by Geoffrey Ashe
f the name of
King Arthur is mentioned, I suppose what comes to mind is not so much one person as a
whole array of characters and themes, a montage so to speak. Of course we do think first
of the King, the magnificent monarch of a glorified or idealized medieval realm. But we
think also of his Queen, of the fair and wayward Guinevere, we think of his enchanter,
Merlin, who presided over his birth, who set him on the throne, who established him there
in the early and travelled days of his reign. There were the knights of the Round Table,
vowed to the highest ideals of chivalry, and the greatest of them, Sir Lancelot, who, of
course, has a tragic love affair with the Queen. There is another great love story, that
of Tristan and Isolde, the theme of Wagner's Opera.
We think of the place where these people assembled, Camelot, Arthur's magnificent,
personal castle and capital and then, there are stranger things; the story of the quest
for the Holy Grail, giving a spiritual dimension to the whole story and there is magic.
Not only the magic of Merlin but the magic also of his strange, ambiguous student, the
women, the enchantress, Morgan LaFay. And at the end is the tragedy of Arthur's downfall,
his passing away at the isle of Avalon and another mystery that we do not know what really
happened to him that he was said to be immortal, that one day he would return and restore
the golden age in his country.
Now, of course, this is all a realm of the imagination conceived by great authors in
the middle ages and put in medieval garb. But perhaps few people realize what a very great
realm of the imagination it is, how vast a literature this has been. In the middle ages
this was the great theme of creative writing in poetry and prose. Not only in England, but
preeminently in France and in Germany there were romances of Arthur. In fact, in every
language of Christendom at that time.
I suppose, the version we know best is the one that was composed in the 15th century.
This is the great English version of the story, compiled out of earlier versions by the
creative genius of a rather mysterious and cryptic figure, the knight, Sir Thomas Malory.
But the story doesn't end there. The whole thing revives in the time of Queen Victoria,
with Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." As a result of this great work on the
Arthurian Cycle by England's Poet Laureate, the story became known to everybody.
Other poems, novels and plays in our own time, and almost a rebirth of it yet again in
T. H. White's novels, "The Sword and the Stone" and "The Once and Future
King" and other plays and musicals and films based on these works. There are Rosemary
Sutcliff, Mary Stewart, Marian Bradley, Pat Godwin and others, who have gone off on
another line and tried to imagine the Britain of King Arthur as it might really have been.
What I have personally been most concerned with is the background of all this, and the
question, "where did it come from originally?" It's a very obvious thing to ask
the straight question, "did King Arthur exist?" And in fact you cannot give a
straight answer to that question; yes and no are both wrong. There were other great
historical figures who became the heros of medieval legends, such as Alexander the Great
and Charlemagne. We know that they existed and if somebody asks whether they did, we can
say "yes" directly because we have reliable, historical records of them. But
with Arthur, it is rather more difficult because the emphasis really is all on the legend,
the romance.
If we say "yes," that would imply that this magnificent medieval monarch
existed and reigned, at some time or other, in his glorified medieval court as described
as by Malory, Tennyson and the romances. Of course, he didn't. There is no such person as
King Arthur, in that sense; it's quite an impossible idea. So we cannot say
"yes," directly, but to say "no" is also misleading because that
implies that he is completely fictitious, that he was all made up in the middle ages when
these stories were first told, and that there is no sort of background or original person
behind the stories, at all. That, too, is misleading. This is a puzzle, a very difficult
question.
The main reason is that writers of fiction in the middle ages, when they were dealing
with something handed down to them from a distant past, didn't approach it as a modern
historical novelist does. Historical novelists, nowadays, will aim at authenticity. They
will try to get things right and will do research to discover how people dressed in the
time they are writing of, what houses they lived in, what food they took, what interests
they had, what kind of business or work they engaged in. . .they will try to get the
period right. Medieval authors did not do this. When they were dealing with a story that
had been handed down from some distant time, they updated everything. If you look at
medieval paintings of scenes from the Bible, for example, they don't look as they really
would have looked; you'll see little castles in the background and things of that kind.
The authors who wrote about King Arthur were aiming at a particular kind of audience,
very largely an upper class, aristocratic audience or the wealthier middle classes who
could read, but certainly not the people generally. They considered what their audiences
liked and what they were interested in, so they wrote stories about the current interests
of the aristocracy; stories of chivalry, of tournaments, of courtly love and heraldry.
They dressed the knights up in elaborate medieval armor, they had them worship in medieval
cathedrals, and so forth. So the whole story of King Arthur becomes something that is put
into the middle ages even if it doesn't really belong there.
Now these authors and their audiences knew that the story of King Arthur was something
that had been handed down from a much earlier time. We can be sure of that because we can
trace it, to some extent, being handed down. Certainly, the people of the middle ages, on
the one hand, realized that it was an old story, that it was set a long way back, but on
the whole, they didn't really care very much about getting it right.
I would feel that a medieval author or medieval reader of stories of Arthur took rather
the same attitude to his Britain, to his supposed kingdom, as we nowadays take to the Wild
West. On the one hand, we know that for perhaps 30 or 40 years during the latter part of
the 19th century, the American West was wild. There were sheriffs and outlaws and
gunfights. Some of the characters were real people; Billy the Kid existed, Calamity Jane
existed, and so forth. But, unless we have a special interest in the history of those
times, we probably don't care very much about absolute accuracy.
We know that the Wild West is a realm of the imagination. It was created, first, by
novelists such as Owen Wister and Zane Grey. It was then taken up by Hollywood, and it was
taken up, later, by the makers of television series. We now recognize the Wild West of the
movies as a realm of the imagination where certain kinds of adventure happen. Some of the
people who appear in these adventures may be based on real people, Billy the Kid, for
instance. But at the same time, we don't really care very much unless we have a special
historical interest, and I would say that most readers and writers in the middle ages took
rather this view of King Arthur and his Britain.
On the one hand, Arthur's Britain was understood by medieval readers as a country of
the imagination where certain kinds of adventures happened. On the other hand, they knew
that there was some reality behind it (just as there is a reality behind the Wild West),
but, they did not know just when the stories actually took place, only that it was
somewhere back in time.
Now if we look at the writers and film makers in our own time who have taken up this
story, we find that some have more or less gone along with the medieval image and some
have recreated it in their own way. T. H. White, for example, derided the whole idea of
any sort of history behind the Arthurian legends. He didn't care about the reality. It was
just a great medieval story and he retold it in his own way. White, somewhere, speaks of
people who had speculated about a real, historical Arthur and says contemptuously that
"Arthur was not a distressed, ancient Briton hopping about in a suit of woad in the
5th century."
But, of course, others have faced this distressed ancient Briton without any loss of
creativity. They have tried to imagine Arthur's Britain in the 5th or 6th century, more or
less as it might have been, and to put the characters in their real settings. Rosemary
Sutcliff did this, for example, in "Sword at Sunset" and Mary Stewart did it in
her novels of Merlin. You can do it in all sorts of ways and sometimes this does provide
some rather surprising insights.
One of the most astute questions that anybody ever put to me about this was put by a
student who said he had seen three films about the Arthurian theme. He said he had seen
the musical "Camelot" and he had a seen a French film about the Legend of Sir
Lancelot and he had seen "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Now, he asked me,
which I thought was most like the real thing? I said without hesitation, "Monty
Python and the Holy Grail," and indeed it is, this atmosphere of sloshing about in
mud, struggling through forests, not being quite sure what is around the next corner.
Britain, in the dark ages of Arthur, was probably a good deal more like that than the
resplendent kingdom that we see in a film like "Camelot" or "First
Knight."
Well, of course, you may say I've been rather begging the question here. What was the
real setting? And the modern novelists I've spoken of, have been moved to their work
partly by the fact that there is a very slowly growing awareness of what it was and when
it was, through historical study and through the work of archaeologists. And if we look at
that period we can ask, and I think this is a better way of putting the question, not did
King Arthur exist, but how did this legend originate, what fact(s) is it rooted in?
Then, of course, we must ask what period? Well the medieval writers with all their
fancy did know, more or less, that they were being a bit vague. They don't give us many
real dates but they place King Arthur somewhere in the period from about 450 A.D. to 550
A.D. That, of course, is longer than any one man could have reigned, but they see him as
living somewhere about that time, and they were right. This, in fact, is where the story
we know began its career, but the foundations for the medieval romances had been laid a
little before, in the old legends about Arthur.
Arthur is one of the few great heros of legend who has an official biography. It is the
work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who provided the framework for everything that followed and
made it clear when Arthur was supposed to have flourished. You may wonder why he is not
called by a surname. The fact is that, in the early 12th century, surnames, in the modern
sense, had not caught on. People were referred to as "so in so, the son of so and
so", or they were referred to by their birthplace. In Geoffrey's case, very probably,
he was born in the town of Monmouth in Southeast Wales. We don't know much about him; he
may have been a Welshman, he was certainly of Celtic, rather than English, stock. It is
quite possible that he was a Breton. Many people from Brittany had come over to England in
the train of the Norman Conquest and, indeed, there was one quite prominent Breton noble
family in the neighborhood of Monmouth. It is possible that Geoffrey was connected with
them.
He is certainly interested in the people of the Celtic fringe, the Welsh, the Cornish
and especially, the Bretons from the other side of the channel, who were of the same
stock. He was probably born somewhere about 1100. We know that he was a minor cleric most
of his life and that he was teaching at Oxford between 1129 and 1151. We know that later
he was consecrated as bishop of St. Asaph, in Wales, but that he, almost certainly, never
went there and that he died about 1154 or 1155. He was deeply interested in the traditions
of the Celtic people of the west, who were all descended from the Britons who inhabited
this island in Roman times. He was interested in the traditions of the prophet and
magician, Merlin or Myrddin, as the Welsh called him.
His most important work appeared about 1136 and was called "The History of the
Kings of Britain." This is one of the most important books of the middle ages. It had
enormous influence, an influence not only in the field of the stories of Arthur, but in
others. Its here, for instance, that we first find the story of King Lear and his three
daughters. It was taken up by Edmund Spenser, by Shakespeare himself in the play,
"King Lear" and by many others. But, of course, as you can imagine, the title of
this book "The History of the Kings of Britain" is, to put it mildly,
misleading. It's a quite extrodinary romance of the supposed history of the Kings of
Britain over several centuries. Geoffrey claims to have found it in an "ancient book
written in the British language." If that is so, the book has disappeared, but we
just don't know.
We can see, though, that he does use earlier histories, chronicles and Roman writers.
Geoffrey is a very learned man, but what he does with his materials is a marvelous flight
of the imagination. You can certainly never trust him for history, although he does use
history. He starts his story way back in the age of classical epic, somewhere about the
12th Century B.C., after the fall of Troy, and he tells us that Britain, which was then
called Albion, was colonized by a party of fugitives from the fall of Troy. They were the
Trojans, led by a prince called Brutus. They arrived in Britain, and as we are told,
Britain was only inhabited by a few giants, most of them in Cornwall. Geoffrey tells us
that the Trojans had no great trouble exterminating the giants. They then took over the
country, generally, and renamed it, Britain, after their leader, Brutus. This is a nice
example of merry medieval etymology. They founded a capital city on the Thames, near Troy,
afterwards called London.
Geoffrey then goes on to list a whole series of British kings in the thousand years or
so B.C. He has, I think, 76 of them, nearly all imaginary, some of them, perhaps, based on
old traditions, some invented by himself. We find some very interesting things. As I
mentioned, we find King Lear. Just before King Lear is the story of his father, Bladud,
who discovered the hot springs at Bath. You may be interested to know that Bladud also
made himself a pair of wings and flew over London, but crashed on a temple in the first
recorded "flying accident." His son was Lear.
You may notice, of course, that although Shakespeare gives a lot more about King Lear
than Geoffrey does, he doesn't give us two things. One, he doesn't tell us when King Lear
lived. Geoffrey does tell us that, it was in the 8th Century B.C. We also know that King
Lear goes mad, but in view of the activities of his father with his pair of wings, I can't
help thinking there may have been madness in the family.
Well, eventually, Geoffrey gets to the Roman conquest of Britain and then he can't be
quite so free in his inventions, but he tries to make out that the Romans never really
conquered Britain. It was a sort of protectorate and the line of British Kings went on
under the Roman protection. He improves his story by making out that several of the Roman
Emperors were British, anyway. But the part we're most interested in is after Roman
Britain, the 5th Century A.D., when Britain became independent.
He tells us that there was a king called Constintine, who had three sons, but that he
was assassinated, and power came into the hands of a usurper named Vortigern. Vortigern
did something that was absolutely disastrous for his country. He needed auxilliary troops
to fight the barbarians, the Picts and other people who were making trouble in the north
and he invited the heathen Saxons, from across the North Sea, to settle in Britain. These
Saxons, of course, were the ancestors of the English, but at that time, they were a very
ruthless and piratical lot whose leader was Hengist.
Vortigern was, fundamentally, a weak sort of character, and he came under Hengist's
thumb. The Saxons seized a great deal of territory and, at a peace conference arranged by
Vortigern and Hengist, killed all the British noblemen with weapons they had secreted in
their boots. Vortigern, in fear for his life, fled to Wales and tried to build himself a
fortress in Snodonia. The walls kept collapsing and, in the course of his attempts to
repair the damage, Merlin comes on the scene. This is where Merlin enters literature for
the first time, as an advisor to Vortigern, or rather as a prophet, who appeared on the
scene and foretold Vortigern's speedy doom which did, in fact, follow.
The rightful kings were restored. I cannot tell you exactly when this is supposed to
have happened, but it was probably somewhere about the 430's. One of the rightful rulers
is called Aurelius Ambrosius (the Ambrosius Aurelianus of history) and one is called
Uther. With Uther, we rise to the climax of Geoffrey's story, Arthur.
Uther, he says, was holding court in London, one day, and among the guests were
Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall and his wife, Ygerna. Uther's eye feel upon Ygerna and he
conceived a violent passion for her. As Geoffrey puts it, he was always passing her dishes
and engaging her in sprightly conversation. Her husband realized, after a while, that the
conversation had become too sprightly and, without asking permission, he left the court,
taking Ygerna with him. He put her in his castle at Tintagel, on the North Coast of
Cornwall, where he supposed she would be out of Uther's reach, if he should come looking
for her.
Now if you've been to Tintagel, you'll see that this was rather an astute thing to do.
It's right out on a huge rocky promontory, connected with the mainland by one narrow
bridge. He reckoned that even if Uther arrived with a whole army, he couldn't get in, that
a few guards could hold the bridge. Meanwhile, Uther had taken this departure from the
court as an insult and sent his troops down to ravage the duke's lands, in Cornwall. The
duke marched out with his own troops to contest the invasion and at this point, Merlin
reappears.
Merlin went to Uther and told him that he could achieve what he desired in the matter
of Ygerna. Merlin did this by turning the King into an exact replica of the lady's
husband, a clone, so to speak. This was the most effective possible disguise for the
purpose, because he simply went into the castle. The guards assumed that this was the boss
returning, he had his way with Ygerna and, thus, was Arthur begotten. I'm bound to say
that if you actually look at Tintagel, the story does raise certain queries and,
particularly, if you saw the film, "Excalibur." In the film, Uther not only
performs this act of sexual conquest, he does it in full medieval armor which weighed
about 50 pounds.
Now, considering all the steps you have to climb to get to the castle, I must say that
if I had done this wearing full medieval armor, I would not have felt equal to anything
much by the time I got to the top. At any rate, thus, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth,
was Arthur begotten.
Meanwhile, very fortunately, her real husband, the duke, had been killed in battle, so
Uther was able to resume his true shape, marry the lady, make her his Queen and make their
son, Arthur, his heir. Well, says Geoffrey, Uther died comparatively young and Arthur came
to the throne while he was still in his teens, but he, very soon, showed that he was a
capable leader. He led his troops against the Saxons, who were still making trouble in
various parts of the country, and after various vicissitudes he defeated them on a hill
outside Bath, wielding a wonderful sword called Caliburn, which had been forged in the
Isle of Avalon, an enchanted place.
You'll notice that Geoffrey hasn't quite got the name Excalibur yet, but the name
Caliburn will very soon become Excalibur, in writers who follow him. After defeating the
Saxons, Arthur went north into what is now Scotland, where the Picts and Scots had been
making trouble. He defeated the Picts and Scots and then, because the Irish had been
helping them, he went over and conquered Ireland. Then, as an afterthought, he went and
conquered Iceland, which would not, then, have been very difficult, because it was
uninhabited. He came back and reigned with great magnificence, prosperity and popularity.
He married Guinevere and began to form an order of knighthood, attracting men of note from
every nation. This, of course, is the beginning of the idea of the Knights of the Round
Table, although Geoffrey doesn't actually introduce the table as a piece of furniture, but
he does introduce this theme of Arthur's knights and their international fame.
He reigned for quite a long time, 12 years or so, in peace and prosperity, and then he
resolved to undertake conquests on the continent. He conquered Norway and he conquered
Denmark. In this part of the story, we are beginning to see more characters that are
familiar to us. We hear of Gawain and Kay and Bedivere. We didn't hear of Lancelot,
because he doesn't come into the story until after Geoffrey's time. Then, Arthur went over
to Gaul, the country now called France, which was still in the grip of the Western Roman
Empire, if rather shakily.
This is one of the clues, of course, to when Geoffrey thinks all this is happening,
because the Western Roman Empire ended in 476, so, presumably, he's somewhere in the 5th
Century. Arthur conquered the Romans, or defeated them at least, and took over a goodly
part of Gaul and organized his conquests under his followers, Kay, Bedivere and others. He
went back to Britain and held court very magnificently at Caerleon-upon-Usk, in Wales,
near Monmouth. Geoffrey, very possibly, choose this site because he had seen the ruins and
because it was a town dating from Roman times, which would still have been standing when
Arthur reigned.
In Geoffrey's account of Arthur's court, he doesn't actually mention Camelot, but this
is the beginning of the conception of Camelot. While Arthur was holding court at Caerleon,
ambassadors came from Rome, protesting his conquests and his withholding of the tribute
which the Britons had once paid to Rome. They demanded that he pay the tribute and restore
the lands he had overrun. Arthur decided to take the offensive and led an army to Gaul,
leaving at home his nephew, Mordred, as his deputy, together with Guinevere.
He defeated the Romans and was marching into Burgundy, in central France, when he was
recalled by bad news from home. Mordred had revolted. He persuaded the Queen to live in
adultery with him and had proclaimed himself King. Arthur hurried back and defeated the
traitor in battle, in Cornwall, by the River Camel. Mordred was killed but Arthur was
grievously wounded and, says Geoffrey, he was taken away to the Isle of Avalon for his
wounds to be attended too.
That is a very strange ending and, of course, we are not told whether he died or what
happened. We're simply told that a cousin of his became king and then Geoffrey goes on
with the history, until he comes to the end of it a couple of hundred years further
on.
What Geoffrey seems to be doing here is leaving the way open for what was certainly a
folk belief about Arthur; that he had never really died; that he was immortal. He was in
this mysterious Isle of Avalon or he was asleep in a cave or somewhere like that and
sooner or later he would come back. Geoffrey never commits himself to this because he
doen't tell us what happened to Arthur, he leaves the door open.
Now, of course, this is not history and you cannot rely on Geoffrey for any historical
facts, as I said before, but he undoubtedly uses history. We can see him doing this right
through the Roman period, we can see him doing it in the part that comes after King
Arthur, and we can see him doing it, to some extent, with the mysterious 5th century
itself. We can see that he does use various old Welsh chronicles and things like that.
Arthur is clearly in the 5th century and if we ask if this is anything like what happened
in the 5th century the answer is yes, it is something like it.
This is not a story made up out of nothing at all. It is a fact that the people of
Britain were the Celtic people, the ancestors of the Welsh, and that they did become
independent of Rome, somewhere about the year 410. There is every reason to think that
this King Vortigern existed and certainly the Saxons, the ancestors of the English, were
coming into the country about this time as auxilliary troops. This is the sort of thing
that the late Roman Emperors had done when they were beset with the invading barbarian
tribes. They would bring in one lot of barbarians under some sort of treaty, on condition
that they would keep order and fight against the other barbarians. When they were brought
in on this basis, they were called "foederati" (federates), and it is reasonable
to suppose that the Saxons did come in on that basis, just as Geoffrey tells us.
We know, also, that they got out of hand; that many more Saxons came into the country
and that, somewhere about the middle of the 5th century they seem to have been raiding,
widely, over most of what is now England, and, for a while, the country fell into anarchy.
We know from archeology that around this time the Britons were deserting the Roman towns
and settling in the country in old hill forts and places of that kind (presumably, if you
stayed in a town with these raiders around you were a sitting duck, and it was better to
go somewhere else). So, we find that Geoffrey's story is confirmed, to some extent, by the
fact that people were leaving the towns, evidently to get away from the marauders. And, we
know that something happened in Britain which didn't happen anywhere else in the old Roman
empire of the West, and this is the most significant thing for the story of Arthur.
Generally speaking, when the various barbarians poured across Gaul and Spain, the
people of those provinces do not really seem to have cared very much. There is not much
sign of popular opposition to them, but in Britain, the situation was different. The
people had become independent, they had acquired their freedom and they did fight back
against the invaders quite effectively.
There was a phase when the Saxons, having raided at will for years, for some reason
withdrew into their original settlements. We know, also, that somewhere around the year
500, there was a British victory at a place called Mount Badon which seems to have stopped
the Saxon encrochments for quite a long time. So, the story of Arthur and the recovery of
the Britons does have its roots in something that was quite unique: the successful
struggle of an independent, formerly Roman people against a barbarian invader.
Now, before we attempt to decide anything about Arthur himself, it may be a good idea
to look at something we can be rather surer of; the evidence of archeology. Several places
which are connected with Arthur (such as Tintagel, in Cornwall) have been excavated in
this century and we know that they were inhabited at about the right time, although we
don't know very much about them.
There is a more interesting instance in the county of Somerset; the ancient hill fort
called Cadbury Castle. When I speak of a hill fort, I mean an earthwork dating from the
Iron Age, which was the ancient British period, before the Roman conquest. Then, people
lived on top of hills and fortified them with great lines of banks and ditches (ramparts)
all around them. Eventhough it's called a "castle," that doesn't mean that there
was ever a castle there, in the medieval sense, with great towers and battlements; it
means that the hill itself was the castle.
Now, there are many of these hillforts, but Cadbury Castle is rather special because
about the year 1542, a traveler named John Leland said that this hillfort was Camelot,
Arthur's fort or headquarters. He doesn't say that "it may have been" or that
"this is a guess," he just refers to this as an understood thing and says
"Arthur much resorted to Camelot." Leland doesn't tell us any more, but clearly,
at that time, there was some idea that this hill was connected with Arthur. Now, we have
to be careful about this; Camelot, at least in the medieval sense, the way you see it
depicted in films, certainly never existed. There would never have been a time when you
could go up that hill and see a great stone fortress with Vanessa Redgrave strolling on
the battlements, but it could be Camelot if we define very carefully what we mean when we
use that term. Camelot, you see, is never claimed to be the capital of Britain. It's
Arthur's special place, and it could be that, behind the idea of Camelot, is the fact that
an original Arthur, an original King, did occupy that hill and make it his headquarters,
sometime back in the fifth century.
The modern Cadbury story began almost 50 years ago. On top of the hill is a great,
grassy enclosure inside the ramparts (about 18 acres all together) and, at that time, the
owner of the hill plowed up the summit area for crops. The soil there is very shallow so
the plow turned over the soil almost down to the bedrock. A local amateur archaeologist, a
Mrs. Harfield, used to go up that hill to walk her dog. The dog's name was Caesar and
while Caesar trotted around, Mrs. Harfield walked up and down the plow furrows poking
around in the plowed soil with the ferrule of her umbrella. This is the most elementary
form of archeology and she found little fragments of pottery, and showed them to Dr.
Raleigh Radford, one of the great experts on the Arthurian period.
Radford had worked at Tintagel some years before and recognized, in the Cadbury
pottery, a certain similarity to the kind he had found at Tintagel. The pottery wasn't
made in Britain and was a rather fancy sort of imported stuff from the Eastern
Mediterranean, a very long way off and very expensive to import. It was used for luxury
goods (wine and expensive oils) and what was most important of all, it could be dated
pretty close to the time Arthur was supposed to have flourished.
This sort of earthenware has been found in other places in Britain, but finding it
implies something about the place where you find it. It suggests that somewhere closeby
there must have been a wealthy household, the household of a prince or king who had the
power, wealth and influence to import this expensive stuff and these kinds of luxury
goods. Now, a finding like this puts Cadbury in quite a new light.
It was a long time before any further work was done. In the 1960's the Camelot Research
Committee was formed, of which I was Secretary and Leslie Alcock (now Professor Alcock)
was The Director of Excavations. Between 1966-70 Cadbury Castle was excavated and we found
some very interesting things. The most important thing was that the hill had been vacant
during the Roman period because the Romans, evidently, moved the people out so that they
couldn't use it in a rebellion.
After the Romans left Britain, it had been reoccupied at about the time of Arthur, the
late 5th century, and had been refortified on an enormous scale. When we cut down through
the top rampart, we found a stone wall 16 feet thick running all the way around the top of
the hill for something like three quarters of a mile. The wall had been bound with timber
beams; they had been rotted away but you could see where they were. There had been some
sort of breast-work platform, possibly watch towers and there was a gatehouse.
The whole hillfort had been refortified about Arthur's time, evidently by a leader of
importance and high authority, as it would have required a great deal of wealth and very
great resources of manpower to accomplish that refortification. Since that time, it has
become even more interesting because many more of these hill forts have been excavated,
but there is no other case in England or Wales of an elaborate fortification .
What we have at Cadbury is hard evidence for a great leader with great resources, at
just about the right time, in the very part of the country that is traditionally
associated with King Arthur. Can we do any better? Can we home in on a man actually called
Arthur, or are we merely left with a pile of inconclusive evidence for some nameless,
great leader?
One of the most interesting bits of evidence for Arthur is his name. Arthur is the
Welsh form of the Roman name, Artorius, and we know that the British people were still
giving their children Roman names in the 5th century, even after they had broken away from
the empire, so, a man named Artorius would seem to belong to that period. Somewhat later
in the 6th century, we suddenly find records of about half a dozen men, all called Arthur,
who presumably had been named after a great hero of that name.
There is one other rather interesting piece of evidence for a real Arthur. This is the
story of his not being dead, but only asleep in a cave. He is said to be asleep underneath
the hill at Cadbury and in quite a number of other places, as well. Of course, this sounds
like a pure piece of folklore or a myth, but a very eminent folklorist, Jennifer Westwood,
has pointed out that there is something rather special and significant about this story of
a hero, asleep in a cave. She says that the same story is told of other people besides
Arthur; there is a German Emperor, a Spanish hero, a Polish hero, and various others
"asleep in caves" all over the continent. Westwood points out that the story is
always told of a real person, and never of a fairytale or a mythical character. Since that
story is told of Arthur, it suggests that he may have been a real person, but it is much
more difficult to get anything like a historical statement about him.
Where are traditions, poems and other materials handed down in Wales by the descendants
of the Britons which were known to Geoffrey of Monmouth and were used by him. There is a
work called the "Historia Brittonum" (History of the Britons), compiled
somewhere about the year 800, ascribed to a Welsh monk called Nennius. Nennius gives us
stories about what was going on in Britain in the 5th century and Geoffrey certainly used
some of them. There is a chapter telling of Arthur, a war leader in Britain sometime in
the late 5th century, who won 12 battles, culminating in the famous Battle of Mt. Badon.
The list is interesting list and very tantalizing, but it doesn't tell us anything really
about who Arthur was; whether he was some kind of high king or a local king, organizing a
resistance, or simply a commander-in-chief.
My own view is that he was something like what the Irish called a high king, a man who
held an honorary position at the head of all the other kings of Britain. Nennius tells us
where where these 12 battles were fought; sometimes we can identify the place, more
usually we cannot. Some of them seem to have been in Lincolnshire, in the East of England,
one is in Scotland, one is Chester, which is near the west side of the country. These
locations would suggest that Arthur was fighting the Saxons during that time of anarchy
and widespread raiding mentioned before, but there is a difficulty about accepting it as
real history. Nennius' list, written in Latin, is supposed to be based on an older Welsh
poem about the exploits of Arthur, which unfortunately we have lost.
Up to a point, it looks quite convincing but when he comes to the Battle of Mt. Badon,
it says that in that battle, Arthur slew 960 of the enemy single-handedly. Now, obviously,
anybody of whom that is said has already become a legend. We can't really be sure how much
history there is in this, and I think there is some, but the man who slays 960 men
single-handedly is obviously larger than life.
There are other references to Arthur in numerous local legends and in references to the
Battle of Camlann, where he was supposed to have fallen in his quarrel with Mordred,
originally called Medraut; a number of scholars have tried to piece together a believable
Arthur figure out of this matter. Professor Alcock tried in his book, "Arthur's
Britain," suggesting that what we have here is a tradition of a great military leader
who made Cadbury his principal fortification and that most of the rest of what is said
about Arthur is, more or less, fantasy.
This was a popular view for some years, and I certainly followed it myself in my own
earlier books, but it has to be admitted that we can't be very sure about this. These
references in Welsh chronicles, poems and so forth are all quite a lot later than the
events they are telling about, and in 1977, the very eminent Celtic scholar, David
Dumville, more or less ripped the whole thing to pieces in an article that had a great
influence on studies in this field. He argued that the Welsh evidence isn't really
historical evidence at all, that it's all a kind of void.
Certainly the Welsh materials are not early enough, they always have elements of legend
in them (like the killing of 960 men), they spread Arthur out too far in time (something
like 90 years) and they never give a real date for him, what I would call a chronological
fix. They never say that Arthur was king when so and so was emperor, and it all hangs in a
kind of void.
Now, I believe, we can get further, and I think I've succeeded in doing this. In 1980,
BBC Television ran a series of archaeological programs about the dark ages which were
presented by Michael Wood. In successive programmes, they took different time periods and
tried to relate them to a particular famous person who lived in that period. When he
discussed the 6th century and Cadbury Castle, he naturally related it to Arthur. He tried
to sew up the whole question of Arthur in about 10 minutes flat, which I thought was less
than convincing, but I realized that he had made some important points about what the
evidence was like. I went back to some old ideas of my own and started re-thinking them.
It seems to me that, if we approach it from a rather different angle, we can get to an
original Arthur figure.
The findings of my study of the sources for Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the
Kings of Britain," were originally published in "Speculum," the quarterly
journal of the Medieval Academy of America, in April, 1981. It is really a question of
lateral thinking. Historians, before, had always taken it for granted when they looked at
Geoffrey's account of King Arthur, that the only part that could have any sort of
historical basis was the part that took place in Britain. They believed that the whole
idea of Arthur's going over to Gaul and fighting on the continent was something Geoffrey
had simply invented and this meant, of course, that it was of no use looking for evidence
outside Britain (which meant chiefly Wales and as I've already said, this was
inconclusive).
But, this is not Geoffrey's way. He doesn't invent whole episodes out of nothing at
all. Half of his story of Arthur is taken up with the campaign in Gaul and yet, where did
he get it from? Interestingly, he gives us the only real dating for Arthur that Arthur
ever gets. He tells us three times that Arthur's continental campaign took place when the
Emperor (of the eastern part of the Roman Empire) was named Leo. Leo I was quite real and
reigned from 457 to 474. There are other names that I think narrow it down further. If we
look at the continental records at that time, we find that between 468-70, exactly at the
time Geoffrey indicates, a man described as the king of the Britons did lead an army into
Gaul, and did get involved in the various troubles and wars that were going on at the
time.
We even have a letter to him that puts us, incidentally, in the same position as with
Shakespeare. We have a letter to Shakespeare, but unfortunately we have no letter by
Shakespeare. Likewise, we have a letter to this king of the Britons who appears in Gaul
but, unfortunately, no letter written by him. But the letter written to him is good enough
evidence of his being a real person. The reason why nobody really followed up on this man
is that the two best pieces of evidence for him don't call him Arthur, they call him
Riothamus.
It has been supposed that Riothamus was his name which, of course, would probably rule
out Arthur. But, some years ago, I discovered and, simultaneously, a very eminent French
historian, Fleuriot, discovered that Riothamus is not a name at all, but a title. It's the
Latin form of what would have been a British title, Rigotamus, meaning the supreme or high
king.
That left the question of his given name open and, in fact, there is a Breton account
of this war which apparently refers to the same man and does call him Arthur. If we look
at Riothamus' career, he does a lot of things that Geoffrey seems to build on. He takes
his army over to Gaul at the right time (during the reign of Leo), he advances to the
neighborhood of Burgundy and vanishes from history, apparently without dying, which is
similar to what Geoffrey tells us about Arthur.
Riothamus was actually betrayed by a deputy ruler, a Roman official, who intrigued with
the barbarians and this is exactly the theme that Geoffrey takes up and imagines Mordred
doing. Arthur-Riothamus, or whatever we call him, disappears from history with no recorded
death, just as Arthur does, and when we last see him and follow his progress on the map,
he is actually moving in the direction of a real town in Burgundy, called Avallon, which
seems almost too good to be true.
Let me say right away that this cannot be the whole explanation of Arthur. We don't
know what Riothamus was doing in Britain before he went overseas, but we can say that he
is the only real candidate for the refortifier of Cadbury. There is nobody else on record
who could have done it. He could certainly have fought some of the battles that Arthur is
supposed to have fought. Unless more is found about him we cannot be very sure how much of
the story of Arthur he accounts for. Nobody could account for the whole of it because it
spreads out too far in time and there are other difficulties.
I believe, though, that Arthur-Riothamus, who is a documented person, is the starting
point of the story in the 460's A.D. and there is some evidence from medieval chronicles
that this was known to some historians in the middle ages. Now, the King Arthur of legend
may very well have absorbed the exploits of other men, perhaps other men called Arthur,
and here we can only conjecture. The figure of Arthur, in any case, grows and spreads in
literature. He becomes much more than any original could have ever been, and he becomes a
great patriotic symbol.
The real question is not "did Arthur exist?" Riothamus, certainly did exist.
There is no question about that, at all, and we have good contemporary evidence for it.
The question really becomes, "is Riothamus the original figure around which the
legend of King Arthur was constructed?" I believe he is. There are so many
coincidences and Riothamus does so many "Arthurian" things, that I think we have
finally got down to the bedrock.
If we do regard this man, Riothamus, as the original Arthur, we are putting him a
generation or two earlier than many historians have tended to do (the 460's rather than
the early 500's). This would place him closer to Roman civilization; it would make him
probably a man with a more or less Roman education; bilingual, using Latin as well as the
British language; a real king and not just a general; somebody who was important enough to
be involved in continental affairs and in the affairs of the empire as it struggled to
maintain itself in the West.
I think this raises new issues about who the original Arthur might have been and what
he might have been like, and if, by doing that, I've opened up any fresh potentialities of
interpretation, of imagination, of fiction, poetry or drama, I'll be just as pleased and
gratified as anyone else.
Arthurian
Mythology 
