To The Oxford Arthurian Society, without which . . .
First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing
This paperback edition first published in 2005
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List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Who was King Arthur?
PART ONE: From History
1. In the Reign of King Arthur . . .
2. Arthur Fought against Them in Those Days
3. The Strife of Camlann
4. The Destruction of Britain
5. Tyrants and Kings
6. The Kings of the Britons
PART TWO: Into Legend
7. Arthur’s Brave Men
8. Lives of the Saints
9. Geoffrey of Monmouth
10. Arthur, King of Britain
Epilogue: Digging up Arthur – Glastonbury 1190
Conclusion: The Reign of Arthur?
Bibliography
MAPS
1. ‘Arthur’s Britain’
2. Searching for Mount Badon
3. Gildas’s Britain
4. Late Roman Britain
5. Britons vs Saxons
6. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur – The last campaigns
Many thanks to all those who helped me on the long route to The Reign of Arthur. Special thanks must go to Andrew Smith, for his persuasive suggestions, eye for detail and help with tricky translations, and also for permission to use his research on the press coverage of the Artognou stone. Thanks, too, to the numerous members of the Oxford Arthurian Society, especially Peter Ewing, whose thought-provoking talks raised many of the ideas tackled here. Dr Jeremy Catto, Dr Nick Higham and Charles Evans-Günther gave help and support when this book was still in its infancy. I should also like to thank my wife Julie, our son Geheris and my parents Alan and Valerie for, among other things, our intrepid expeditions to most of the obscure Arthurian locations mentioned in this book. Lastly, I should mention my primary school teacher Keith Moxon, who first introduced me to the dark-age historical context of the Arthurian Legends of which I was so fond. It was that encouragement which, ultimately, led to this book being written.
Unless otherwise stated, the images in this book are © Julie Hudson, and are used with permission. The extract on p. 238 is reprinted by permission of Boydell & Brewer Ltd from King Arthur, Hero and Legend by Richard Barber (Boydell Press, 1986) p. 135. Extracts from Thorpe, L. (ed. and trans), Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966), © Lewis Thorpe 1966 and Thorpe, L. (ed. and trans), Gerald of Wales: Description of Wales (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 281–8, © the estate of Lewis Thorpe 1978, are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
The quotation from Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is taken from Vinaver, A., Malory Works (OUP, 1971). It is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. The quotation from Myres, J.N.L., The English Settlements (OUP, 1986), is also reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.
Unless otherwise noted, extracts from Historia Brittonum are reproduced by kind permission from Arthurian Period Sources volume 8, Nennius (ed. and trans. by Dr John Morris) published in 1980 by Phillimore, Shopwyke Manor Barn, Chichester, West Sussex, PO20 2BG.
Quotations from Gildas are reproduced by kind permission from Arthurian Period Sources, volume 7, Gildas (ed. and trans. by Michael Winterbottom), published in 1978 by Phillimore, as above.
Arthur was a great king. He ruled a land of knights in armour, damsels in distress, dragons and derring-do, home of Merlin the Magician and Morgan le Fay. He was born in Tintagel, became king by a combination of sword, stone and sorcery, and ruled from the castle of Camelot. At his Round Table sat Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad, seekers of the Holy Grail. Finally, in tragedy, the love of Lancelot and Guenevere brought down the whole kingdom, leaving Arthur sleeping in the Isle of Avalon.
Did this King Arthur really exist? Almost certainly not. He was defined by writers of romance fiction in the twelfth century and refined through the Middle Ages. He inhabited a fabulous world based on that of his medieval audience. It was in this form that Arthur was revived by the Victorians and entered the public imagination.
Could this fantastic king be based on historical reality? By the late twentieth century, scholars reached a consensus. Through the legends, they argued, could be glimpsed a genuine historical Arthur. Perhaps he was not a king but a warlord, a Roman general or Celtic chieftain, leading his armoured cavalry against invading Saxons. He fought battles at such windswept locations as Liddington Castle or Little Solsbury Hill. His capital, a declining Roman city or reclaimed hillfort, remembered by the name of Camelot, could be identified by archaeology. His world, if not exactly one of chivalry, was a last beacon of civilisation against a barbarian wind of change.
This image of the ‘historical’ Arthur found its way easily into popular history. Professional historians were soon followed by amateur enthusiasts and local antiquarians. Regional partisans still traipse across their local fields, clutching Ordnance Survey maps, seeking names resonant of Camelot and Avalon.
According to the medieval ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, the deeds of King Arthur would always provide food for storytellers. The number of new Arthurian novels, each longer than all the early Arthurian sources combined, appears to bear this out. Although in the mass media the name of Arthur will always evoke the image of ‘knights in armour’, most novels since the sixties have cloaked their Arthur in the muddy trappings of the Dark Ages. This new ‘fictional’ Arthur has become subtly different from his ‘historical’ counter-part. He emerges from a Celtic twilight into a world where the ‘old ways’ face the destructive coming of the Church of Rome. While Arthur may be ambivalent in this contest, there is no disguising the ‘old’ loyalties of the powerful women surrounding him, exponents of a matriarchal tradition stretching back to Boadicea and the Druids. Inevitably, there is love between the Queen and a Lancelot-figure, there is a grail, holy to one tradition or another, an Avalon where Christian and pagan battle for the hearts and minds of Dark Age Britain.
But are these ‘Dark Age’ Arthurs any more real than the ‘medieval’ figure which preceded them? Over the last twenty-five years, the academic world has become almost unanimously hostile to the idea of a ‘historical Arthur’. It has become scholarly orthodoxy that, although someone called Arthur may have existed at some point in the Dark Ages, even that small admission is best avoided. The first mentions of him were written hundreds of years after he supposedly lived and are so hopelessly entangled in myth and folklore that nothing historical can be gleaned from them. Sources from his own time make no mention of him, archaeology has uncovered no trace of
him, so it is best to ignore him completely.
This sea-change in scholarly opinion has taken place largely out of public view. It has hardly entered into popular histories. The public demand for Arthurian books has been fed by reprints of old and discredited works, or poorly researched amateur sleuthing of the ‘King Arthur shared my post-code’ variety.
The refusal of academic historians to engage with the ‘evidence’ for Arthur presented in popular works is a great disservice to interested readers. The essential questions remain unanswered. Did King Arthur exist? Was he a significant figure of history and can we learn anything of his reign? If not, how did the legendary image arise?
We shall find out what contemporary sources actually say. We shall use this information to assess how likely later works are to give us a true picture of the enigmatic ruler. We shall see how they came by their information and how reliable they are. Our investigation will take us up to the late twelfth century when romance fiction firmly took hold of the Arthurian genre, obscuring its possible factual content. I will show that the idea of Arthur as a real Dark Age British military leader is very plausible, and goes a long way to making sense of the evidence. On the way, I hope to dismiss some modern prejudices both for and against the ‘historical’ Arthur.
First, we need to find an approximate date for the reign of Arthur.
ONE
The popular view of Arthur largely derives from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, written in 1470. Although Malory portrays the king as a medieval ruler, he occasionally reveals the pre-medieval era when his tales are set:
They com to the Sege Perelous, where they founde lettirs newly wrytten of golde, whyche seyde: Four Hondred wyntir and four and fyffty acomplyssed aftir the Passion of Oure Lorde Jesu Cryst oughte thys syege to be fulfylled . . . ‘in the name of God!’ seyde Sir Launcelot, and than accounted the terme of the wrytynge, frome the byrthe of oure Lorde unto that day. ‘Hit semyth me,’ seyd sir Launcelot, ‘that thys syge oughte to be fulfylled thys same day, for thys ys the Pentecoste after the four hondred and four and fyffty yere.”
If Sir Lancelot has calculated correctly, the quest for the Holy Grail is about to begin around the year AD 487. Other Arthurian sources give similar dates from the late fifth to the early sixth centuries. However, it is clear that the romances do not give us an accurate picture of those centuries. Malory has an archbishop of Canterbury at least 50 years too early, a Holy Land inhabited by Turks 500 years before they arrived and a siege of the Tower of London (c. 1080) using ‘grete gunnes’ 800 years before they were first seen in England. Not only in such anachronisms is it obvious that we are not reading tales about the fifth century; central images and themes derive from the medieval world, not the Dark Ages. Courtly love and tournaments point us to the twelfth century. Jousting would have been impossible without stirrups, unknown in fifth-century Britain. If Arthur and his companions were real inhabitants of Britain c. 487, we must look beyond the romances for evidence of their world.
At the start of the fifth century, Britain had been part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years. Roman roads, walls and fortifications could be seen all over the country. Although most of the troops had left the island in 409 and the Emperor had formally charged the Britons with their own defence the following year, imperial documents continued to be drafted detailing the military and civil officers of the British provinces. To the bureaucrats in the imperial capitals, normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.
Roman civilisation, by 410, was not that of films such as Gladiator. Pagan religion, gladiatorial games and vestal virgins had been outlawed for almost a century. Heavy cavalrymen, not the famous legionaries, dominated the armed forces. In many cases, as imperial authority waned, Christian bishops took over governmental responsibilities. British bishops even ventured across the barbarian-infested seas to attend councils in Europe. The language of the Empire, Latin, continued to be used by the Church. The only British writers whose work has survived from this period were churchmen and wrote in Latin.
Britain, however, was hardly a well-organised Roman province. Angles, Saxons and Jutes had seized control of those parts of the island nearest the continent. We call these people the Anglo-Saxons or the English, though to their enemies they were the Saxons. They later recorded such exploits as that of one of their leaders, Aelle, taking the Roman fort of Anderida and killing all the inhabitants in 491, just four years after the date Malory assigned to the Grail quest.
Archaeology indicates that in the fifth and sixth centuries Saxon settlements were confined to the south and eastern coasts and the river valleys most easily accessible from them. It was many generations before the more remote highlands of Britain were conquered by the English.
Elsewhere in the Empire, barbarians had settled into the structures of the Roman provinces they invaded. They lived in the same cities, used the same titles and eventually, in France, Spain and Italy, came to speak the language of the Romans they conquered. Mostly, these barbarians had come from just beyond the borders of the Empire. They had all been converted to Christianity and those aspects of Roman culture this implied before they crossed the frontiers.
In Britain, the situation was different. The invaders came from areas which had not bordered on the Empire. They retained their pagan religion and culture and did not begin to accept the imperial religion until 597. Inevitably, Roman civilisation, soldiers, bishops and all, disappeared from the lands under their sway. It is English which we speak here today.
Writers referred to two other barbarian groups: the Picts who lived in the north beyond the Antonine Wall and the Scots, invaders of the western shore from Northern Ireland. Between them and the English lay the Britons themselves
Although the word ‘British’ now covers all the inhabitants of Britain, in the Dark Ages it referred to one specific people. The Saxons knew them as the Welsh, or foreigners, but the Britons called themselves the Combrogi or fellow-citizens. Although they used Latin on their monuments, they spoke British, the ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton, what we now call a Celtic language.
The leaders of the British came from those areas which had seen the least Romanisation. For example, archaeology and history show the Cornish leaders to have been important, though no major Roman structures have been found west of Exeter. Other British leaders came from Wales, Cumbria (still bearing the name of the Combrogi) and, north of Hadrian’s Wall, land which had barely been under Roman control at all. Some British rulers held Roman cities. Most preferred to refortify the ancient hillforts deserted since the Roman Conquest. The massive South Cadbury Castle, often said to be the original Camelot, is one of the most famous.
There seemed to be little trace of Roman culture among these Britons. St Patrick wrote of some that they were ‘not Citizens of the holy Romans, but of the devil, living in the enemy ways of the barbarians’.
It was among the Britons that the legends of Arthur were preserved. History, archaeology and, perhaps, their legends provide clues to these, the darkest of the British Dark Ages. Somewhere in the gloom, if the medieval romances are to be believed, we should find the evidence for the reign of Arthur.
Ancient Manuscripts
The main historical texts relating to the years 400–550, with the approximate dates they were written, are:
Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘On the Destruction of Britain’) (c. 500)
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731)
Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’) (829)
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (early part 891)
Annales Cambriae (‘Annals of Wales’) (977)
All except Gildas are from long after the time they describe. This is a common feature of most history books and does not necessarily imply that they are untrustworthy. To investigate the real Arthur, we must discover how reliable and internally consistent these texts are, how plausible are their accounts, and how they compare to what can be deduced from archaeology.
Historians used to place great reliance on written sources. These provided the names, dates, kings and battles from which conventional history was constructed. Writers tended to accept that the sources covering the Dark Ages were a close approximation of the truth. Even later sources were sometimes used, on the grounds that they probably contained material from oral tradition or lost written sources. Archaeological remains were largely interpreted on the basis of these written sources.
Where historians were critical, they were inclined to favour the English over the British material. The first English historian, Bede, a congenial and deceptively modern scholar, provided a reassuring framework of AD dates and recognisable kingdoms. The apogee of almost uncritical acceptance of written material came in 1973 with John Morris’s The Age of Arthur. Sources of disparate periods and genres were combined by Morris into a highly imaginative story of Arthur as Emperor of Britain. This was challenged four years later, in the rather more obscure pages of the journal History, by David Dumville. An expert in the ancient languages of the British sources, he argued that all of them were very late and so infected with legendary material that no reliance could be placed on them. Academics have, generally, accepted Dumville’s thesis. It is assumed, rather than argued, that the ninth- and tenth-century material dealing with Arthur is ‘inadmissible evidence’ (Dark 2000).
Archaeologists have effectively been given carte blanche to disregard the written sources. No longer fettered by the prejudices of ancient Britons, they treat sub-Roman Britain to all intents and purposes as prehistoric. Finds can be interpreted according to the prevailing fashion. Gildas can be used selectively to bolster a case, as where he says that Britons retreated to fortified hills, but ignored when he says that they were fleeing Saxons intent on destroying their cities and massacring them. Because all written sources are equally suspect, they are all equally useful if they reinforce or attract publicity for an archaeologist’s latest finds. Thus, experts who would dismiss any notion that Arthur was a Dark Age king will happily connect the name ‘Artognou’ on a slate from Tintagel with the twelfth-century legend that Arthur was conceived there by magic.
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