Gildas, the historian who probably wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Brittaniae (Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) within a generation of the Arthurian period, records that the Battle of Badonici Montis (usually translated today as Mount Badon) was a siege, but, tantalizingly, he does not mention that Arthur was present at the great victory which, he laments, ‘was the last defeat of the wretches’. The Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) which might or might not have been written by a man called Nennius, and which was compiled at least two centuries after the Arthurian period, is the first document to claim that Arthur was the British commander at ‘Mons Badonis’ where ‘in one day nine hundred and sixty men were killed by an attack of Arthur’s, and no one but himself laid them low’. In the tenth century some monks in western Wales compiled the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) where they record ‘the Battle of Badon in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the victors’. The Venerable Bede, a Saxon whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English) appeared in the eighth century, acknowledges the defeat, but does not mention Arthur, though that is hardly surprising because Bede seems to have taken most of his information from Gildas. Those four documents are just about our only early sources (and three of them are not early enough) for information on the battle. Did it happen?