Cadwaladr as that of Cadwallon, in which case Cadwaladr died on November 17, 665.
