A few months ago, I spotted something weird.
For once it wasn’t a mirror, but rather a small piece of an article on Wikipedia.
It’s on a page called the “List of rulers of Wales”, a country in the United Kingdom.
I found myself here exactly one year ago today at the time of writing,
as this page is linked to on the Prince of Wales article, a page that’s so bad that I had just made
a 20-minute video attempting to correct it. As I was scrolling down the article I made
a mental note of the usual issues I was expecting to see on a niche topic like this:
dates for things we have no evidence for, kings placed in the wrong location,
whilst labelled as being in the wrong location, unusual spellings, uncommon translations, and…
Huh, a man named Anwn Ddu, someone that I’d never heard of, and someone that it doesn’t
seem many other people have heard of either. Now this article, and especially this section,
are not perfect by any means, but our friend Anwn here stuck out a lot to me,
doubt helped by the ominous glowing red text: "page does not exist", oddly foreshadowing.
He’s been in the back of my head for an entire year, so now it’s
time for me to tell you about my journey with Wikipedia’s king who… doesn’t actually exist.
So first, how did I know something was wrong?
The only reason that this man stood out to me at all, was not simply because he was there.
I didn’t know a lot about the kings in South Wales at this time, and if this name simply
stood on its own, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But it’s accompanied by a long description,
the longest of any person on this article, outlining that not only was he the ruler
of this state in South Wales, but also of another kingdom to his West, known as Dyfed.
Now, at the time I’d also just done a 40-minute video on the kingdom of Dyfed,
I’d just spent 8 weeks reading their entire list of kings, analysing every source that I
could get access to that covered this dynasty, and I had never seen a king named Anwn Ddu come
up even once. No historians mentioned him, and no primary sources did either.
So, I decided to do some digging. I looked just in a few books: John Davies’s
‘A History of Wales’? Didn’t mention him. Kari Maund’s ‘The Welsh Kings’? Nothing.
T. Charles-Edwards’s ‘Wales and the Britons’? Also nothing.
Peter Bartrum’s colossal ‘Welsh Classical Dictionary’? Nothing. That just came up with a
place called Llanwnda [3], not what I was looking for.
So I shelved it.
I made a note on my phone to remind me that it existed, and then forgot about it.
What? He doesn’t exist, he doesn’t even have his own page,
I’ve never seen this name in my entire life. But ok, there’s a reason why this video exists
now. I didn’t forget about him forever, about a month ago I finally revisited the page,
saw this man once again, and remembered both that he existed, and also that he didn’t.
And I decided once again to try and finally solve this mystery.
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I was on Wikipedia, so I thought there must be a citation somewhere, right?
But no, there was nothing. The references section at the
bottom barely lives up to that name, we have a translation of a primary source from 1835,
I checked inside, and found nothing. We have 'A History of Wales' by John Edward Lloyd
from 1911, an important work, but one that was written before my great grandparents were
alive. Regardless, Anwn Ddu isn’t in here either. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography, also nothing.
Finally the Encyclopaedia of Wales, which I couldn’t search inside,
but as you’ve seen so far, and will soon see even more, I’m certain that Anwn Ddu isn’t in here.
So now what? I felt like I hit a dead end, again! But do you remember towards the start of this
video, I noted how there were a few expected mistakes littered across the page: names,
and dates, and the very occasional odd spelling. So what occurred to me was that maybe Anwn,
isn’t supposed to be spelt like that. So, what else was there to do, but to
revisit the historian Peter Bartrum’s work, a huge collection of Welsh figures from before
the year 1000, and to scroll through all the “A” names until I hopefully found something [1].
And eventually, I did. On the very bottom of page 20, I found: Annun Ddu, "a n N U n" [2].
I’d found him, Annun Ddu, Annun “the black”. But of course as I expected
he wasn’t at all what the Wikipedia page said he was. Bartrum notes here that he’s
just recorded as a distant ancestor to a king in Wales named Brychan,
who was active in the early 400s just a little north our other two Welsh kingdoms [2].
But curiously, Bartrum notes his name in these genealogies as: Annhun rex Grecorum, and Annun
regis Grecorum. Annun… king of Greece [2].
Gwent,
Dyfed,
and Greece?
And to be honest this wasn’t the weirdest part, because as I said this man has
nothing to do with Dyfed or Gwent, why was he listed as a king here at all?
Finally, I’d found the man, finally, after first encountering him a year ago, but I ended
up with more questions than I started with. And I didn’t know it yet, but this single name,
in bright red text, was a lot weirder than I could have imagined.
I decided that, if the modern page didn’t have
any sources connected to our missing man, then perhaps there might have been
some when the name was first added.
It was a long shot, but I wanted to
know how Annun got here in the first place anyways, so I went looking for the edit that
first caught my eye: when was Anwn Ddu, the king of Gwent, added to this page?
On the 20th of June 2017, the article looked like this. It’s a fairly decent list, it’s missing a
few earlier figures, but I’d honestly say this one is more accurate than the current one.
Regardless, 6 days later our man appears… sort of.
Because that: Anwn ap Macsen Wledig, is not what
the modern entry says. The current entry was made on the 4th of January in 2019,
and claims that Annun was appointed by the uh, “Emporer”, Magnus Maximus, but the 2017 article
says he was his son. What’s going on?
Well, I went back to Bartrum, and sure enough I found Annun ap Macsen Wledig,
Welsh for Annun son of Magnus Maximus (one of the many usurping Roman emperors) [11]. He appears as
“Anthun” in a single genealogy from here, on the Isle of Man [9][2], whilst Annun Ddu only appears as an
ancestor to a king here in Brycheiniog [2][10], so why is he now listed as a king of both Gwent and Dyfed?
Well, one of those was much easier to find than the other, because the answer
lay within the genealogies of the kings of Dyfed. You see, they are really, really weird.
Like all medieval Welsh genealogies, they claim descent from a whole bunch of Roman figures,
such as emperors, or in Dyfed’s case just random titles like 'Protectoris', 'Stator', and my personal
favourite: “Cupbearer and Mixer” [7], all one name. But the most unusual name in Dyfed’s pedigree is
right here: a supposed son of Magnus Maximus literally named “Dyfed” [5].
Dyfed isn’t a personal name, so historians such as Bartrum and Wade-Evans have suggested that
perhaps this man is really Magnus Maximus’s other son: Anthun, and that he was given the
nickname “Dyfed”, or the older “Dimet” because he controlled this region for his father [5].
Regardless of if this is true of not, this does appear to be where the Wikipedia article has
gotten this information from, as they then list a couple of Dyfed ap Macsen’s descendants until
finally arriving at an actual king of Dyfed, and the reason I never saw this name, is because the
author subscribes to this theory that Dyfed ap Macsen is really Anthun ap Macsen, or Annun,
and then conflated him with another man entirely from the other side of the country: Annun Ddu.
Finally, mystery solved, I wasn’t going crazy, there’s a clear line
of reasoning here, even if it’s flawed. But hang on, that’s not everything is it?
This gets weirder. Because we’ve mentioned a lot of places so far, but do you remember
Gwent? The kingdom that started this whole chapter, and this entire video? How does
Annun Ddu, or Anthen, or whoever, fit into here?
Also, remember he was called the king of Greece?
I will admit, this took me a while, much longer than I thought.
The original draft of this video ended here, with me simply saying
with frustration that I have no idea why he’s listed as the king of Gwent.
But I think I finally cracked where this came from.
If we move down this list, we encounter another supposed ruler of Gwent: Ednyfed,
who is another man listed in that genealogy of the kings of Dyfed [7], and then his supposed son Dyfnwal,
who is not in the Dyfed genealogy. So, is this where we finally
attach to the kingdom of Gwent? No. Dyfnwal here is a man from Ystrad Clud
in modern day Scotland, he isn’t attached to Annun or Magnus Maximus until a much later manuscript [6],
for reasons that we don’t fully understand. But regardless the Wikipedia article here
claims that he’s the father of a man named Ynyr, who was an actual king of Gwent.
So we have Magnus, his son Annun, his son Ednyfed, all from the Dyfed pedigree [7].
A later manuscript that gives him another son, Dyfnwal. Sure [6].
But Dyfnwal doesn’t have a recorded son named Ynyr, anywhere.
This was a dead end for a while because as far as I could see,
no sources ever mentioned who Ynyr’s father was, and nobody connected him to Dyfnwal, or Annun [8].
Eventually, I decided the best course of action would be to read Bartrum’s notes
on all 9 of Dyfnwal’s sons, hoping to somehow find a connection to Gwent, because surely the
author of the article didn’t just make it up? And eventually, I did. In the second-to-last
sentence, about the very last son, Deingr [4], there was a small note that simply told me
that a man named Iolo Morgannwg claimed that Deingr’s father, Dyfnwal, was a king of Gwent.
Unfortunately for us, Iolo Morgannwg was one of the most infamous forgers in all
of British history. He famously faked a bunch of manuscripts, and upon searching
in one collection of them I finally found what I was looking for: a fake genealogy,
never replicated in any of the old texts, listing Ynyr, son of Dyfnwal, king of Gwent [12].
Anwn Ddu is listed as the first king of Gwent, because an old source adopted a random man from
Ystrad Clud as his grandson, a man who centuries later, would be a victim to one of dozens of
forgeries, claiming that he was really a king in south Wales with a son named Ynyr.
Finally, this is why Anwn Ddu is here, the man who doesn’t actually exist,
an amalgamation of several different medieval figures transformed into a monarch
of 3 different states in South Wales, to which only one of them is he actually connected to.
Except of course, here he’s called the king of Greece.
Surprisingly, this was much easier to
find than the other two. You see, Annun Ddu does appear in one other place than as an ancestor to
the kings of Brycheiniog: he shows up in one of my favourite genealogies ever, unceremoniously known
as the 16th entry in the Harleian Genealogies [2]. It’s the ancestry for an unknown line of kings
somewhere in modern day Scotland [9], and there are two things that I find so fascinating about it:
First, it is the only known time in this set of genealogies that a Welsh or Brythonic
kingdom traced their origins to a pre-Roman figure [note 1], in this case a man named Caractacus.
They even record his father and grandfather, who were later found through coin evidence!
Secondly, they also attempted to claim descendance from literally every single Roman emperor.
And one of these Romans is our man Annun Ddu. Here spelt as Antun Ddu [2].
This may seem a little unusual, but what makes it stranger is that he’s paired with someone else.
As this document claims descendance from Antun Ddu, and Cleopatra.
Antun Ddu and Cleopatra.
Antony, Marcus Antonius, Julius Caesar’s general who was one of the key figures in the civil war that
erupted across the Roman empire following his assassination.
And what part of the Empire did he rule from after he achieved victory?
Greece.
Antonius, to Antun Ddu, claimed as a Roman ancestor to the kings of Brycheiniog,
and unceremoniously combined with another man named Annun who was claimed as the ancestor of
the kings of Dyfed for a Wikipedia article on a random day in 2019.
Couple this with an elaborate hoax from 200 years ago, attaching one of the oldest kings
of Gwent to this very same Annun, and then we have the recipe for a mistake in an article
that’s been over 1000 years in the making.
Annun Ddu isn’t a real figure, he isn’t a son of Valerian, and Cleopatra didn’t give birth to Aurelian. He isn’t the same Annun as the son of
Magnus Maximus, and he certainly isn’t really the great grandfather of the kings of Gwent.
He didn’t rule Dyfed, he didn’t rule Gwent, and this Annun didn’t rule Brycheiniog,
but that didn’t stop people from mixing, matching, and conflating their names,
whether it was by a genealogist in the 800s, or a forger in the 1800s, or by a well-meaning editor
on the 4th of January, 2019. Thank you for watching.