26th September
Fighting Dragons
Source: Visit North Wales website
On this day in 1499, a black dragon from Keddington Hill, Suffolk, fought a white dragon from Ballingden Hill in Essex. The battle took place near Little Cornard in Suffolk. Despite much fire and fury, their fight was fairly inconclusive with the Essex dragon gaining a slight advantage. The black dragon broke off the contest and both retired to their respective caves. Where this relatively recent myth came from is not too clear, although it may be a symbolic retelling of the Roman defeat by the Iceni army of Boudicca. It also carries echoes of a much older tradition of Celtic dragons. In ancient Britain King Llud’s realm was beset by two dragons, one red and one white. When the battling dragons tired, they fell to earth, exhausted. Llud, skilled in old magic, had the dragons tied up in a silk sheet and buried near the hill fort of Dinas Emrys in Gwynedd.
Many years later, in the fifth century, the semi-mythic British king, Vortigern, was frustrated that the castle he was trying to build at Dinas Emrys kept falling down. He called on the boy-magician Ambrosius Aurelianus for advice, and the lad had the foundations of the castle dug up to reveal the two dragons, still battling furiously. The white dragon appeared to be winning and Ambrosius claimed this beast represented the invading Saxons. Ultimately however the red dragon, whom Ambrosius identified with the Britons, won the fight. In terms of history, Vortigern was said by the monk Gildas to have been defeated by the Saxons but that their advance was halted by the Britons led by the adult Ambrosius. This symbolic myth was later transferred to represent the victory of the Welsh Henry Tudor over the English King Richard III - possibly because the Saxons later overran the whole of Britain apart from Scotland and Wales, thus invalidating Ambrosius’ Dark Age prediction.