The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  Even so, on arriving at Cadbury Castle I could see why such sober heads as Leslie Alcock, who had excavated here in the 1960s, should have succumbed to its charm: the ring of trees around the banked hill; the approach up through them along a hollow way; the emergence onto a plateau commanding views across to the Somerset Levels and Glastonbury. Moreover it was close to the River Cam, and had the villages of West Camel and Queen Camel just to the west, so encouraging the identification with ‘Camelot’.

  When Alcock excavated here, he established that the hill-fort was built in the Bronze Age, with later Iron Age usage, and that it was substantially enlarged and occupied just after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century – much more so than other comparable hill-forts. The fifth century was precisely when Arthur was supposed to have emerged to lead the British against the Anglo-Saxons.

  With great good luck, Alcock discovered a ‘Great Hall’ from this period, measuring some sixty-five feet long; good luck, in that his team of archaeologists allowed themselves only a relatively small part of the plateau to excavate, so to find anything was providential. Perhaps it was this that tipped Alcock over the edge into making the identification with King Arthur, which brought Cadbury Castle to worldwide attention at a time, the late 1960s, when a generation were searching for a lost and future king. It cost him a great deal of respect from his peers, who questioned the historicity of Arthur. There are no contemporary accounts of his reign and the first chronicle describing his deeds dates from 600 years later – but then, argued Alcock, there are hardly any fifth-century contemporary accounts of anything in the first place.

  The power of the Arthurian myth is intense, and I can see how archaeologists could succumb to that sheer power, like those who open burial chambers with toxic fumes.

  After Geoffrey of Monmouth created the story in the twelth century (although he may have used sources that have since been lost), the tale grew in the telling over the following centuries as it was passed between the English and the French. With their perennial fascination for adultery, the French elaborated the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and stressed the romance of the tales; the British built up the patriotic and nation-building elements – ‘the Matter of Britain’, as the epic became known.

  As with Star Wars, in order to expand the cycle new writers had to keep creating prequels. The finale to the story – the death of Arthur at the hands of Mordred, and the disintegration of the Round Table – was one of the first elements in its telling. Only by going further back could they create new material, spinning out fresh adventures for different knights, embroidering the Grail Quest and delving earlier into Arthur’s boyhood – a process that has continued right up to the present, with T H White’s influential The Sword in the Stone. In the BBC’s recent Merlin series, even the wizard is imagined as a young boy, which really does put the story into reverse. Next we can expect Merlin’s Mother.

  But over the thousand years in which the story has been retold and expanded, one account stands out with diamond clarity. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur combines a journalistic matter-of-factness in his retelling of events – one lecturer of mine at Cambridge observed that you can read the accounts of jousts like cricket fixtures and see certain knights advancing slowly up the ‘prowess-ranking’ – with an underlying elegy for the passing of an age.

  Malory had notoriously seen the rougher side of life. He was imprisoned numerous times, on charges that included theft, rape and attempted murder. Attempts have been made to rehabilitate his reputation and show that many of these charges may have been politically motivated – that, for instance, it was a jealous husband who accused Malory of rape when Malory absconded with his wife; but the authorial tone is not that of someone who has led a cloistered existence. When his knights fight, it has all the gritty exhaustion and confusion of a bar brawl that starts up all over again just when everyone thinks the protagonists have calmed down.

  He wrote it during the Wars of the Roses, in which he played a part. Those self-destructive and brutal wars circle under Malory’s disintegrating Round Table. The age of the lance and halberd was giving way to that of gunpowder and the arquebus. Edward IV could give a chivalrous speech and then massacre his Lancastrian opponents sheltering inside Tewkesbury Abbey.

  Malory divided his original manuscript for Le Morte d’Arthur into eight books, most of which are very familiar to us: the tales of Arthur and Merlin, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristan (which he tells at Wagnerian length) and of the Holy Grail. His great achievement was to take this disparate set of stories and unify them into one overarching narrative, adding link passages, which are called ‘explicits’.

  The book that I’ve always liked most is the least familiar – that of ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’. It is the sole book for which there is no obvious source. Critics have suggested the source is lost, but I like to think that this was the one part of the story Malory made up.

  The plainness of the tale is characteristic of him. He is not drawn to the flowery romance of Lancelot and Guinevere – he underplays their adultery as much as possible – or the more abstract theological points of the Grail legend. What Malory likes is grittiness of character and, in characteristic English style, a good story about class difference. ‘Gareth of Orkney’ could be a Mike Leigh film. He is the only one of Arthur’s knights whose name you can still find in a playground today: calling a child Galahad, Percival, Lancelot or Gawain would mark them for life.

  Gareth arrives at King Arthur’s court incognito, a big, raw-boned lad of great strength; ‘large and longe and brode in the shoulders’. For reasons that are unclear, he does not announce himself as a prince of royal blood; but he is in truth the son of King Lot of the Orkneys and the much younger brother of Sir Gawain, who has been away from home so long chasing damsels and dragons that he fails to recognise his own brother.

  Gareth asks that King Arthur grant him a boon. Arthur, who always falls for such open-ended requests, agrees, but is disappointed when all that Gareth asks is that he be given food and drink for a year. The disagreeable High Steward Kay points out that Gareth could have asked for horse and armour and become a knight, and that this proves he’s a ‘vylane born’, just a peasant. Kay nicknames Gareth ‘Beaumains’ (‘Fair Hands’) – more malicious for being in French – because he looks as if he’s never done any manual labour, and sends him to the kitchen as a galley boy.

  After a year in which Gareth is fattened up ‘like a porke hog’, a damsel arrives with the customary tale of woe and need. Lancelot, who can spot a prince dressed as a frog, knights Gareth and he is sent off to help the damsel – who is none too pleased. She had expected a more upmarket, Premiership knight. The names of Tristan, Gawain and Lancelot himself are mentioned.

  The damsel’s name is Lynette and she would undoubtedly be played by Alison Steadman. As Gareth makes his way across country to help rescue her besieged sister, Lynette gives a non-stop commentary on how Gareth ‘smells like a kitchen boy’ and is ‘nothing but a ladle-washer’. Even the various knights Gareth defeats she describes as easy pickings: ‘That first knight you killed – his horse just stumbled; and as for the second knight, you came up behind him!’

  The effect is to make Gareth fight even harder. With the true masochism of an Englishman, it is her scolding that drives him: the chivalric code forbids talking back to a lady, so he can only become yet more violent in his fighting.

  Although Malory is likewise gentlemanly about this, it’s clear that bossy Lynette is not much of a looker; but her sister Lyonesse, who needs rescuing, turns out to be a stunner when she unwimples her visage – or, as Gareth puts it, ‘the fayryst lady that ever I lokyd upon’.

  Gareth launches a frenzied assault upon her captor, the Red Knight, that lasts an entire day.

  At first light the opponents joust, but both fall to the ground, stunned. They engage again on foot, buffeting each other around the head with their swords, leaving pieces of shield and harness strewn around them. T
his goes on for some hours, until they are winded and stand there swaying, ‘stagerynge, pantynge, blowynge and bledying’. Gareth and the Red Knight run at each other again like boars, clashing heads and ‘grovelynge’ to the earth. They are so stupefied by the struggle that, Malory reports, they pick up each other’s swords by accident. Come the evening and most of their armour has fallen away, leaving them half naked.

  And then occurs one of those moments of genius that Malory’s deceptively simple prose style allows him to slip into his narrative. The two men agree to rest and find two molehills to sit on ‘besydes the fyghtynge place’. They unlace each other’s helmets and literally have a breather. They ‘take the cold wynde’.

  The armistice pause is broken when Gareth glimpses Lyonesse at the window and remembers what he’s there for. Egged on by sister Lynette – ‘Where’s your courage, man!’ – Gareth rips off his adversary’s helmet, about to kill him, when the Red Knight manages a long, exculpatory monologue. He explains that he is avenging some damsel whose brother was killed by Lancelot or Gawain, although he’s not sure which. It’s a lame story; nevertheless, given that a woman is behind it all, Gareth feels he has to stay his hand.

  So Gareth gets the girl. Even here, Malory can’t resist throwing in some bedroom farce. The young lovers arrange to meet at night ‘to abate their lustys secretly’. Because they are young and inexperienced in such matters, notes the older and wiser Malory, the plan doesn’t stay secret. When Lyonesse arrives at Gareth’s bed wearing nothing but a coat lined with ermine – about as hot an image as the fifteenth century could manage – her jealous sister Lynette sends a knight with an axe to stop them.

  Although the bold Gareth sounds more like a Monty Python character at times, Malory weaves him into the fabric of the tale so that his death unpicks the whole great tapestry. When Lancelot accidentally kills Gareth later, Gawain’s revenge for his brother’s death precipitates the collapse of the Round Table. Gareth is the very human and English keystone that Malory adds to his great narrative arch.

  As I left Cadbury Castle and made my way across to the landmark of Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead, which marked the ascent of the Icknield Way to Salisbury Plain, it was hard not to think of this Somerset country as a castellated plain. Many of the hills were surmounted by an Iron Age fort or earthworks – or in the case of the most dramatic of all, Glastonbury Tor, which I could see behind me, by a tower rearing up foursquare.

  Unlike Leslie Alcock and the historians, I had no need to worry about the truth of Arthur’s existence; but I had an absolute belief in the truth of the Arthurian story as story – that it satisfied a very English need for stoicism in the face of adversity, for a lost Golden Age, and illustrated a perennial truth: that rather than face a damsel with a sharp tongue, most Englishmen would fight an army, or a dragon, or go on a quest to the other side of the world.

  *

  From Cadbury Castle I was following the old drovers’ road east, directly towards the rising sun on Salisbury Plain. There were times when the old lane had been superseded by modern roads; but a surprising amount of the Icknield Way, or this loop of it, was still traceable. It gave me pleasure to rejoin a grassy lane, the sort that one would hardly notice out of the corner of an eye if driving, yet once resurrected as part of a greater road had real resonance. The Long Lane, as it is sometimes called in this part of Somerset, glowed green for me: ‘the Long Lane’ because it led on to the North Sea.

  It was impossible anyway to get too lost over the next ten miles as ahead lay the landmark of Alfred’s Tower on Kingsettle Hill. This three-sided folly rose up like a giant triangulation point. It was erected as a supremely self-confident monument by the eighteenth-century banker, Henry Hoare, for his Stourhead estate. The tower commemorated the historical likelihood that here in 878 King Alfred raised his banner to summon his troops for one last stand against the Vikings, who had penetrated this far into Wessex.

  The tower stands 160 feet in height and dominates the surrounding landscape; it ‘commands Somersetshire nearly as far as the curvature of the earth allows’, wrote Edward Thomas. Much of its triumphalism can be understood if one remembers that the tower was built when George III had just ascended the throne – a king with a background as equally Germanic as Saxon Alfred – and that Britain had recently defeated those other Scandinavians, the Swedish, in the Seven Years War.

  The myths about Alfred were as complex as the ones about Arthur and the bold statement over the Tower’s entrance was one I would untangle as I journeyed further into the Berkshire Downs ahead:

  Alfred the Great

  AD 879, on this summit

  Erected his Standard

  Against Danish Invaders.

  To him we owe the origin of Juries;

  The establishment of a Militia;

  The creation of a Naval Force: –

  Alfred, the light of a benighted age,

  was a philosopher and a Christian;

  the Father of his people,

  The Founder of the English

  Monarchy and Liberty.

  Certainly Alfred managed to rally the English for a final push back against the Vikings, and having walked here, I could see why this was a supremely good place for him to have done so. His subjects in the burghs to the west of Salisbury Plain would all have known how to reach this spot along those same drovers’ paths I had followed. There would, too, have been a sense that the Vikings had reached the inner keep of Wessex; if the Saxons could not hold the drawbridge into Somerset, where, in the celebrated story, Alfred had hidden when on the run as a failed baker, then it was all over. They would get no support from Celtic Cornwall.

  Some have suggested that if this was indeed Arthurian country – or already associated with him – then there could have been no more symbolic place for Alfred to raise his standard. But they forget that Arthur was a symbol of the Romano-British who had originally resisted the Saxons, so may not have been the best role model for Alfred. Come to that, Arthur may not yet have been invented.

  The tower was not quite as monumental and unchanged as it looked. An American plane – ironically, a de Havilland Norseman – had flown into one of the tower’s turrets in 1944, killing all the crew, when low fog had crept up from the Somerset marshes and hidden the tower. It had taken forty years to repair the damage.

  But my thoughts on climbing the 200 steps of the tower were not of Alfred, nor of plane crashes. Because I had come here before, with my wife and children, when I was still married.

  It had been for a picnic, on a convenient day’s excursion from Bristol. What concerned me, as I climbed the steps again, with a diamond lattice of light illuminating each sweep of the spiral staircase as it passed a narrow window, was that I could remember almost nothing about that first visit. This had been some five or six years earlier – I could not be certain exactly – but not that long ago. And yet other than the bald fact that we had all climbed the tower, the experience had been wiped clean from my memory.

  You can sometimes get that same feeling looking at an old photo album. Why am I smiling in the picture when I can’t even remember the day, the hour, the occasion? In this case exacerbated by a subsequent separation and divorce.

  It wasn’t that the last time I climbed the tower I had been with three children running around me; it was that I couldn’t remember what they had done. What we had all done. Was someone told off for going too close to the edge at the top? Undoubtedly. Or for running back down again?

  This had, admittedly, been part of a larger outing. We had visited the main Stourhead estate as well. But it gave a certain melancholy to the view as I gazed back at Glastonbury Tor and Cadbury Castle in the distance. How the past can get wiped so clean. And an empty tower with a spiral staircase was a powerful receptacle for the loss of memory.

  *

  The next day, I was cheered by the discovery that there was a pub directly on my route up onto Salisbury Plain, despite the isolated country. The Red Lion was an old drovers’ i
nn. The name was a giveaway: it indicates a pub of great antiquity; the red lion was an emblem on John of Gaunt’s fourteenth-century coat of arms. I was to pass many more Red Lions in my journey along the Icknield Way.

  Even better, there was a quite superb stretch of the Long Lane leading there, grassed over and hedged by hazelnut.

  ‘Yes, it’s Roman,’ the pub landlord told me. ‘There’s more Roman stuff up on the hills above.’ I didn’t like to tell him that both the road and the remains on White Sheet Hill were thousands of years older than the Romans; I was used to the assumption that anything old must be Roman.

  And there were more important matters to discuss: no less than five pies to choose from, heaven for a pie fancier. I asked the landlord for his thoughts. ‘They’re all good, but the lamb and leek smells the best,’ he told me. It was an eccentric recommendation and all the better for it.

  The landlord had a beard, the sure sign of a fanatic of some sort. Most publicans with beards I’ve encountered over the years have been obsessed by CAMRA, or a particular football team, or kept unfeasibly large dogs on the premises. But this one was subtler and more unconventional. He darted around the tables as his customers ate their assorted pies, more like a maître d’ at a good restaurant, checking that his charges were enjoying themselves.

  Sometimes his small talk ran a little off-key. With one couple, he complimented the woman on the very short skirt that she was wearing. A conversation ensued as to whether the skirt would or would not be suitable for work. When the woman got embarrassed and the conversation dried, the landlord quickly added, ‘But of course I really like your top as well.’

  Fortified by my pie, I set off up White Sheet Hill, my entrance to the heights of Cranborne Chase and Salisbury Plain. At the bottom of the hill was a curious set of artificial mounds which the Normans had constructed to encourage rabbits, a good cash crop. Weaving its way around them, the chalk path took me onto the hill. A south-westerly wind had got up and White Sheet Hill was not a hospitable place, but I saw a lone figure standing on top of what even at a distance was clearly a Bronze Age barrow. He had various boxes of kit open.