These Our Monsters

by Katherine Davey

  Certainly Cumbria preserves many Arthur legends. CARLISLE CASTLE (not actually begun until the 11th century, but on the site of a Roman fort later taken over by Romano-British Cumbrians) is identified by several medieval Arthurian tales as Arthur’s ‘Camelot’. (Though that’s a claim hotly contested by Colchester – once Camulodunum; Cadbury Castle in Somerset; and Caerleon in south Wales.) At least two Cumbrian sites were known as the Round Table of the legendary king. One, now lost, was a Roman amphitheatre near Carlisle. The other, KING ARTHUR’S ROUND TABLE, is in Eamont Bridge near Penrith. Henry VIII’s travelling historian, John Leland, who visited it in the early 1540s, says it was ‘by some called the Round Table, and by some Arthur’s Castle’. In fact it’s a circular prehistoric earthwork ‘henge’ monument, perhaps much later used as a medieval jousting arena: when you’re visiting it, don’t miss the still more spectacular Neolithic MAYBURGH HENGE, a short walk away.

  RAVENGLASS ROMAN BATH HOUSE, which in reality served the adjacent Roman harbour-fort of Glannoventa, has more ambitious Arthurian claims. Still probably the tallest surviving Roman building in northern England, it was known in Elizabethan times as Walls Castle, and thought to be a medieval fortress, the palace of King Everlake the Unknown, legendary King of Avalon. Here, according to some stories, the body of the mortally wounded Arthur was brought, and from there carried across the (Irish?) sea by seven queens, to be healed and to await his moment to return.

  But that’s another point at issue. Other legends insist that Arthur and his knights lie sleeping underground somewhere in Britain, awaiting their recall at the time of the nation’s greatest need: one suggests in a cave beneath RICHMOND CASTLE in Yorkshire and another near SEWINGSHIELDS crag on HADRIAN’S WALL. Wherever they lie, Sir Gawain seemingly isn’t with them. According to Malory, he was badly wounded in the head in single combat with Sir Lancelot and then unluckily struck again on the old wound in a battle against the forces of the wicked Mordred at Dover. He died in DOVER CASTLE, and was buried in the castle chapel. As triumphant proof of this story, says Malory, ‘there all men may still see the skull of him, and the same wound is seen that Sir Lancelot gave him in battle.’

  What was firmly believed to be Gawain’s skull was indeed displayed at Dover Castle for well over a century. The Spanish tourist Ramon de Perellos viewed it there in 1397 and in 1485 William Caxton (who not only wrote a preface to Malory’s tales of Arthur, but also, crucially, printed them for the first time) cited it among other surviving Arthur relics as proof that the legendary king had once really existed. Leland reported that the skull was still on show in the 1540s. But after that little more is heard of it. Does a relic of Dame Ragnell’s wisely choosing and (eventually) delighted husband still survive in a forgotten corner somewhere?

  ‘Capture’ – Tristan and Iseult

  The inspiration for this story, the legend of Tristan and Iseult (or Isolde or Yseult), is not quite as Louisa retells it. Shorn of many additions over the centuries, the core legend tells that Tristan is the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, who lived at Tintagel. A slayer of dragons and monsters, Tristan is also an accomplished falconer and musician. He’s sent to Ireland to bring home his uncle’s chosen bride: Iseult, daughter of King Anguish. Supremely beautiful, she’s also renowned as a healer. But on the way back Tristan and Iseult both drink (either deliberately or by mistake) a magic love potion which has been prepared for Iseult and Mark’s wedding night. So Tristan and Iseult fall hopelessly in love. Iseult marries Mark all the same, but continues to love Tristan in secret. Eventually Mark finds out, and Tristan reluctantly gives up Iseult and goes into exile in Brittany. There he marries (confusingly) another Iseult, called ‘of the White Hands’, but is wounded by a poisoned arrow. Only the original Iseult can save him with her healing skills, so he sends to Cornwall for her. Her ship is to fly white sails if she is aboard, black if she’s not. Iseult comes, but Tristan’s jealous new wife tells him the ship has black sails and he dies of despair. Iseult then dies of a broken heart. Mark allows the doomed lovers to be buried side by side at Tintagel, where a vine and a rose tree intertwine over their graves.

  TINTAGEL CASTLE has been inspiring legends for many centuries. Their foundation is the fact that ‘Din Tagell’ – meaning ‘the fortress with the narrow entrance’, describing the headland-and-island site perfectly – really was an important power centre of Cornish rulers between about AD 450 and AD 650. During this post-Roman, Early Middle Ages (sometimes called ‘the Dark Ages’), pagan Anglo-Saxons progressively conquered much of what is now England. But in the South West the old Romano-British kingdom of Dumnonia – Cornwall, Devon and part of Somerset – long held out, maintaining the Christian faith and (as a recent discovery at Tintagel proves) the ability to speak and write Latin and Greek.

  Other archaeological finds from Tintagel prove that its princely inhabitants enjoyed both direct seaborne links with Europe and a high standard of living. These include the biggest assemblage of imported Mediterranean pottery tableware found in western Britain; wine and olive-oil jars from as far away as Greece, Turkey and North Africa; and luxury glassware from France and Spain. Naturally almost impregnable, the island fortress also had a plentiful source of fresh drinking water, allowing it to be defended against enemies who may have included Irish colonists as well as raiding Saxons.

  For reasons now unknown, Tintagel had largely been abandoned by about AD 700. But memories of its past glories long survived in legend, probably reinforced by the physical remains of its early medieval buildings. Still visible today, these must have been much more apparent in the 1100s, when the Tintagel legend industry began moving into higher gear. So much so that during the 1230s Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and one of the richest men in Europe, built a strategically useless but highly symbolic castle here, staking his claim to a place in the Tintagel story.

  The legend that Earl Richard bought into, and today is much the best known of the Tintagel myths, was first written down in about 1138 by the wildly successful ‘historical novelist’ Geoffrey of Monmouth. His History of the Kings of Britain tells how Uther Pendragon, King of Britain, fell in love with the beautiful Ygraine, wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. To protect her from Uther’s lust, Gorlois locked her up in the strong fortress of Tintagel, which half a dozen men could defend against an army. But the enchanter Merlin magically transformed Uther into the exact likeness of Gorlois: in this disguise he passed unhindered into the fortress and slept with Ygraine, who thus conceived the future King Arthur. Where the famous hero was actually born we aren’t told, but for many Tintagel is (albeit without even legendary evidence) hailed as Arthur’s birthplace.

  Though the Arthur legend has now swept the board at Tintagel, it is the story of Tristan and Iseult that has the longest association with, and the best historical claim on, the site. The oldest surviving versions of the story were written down in France (by one ‘Thomas of Britain’) and Germany in the mid 12th century. But these were all but certainly based on earlier legends from Cornwall, Brittany, Wales and Ireland, ‘Celtic’ lands bound together by the sea routes between them. Breton stories at least as old as the ninth century record a King Mark, also called Cunomorus (meaning ‘hound of the sea’), who ruled not only in Cornwall but also in Brittany. He allegedly died in battle there, near the significantly named Ile Tristan, in about AD 560. Iseult’s Irish father, ‘King Anguish’, was also probably a historical figure, the famous King Aengus of Munster.

  More concrete (or in this case granite) evidence that Mark/Cunomorus and Tristan were real Cornish rulers survives about 28 miles south of Tintagel, near Fowey and nearer the hillfort of Castle Dore, once thought to be the site of King Mark’s court. Here a sixth-century standing stone is inscribed in Latin: ‘Here lies Drustanus, son of Cunomorus’. Some believe that ‘Drustan’ is ‘Tristan’, in which case he was the son, not the nephew, of King Mark. So their shared relationship with Iseult, if it happened, becomes even more transgressive and poignant.

/>   And there’s more. According to the admittedly unreliable testimony of Henry VIII’s historian John Leland, who saw the Drustan Stone in about 1536, the epitaph on it then ended ‘with Lady Ousilla’ – a Latinization of the Cornish name ‘Eselt’, not so far from ‘Iseult’. So does Iseult also lie here with her lover (and stepson?) rather than at Tintagel as in the legend? There are a lot of ‘ifs’ here. But it’s certain that, just as the Arthur legend took over Tintagel from the older myth of Tristan and Iseult, the once separate and independent tale of the doomed lovers also got sucked into the all-conquering Arthur story-cycle. As early as the 13th century, Tristan had been demoted from a Cornish–Breton prince to a mere Knight of the Round Table.

  LONDON AND THE SOUTH EAST

  The Jewel Tower

  Sole survivor of the royal apartments within the great medieval palace of Westminster, the Jewel Tower was built in about 1365 to safeguard Edward III’s personal treasures. But it was raised on confiscated monastic land (belonging to Westminster Abbey), something which folklore insisted was almost guaranteed to bring bad luck. Worse still, its foundations disturbed the grave of a holy hermit. A monk of injured Westminster Abbey later gleefully recorded the terrible punishment inflicted on the chief instigator – William Usshborne, Keeper of the King’s Privy Palace. First, Usshborne plotted with a local leadworker to dig up the hermit, throw his bones into a pit and steal the lead from his coffin: but when the leadworker got the coffin to his workshop, ‘all strength departed from his body’, and he soon afterwards died.

  Usshborne didn’t take this heavy hint. Instead he created a fishpond in the Jewel Tower moat, and invited his neighbours to dine on a pike taken from it. ‘But as soon as he had swallowed two or three mouthfuls of the fish … he began shouting “it is trying to choke me!” … and suddenly he fell to the ground and died a wretched death without the last rites’ (thus, according to medieval belief, almost certainly bound for Hell). ‘It was said’, the monk smugly went on, ‘that this happened because he had confiscated the meadow and garden of the infirmary and the prior of Westminster’s garden for the use of King Edward III. For this, there was absolutely no compensation to the church of Westminster.’

  Dover Castle

  Another story of supernatural retribution was reported from Dover Castle in the 1950s. It’s a tale about a solitary roadside sycamore tree just visible from the castle battlements, possibly told originally by garrison soldiers. The tree marked the spot where, at some unknown date, a Dover soldier beat a comrade to death with a sycamore-wood club. He then stuck the club in the ground, boasting cynically to himself that his crime wouldn’t be discovered until the dry stick took root. The murderer was posted abroad, and many years passed before he returned to the scene of the crime. To his horror, he found that the murder weapon had indeed miraculously taken root, and grown into a flourishing sycamore tree. Struck with remorse by this sign of divine judgement, he confessed to the murder, and was hanged. Sycamore trees do grow quickly – a sapling can reach ten feet high in its first year. But nobody now seems to know where the ominous tree stood, or whether it’s still there.

  Kit’s Coty House

  More clearly visible, Kit’s Coty House near Aylesford in Kent was among the very first English monuments to be officially protected (in 1883) by the state. It’s actually a prehistoric chambered tomb with three huge sarsen stones (sandstones from the chalk downs of southern England) topped by a massive capstone; raised about 4000 BC, it was originally covered by a ‘long barrow’ earth mound. Learned Elizabethan scholars such as William Camden, however, got its date wrong by 3,000 years. They maintained that ‘Kit’s Coty’ was ‘Categirn’s Coty’ – the tomb of the British prince Categirn, son of Vortigern, killed by the Saxons in about AD 450 – and that the nearby LITTLE KIT’S COTY HOUSE was the grave of his Saxon rival Horsa, brother of Hengist, also slain at the nearby and genuinely historical Battle of Aylesford.

  Folklore told a different story – that Kit’s Coty was built by three local witches, who had to call in a fourth to summon up enough magic power to lift its huge capstone. Others, more prosaically, held that Kit’s Coty just meant ‘Kit’s cottage’, where Kit the shepherd boy sheltered with his sheep. But it’s apparently still believed that if you place anything on Kit’s Coty at full moon (difficult, since the monument is protected by railings) and then walk round it three times, the object will disappear.

  Minster Lovell Hall

  A better-authenticated tale about a disappearance relates to Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire. This was once the home of Francis, Lord Lovell, notorious (or renowned, according to your point of view) along with Ratcliffe and Catesby as a leading henchman of Richard III – the White Boar (in reference to his heraldic device) or, more insultingly, ‘the Hog’:

  The Rat, the Cat, and Lovell our Dog

  Rule all England under the Hog

  Escaping Richard’s defeat at Bosworth, Lovell fought on against Henry VII, landing at PIEL CASTLE in 1487 with the Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel. When Simnel was in turn defeated at Stoke Field, Lovell again escaped – some believed he was drowned during his flight, but another story, recorded in 1622, held that ‘he lived long after in a cave or vault’. So it was perhaps no surprise when, in 1708, workmen breaking through a wall at Minster Lovell discovered a secret room. It contained the body of a dead man – Lord Lovell surely – sitting at a table with a dead dog at his feet. But as soon as fresh air rushed in, bodies and table instantly crumbled to dust.

  Though it was reported on very good authority, there are all sorts of problems with this story – one of several in folklore where walled-up bodies suddenly turn to dust on discovery, which bodies don’t really do. Not least is the question of whether anyone hiding in a secret chamber would take a potentially barking dog with him. Lovell certainly did survive the Battle of Stoke, being recorded living in Scotland in June 1488. But what happened to him in the end isn’t known. Perhaps ‘Lovell our Dog’ – and his own dog – really did finish up at home in Minster Lovell Hall.

  THE SOUTH WEST

  Silbury Hill

  The biggest artificial prehistoric mound in Europe, awe-inspiring Silbury Hill was raised in about 2400 BC, and clearly played a crucial, though now unknown part in the AVEBURY ‘sacred landscape’. Its purpose is unknown, but it certainly isn’t a burial mound. Though it’s been tunnelled into both vertically and from side to side, and thoroughly investigated by English Heritage in 2007–8, no burial has ever been found there. Folklore knows better. ‘Zel-bury Hill’ (the old local pronunciation) is the burial place of King Zel, who was interred there on horseback, and the mound was magically raised over him in the time it took to boil a pan of milk. So John Aubrey heard in 1670, and it was later told that Zel was buried in a golden coffin, and could sometimes be seen riding round the hill in golden armour; or that the ‘body’ buried was actually a life-sized solid gold statue of a horse and rider. Zel is fictitious, and a more plausible theory was offered for the mound by the 18th-century pioneer antiquarian William Stukeley, who suggested that Silbury might be a memorial to the anonymous builder of AVEBURY STONE CIRCLE. Another, quite different story linked the great mound to the ‘Druids’ or ‘priests’ of Avebury. When the Devil planned to bury the town of Marlborough (or in some versions STONEHENGE, or Avebury itself) under a massive sackful of earth, the priests stopped him in his tracks by their magic. He dropped his sack and its contents became Silbury Hill.

  Old Sarum

  The spectacular Iron Age ramparts of Old Sarum enclose the remains of a Norman castle and a great cathedral, all that’s left of the city where William the Conqueror once gathered all the nobles of England. But the hilltop site was an uncomfortable place to live. The water supply was poor, high winds sweeping round the cathedral drowned the priests’ services, and the clergy quarrelled bitterly with the soldiers in the neighbouring castle. So, in about 1220, Bishop Richard Poore decided to build a new cathedral in a more hospitable setting.


  In fact the site of the present ‘New Salisbury’ cathedral was chosen for purely practical reasons, but folklore tells another story. The bishop, it relates, ordered an archer to shoot an arrow from Old Sarum’s ramparts, or some say he shot the arrow himself. Where it fell, he built Salisbury Cathedral.

  But there’s a problem with this tradition. Salisbury Cathedral is only just under two miles (3,200m, or 3,520 yards) from Old Sarum. But the greatest distance a highly trained professional medieval archer (let alone a middle-aged bishop) could shoot the lightest ‘flight arrow’ was only 370m (or 400 yards) – about an eighth of the actual distance from the ramparts of Old Sarum to the cathedral site. Medieval people, much more familiar with archery than we are, must have been aware of this discrepancy, which suggests the story is a late one. Persistent folklorists get round the difficulty. The arrow, they explain, actually hit and wounded a passing deer, which ran on until it finally dropped dead where the cathedral now stands, still stuck with the arrow.

  Hailes Abbey

  Renowned for ‘the Holy Blood’, allegedly a portion of Christ’s blood shed at the Crucifixion, Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire was among the most famous pilgrimage destinations in medieval England. It was founded in 1246 by the immensely wealthy Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and nominal ‘King of the Romans’, in thanksgiving for deliverance from a shipwreck. Richard, an Arthurian-myth enthusiast who also built TINTAGEL CASTLE, was buried at Hailes in 1272, two years after his son Edmund gave the abbey the sensational relic from which its fame and prosperity sprang. Edmund bought this phial of the Holy Blood (perhaps part of the regalia of the ninth-century Emperor Charlemagne) while travelling in Germany. He gave a third of it to Hailes, the other two-thirds going to the monastery of Ashridge in Hertfordshire; but it was at Hailes that the relic, and the stories and pious legends surrounding it, chiefly burgeoned.