Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons Francis Pryor Leading archaeologist Francis Pryor retells the story of King Arthur, legendary king of the Britons, tracing it back to its Bronze Age origins.The legend of King Arthur and Camelot is one of the most enduring in Britain's history, spanning centuries and surviving invasions by Angles, Vikings and Normans. In his latest book Francis Pryor – one of Britain’s most celebrated archaeologists and author of the acclaimed ‘Britain B.C.’ and ‘Seahenge’ – traces the story of Arthur back to its ancient origins. Putting forth the compelling idea that most of the key elements of the Arthurian legends are deeply rooted in Bronze and Iron Ages (the sword Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, the Sword in the Stone and so on), Pryor argues that the legends' survival mirrors a flourishing, indigenous culture that endured through the Roman occupation of Britain, and the subsequent invasions of the so-called Dark Ages.As in ‘Britain B.C.’, Pryor roots his story in the very landscape, from Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, to South Cadbury Castle in Somerset and Tintagel in Cornwall. He traces the story back to the 5th-century King Arthur and beyond, all the time testing his ideas with archaeological evidence, and showing how the story was manipulated through the ages for various historical and literary purposes, by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory, among others.Delving into history, literary sources – ancient, medieval and romantic – and archaeological research, Francis Pryor creates an original, lively and illuminating account of this most British of legends. BRITAIN A.D. A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons FRANCIS PRYOR Copyright (#ulink_716ed039-c6fa-50eb-b057-0e5d0acee28f) Harper Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harperpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004 Copyright © Francis Pryor 2004 Francis Pryor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book Maps and diagrams by Leslie Robinson and Rex Nicholls A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007181872 Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007347582 Version: 2017-01-05 For Maisie From the reviews of Britain AD: ‘Controversial, deceptively clever and a damn good read’ BBC History Magazine ‘Pryor’s opinionated (yet fairly argued) text rollicks along, informed by a great deal of recent research and new discoveries…Eminently readable’ British Archaeology ‘Francis Pryor has been an eloquent advocate for a new, fascinating vision of the prehistoric past. After Seahenge and Britain BC, this book completes an exhilarating trilogy in which the received ideas of far too long are swept away’ Scotsman Table of Contents Cover Page (#ucff70eb1-58d9-5e4a-98cb-4927a53675b6) Title Page (#ua652d8e0-2905-514c-ae3a-343ea0075b0f) Copyright (#u928e2e23-f5c0-56f3-888a-8bffbc8c37ac) Dedication (#ud5c8a19a-49b1-5f89-9806-b421fe472c6b) Epigraph (#u9c4f7825-e6fc-545a-a845-f0b21d0cc3fd) INTRODUCTION (#ua4b6aedf-fea7-586d-a451-0611b001c369) CHAPTER ONE Origin Myths: Britons, Celts and Anglo-Saxons (#u38c9e35a-4357-5adc-a1c5-bdf9601d69eb) CHAPTER TWO The Origins and Legacy of Arthur (#u4e49de7d-6c22-5a44-8a5e-1ffaf807dbf4) CHAPTER THREE Ancient Britons (#u77c7b338-364e-5eb7-a509-d21c0e8cda6b) CHAPTER FOUR My Roman Britain (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER FIVE Late- and Post-Roman Britain: The Situation in the South and East (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SIX The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Origins of England (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SEVEN Arthurian Britain: The Situation in the West and South-West (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER EIGHT The Making of the English Landscape (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER NINE Continuity and Change (#litres_trial_promo) Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Plates (#litres_trial_promo) Text illustrations and Maps (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_63ede682-9fa4-553f-ab8b-c261044984e5) Britain ad is in a sense the third volume of an informal trilogy on the archaeology and early history of Britain. It was not planned as a trilogy from the outset, because the idea only came to me gradually, as I was writing the first of the three books, Seahenge. I knew then that I had to write Britain bc, and in my heart of hearts I also wanted very much to tackle the challenge posed by the collapse of Roman rule and the onset of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ of the fifth to seventh centuries ad. But I felt more than a little daunted by the task. It was the writing of Britain bc that gave me the broader perspective and confidence to undertake the present work. As I worked on Seahenge, I became aware that I was writing a book about what archaeologists refer to as ‘process’: the methods, approaches and techniques whereby archaeology is actually done. In that sense, Seahenge is a book less specifically about Britain than the other two; but if you read Seahenge first you will derive more from the Britain books, because you will better understand the thought processes behind the work of the various archaeologists and historians involved. Incidentally, I should add here that Mark Brennand and Maisie Taylor have written the full detailed, academic report on that most remarkable of sites. (#litres_trial_promo) Their detailed analysis of the fifty-five timbers—the way they were worked and how they were positioned—has given us a unique insight into the way Early Bronze Age people viewed their world. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that it has transformed our understanding of Early Bronze Age ritual and religion, and has confirmed many theories that had hitherto been based largely on speculation. My approach is a personal one. I believe with some passion that archaeology is a personal discipline, and consider it misleading to suggest that there are such things as impersonal, dispassionate or objective archaeological books, just as there are no absolute facts in archaeology, other than the objects themselves. The objects are facts, but anything we attribute to them is interpretation. You may think that a term like ‘cremation urn’ has to be factual; but that presupposes that we all agree on what constitutes a cremation—and here, as elsewhere, there are many grounds for argument. If archaeologists and historians care about their subject, they will have axes to grind, and I prefer to sharpen mine in public. In all my books I have tried to think and write in time-depth, because I am convinced that the fundamental attitudes underlying human society take a long time to change. Such a long-term view of British history and prehistory would have been impossible without the work of the Venerable Bede, who was one of the ablest minds of all time. It was Bede, in his great Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), which he completed in the year 731, who introduced the system of BC/AD to British history. (#litres_trial_promo) In Britain BC I used archaeology to give an impression of what it might have been like to have been alive in the supposedly anonymous and faceless world of prehistoric times. Prehistory, incidentally, is the name given to the study of human history before the advent of writing and written records, which arrived in Britain with the Roman Conquest of AD 43. Too often it is portrayed as a time when individuals, who of course could not be identified, did not matter. So they have tended to be forgotten, their humanity replaced by explanations that assume that prehistoric people somehow lacked free will. In the past prehistorians were too ready to attribute social and cultural innovation to external processes such as migration, economic collapse and environmental change. By approaching their subject in this cold-blooded way, they dehumanised it and made ancient people appear like machines that merely responded to various stimuli in a predictable fashion. This was far too mechanistic for my taste: I prefer my archaeology, like my friends, to be human, fallible and hard to explain. But for some reason nearly all archaeologists detest unsolved mysteries; they would prefer any explanation to no explanation. Archaeologists dealing with the period covered by Britain ad have also fallen, too often, into a mechanistic explanation of change and the denial of free will to the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxons’. But there is an important difference between the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ and prehistory, because now we are no longer wholly reliant on archaeology. In the present book I have tried to reconcile the contrasting views of ancient life provided by historians and archaeologists; and I conclude that in many significant respects the two are irreconcilable. I do not believe that this matters a great deal, because the authors of the only ‘historical’ sources available were not writing history at all: they were writing polemic, with a well-defined audience and purpose. I shall have more to say on that in Chapters 1 and 2. In this book I will suggest that in the fifth and sixth centuries AD there are, if anything, rather too many faces: unreliable ancient authors, semi-mythical leaders and one impossible hero called Arthur. These faces have been dominant for far too long, and the voices that have attended them—sometimes their own, more often those of their modern academic supporters—have tended to drown out the quieter, subtler, and to me far more persuasive, stirrings of archaeology. In this book I have made a conscious effort to redress this imbalance. I have tried to write about more than just the lives of people in the past. I have attempted to make my work relevant to the world around us today. If archaeology is only about antiquity it will soon wither and die, as a pointless, self-serving pursuit. This trilogy addresses themes that matter in the twenty-first century: questions about ideology, the role of religion in daily life, problems of identity and sense of place. In the present book I have also grasped the nettle of what it means to be British—but I do not offer solutions, because there aren’t any. I also avoid the easy way out of saying that there is no such thing as Britishness. Popular definitions of Britishness certainly vary, but that does not invalidate them. Some of them may be jingoistic, or worse, but I believe that a sense of community, however one chooses to define that term, is something worth holding on to in a crowded world that is growing increasingly self-centred. Finally, I write about something that is surely quintessentially British, namely the keeping up of appearances. Over the years I have become increasingly convinced that the British use their past as a surface coating, a facing, to prevent them from thinking about who they really are as individuals. You can see a rather extreme expression of this tendency if you visit Glastonbury. Anyone who stood outside the Abbey Gates with a loudhailer and proclaimed that Arthur never existed, and that Camelot and Avalon were not intended to be taken as literal truth, would be jeered to the echo, before the rocks began to fly. Much of the Arthurian New Age ‘philosophy’ is actually quite closely linked to early-twentieth-century views on racial purity, in which people like the Celts were seen to have an actual, ethnic identity. In today’s New Age, the ancient Celt is seen to possess mystical virtues that your average Irish Dark Age warlord would have found less than attractive.Half-baked, wishy-washymysticism would not have appealed to him. In the first two chapters of this book we will see how Druidism, Arthur and what is called the ‘Celtic Twilight’ are largely modern inventions. This already grossly distorted view of early British history has been further elaborated by the New Agers. I wouldn’t object to this—after all, everyone is free to believe what they choose—were it not for the fact that I detect whiffs of quasi-racism in much of this muddled thinking. I get very wary when I hear talk of how wonderful the Celts were. The unlamented Aryans lurk not far below the Arthurian surface, in legends such as Tristan and Yseult; if, that is, one treats these stories as anything other than fiction, pure and simple. In Seahenge I played down the full horror of some of the events surrounding the lifting of the timbers from the beach at Holme-nextthe-Sea in Norfolk, as I was writing principally about archaeology, and did not want to chase what I then regarded as a red herring. (#litres_trial_promo) It was also both too close and too unpleasant even to attempt to write about with any degree of objectivity. Readers may however recall that the unfortunate archaeologists on the beach had to face the wrath of neo-Pagans and Druids, which they did with dignity and not a little courage. I remember how one of the Druids proclaimed angrily that he was a ‘British Aboriginal’, and that we were desecrating ‘his’ religious site. I replied, in a foolish attempt to use humour to defuse the situation, that that was fine, because I was descended from Vikings and was therefore allowed to do a little light pillaging. This made him apoplectic with rage. He genuinely believed in his racial purity, and that that gave him certain rights. The linking of rights to race is just a blink away from Nazi beliefs. Although it is not my main purpose, I do hope to debunk some of these spurious half-truths, and in the process help people come to their own conclusions about what it meant to be British in the past, what it means in the present, and what it will mean in the future—and of these three, the future is the one that matters most. I have had a lot of fun writing this book. I have visited remote and extraordinary places, and met many old friends and some fascinating new people. The old friends were generally archaeologists, and the new people were mainly historians or specialists in fields of study that a prehistorian such as myself is unlikely to encounter. Britain ad, and the making of the three television films that have accompanied it, has been a wonderful journey of discovery. Having said that, I must sound a note of warning. Journeys of discovery lead one into uncharted territory, but in the present instance that territory is not the true terra incognita one encounters during academic research. Instead this quest has taken me into realms of the past that have been thoroughly studied by many archaeologists, historians and, more recently, scientists. These scholars might reasonably enquire what business a prehistorian of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages has with post-Roman Britain. In my defence I can only say that sometimes a fresh view, one rooted in a lifetime’s experience in a different, but closely related, field, can sometimes provide unexpected insights. I do not think it hurts to view the three or so centuries of the misnamed ‘Dark Ages’ (i.e. from the official end of the Roman Empire in Britain to, say, the mid-seventh century: AD 410—650) as what they were: an insular development out of Later Iron Age culture, following some 350 years of Roman influence. (#litres_trial_promo) In archaeology it is always a good idea to examine origins and consequences: too often we fix our gaze on one period on its own. Chronological isolationism is just as bad as its geographical equivalent; indeed, when it comes to the study of post-Roman Britain it is essential to take a broad view of both time and space. In this book I have tried to view the events of the post-Roman epoch in greater time-depth than previously. To my mind what happened in Dark Age Britain is not particularly surprising when placed against the backdrop of prehistory. What is strange, however, is the variety of ways in which the post-Roman period has been interpreted by subsequent generations, including our own. I suspect this has something to do with identity: the identity of various ?lites, including royalty. It also has to do with emerging and beleaguered national identities. Again, I touch on these themes further in the first two chapters. For myths to arise they often require mystery, and the post-Roman period has always been seen in the popular imagination as particularly mysterious. I was brought up to believe that chaos and anarchy followed the collapse of Roman civilisation in Britain. Out of this primordial cultural soup arose a new form of life which in southern Britain was to be called England. The magic ingredient, the yeast of the brew, was hordes of Continental immigrants who by the early seventh century had transformed post-Roman anarchy into the rugged, no-nonsense world of the Anglo-Saxons. As national origin myths go, that of England is pretty good. It explains why the English are—or think they are—so different from the other nations of Britain. It’s also an excellent story. But whether it’s true or not is another question altogether. Today most people with even a passing interest in the past are broadly familiar with what one might call the cultural aspects of medieval times. We enjoy their great buildings, their paintings, sculpture and increasingly their music. As a result, we believe we can identify with them. The post-Roman period lurks on the misty, romantic fringes of that world. It’s a period that we wish we could identify with, but sadly we cannot. This is frustrating, because for better or worse the Dark Ages lie at the threshold of the period that gave rise to our own times. As a consequence of this, over the centuries we have recast the Age of Arthur in our own image. This is because historians, story-tellers and others are very good at reshaping the past in ways which reflect contemporary concerns. Today, for example, some of us look to Arthur to supply the mysticism which seems to have vanished from modern life, for whatever reason: perhaps the rationality of science, growing secularism, or even the dogmatic certainties of evangelical religion. These surely are some of the reasons why the Arthur industry is thriving. I have no wish to debunk the hundreds of books, films and videos that appear every year on Arthur and his court. Rather my intention is to think about the contexts of that time and to consider what might actually have happened, given what we know about previous and subsequent epochs from both archaeology and history. I have already mentioned that the Romans introduced writing to Britain. Of course most people were not aware of it at the time, but this process had already given rise to the discipline of history, which one might define as the study of the past from written sources. These sources can be as diverse as wills, letters, accounts, inscriptions, military commands or ecclesiastical texts, but they are all grist to the historian’s mill. The historian’s tradition is to paint with a broad brush and to seek causes for historical events. Historians also have a tradition of superb writing: open Edward Gibbon’s magisterial The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (written between 1776 and 1788) at random, and some resounding passage will tumble forth. This is what Gibbon says about King Arthur. I quote it at length both because it makes excellent sense and because it reads so beautifully: But every British name is effaced by the illustrious name of ARTHUR,* (#ulink_1a036ac7-eea1-547d-a924-76f0a7ebe6e4) the hereditary prince of the Silures, in south Wales, and the elective king or general of the nation. According to the most rational account? (#ulink_b1814982-8e1f-5f88-b471-df1b824c1f1c) he defeated, in twelve successive battles, the Angles of the North and the Saxons of the West; but the declining age of the hero was embittered by popular ingratitude and domestic misfortunes. The events of his life are less interesting than the singular revolutions of his fame. During a period of five hundred years the tradition of his exploits was preserved, and rudely embellished, by the obscure bards of Wales and Armorica [Brittany], who were odious to the Saxons, and unknown to the rest of mankind. The pride and curiosity of the Norman conquerors prompted them to inquire into the ancient history of Britain; they listened with fond credulity to the tale of Arthur, and eagerly applauded the merit of a prince who had triumphed over the Saxons, their common enemies. His romance, transcribed in the Latin of Jeffrey of Monmouth, and afterwards translated into the fashionable idiom of the times, was enriched with the various, though incoherent, ornaments which were familiar to the experience, the learning, or the fancy of the twelfth century…At length the light of science and reason was rekindled; the talisman was broken; the visionary fabric melted into air; and by a natural, though unjust, reverse of the public opinion, the severity of the present age is inclined to question the existence of Arthur. (#litres_trial_promo) That was going too far, even for Gibbon, who clearly believed in Arthur as a real historical figure. At first archaeologists followed this grand tradition, but it soon became apparent that the writing of sweeping narrative did not work for archaeology. It’s not that our data do not allow us to draw general conclusions; it’s just that we should not attempt to mimic what historians do so well. As archaeologists we can indeed paint with a broad brush, but we have learnt that it is best to confine our efforts to the painting of archaeological pictures. Today archaeology tends to be more concerned with the long-term processes of social change. We prefer to work with landscapes rather than lineages, and we tend to be less involved with one-off events than with more gradual change. When we do try to pin down specific historical incidents we often become unstuck. The classic case, which I will discuss in Chapter 6, is that of the so-called Anglo-Saxon ‘conquest’ of England, and its aftermath. Because archaeologists work with data that are foreign to most historians, we are sometimes accused of stretching the evidence too far. I was once kindly, but rather patronisingly, told by a classicist that I, and archaeologists like me, should take lessons on the limitations of inference. (#litres_trial_promo) He did not believe that prehistoric data (i.e. sherds of pottery, fragments of flint, or pieces of bone) were capable of sustaining speculation about the manner in which prehistoric communities might have viewed the world around them. Most prehistorians consider we are ‘speculating’ from the safety of solid statistical or palaeoenvironmental data. We do not believe that we are flying kites. Having said that, we do not believe either that we have actually hit on the truth, because unless a day dawns when we can somehow get inside the minds of long-dead people, we will never know how or what they actually thought. Even then we will have to confront the many prob lems that face anthropologists when they try to explain what motivates tribal societies in various parts of the world today. In fact the long established, innate conservatism of the archaeological profession makes it extremely hazardous for any prehistorian to espouse ‘flaky’ theories, or ideas that tend, however slightly, towards the crackpot. Recently, however, there has been a welcome freeing-up of attitudes. In the past two decades the intellectual climate in archaeology has become more liberal, and slightly less intolerant of dissent from within. Ironically, only history—in perhaps a century or two—will be able to judge the extent to which archaeology is actually revealing truths or is building castles in the air. There is one important difference between history and archaeology which has nothing to do with the quality of the data we study, but rather its quantity. Written historical information on the post-Roman era in Britain is surprisingly scarce, and new discoveries happen very rarely; when they do, it is often in the course of archaeological excavation. By contrast with the essentially static historical ‘database’, that of archaeology is constantly increasing. Hardly a day goes by without some new discovery. Often these discoveries might appear routine and unimportant, such as the exposure of the footings of yet another Saxon-period house, but these isolated pieces of information can be fitted together to form a coherent pattern. It’s a process that can take years, as we will see (Chapter 8) in the case of Dominic Powlesland’s work at West Heslerton in Yorkshire, but that does not make it any less reliable. The progress of archaeological research tends to be gradual and cumulative; it can only be measured from time to time. That is why it is sometimes necessary to step back in both time and space to take a broader view. When I started writing this book, I intended to organise it much as we had done the three television films, for the simple reason that it seemed to work very well. I also liked the process that gave rise to the structure of the films. In many ways the making of the television series was like an archaeological project, being based on a small and closely integrated team. As the months passed its structure grew in complexity: stories nested within stories in a way that is only possible on film, where one can show one thing on screen, while telling another in commentary and flashback. I decided to arrange the book in a simpler fashion, that was only broadly based on the structure of the films. I start with two chapters on the ancient sources and modern origin myths of Britain, and the legends that surround King Arthur. In subsequent chapters I turn to the archaeological evidence, starting not in the Dark Ages of immediately post-Roman Britain, not even in the preceding Roman period, but in pre-Roman, or prehistoric, times, where the roots of the mythical King undoubtedly lie. (#litres_trial_promo) Dates and Periods * (#ulink_612eb37d-2261-5bae-8017-ef76b0baeba2)Gibbon adds a footnote on his sources here, which concludes with the remark that ‘Mr Whittaker…has framed an interesting and even probable, narrative of the wars of Arthur: though it is impossible to allow the reality of the round table.’ ? (#ulink_612eb37d-2261-5bae-8017-ef76b0baeba2)By ‘most rational account’ he is probably referring to the Welsh author known as Nennius. CHAPTER ONE Origin Myths: Britons, Celts and Anglo-Saxons (#ulink_c1e3de56-444d-52cd-9dfd-e39c42c844f9) THE EARLY HISTORY of southern Britain has often been portrayed as particularly tumultuous and difficult. Sir Roy Strong has summarised the conventional picture in characteristically elegant fashion: The fifth and sixth centuries still remain ones of impenetrable obscurity, fully justifying their designation as the Dark Ages. Britain was only one of many countries which suffered the consequences of the collapse of the Roman Empire. In England’s case the effect was far more dramatic, for there was no continuity as two-thirds of the eastern parts of the island passed into the hands of German pagan and illiterate warrior tribesmen. Urban society collapsed, and the Latin language was abandoned in favour of British or primitive Welsh. Under the aegis of the British Church some form of Latin learning survived, but in the east a series of Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms emerged whose cultural status can only be categorised as barbarian. (#litres_trial_promo) If we examine the archaeological record it is hard to find convincing evidence for the picture of post-Roman disjunction, anarchy and chaos that is supposed to have led to the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries ad. It is even harder to find actual evidence for these invasions themselves. Instead, archaeology paints a picture of rural stability in those parts of southern and eastern Britain that were to become Anglo-Saxon England in the early seventh century. This stability should be set against a background of increasing contacts with the Continental mainland that had been underway since at least the Iron Age, and that continued throughout the Roman period. After the departure of the Roman field army in AD 409, order in the one-time province of Britannia was maintained by existing local ?lites and by elements of the erstwhile Roman army who effectively ‘privatised’ their services. The Christian Church most probably played a significant role in local administration, even in the east of England, where Anglo-Saxon paganism was once believed to have reigned supreme. This picture differs dramatically from the conventional image of the period known, inappropriately, as the Dark Ages. I believe that a number of long-held and popular, but ultimately false beliefs are obscuring what is actually a fascinating and highly creative period of British history. It was a time of huge change, but not of chaos. It was a period which witnessed the creation of a distinctive post-Roman European civilisation, and which also gave rise to some brilliantly executed and beautiful objects. Above all, it was never a Dark Age. In the version of the past taught at most British schools in the second half of the twentieth century, and still widely accepted by the population at large, British history begins with the Ancient Britons. One would suppose these to have been the indigenous or ‘native’ people of the British Isles, who had been living there since they became islands after the Ice Age, around nine thousand years ago. It was believed, however, that Britain had been subject to a number of invasions from the Continent in pre-Roman times: first, a wave of people who brought with them the arts of farming and pottery manufacture in the Neolithic or New Stone Age; then another, smaller, influx of new and genetically distinctive people known as the Beaker folk, who were believed to have introduced the skills of bronze-working. The third and perhaps most significant invasion, or invasions, was supposed to have taken place in the Iron Age, after about 500 bc. These newcomers were known as the Celts. In addition to these three main ‘invasions’ there were a number of others of less significance—making a total of eight or nine. It is not the purpose of this book to examine the earlier two of these three hypothetical prehistoric waves of immigration. (#litres_trial_promo) Suffice it to say that while modern archaeology does still accept that some incomers helped establish farming in Britain, the so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was far more an invasion of ideas than of people. The later invasions of Beaker folk are simply discounted, although personally I believe that something was going on in the Early Bronze Age, which may well have involved high-status individuals travelling to and from Britain. This is supported by a number of scientific tests and other archaeological indications which suggest that the population of prehistoric Britain and Europe was far more mobile than would have been supposed fifty years ago. But while mobility—where people travel hither and thither—is one thing, prehistorians today are reluctant to attribute most major changes to a single cause, such as mass migration. In the accepted picture of early British history, Iron Age (by now ‘Celtic’) Britain was visited by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC, and was finally conquered by the Romans in AD 43. There was a major revolt against Roman rule, led by the East Anglian queen of the Iceni, Boadicea (today Boudica) in AD 60—61. Christianity was made legal in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine the Great in AD 324, with the Edict of Milan. The Roman period in Britain ended nominally in or just before the year AD 410. There was then a period of about four decades, sometimes known as the ‘sub-Roman’ period, when a sort of insular Roman rule continued; but Anglo-Saxon migration had started, and the Romanised British population in eastern England were powerless to resist it. The following period, of two or so centuries, was known variously as the Pagan Saxon period or the Dark Ages (today most scholars prefer the term ‘Early Saxon’). It was characterised by waves of invasion by various people, including Angles, Saxons and Jutes. This was the age of the legendary King Arthur. Arthur was supposed to have been a Romanised Briton, based in the West Country, who led British/Celtic resistance to the Anglo-Saxons, who were expanding their domination of England westwards. He won a famous victory at the Battle of Mount Baddon or Badon, some time at the beginning of the sixth century, but was eventually defeated and slain at the Battle of Camlan in AD 539. Missionaries under St Augustine reintroduced Christianity to Britain in AD 597, and the Pagan Saxon period was followed by the Christian Saxon period, which came to an end with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Differences between St Augustine’s Roman Church and the British or Celtic Churches were resolved, largely in favour of the Roman Church, at the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Christian Saxon period witnessed the birth of England; its first widely acknowledged king was Alfred, who ruled from his capital Winchester in Wessex from 871 to 899. Alfred’s reign was largely given over to wresting eastern England back from Viking domination. Viking raids had become a serious problem from the late eighth century: the famous abbey on Lindisfarne island was sacked in 793, and the ‘great raiding army’ of Viking warriors invaded East Anglia in 866. It will be clear from this highly compressed synopsis of conventional British prehistory and early history that the Arthur stories are not the only examples of what one might term British origin myths. None of them attempts to explain British origins directly. In other words, they are not British equivalents of the biblical story of Creation. But they do nonetheless address themes that are closely bound up with a sense of emerging national identities. The problem is whether they are actually about the time in which they are supposed to have taken place, or the times in which they are told, retold or elaborated. My own view is that it’s the latter, if only because the real origins of British culture—whether or not it was ever perceived by prehistoric people as such—lie hidden in the mists of antiquity. I do not believe that it is necessary to define a culture to be part of one; it would be absurd to suggest that the people who created Stonehenge five thousand years ago were without a developed culture—indeed, a highly developed culture. It probably had many points in common with similar cultures in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but we do not know whether these communities saw themselves as either British or as part of a series of insular cultural traditions. I believe that the many parallels that can be observed in the layout of ceremonial and other ritual sites and monuments across Britain and Ireland reflect a shared cosmology or system of beliefs. That, however, is not to say that they shared a common culture. Take language. The people of the various tribal kingdoms of Britain would have understood the dialects of the kingdoms around them, but the leaders of, say, the Iceni in Norfolk would probably not have understood their equivalents in Wales, Northumberland or Devon. It is unlikely that the Ancient Britons saw themselves as Britons. By the Later Iron Age, in the century or so prior to the Roman Conquest, the upper echelons of southern British tribal societies would have been aware of the Channel and of Gaul (France) beyond it. Some would probably have had relatives there. At what point did a sense of ‘Britishness’ develop? If we are to answer that, which is essential to a proper understanding of Arthur’s role, we must first tackle the vexed question of the Celts, who are often seen as being synonymous with the Ancient Britons. Arthur was a Romanised Briton, and it follows that he must also have been a Romanised Celt. Who were they, then, these romantic-sounding Celts? They have had an excellent press. In 1970 the historian Nora Chadwick wrote, in a best-selling paperback on the subject: Celtic culture is the fine flower of the Iron Age, the last phase of European material and intellectual development before the Mediterranean world spread northwards over the Continent and linked it to the world of today…Common political institutions gave them a unity bordering on nationality, a concept which the Mediterranean peoples could understand. They realised that the Celts were a powerful people with a certain ethnic unity, occupying wide and clearly defined territories, in process of expansion, and that they were possessed of internal political organisation and formidable military strength. (#litres_trial_promo) At this point I should say a few words about culture and ethnicity, as they are understood in archaeology. ‘Culture’ is the harder of the two to pin down. At times I will use the word in its accepted contemporary sense: as a description of a given group of people with shared outlooks and values. At other times it will be clear from the context that I am using it in its narrower, archaeological sense. An archaeological ‘culture’ is one represented by a recurring assemblage of artefacts which are believed by archaeologists (although not necessarily by the people who made and used them) to represent a particular set of activities, or a particular group of people. For example, the widespread occurrence in Early Bronze Age Europe of highly decorated drinking vessels, together with bronze and copper daggers, was believed to represent people of the distinctive ‘Beaker Culture’. Today the word ‘culture’ is finding less favour; most archaeologists try to avoid it, as it carries so many other meanings. This has led to unhappy-sounding terms such as the ‘Beaker phenomenon’ or the ‘Beaker presence’, neither of which has any meaning at all. The term ‘ethnicity’ is less vague, and does not have a specialised archaeological definition. Nonetheless, the one I prefer is taken from the Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology: ‘The ascription, or claim, to belong to a particular cultural group on the basis of genetics, language or other cultural manifestations.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The Celts were seen as an ethnically distinct group of people whose origins lay around the upper Danube and Alpine regions. There are passing references to them by the great classical Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century bc. Their presence was also noted near the Greek colony atMassilia (Marseilles) by a slightly earlier writer, Hecataeus. (#litres_trial_promo) From Greek colony at Massilia approximately the fifth century BC it was believed that they spread north, east, south and west from their central European heartland. (#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the third century BC the process of expansion was drawing to a close. Then the Roman Empire came and went, and in post-Roman times Celtic culture continued to flourish mainly in western Britain and in neighbouring parts of north-western France. (#litres_trial_promo) Given this view of history we can only assume that elsewhere in Europe Celtic culture simply vanished in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (the Eastern or Byzantine Roman Empire continued until the fall of Constantinople in 1453). (#litres_trial_promo) The identification of the Celts as a distinct entity was largely based on a wonderful art style that came into existence in Early Iron Age Europe. (#litres_trial_promo) Celtic art, as it is generally known, did indeed begin in Continental Europe—as, centuries later, did Impressionism—but the spread of neither style of art involved the migration of people. Art is, after all, about ideas which can be communicated both by example and by word of mouth. The term ‘Celtic art’ has, however, stuck, and I do not think it can easily be dislodged. Personally, I would prefer a less culturally loaded term, like ‘Iron Age art’. But whatever one calls it, it is superb: it features vigorous, swirling plant and animal figures that possess an extraordinary grace and energy. The standards of design and craftsmanship are outstanding. Some of the finest examples of Celtic art were produced in Britain in the decades prior to the Roman Conquest of AD 43. (#litres_trial_promo) The art was both very distinctive and widespread throughout Europe, but there is little evidence for the spread of an actual people. This fact first came to prominence in 1962, when Professor Roy Hodson published a paper in the learned journal the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Two years later he wrote another in the same journal. In essence his argument was simple: the numerous invasions of Iron Age Britain that had been suggested by leading scholars such as Professor Christopher Hawkes of Oxford simply hadn’t happened. Hodson proposed that the changes in, for example, pottery styles that are evident in the British Iron Age merely reflect changes in style, taste and sometimes in technology (for example the introduction of the potter’s wheel in the first century BC). He argued persuasively that an invasion of new people from abroad would have brought with it widespread changes: in house shape, in burial customs, in farming practices and so forth—but that had not happened. British Iron Age houses remained resolutely round, whereas their counterparts on the Continent, where the invaders were supposed to have originated, were rectangular. It wasn’t enough to base the existence of hypothetical migrations on such slight evidence. Today Roy Hodson’s reinterpretation of the British Iron Age as a largely insular phenomenon is universally accepted by prehistorians. It has become the new orthodoxy. If there were no Iron Age invasions, then how did the Celts reach Britain? The answer can only be that they didn’t come from outside. In other words, they were always there. In that case, what was happening on the Continental mainland? What about the art? What about classical references to Celts in, for example, the area around Marseilles? How one answers these questions depends on one’s point of view. If you believe in an ancient people that shared a common ethnicity, and perhaps similar Indo-European languages and culture, it doesn’t really matter what you call them. ‘Celts’ will do nicely. ‘Prehistoric Europeans’ would be even better—or worse. The point is that retrospectively applied labels that are believed to have cultural or ethnic validity are pointless. In common with most of my colleagues, I take a position which acknowledges, for example, that there may indeed have been a tribal group living near Marseilles who called themselves Celts, but that the evidence for a vast pan-European Celtic culture simply isn’t there. Certainly people were moving around, as they have always done and will continue to do, but there is no evidence for large-scale, concerted folk movements in the fifth to third centuries BC. If you examine a given tract of landscape, as I have done in the Peterborough area over the past thirty years, there is no sign whatsoever that the population changed some time in the mid-first millennium BC with the arrival of the Celts. It simply did not happen. Everything, from the location and arrangement of fields, settlements and religious sites to ceremonial rites, bespeaks continuity. In Chapter 3 I will look at another, very different, Iron Age landscape in Hampshire, and again there is no evidence for a change of population. Today most prehistorians take the view that changes in the archaeological record are a reflection of technological advance, population growth and evolving social organisation. Societies were becoming more hierarchical and their leaders were becoming more powerful. These ?lites maintained contacts with each other by various means, such as the exchange, often over long distances, of high-status objects, many of which were examples of the best Celtic art. In short, one can substitute the words ‘Iron Age culture’ for ‘Celtic culture’. The big difference is that Iron Age culture was actually Iron Age cultures—plural. That applied in Britain as much as anywhere else. Archaeologically speaking, it would be misleading to talk about pre-Roman Celtic Britain as if it was a unified society. In fact the reverse was true, as we will see in Chapter 3. A side-effect of the debunking of the ancient Celts has been to deprive us of a species of archaeological book that was often very well-written and coherent. As the authors of Celtic histories believed they were describing a lost people, they were quite happy to draw together disparate strands of evidence to paint a vivid picture in a way we would hesitate to do today. (#litres_trial_promo) The origins and consequences of the Celtic myth have recently been reviewed by the archaeologist Simon James. He takes a decidedly minimalist view of the Celts, with which I am in complete agreement: The term ‘Celtic’ has accumulated so much baggage, so many confusing meanings and associations, that it is too compromised even to be useful as a more general label for the culture of these periods. The peoples in question organised themselves in a diversity of ways…and, it seems, spoke a variety of languages and dialects, which were not all mutually intelligible. The undoubted similarities and relations between them are best explained in terms of parallel development of many societies in intimate contact, rather than of radiation from a recent single common origin. (#litres_trial_promo) James considers that the notion of British identity is remarkably recent, and did not develop until the later Middle Ages. (#litres_trial_promo) It is an idea that might be thought to have its roots in the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, as that was the time when it became politically important to start thinking in terms of a broader British nation. But in fact there was little public enthusiasm for the idea until the 1770s, following the loss of the American colonies. Unsuccessful foreign wars can have unifying effects at home. The emergence of a broader British identity was given further impetus by the late eighteenth-century development of the second British Empire, based on India, which was beneficial to the interests of both Scotland and England. So any differences between the two countries were placed on hold. Archaeologists are part of modern society, and reflect the norms of that society; that is how the Celtic myth came into existence. It was then given intellectual substance by prehistorians, who have since been the first to debunk it. The modern notion of ‘Celticity’ or ‘Celticness’ has its origins in British insular independence movements. Many people in Ireland and Wales did not feel part of a Britain that was dominated by England. The situation in Scotland was more complex, because regional differences and traditional frictions between Lowlands and Highlands, Protestants to the east and Roman Catholics to the west, tended to smother the emergence of popular anti-British/English feeling until the second half of the twentieth century. The victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 set the seal of Protestant domination in Ireland. In the north this domination came from Scotland, in the south from England. During the eighteenth and subsequent centuries opposition to Protestant domination in Ireland was largely expressed through the Roman Catholic faith and the revival of a Gaelic or Celtic identity. Today the notion of Celticity still gives rise to strong feelings in Ireland, where the wrongs of the recent past are very keenly felt. Even in academic circles the archaeological debunking of the ancient Celts meets with strong resistance. The situation in Wales was perhaps even more complex than in Ireland. In Wales, Protestantism was the dominant religion, and the chapel formed the focus of many industrialised communities. The expression of an anti-British Welsh identity began, ironically enough, among London Welsh in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The stimulus was provided by economic migration from rural areas (mainly to the NewWorld); this in turn was accompanied by a huge movement of English people to work in the industrialised south of Wales. In the 1790s there was a revival of their literature and history by the Welsh population resident in London, and it took a strangely archaeological course. The following appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1792: This being the day on which the autumnal equinox occurred, some Welsh bards, resident in London, assembled in congress on Primrose Hill, according to ancient usage…A circle of stones formed, in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd, or Altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheath it. (#litres_trial_promo) The celebration of Welsh identity which accompanied the literary revival was focused on a colourful figure known as Iolo Morganwg, born Edward Williams in 1747. Williams was a Glamorganshire stonemason who had been working in London since the 1770s and was a member of a group of Welshmen who took an active interest in the literature, history and antiquities of their native land. He adopted the bardic name Iolo Morganwg (‘Iolo of Glamorgan’) and set about reviving (and sometimes forging) documents, and creating new customs that bolstered his passionately held views on Welsh politics and identity—which owed much to the ideas of radical political theorists like Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man. Morganwg linked his ‘Gorsedd’ (circle of stones or pebbles), and the ceremonies associated with it, to ancient times—even as far back as the Druids. Morganwg achieved something quite remarkable: he managed to have his largely invented Gorsedd ceremonies attached to the genuinely antique Eisteddfod. The Eisteddfod was (and is) an annual meeting that celebrates Welsh music, literature and poetry. The first recorded Eisteddfods took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at a time when the Welsh poets (Welsh Beirdd) were still a distinct and ancient class with their own ‘orally transmitted rules and norms’. (#litres_trial_promo) By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the tradition of the Eisteddfods was flagging, and the addition of the politically loaded Gorsedd rituals had a galvanising effect on their popularity. The first Gorsedd Circle bardic ceremonies to be held in Wales took place at the end of the three-day Eisteddfod in Carmarthen in 1816. The grafting of the ‘dignified nonsense’ of the Gorsedd rituals onto the Eisteddfod has given subsequent students of Welsh history serious headaches. (#litres_trial_promo) What cannot be denied, however, is that while the reinvention of Welsh identity represented by Morganwg and his followers was very popular, it was an essentially middle-class phenomenon. The bulk of the Welsh population were English-speakers, and they expressed their identity and shared values through the chapel, choirs and active involvement in Labour politics. What are we to make of the modern invention and reinvention of a Celtic identity? The first point is that it owes little or nothing to the ancient Celts, who, as we have seen, did not exist as a single cultural or ethnic entity. So is it still valid? I believe it is, but only time will tell how long it will last. I would agree with Simon James that the modern concept of Celticness matters because it is an expression of self-identity. It is also a shared sense of difference from the English/ British who were (and are) seen as a threat. And it cannot be denied that the people concerned share, or more usually shared, languages whose ancient roots were related. Maybe their view of a common early history is flawed, but then so is that of the English. Simon James would go further: ‘That this tradition [of the ancient Celts] is now under attack does not invalidate modern Celtic identity, because to some degree all modern ethnic and national identities create essentially propagandist histories.’ Writing about the people of the British Isles, he notes: Ethnicity and nationhood depend on self-identity, on being aware of larger groupings and their interactions, and feeling involved in one of them. I would argue that, until the rise of the four historic nations in the medieval period, and even long after, a clear sense of large-scale ethnic or national identity—of belonging to an imagined community like the Scots, Welsh, Irish or English—was usually weakly developed among the mass of the people, who rarely had to deal with such issues. (#litres_trial_promo) If the concepts of Britain and Britishness are seen by many Welsh, Scottish and Irish people as no more than ways of referring to England and Englishness, what of the English? Even if they wanted to, they could not identify themselves with the Celts, as they themselves are the Other, the forces of opposition, which played a key role in the birth of the modern Celtic identity. They have had to look somewhere else. The Vikings and Normans are already spoken for by the Danes and the French, which leaves only the Germanic presence of the Anglo-Saxons—a choice which was made very much easier, in Georgian and Victorian times, by the presence on the English throne of a German royal family. The idea that the origins of the English nation could be found in a massive influx of Anglo-Saxon people first became popular around AD 700—1100. (#litres_trial_promo) Its widespread acceptance was due to a number of contemporary accounts, including those of Gildas (sixth century), the Venerable Bede (c.731) and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (from c.890). (#litres_trial_promo) Then, some time around 1136, the highly influential author and creator of the principal Arthurian stories, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote in his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) an origin myth which traced the foundation of Britain back to the Trojans—of all people. (#litres_trial_promo) This wonderful flight of fantasy described how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy, landed at Totnes, subdued the race of giants who lived there, and gave his name to the country he had pacified (Britain = Brutus). During his visit he founded London, calling it New Troy. Even the creation of the Arthur stories seems drab by comparison with the Brutus myth, but both were widely accepted throughout the medieval period, during which Geoffrey’s history was held in high regard as an accurate historical source. After about 1600 the Brutus myth fell from favour, to be replaced by a new set of semi-mythic principal characters, including Hengist, Horsa and Alfred the Great. (#litres_trial_promo) Alfred is of course a known historical figure, whose achievements are well documented. Perhaps it is sad that today he is better known for burning cakes than for his administration or government. The brothers Hengist and Horsa are indeed semi-mythic. They make their first appearance in that magnificent work of early propagandist history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (c.731), where they are portrayed as the founders of the royal house of Kent. Bede tells us they were leaders of Germanic forces invited to Britain by Vortigern, a Romanised southern British king, in the year 449. According to Bede, their arrival signalled the adventus Saxonum, or coming of the Saxons, who originally appeared as mercenaries, or foederati. During the 450s we learn that the mercenaries turned against their client, Vortigern, to establish their own rule. It seems a straightforward enough story, and it was later taken up and elaborated by other sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles; but Bede, like all subsequent historians, had his own motives for writing in the way he did. He did not see himself as writing ‘pure’ or unbiased history in the sense that we would understand it today. In writing his great work he was also delivering a message; and the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons was part of that message. In the early eighteenth century the Anglo-Saxonist view of history was strongly influential. It was widely believed, for example, that institutions such as Parliament and trial by jury were ultimately Germanic. But this view changed as the political scene itself altered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We have seen in the case of the Celts how issues to do with nationalism and self-identity came to the fore at this time, but it was by no means a straightforward picture. France was perceived as the great enemy, not just as another powerful nation, but one with the potential to subvert the entire structure of British government, as witnessed by French attitudes to the American colonies, the Revolution of 1789 and of course the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. There were pleas for British unity. The great Whig politician and conservative thinker Edmund Burke, in his highly influential Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, did not play down national differences within Britain, but placed great emphasis on the antiquity of the British system of government. A few years earlier, in 1756, the antiquarian and pioneering archaeologist of the Old Stone Age, John Frere, also worried about contemporary political developments; he ‘called for the English, Lowland Scots and the Hanoverian Kings, all of whom were descendants of the Saxons, to live in harmony with the Ancient Britons (the Welsh)’. (#litres_trial_promo) Ancient history was being brought into contemporary affairs in a way that we would find extraordinary today. We have already seen that archaeological and historical research is affected by the climate of thought prevailing at the time, and I cannot avoid a brief discussion of the two World Wars, both of which saw Britain pitted against Germany: in theory, at least, Anglo-Saxon versus Teuton. The First World War did not have a major impact on Anglo-Saxon research in Britain. Before it, opinion was divided as to whether the Anglo-Saxons were large-scale military invaders or true immigrants, and in the 1920s and thirties an essentially similar debate continued. However, after the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the Second World War, the English began to feel uncomfortable with their supposed Germanic roots. The end of the war also saw the effective end of the British Empire, for a number of reasons. This led to a change in historical attitude: a world view centred on Anglo-Britishness was no longer possible. Nicholas Higham has described the effects of the post-war/post-Empire situation well: One result was the final overthrow of the old certainties provided by a belief in the inherent superiority of English social and political institutions and Germanic ancestry, by which the British establishment had been sustained for generations. This provided opportunities for the revival or construction of alternative visions of the past. Historically, insular Germanism was rooted in the enterprise of legitimising the early and unique rise of the English Parliament to supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its fragility was now revealed. (#litres_trial_promo) We will discuss the problems inherent in ‘insular Germanism’ later; here I merely want to note that today the world of Anglo-Saxon archaeology is divided over the question of large-scale invasions in post-Roman times. More conservative opinion still favours mass folk movements from the Continent to account for the widespread changes in dress style, funeral rites and buildings. Other scholars point out that such changes can be brought about by other means. This alternative view, which I support, would have been inconceivable thirty years ago. Viewed as a piece of archaeological history, it seems to me that the Anglo-Saxon invasions are the last of a long list of putative incursions that archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used as catch-all explanations when they encountered events they could not explain. It is far more healthy, intellectually speaking, to admit sometimes that we don’t fully understand a particular phenomenon, rather than to rush to an off-the-peg ‘solution’. Doubts can sometimes prove wonderfully stimulating. As has been noted, however, wherever archaeologists have taken a close look at the development of a particular piece of British landscape, it is difficult to find evidence for the scale of discontinuity one would expect had there indeed been a mass migration from the Continent. We will see this in several case studies, including the Nene Valley (Chapter 4), West Heslerton in Yorkshire, and in the Witham Valley near Lincoln (both Chapter 8). I believe it will be a close study of the landscape that will clinch the archaeological case against large-scale Anglo-Saxon invasions, just as it did for their supposed ‘Celtic’ predecessors. CHAPTER TWO The Origins and Legacy of Arthur (#ulink_97aaa58f-88b0-5353-bd29-0864b92288e5) LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I found the tales of King Arthur enthralling. Everything about him seemed to fire the imagination. I did not fully understand the rather murky business surrounding his conception in Tintagel Castle; nor did I realise that the various elements of the tales came from different sources and periods. That didn’t matter, because the whole epic was driven by the energy that comes from a good story. Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon (King of Britain) and Igraine, the beautiful wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. This union was made possible by the wizard Merlin, who altered Uther’s appearance to resemble that of the Duke, who was away fighting. Conveniently he was killed in battle shortly after Arthur’s conception. Uther married Igraine and Arthur became their legitimate son, growing up to be a handsome, generous, brave and virtuous prince. According to legend, Britain could not find a king, so Merlin devised a test: the man who could withdraw a sword embedded in a stone was the rightful heir. Arthur duly accomplished the task. His reign was a busy one. As King of the Britons he fought the invading Anglo-Saxons, and won a famous victory at Mons Badonicus (Mount Badon). His final battle was at Camlann, where he opposed his usurping nephew Mordred. Arthur may have been killed on earth, but he was taken to the magic island of Avalon by the indispensable Merlin, where his wounds were cured. Other versions have only Arthur and one of his knights, Sir Bedevere, surviving the battle. Arthur proceeds to Avalon, while Bedevere is charged with returning his sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Arthur resides on Avalon to this day, and will return if Britain is ever in need of him. Arthur’s capital was at Camelot, which in the Middle Ages was supposed to have been at Caerleon on the Welsh borders, and his court was organised around the Knights of the Round Table. All the knights were equal in precedence but they all vowed to uphold a code of ethics laid down by Arthur, who was one of their number. The best-known of the Knights of the Round Table were Bedevere, Galahad, Gawain, Lancelot, Mordred, Percival and Tristan. From Camelot the knights set out on their adventures, of which the most famous was the quest for the Holy Grail, the mystical chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper. The myth was centred around Percival, Galahad and Glastonbury, where the Grail was supposed to have been taken by Joseph of Arimathea, who looked after Christ’s body after the Crucifixion. Joseph’s staff, driven into the ground at Glastonbury, took root as the Holy Thorn. Apart from Arthur and Merlin, the most celebrated character is Sir Lancelot, Arthur’s most trusted adviser. Lancelot had many adventures, of which the most hazardous was his love for Guinevere, Arthur’s Queen, which was foretold by Merlin. She returned his love, and they had a protracted adulterous relationship. Despite Arthur’s anger when he learned the truth he was strangely forgiving of his old friend. Lancelot missed the Battle of Camlann and subsequently learned that Guinevere had become a nun at Amesbury. He himself became a monk at Glastonbury, where he was told in a dream that he should ride at once to Amesbury. He arrived too late to be present at Guinevere’s death, and died of grief soon after. If the myths surrounding the arrival in Britain of the ancient Celts, and perhaps the Anglo-Saxons too, have been discredited or are beginning to crumble, what of King Arthur? One might suppose that as he is portrayed as a heroic, mythical figure he would have been particularly vulnerable to critical assault. Strangely, however, the reverse seems to be the case: Arthur and his legends stubbornly refuse to die, despite everything that is hurled at them. One reason for this is that the Arthurian legends are suffused with strange echoes of antiquity which seem to possess more than a faint ring of truth. The stories contain elements which would have been completely at home in the Bronze and Iron Ages: the importance of the sword Excalibur, its ‘disposal’ in a lake in which lived the Lady of the Lake, and the fact that Avalon is an island: Arthur’s ‘peerless sword, called Caliburn’, in the twelfth-century account of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ‘was forged in the Isle of Avalon’. (#litres_trial_promo) Swords, lakes and islands were of known religious significance in prehistoric times, not just in Britain but across most of northern and central Europe. These are ancient myths, and there is good evidence to suggest that they survived in Britain throughout the Roman period too; that they even flourished during the Dark Ages, and survived well into medieval times. Another element in the story with an ancient feel to it is the tale of the sword in the stone. The story does not appear in the principal earlier medieval writers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon or Chr?tien de Troyes, and seems to have been introduced by writers of the Old French ‘Vulgate Cycle’, which I will discuss shortly. It must surely be explained as a mythic reference to the casting of a bronze sword. I have witnessed this process, and it is most spectacular: the orange-glowing sword is actually pulled from a two-piece stone mould by the metal-smith. It’s rather like the process of birth itself, and is altogether different from the shaping of an iron sword, which is fashioned by repeatedly hammering out and reheating an iron bar. Other early components in the Arthurian story include the tales surrounding the Holy Grail, although, as we will see, these are rather less ancient, and may contain Late Roman and Early Christian elements. It could be argued that it was the popularity of the Arthurian legends that kept these myths alive, but there is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that a great deal of pre-Roman religion and ideology survived, in one form or another, into post-Roman times. These tales would have been recognised as being ancient, and would have been selected for inclusion within the Arthurian tradition for that very reason. The Roman period, in other words, does not represent a clean break with earlier traditions; we will see in Chapter 9 that certain important and supposedly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ introductions were actually earlier traditions continuing in altered forms—as one might expect after nearly four centuries of Roman rule. Perhaps the main point to emphasise is that these ancient observances were living traditions that were shaped and recreated by subsequent generations for their own purposes. In many instances they were not intended to be taken literally, as history. They always existed within the realms of legend, myth and ideology. People in the past would have understood this. Sadly, we appear to have lost that sense of wonder or transcendence that can accept different realities for their own sake, without feeling obliged to burden them with the dead hand of explanation. The principal modern proponent of King Arthur has been Professor Leslie Alcock, who believes that South Cadbury Castle in Somerset was the site of Arthur’s court, Camelot. This acceptance of Arthur’s historicity (i.e. historical truth) colours much of his writing, both archaeological and historical. Although he acknowledges that there are many unsolved problems, he belongs to what David Dumville has termed the ‘no smoke without fire’ school of recent Arthurian historians. (#litres_trial_promo) Adherents of this school may have doubts about Arthur’s historicity, but they believe that so much was written about him, albeit long after his lifetime, that there has to be a core of truth to it. Alcock has also argued, moreover, that early sources such as the British Easter Annals mentioned St Patrick, St Bridget and St Columba by name, and nobody today doubts their historicity—so why doubt Arthur, who is mentioned in the same sources? (#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, historians do not work like that: each person’s claim to veracity must be examined on its own merits, preferably using a number of independent sources. It is not good enough to claim that if A is known to have existed, then B must have lived too. I knew Alcock when he was still actively engaged in archaeology, and I know many of the people who worked with him at his excavations on South Cadbury in the late sixties and early seventies. His excavations were of the highest standard, and the subsequent publications were also first-rate.Why did he become so involved with what was ultimately to prove a wild-goose chase? I don’t think anyone knows precisely why, although Nicholas Higham has plausibly suggested that Alcock’s was essentially a post-war reactive response: he was looking for a non-Germanic origin for British culture. (#litres_trial_promo) A cynic, however, might suggest that the Camelot/Arthur stuff helped keep Alcock’s much-loved South Cadbury project financially alive. Maybe, but neither he nor the very distinguished people on his Research Committee were particularly worldly or ambitious in that way. It was a bona fide academic research project, and certainly not a mere money-making ploy. So, to return to my original question, why did he become so preoccupied with Arthur? I can only suppose that something of the Arthurian magic touched him and fired his imagination. Maybe too he was intellectually predisposed to accept Arthur as a result of the horrors of the Second World War. There is no doubt that, even if at times flawed, Alcock’s writing on the history of Arthur can be remarkably persuasive. For a long time he clearly believed in the importance of what he was doing, even if he did eventually radically rethink his original ideas about Cadbury and its supposed identification with Arthur’s Camelot. (#litres_trial_promo) Whatever the truth about Arthur and Camelot at South Cadbury, the excavations were superb, and have given rise (as we will see in Chapter 8) to an important and continuing project of fieldwork. What is it about the Arthurian legends that so many people find appealing? Is it just that he has been used as a historical metaphor to explain something as nebulous as the origins of Britain? Or is it more than that? Does Arthur express something deep within ourselves, something we do not fully understand, but which we feel matters? Or are the myths surrounding the Once and Future King just very good stories? My own feeling is that while it may be possible to deconstruct the historiography (i.e. the history of the history) of the Arthur myths, that process will not necessarily explain their enduring appeal, and it certainly will not explain why they are so extraordinarily popular with so many people of different nationalities today. Let me give a single example of the phenomenon. Anyone who has been touched by the power of the Arthur myths never forgets the experience. It happened to me back in 1974, in Toronto, when I was an Assistant Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was a time when there was a great upsurge of Arthurian interest, brought about by Leslie Alcock’s claim that a Somerset hillfort at South Cadbury was probably the site of Camelot. (#litres_trial_promo) Geoffrey Ashe’s popular analysis of the myths and stories surrounding the Grail legends had appeared in paperback, (#litres_trial_promo) and of course there were other publications, some good, some less so. (#litres_trial_promo) It was widely assumed that, as an English archaeologist, I would know about the Dark Ages. In fact I was a prehistorian working on the outskirts of prosaic Peterborough, not at glamorous Glastonbury—but like a fool I kept quiet about that. In any case, the museum’s PR people thought it would be a good idea if I gave a public lecture on the subject of ‘Arthur’s Britain’. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. My suspicions should have been roused when the BBC contacted me in late summer while I was digging in Peterborough; my lecture in Toronto was scheduled for some time around Christmas. The BBC had received a tip-off from someone in Canada, but as I was still reading the first chapters of Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, I couldn’t answer the questions they asked me. So they left me in peace. Back in Toronto, I soon realised that my Arthur talk was going to be very big indeed. The publicity was huge, and was developing swiftly. In the mid-1970s the over-commercialised AM radio stations of North America were being replaced by more laid-back FM stations, playing music by bands like the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd and so forth. King Arthur was meat and drink to this audience, and I had several extended chat sessions with DJs on air. On the day of the lecture I arrived at the museum, but the crowd around the main entrance was so big that I had to go down to the basement and enter through the goods entrance. I clutched my slides in what was rapidly becoming a very sweaty palm. Upstairs, the main lecture theatre was already packed, and there was still half an hour to go. I handed my slides to the audio-visual technician, who was visibly shaken by the huge crowd. He was Welsh, and the quiet words ‘Good luck, boyo’ came from an uncharacteristically dry mouth. Out on the stage a crew was rapidly rigging up a sound system that would relay my voice to a crowd standing in the huge rotunda just inside the museum’s main entrance. I later learned that additional loudspeakers were positioned outside the building—and remember, this was Canada in the winter. I think the lecture was successful, but I was so dazed that I can’t in all honesty remember how it went. Arthur had worked his magic, and had left me an older and a wiser young man. After that experience, I simply will not accept that the appeal of Arthur is just about British origin myths or the romance of chivalry. I do not believe that there is a rational explanation, but I am convinced that there is a power to these stories that cannot be explained away. We have seen how two of the British origin myths, the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, owe their current popularity to a series of reinventions in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same can be said of Arthur, but his story has a far longer history of creation, recreation and adaptation. By contrast, whether or not one believes there was ever an ethnic group called the ancient Celts, it cannot be denied that Britain was home to a diverse group of Iron Age cultures with their own highly original style of art. Similarly, even if, as I believe, they did not invade en masse, a few ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (or people like them) probably did come to Britain in the post-Roman period—either that, or perhaps as well as that, influential British people repeatedly travelled to northern Germany, where they were influenced by what they saw. But when it comes to Arthur, one fact cannot be sidestepped: there is no mention of a character of that name in any ancient account of Britain written between AD 400 and 820—and Arthur is supposed to have lived in the fifth century. (#litres_trial_promo) There are sixth- and seventh-century accounts of battles and other events in the fifth century which have been linked to Arthur by modern authors, with more or less credibility, but none with certainty. There are also later accounts which hark back to earlier times and hypothetical lost authors; but nobody, either at the time or within a few generations of his death, wrote about him by name until some four centuries later—fifteen or twenty generations after the event. To put that in context, it is as if Simon Schama was the first historian ever to mention Oliver Cromwell by name. Today Arthur is essentially a literary phenomenon, and there is an enormous subsidiary literature devoted to the legends surrounding him. (#litres_trial_promo) Here I will concentrate on the early writing that actually gave birth to the legends that still continue to be recreated and elaborated. (#litres_trial_promo) We cannot embark on even a short review such as this without first questioning whether our hero did or did not exist. (#litres_trial_promo) Given the lack of direct evidence prior to the ninth century, it seems to me that the question cannot be answered. Derek Pearsall puts it well: ‘Proving that Arthur did not exist is just as impossible as proving that he did. On this matter, like others, it is good to think of the desire for certainty as the pursuit of an illusion.’ (#litres_trial_promo) What we can say, however, is that the fifth century was a time when strong individual leaders were needed and had come to the fore—as we will see when we discuss the Late Roman frontier fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall (Chapter 9). It seems to me that if Arthur did not exist, which seems more likely than not, he ought to have done. It is equally probable that there were several Arthurs. The trouble is, we have no evidence either way. If we cannot establish the truth of Arthur the man, what can we say about Arthur the myth? The stories and legends of the Arthurian cycle may tell us only a little about post-Roman Britain, but they can tell us something about the times in which they were written. More importantly, they can throw a great deal of light on the way in which British history has been expropriated by powerful people and political factions for hundreds of years. It is a process which continues to thrive. The earliest account of events that were later linked to Arthur was written in a sixth-century history by a man named Gildas. Gildas is a shadowy figure, but we do know that he was a British monk of the Celtic Church, that he was thoroughly fluent in Latin, and that he died around 570 or 571. He spent his life in south Wales and Brittany, where he is revered as a saint. The oldest existing manuscript of his work dates to the eleventh century. Its title, De excidio et conquestu Britanniae (Concerning the Ruin and Fall of Britain), gives away the reasons why Gildas wrote his history: he was in fact preaching something of a political diatribe. (#litres_trial_promo) Gildas wrote in a particularly high-flown, flowery style of Latin that does not translate very comfortably. The distinguished archaeologist and historian Professor Leslie Alcock was driven to write: ‘If ever there was a prolix, tedious and exasperating work it is Gildas’ De excidio.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Even so, his message is abundantly clear: Anglo-Saxon expansion is divine retribution for the moral laxity of the Celtic/British nobility. The absence of any mention of Arthur in this important early source is surprising—the more so since Gildas is the first to mention the Battle of Mons Badonicus (Mount Badon), which was supposedly the most significant event of Arthur’s life. If he wanted a stick with which to castigate his audience, Arthur would have been ideal for the purpose. But his name is never mentioned. Instead we are told that the victor of Mount Badon was one Ambrosius Aurelianus—although Alcock, a strong advocate of Arthur being the victor at Badon, doubts whether that was what Gildas meant. Alcock does not deny, however, that Gildas does say that Ambrosius Aurelianus was a successful leader of the Britons in battle. According to some readings of his text, Gildas mentions that Badon was fought in the year of his own birth, which was probably around, or shortly after, AD 500. In a difficult passage, Gildas appears to imply that he is writing forty-four years later. Some dispute this, and believe (as did Bede, who had access to earlier and more authoritative versions of Gildas) that what is referred to as having occurred forty-four years earlier is some event other than the author’s birth. But, taken together, the evidence suggests that Mount Badon was fought in the decades on either side of the year 500. The name Arthur probably derives from the Latin gens or family name Artorius, although in manuscripts it often appears as Arturus. It may also be derived from artos, the Celtic word for a bear. The first account of a person named Arthur is by the anonymous author (once believed to have been Nennius) of the Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), a collection of source documents written and assembled around 829-30. Although the Historia draws on many earlier Welsh sources, it is its ‘highly contemporary political motives’ (#litres_trial_promo) that are most important if we are to understand it—and indeed nearly all medieval and earlier Arthurian literature. In this instance the motives relate to politics in ninth-century Wales. The author of the Historia Brittonum was writing for the particular benefit of King Merfyn of Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, and his supporters, who were resisting English conquest and Anglicisation. They needed a heroic Celtic leader that people could look back to, and the Historia provided one. The Historia was also created as a counter to the ‘Englishness’ of the Venerable Bede’s history, which was then very popular. As Nicholas Higham points out, the ?lite surrounding King Merfyn resisted external pressures successfully: ‘The separate existence of Wales is a lasting tribute to their achievement.’ (#litres_trial_promo) It is always difficult to make use of documents that only exist in the form of later copies or translations, as subsequent copyists may have added their own personal touches to flesh out the events being described. Arthur was very popular in the early medieval period, and it is probable that his name was interposed in earlier histories in this way. One example of this is the account of two important Arthurian battles in the Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals), written around 1100, but drawing on earlier sources. Historians and others have tended to concentrate their attention on Arthur, but these documents, which were probably produced in south-west Wales, are actually far more concerned with the threat from Gwynedd, to the north, which completely overshadowed the issue of ‘racial’ struggle with England. (#litres_trial_promo) The Welsh Annals, a record of significant events, were included in the Historia Brittonum of Nennius. (#litres_trial_promo) The two crucial references are to the two most famous battles of the Arthur cycle: that at Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon, in which Arthur and his British army defeated the Anglo-Saxons; and Arthur’s final battle at Camlann. In translation they read as follows: [Year 516] Battle of Badon in which Arthur carried the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights and the Britons were victors. [Year 537] The strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Modred perished. And there was plague in Britain and Ireland. (#litres_trial_promo) Modred (or Mordred) was Arthur’s nephew, who is supposed to have usurped his throne. There is little doubt about the historicity of Badon, as the battle is mentioned by name in Gildas, who was not writing to promote the British cause. That is not to say of course that Arthur was the British leader—and plainly, if he did carry a cross on his shoulders for three days, he could not have done much actual fighting. The problem is to know when these accounts were written. Were the references to Arthur added later, when the Annals were compiled? Or were the individual annual entries indeed written year-on-year, in which case they would have a greater claim to historical accuracy? Leslie Alcock opts for year-on-year composition, but most historians now believe that the Badon entry was actually written around 954, some 450 years after the event itself. Given the strong political motives that we know lay behind the writing and compilation of the Historia Brittonum, we must treat these entries with enormous caution. The substitution of Arthur for Gildas’ Ambrosius Aurelianus as the victor of Mount Badon might partially be explained by the political impossibility—given the Historia’s intended audience—of citing a general with a Roman name as a heroic British leader. As I have said, these events have been discussed interminably. The Welsh Annals state that Camlann took place twenty-one years after Badon, but there is no absolute agreement as to the date of Badon, except, as we have seen, that it probably happened in the decades on either side of 500, and probably not after 516. The Welsh Annals add further confusion to an already confused picture by mentioning ‘Bellum baronies secundo’ (the second Battle of Badon), which Alcock believed was fought in the year 667. The actual sites of the two battles are also unknown. The most distinguished writer and scholar of the eighth century was the Venerable Bede. This remarkable man was born near Monkwearmouth, County Durham, some time around 673, and died about 735. He is widely associated with the then new monastery at Jarrow, near Newcastle in Northumberland, where he was ordained priest in 703, but he probably lived most of his life at the monastery that was twinned with Jarrow, at Monkwearmouth. His major work, which tradition has it was written at Jarrow, is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which he finished in 731. (#litres_trial_promo) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is a highly important source of early English history. It is both well written and well researched, but like the man, Bede’s intentions in writing it were complex. Bede’s primary motive was the salvation of his people, and he saw the Church as the means of achieving it. Although not an ethnic Anglo-Saxon himself, he wrote from their perspective, and his history is essentially about the anarchy and power vacuum that followed the end of Roman rule. He describes a period when southern Britain was subject to marauding bands from the Continent. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by St Augustine in 597 was for Bede the great turning point. As he saw it, the Church imposed order in a world where structure was lacking. He was hostile to the British, whom he saw as chaotic, and he used the writings of their own historian, Gildas, against them—in the process he edited and greatly improved the overelaborate language of the De excidio. Bede fails to mention Arthur, and follows Gildas, his source, in attributing the victory at Mount Badon to Ambrosius Aurelianus. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the last of the major pre-Norman histories of Britain, was established by King Alfred some time in the 890s. In form it was an annal, written in Old English, and was maintained and updated at major ecclesiastical centres. It begins with the Roman invasion and was still being updated in the mid-twelfth century. Surviving manuscripts are associated with Canterbury,Worcester, York and Abingdon. The Chronicle can be patchy as a source on early events, but it is much better in its later coverage, of the reigns of Alfred (871—99), Aethelred (865—71), Edward the Confessor (1042—66) and the Norman kings. It is also an important document for the study of the development of Old English; but while it is not particularly relevant to the Arthur myths, it does provide a useful account of the early Anglo-Saxon histories of south-eastern England, especially Sussex and Kent. The first major source of full-blown Arthur stories is the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s. (#litres_trial_promo) It would be fair to call Geoffrey (c.1100—55) the father of the mythical King Arthur, who was largely his invention. He did, however, use the principal earlier authors Gildas, Bede and Nennius, together with current oral sources, which as we will see could have had very much older roots. His History was also based on an unnamed earlier British or Welsh work which he had seen and which is often assumed to have been the ‘source’ for his own considerable inventions. This famous ‘lost source’ has itself become a Holy Grail of modern Arthurian enthusiasts and theorists. (#litres_trial_promo) Geoffrey’s book was to prove enormously popular and influential, particularly as an inspiration for the later Arthurian literature in the medieval courtly tradition. In the previous chapter we saw how Geoffrey produced the Brutus legend to account for the origins of Britain; Arthur was by no means his only invention. Later in his life he wrote a less successful Latin epic poem about the life of the prophet Merlin, the Vita Merlini. Geoffrey was undoubtedly a very capable author, but like everyone else concerned with Arthur, he had his own motives for writing. He lived in very troubled times. England was in the throes of a civil war between the followers of King Stephen and those of Matilda, daughter of Henry I; the war started when Stephen seized the throne in December 1135, and ended when he died in 1154 and Henry II ascended the throne. During this period, generally known as the Anarchy, the country grew weary of warfare and strife. There was a widespread desire for peace, which may help to explain why Geoffrey’s largely fictional history met with such success both in Britain and on the Continent, where it provided the source for a rich tradition of medieval Arthurian romances. Geoffrey wrote his history in order to provide an honourable pedigree for the kingship of England that was then being fought over so keenly. He was writing for the benefit of the Anglo-Norman aristocratic ?lite, and he set out to show how their predecessor, King Arthur, had performed mighty deeds. Arthur had, according to Geoffrey, defeated the Roman Emperor and conquered all of Europe except Spain. That went down well with an audience of Norman knights whose families, friends and relations controlled not just England and Normandy, but large parts of Europe too. But Geoffrey’s work went further. Significantly, he made use of earlier sources to give the appearance of authenticity for those who possessed some historical knowledge. As Nicholas Higham puts it: It provided the new Anglo-Norman kings with a predecessor of heroic size, a great pan-British king in a long line of monarchs capable of countering pressures for decentralisation, as had occurred in France, and reinforcing claims of political superiority over the Celtic lands. Existing claims that the Normans were descended from the Trojans gelled easily with the descent of the Britons from the same stock…At the same time Arthur offered an Anglo-Norman counterbalance to…Charlemagne as an historical icon. (#litres_trial_promo) Geoffrey’s account of Arthur and his exploits is both remarkably full and detailed, and hard to put down. These, however, are more than mere tales of adventure; there is something transcendent about them. It seems to me beyond doubt that Geoffrey intended to create this sense of ‘otherness’, of the stories being somehow close to the supernatural. Most reviews of Arthurian history talk in terms of pre- and post-Galfridic sources.* (#ulink_dc6856b1-a29f-560c-a9e0-1320e50db9c7) Pre-Galfridic sources are seen as having more historical value than Geoffrey’s own work and those that followed him. All, however, are chronologically separated from the events in question by several centuries. All their authors, too, have their own motives for writing. Nicholas Higham was the first to point out that pre-Galfridic sources such as the Historia Brittonum or the Annales Cambriae should not ‘be treated very differently from, for example, Geoffrey’s Historia, or other later texts. All are highly imaginative works, none of whose authors saw their prime task as the reconstruction of what actually happened in the distant past. Rather, in all cases, then as now, the past was pressed into the service of the present and was subject to the immediate, and highly variable, purposes of political theology.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The story of Arthur’s conception at Tintagel Castle, which involves magical changes of identity, harks back to Biblical tradition and the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary. As Pearsall and others have noted, there is more than a little of the British Christ to King Arthur. Even given the extraordinary power of Geoffrey’s writing, it is still remarkable just how rapidly the Arthurian tradition took off not in Britain alone, but in Europe too. This is largely down to two gifted translators of the original, and to a French writer whose literary skills were the equal of Geoffrey’s. Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae was translated into French by Robert Wace, a churchman who was originally from Jersey, but who lived at Caen in Normandy. He called his translation the Geste des Bretons (History of the Britons), but it was renamed the Roman de Brut (a topical reference to Romance and Britain/Brutus) by the scribes who copied it out for a wider readership. The new title stuck. Wace’s was a very free translation, with many additions—Pearsall describes it as an ‘expanded adaptation’—but it was a very successful one. It was presented to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the imperious and flamboyant new queen of England’s Henry II, in 1155. This puts the work at the heart of European courtly culture, for the court of Henry II (1154-89)? (#ulink_ce78acc6-1e2e-5ebc-99a8-6da44414cac4) and the glamorous divorcee Eleanor was the most exciting in Europe. Henry’s power extended over most of France as well as England, and the court and literary language of his kingdom was French.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Wace added much new and important material to the Arthur story, including the Round Table, and he renamed Arthur’s magical sword—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Caliburn—Excalibur. It was another author-cum-translator, a rural priest nearWorcester named Layamon (‘lawman’), who took the Arthurian tradition, or Brut as it was now known, and transferred it to Middle English verse around 1200. Layamon’s Brut stands as an extraordinary work of literature in its own right. It takes a different course from the courtly vision of Wace. Layamon was inspired by strong feelings of patriotism. He clearly loved traditional Anglo-Saxon battle poetry, heroism and what Pearsall calls ‘kingliness, steeped in religious awe’. (#litres_trial_promo) Pearsall sums up the differences between Wace and Layamon thus: ‘Throughout Wace is calm, practical, rational, with an eye for the realities of war and strategy; Layamon is aggressive, violent, heroic, ceremonial and ritualistic.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Post-Galfridian writers on Arthur take the romance forward wholly in the realms of fiction. Arthur was hugely popular in Anglo-Norman circles in France, where his exploits were further elaborated in verse by Chr?tien de Troyes, a prolific author of Arthurian romance. Between 1160 and 1190 his works included Lancelot ou Le Chevalier de la charette, Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion, and the unfinished Percival ou Le conte del graal. Chr?tien may have used Breton verbal sources in the composition of his works, which were important because they lifted Arthur and his court out of a narrowly British context. It was Chr?tien who introduced the quest for the Holy Grail, but at this stage in the development of the story the Grail was still just the mystical chalice that had been used by Christ in the Last Supper. It had yet to acquire its connection with the Holy Blood, a fascinating process to which I will return later. Effectively, Chr?tien made Arthur a figure of heroic romance who transcended nationality. Derek Pearsall notes: ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth gave shape and substance to the story of Arthur, but it was Chr?tien who invented Arthurian romance and gave to it a high-toned sensibility, psychological acuteness, wit, irony and delicacy that were never surpassed.’ (#litres_trial_promo) It is not my intention to provide a history of the Arthurian literature which thrived on both sides of the Channel in the medieval period,* (#ulink_5960de79-b9ce-568f-aef2-6f13f777ce11) nor can I attempt to cover the wealth of creative writing he has given rise to in more recent times, ranging from Tennyson’s cycle The Idylls of the King to T.H. White’s novel sequence The Once and Future King. However, one author, Sir Thomas Malory (d.1470), must be mentioned if we are to understand how the Arthurian legends were subsequently used in Britain. Malory’s great work, written in English, was Le Morte d’Arthur. (#litres_trial_promo) The original title, given to it by the author himself, was The Book of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This title has the not inconsiderable merit of describing the contents to a T, but it is hardly marketable, which Malory’s astute publisher and editor William Caxton realised immediately. Caxton (c.1420—c.1492) was, of course, England’s first successful printer and publisher, working from his press inWestminster. It was he who gave Malory’s great work its mysterioussounding and slightly ominous title, which he lifted from the last tale in the book, ‘The Death of Arthur’, and it was his inspiration to translate it into French. Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur as a loosely connected cycle of tales. Caxton edited them together into a single text, which he published in 1485. (#litres_trial_promo) As we have seen throughout this chapter, the various authors of Arthurian tales had their own, sometimes complex, agendas and motives. This is true of Malory too. Le Morte d’Arthur was written some fifteen years before it was published. 1485 happened to be the year of the Battle of Bosworth, in which Richard III was killed and a new royal dynasty began under Henry Tudor (Henry VII). Bosworth signalled the final phase of the Wars of the Roses, which ended when Lancastrian forces under Henry VII defeated a Yorkist army at Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, in 1487. It was of course in the Tudor interest to portray the Wars of the Roses as being long, drawn-out and bloody, and Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur around 1470 as a tribute to an earlier and now vanishing age of heroism, honour and Christian chivalry. Like Bede and Gildas before him, he saw the past as providing an example to the present that could not be ignored. It was perhaps an accident of history that the Tudors should have shared his vision, if in an altogether more self-interested fashion. Just who Thomas Malory was is far from certain. There are four contenders, of which perhaps the most likely is a Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire. He was knighted in 1445, and elected to Parliament the same year, but he seems to have been an unsavoury character. In 1440 he was accused of robbery and imprisoning (although we know nothing about any consequent court case). Then in 1450 he was accused, along with several others, of lying in wait to attack Sir Humphrey Stafford, Second Duke of Buckingham and one of the richest men in England. Again, the allegations were never proved. After this Malory appears to have pursued a life of crime, which included cases of extortion with menaces and straight robbery. Then rapes start to appear on the list of offences he was accused of committing, along with yet more robbery and violence. Several attempts were made to catch him, and he spent some time in custody—sometimes managing to escape from it. Eventually the law caught up with him and in 1452 he was held in London’sMarshalsea Prison, where he is supposed to have written his masterpiece. He died on 14 March 1470, and was buried at Greyfriars Chapel near Newgate Prison, from which he had been released following a pardon from Edward IV in 1461. Towards the end of his life he appears to have acquired some degree of wealth, but we have no idea whether this was from his previous life of crime or from a patron such as Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (known as ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’). Was this unpleasant individual the author of the Morte d’Arthur? Certainly the events of his life were colourful, and the book itself is nothing if not colourful. But could a thug and a rapist be the creator of a work which espouses high ideals of honour and chivalry? Frankly, I cannot answer that question. But I earnestly hope that some other plausible candidate will one day be found. Meanwhile we must make do with the flawed Sir Thomas of Newbold Revell. (#litres_trial_promo) Malory used two main sources as inspiration for his work. Both were written in the past, and harked back to an age of heroic chivalry. In the mid-fifteenth century, when Malory was writing, most people must have been aware that the world around them was changing. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, we can appreciate that the medieval epoch (the Middle Ages) was in the process of dying.* (#ulink_61401628-f73a-5d9b-a9ce-b10c29467a93) A new period, and with it a new way of thinking about the world—ultimately a new cosmology—was coming into existence. It was a process that had been fuelled by the release of the knowledge contained within the libraries of Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. Archaeologists refer to this as the post-medieval period, but to most people it will be familiar as the time of the Tudors and the early Renaissance. The first of Malory’s sources was English. It consisted of two Morte d’Arthur poems written in the previous century. Each was distinguished by a particular pattern of rhyming. The so-called Alliterative Morte Darthure was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, whereas the Stanzaic Morte Darthur was based on a Continental original, the Mort Artu of the so-called Vulgate Cycle of French romances? (#ulink_2eed2c60-8131-5e44-aac3-3d18f92fc7a8) - which forms the second and more important of Malory’s sources. The Vulgate Cycle was a huge collection of Arthurian romances that was put together ‘by a number of authors and compilers, working c.1215—30 under the spiritual direction or influence or inspiration of Cistercian monastic teaching…It survives in many forms and many manuscripts, and occupies seven large quarto volumes in the only edition that aims at completeness.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Derek Pearsall considers that the main aim of Chr?tien de Troyes and the compilers of the Vulgate Cycle was to include the story of the Holy Grail as an integral part of the Arthurian epic romance. Malory followed, with many embellishments, where they had led. Perhaps Malory’s most memorable addition to the legend was the linking of the Holy Grail to the Holy Blood. This has recently been examined by the historian Richard Barber in a fascinating study. (#litres_trial_promo) He concludes that the linking of the Grail to the blood which dripped from Christ’s side during the Crucifixion was more than an act of literary creation by Malory. He can find no mention of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in Chr?tien de Troyes or the copious works of the Vulgate Cycle, and comes to the surprising conclusion that Malory ‘was influenced by the cult of the Holy Blood at Hailes [Abbey], not thirty miles from his Warwickshire home, which was a famous pilgrimage site in his day. If this is correct, the Grail reflects Malory’s own piety, typical of a fifteenth-century knight.’ It would suggest too that there was another side to the otherwise unpleasant knight from Newbold Revell. We will see later that there is another lesson to be learned from Richard Barber’s remarkable observation. Malory was working with a vast and rich set of sources. Faced with such an embarras de richesses he could easily have produced an unwieldy and ultimately unreadable mess of a book. Had he decided to prune away all the excess, we would have been left with a skeleton plot, devoid of atmosphere or romance. As it was he took the middle path, and the result is a literary masterpiece of enduring greatness, even if sometimes the complex interweaving of narrative and ‘the almost narcotic or balletic repetition of the rituals of jousting or fighting is part of the dominant experience of reading’. (#litres_trial_promo) It can at times be very heavy going. We have seen that Malory’s printer and publisher, William Caxton, was an astute editor, but he was also an able businessman and bookseller, and he was aware that there was a public demand for an up-todate account of Britain’s most illustrious hero. He was also motivated by patriotism, and felt it was absurd that the most complete account of the Arthur saga should be contained in foreign sources. So he decided to do something about it, and wrote a fine Introduction which makes a persuasive sales pitch. Le Morte d’Arthur is one of the earliest printed books, and several copies of Caxton’s publication survive. The trouble with printed books is that the manuscripts on which they were based often perish, and we can lose sight of what the author intended to write, before the editors or censors made their changes. But in 1934 a manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur was found in the library of Winchester College. It was apparent that in his desire to present Malory’s work as a complete and continuous English account of the Arthur sagas, Caxton had removed most of Malory’s internal text divisions and introduced his own, which obscured the original eight sections. (#litres_trial_promo) So we end this brief review of early Arthuriana with the master spinner of tales himself being spun, and it is ironic that, like the subject of his great work, the identity of Thomas Malory himself remains uncertain. I want to turn now to the ways in which the legends of Arthur have been used in British public life. Royal dynasties change, and sometimes incomers seek legitimacy by harking back to a real or an imagined past. Unpopular monarchs try to ally themselves to legendary heroes, and popular ones seek to increase their public appeal in the same way. When the legends of Arthur were used politically they really did matter. Arthur, and what he stood for, was deadly serious. We have seen how the composition of the pre-Gilfradic sources was influenced by political motives, especially in the case of the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, which was written and assembled to favour the cause of the Welsh monarchy and aristocracy, with Arthur as a potent symbol of Welsh identity and independence. By the same token, Geoffrey of Monmouth saw to it that Arthur was identified with the Anglo-Norman court in England. (#litres_trial_promo) He set about achieving this with what today we would see as barefaced sycophancy, but which was usual practice in medieval times: he dedicated editions of his Historia Regum Britanniae to key people: to Henry I’s (1100—35) illegitimate son Robert, and even to the warring King Stephen. Geoffrey’s version of the past, including the strange account of Brutus and the marginally less strange story of Arthur, remained the dominant version of British history until well into the Tudor dynasty. King Stephen’s successor, Henry II (1154—89), was the first and possibly the greatest of the Plantaganet kings of England. He took an active part in fostering the growth of the Arthurian myth by patronising Wace, author of the Roman de Brut, but he is best remembered as the probable instigator or supporter of a remarkable piece of archaeological theatre that took place at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191, two years after his own death. As we have seen, Arthur was an important symbol of Welsh resistance to the growing power of the English crown, and Henry II realised that something had to be done to lay this particular ghost. It happened that in 1184 the principal buildings of Glastonbury Abbey had been gutted by a catastrophic fire, and the monks were faced with the prospect of raising a huge sum of money to pay for the repairs. The story goes that shortly before his death Henry had been told by a Welsh bard that Arthur’s body lay within the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. So, with the support of Henry’s successor Richard I (1189—99), top-secret excavations were carried out, and the monks announced their discovery of ‘Arthur’s bones’ in 1191. In a successful attempt to make this farrago credible, a Latin inscription was found with the bones, which translates as: HERE IN THE ISLE OF AVALON LIES BURIED THE RENOWNED KING ARTHUR, WITH GUINEVERE, HIS SECOND WIFE This fraudulent discovery seems to have had the desired effect. Pilgrims and visitors flocked to Glastonbury Abbey, and the idea—the magic—of Arthur was effectively removed out of Wales into the clutches of the Anglo-Norman ruling ?lite in England. It was a master-stroke. The appropriation of Arthur provided Richard I, whose domain was spreading beyond the borders of England into Ireland and the Continental mainland, with a hero to rival the cult of Charlemagne that was then so powerful across the Channel. As an indication of the Arthurian legends’ power to impress outside Britain, Richard I gave his Crusader ally Tancred of Sicily a sword which he claimed was Excalibur. Despite the fact that several English rulers have named their offspring Arthur, none of them has yet managed to sit on the throne. It’s as if the name were jinxed. Henry II was the earliest case in point. His grandson Arthur was acknowledged by Henry’s childless successor Richard I as his heir, and would eventually have succeeded to the throne had he not been murdered by King John in 1203. Edward I (1272—1307) made considerable use of Arthur’s reign as a source of political precedent and propaganda to be reformulated for his own purposes. (#litres_trial_promo) He likened himself to Arthur, and with his Queen Eleanor of Castile he presided over a grand reopening of the Glastonbury tomb in 1278; subsequently he organised the construction of a shrine to Arthur in the abbey church, which was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. One can well understand the importance Edward I attached to an English Arthur, given his vigorous campaigns against the Welsh in 1277 and 1282—83. It was Edward too who encouraged the belief that Joseph of Arimathea had visited the sacred site at Glastonbury, taking with him the Chalice used in the Last Supper. While he was there he drove his staff into the ground, and it miraculously took root as the Glastonbury Thorn. Finally, it seems likely that Edward I was also instrumental in the construction of the great Round Table at Winchester, which I will discuss shortly. Edward I’s grandson Edward III (1327—77) was one of England’s most successful monarchs, and like his grandfather he was an admirer of all things Arthurian, making regular visits to Arthur’s shrine at Glastonbury. He founded Britain’s most famous order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, on his return from his famous victory over the French at Cr?cy in 1348. Four years previously he had hoped to ‘revive’ the Order of the Round Table at a huge tournament at Windsor, but had to cancel this plan because of the expense. The Order of the Garter made a very acceptable substitute, as Nicholas Higham has pointed out: ‘The new institution was an “Arthurian” type of secular order, albeit under a new name, established at Windsor, which was popularly believed to have been founded by Arthur.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Edward IV, whose claim to the English throne was hotly disputed during the Wars of the Roses, actually succeeded to the crown twice (1461—70 and 1471—83). If anyone required legitimation it was he. He bolstered his regal pretensions by showing that he was related to the Welsh kings (which he was), and through them, via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, to Arthur, the rightful King of Britain. It was during Edward’s reign that Malory finished his Morte d’Arthur. Henry Tudor defeated Richard III (1483—85) at the Battle of Bosworth, and ruled as Henry VII (1485—1509). To legitimise his shaky claim to the throne, he asserted that his new Tudor dynasty united the previously warring houses of York and Lancaster, and also claimed legitimacy through his connection to Arthur and the real heroic king figure of seventh-century Wales, Cadwaladr (Anglicised as Cadwallader). Henry would have been aware of prophecies that predicted that both heroic figures would one day return to right ancient wrongs. In the second year of his reign he sought to strengthen his perceived ties to Arthur by sending his pregnant wife, Elizabeth of York, to Winchester, which was popularly believed to have been the site of Arthur’s court. At Winchester she gave birth to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Sadly Arthur succumbed to consumption and died, aged fifteen, in 1502; he was elder brother to the future Henry VIII. After this initial recourse to Arthur (which did not involve a serious attempt to prove that the Tudor dynasty really was descended from the mythical king), Henry VII does not appear to have made significant use of the legend later in his reign. Similarly his son Henry VIII generally stayed clear of Arthur, except when it came to the crisis of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. (#litres_trial_promo) In order to establish his own, and his country’s, independence from the Roman Catholic Church he resorted to Geoffrey’s Historia as an account of English history that was free from direct foreign influence (apart from Brutus). He also had his own image, labelled as King Arthur, painted on Edward I’s renowned Round Table at Winchester. A recent study of this portrait and the tabletop on which it was painted has thrown unexpected new light on Henry’s view of himself, his court—and Arthur. The Great Hall of Winchester Castle was built by King Henry III between 1222 and 1235; it is arguably the finest medieval aisled hall surviving in England. The vast painted tabletop resembles nothing so much as an immense dartboard of 5.5 metres diameter, with the portrait of King Arthur at the top (at the twelve o’clock position) and the places of his Knights of the Round Table indicated by wedge-shaped named segments. Today it hangs high on the hall’s eastern gable-end wall, but originally it would have stood on the ground. The Round Table was taken down from its position on the wall for the first time in over a hundred years on Friday, 27 August 1976. The reasons for removing it were to inspect its condition, carry out any necessary restoration and to check that the brackets which secured it to the wall were in sound condition. It also gave archaeologists, art historians and other specialists a chance to date the tabletop and its painting, and more importantly to form a consensus on why and how it had been constructed. The results of their work were edited together by the team leader, Professor Martin Biddle, into a substantial but fascinating volume of academic research. (#litres_trial_promo) Tree-ring dates suggest that the Round Table was constructed in the second half of the thirteenth century, between 1250 and 1280, as the centrepiece for a great feast and tournament that took place at Winchester Castle in 1290. (#litres_trial_promo) It was probably made in the town from English oak by the highly skilled carpenters who were one of England’s great assets in the medieval period. Visit the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, the roof of Westminster Hall or the great lantern at Ely if you want to see examples of their work, which was unrivalled anywhere in Europe. (#litres_trial_promo) The purpose of the tournament was to celebrate, in Martin Biddle’s words, ‘the culmination of King Edward I’s plans for the future of his dynasty and of the English crown’. The construction of the Round Table and the holding of the tournament also had the effect of transferring, in popular imagination, Arthur’s fabled capital from Caerleon in Wales to Winchester in southern England. In other words, it was a major public relations coup. It may seem improbable, but the impact of a round table on medieval sensibilities would have been considerable. Tables are important pieces of furniture. Around them take place meals and other social gatherings, and the shape of the table itself reflects the organisation and hierarchy of the gathering. Today many family dining tables are round or oval. This does not just reflect the fact that the shape is more compact and better suited to smaller modern houses; it also says something about the way modern family life is structured. In Victorian times, for example, long rectangular tables were the norm in middleclass households. This reflected the importance of the Master and Mistress of the house, who would have sat—or rather presided—at either end. Along the sides sat the children, poor relations and others. In medieval times dining arrangements in great houses were even more formal. The Lord and his immediate family would have eaten at a separate high table, probably raised on a dais at one end of the hall. Tenants, servants and others would have dined in the main body of the hall. The high table would have been separated from, but clearly visible to, all those present. To make the display even clearer, the Lord’s family and retinue would probably all have sat along one side of the high table, facing out over the hall for everyone to see. The Winchester Round Table broke all these rules, and it must have had a shocking effect on the people who saw it: in the late Middle Ages a round table was not merely an offence against protocol, it challenged the rigidly hierarchical system in which the understanding of political reality was enshrined. (#litres_trial_promo) Sixty years after the tournament Edward III had the legs removed and the tabletop hung high on the wall, for everyone to see and wonder at. I believe that the effect of this removal from the ground to a more remote spot, high on the wall, was deliberate. Yes, it was more visible, but it was also removed, like an altar in church, visible but separate, and—I can think of no other word—Holy. Although it was still unpainted, there is some evidence that it may have been covered by a rich hanging or cloth. The painting of the Round Table took place in the sixteenth century, in the reign of Henry VIII. Apart from some later touching up, to everyone’s surprise X-ray photos showed there to have been just one layer of paint. In other words, the design had not been built up over the century and a half or so between the time of Edward III and Henry. There were two known events attended by Henry at Winchester which could have led to the creation of the painting. The first was a visit he made in 1516; the second was a more grand state occasion, when the King came to Winchester with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1522. In a fascinating exercise in detailed art history, Pamela Tudor-Craig charted the history of Henry’s beard. (#litres_trial_promo) This study was able to link the Round Table’s portrait of Henry as King Arthur to the period of his second, of three, beards, characterised as ‘square, relatively youthful and short-bearded’, that Tudor-Craig dated to the period June 1520—July 1522. Clearly Henry was out to impress the Holy Roman Emperor. But there was more to it than that. Pamela Tudor-Craig points out that by this stage of his reign he had rid himself of Cardinal Wolsey, who had failed to gain approval for the annulment of Henry’s first marriage, and was directing attention to historical research whereby the case for independence from Rome can be bolstered by the citation of ancient and national roots. The image of a seated king on the Round Table inWinchester Great Hall is not only a prime example of the interest in British history evinced by Henry VIII and his advisors: it is a card in the game of international diplomacy that engaged the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the French and English monarchies during most of Henry VIII’s reign. The Roman Emperor had Charlemagne, Francis of France claimed Julius Caesar. Henry VIII called out the Round Table presided over by King Arthur, his own imperial ancestor. (#litres_trial_promo) During the Renaissance people in intellectual circles were inclined to question ideas that had been widely accepted during the Middle Ages, and the concept of a long-dead king whose courtiers slipped in and out of the realms of religion and magic began to lose credibility as a historical fact. But Arthur continued to exercise a degree of influence in certain circles, as Nicholas Higham explains: Although it is quite easy to over-emphasise Arthur’s importance, he was successively used for political and cultural purposes by Edward IV, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, then James VI and I, variously as a source of dynastic legitimacy and imperial status, as a Protestant icon, as a touchstone of nationalism and the new identity of the realm with the monarch’s own person, and as a source of courtly ideals and pageantry. (#litres_trial_promo) By the seventeenth century a population that had embraced Protestantism and accepted first Oliver Cromwell and subsequently parliamentary government, by which the Divine Right of Kings was repudiated, would not willingly have embraced Arthur, despite the pretensions to equality suggested by the Round Table. Instead, attention shifted towards the more historically verifiable King Alfred as England’s founding father. Alfred saw himself as a Saxon king, and from the eighteenth century onwards the Anglo-Saxons, rather than the semi-legendary Romanised British, became the preferred origin myth in England. It is probably not stretching the truth to think of Alfred as the English or Anglo-Saxon Arthur. He is often represented in similar poses, looking noble, his head held proudly aloft. There is usually a large sword hanging from his belt or grasped in his right hand. He is portrayed as being rather more rugged than the somewhat fey image of Arthur. All in all, Alfred is seen as very English, and an altogether appropriate ancestor for someone like Queen Victoria.* (#ulink_e240f0b6-83f4-5777-829b-0e3aaf8fcb88) Like Arthur, it would seem that Alfred acquired much of his reputation and many of his heroic legends after his lifetime. (#litres_trial_promo) Ultimately it was the Renaissance that finished Arthur as a potent political symbol. Ironically, the freedom of thought engendered by that great change in intellectual attitudes liberated people’s imaginations, and Arthurian legends were given a new and wholly fictitious life. The Arthur of history was replaced by the Arthur of fiction. Today that Arthur is still thriving, and has contributed to a new genre of literature by way of epics such as Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and Idylls of the King, and the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, which owe more than a nod in Arthur’s direction. The world of Arthur has acquired a life of its own: the post-Industrial, pre-modern age has become an unlikely Avalon. It is, for me at least, a somewhat unsettling thought that one day Arthur might prove to be the most enduring character from British history. * (#ulink_a6b897a2-826c-577a-80e8-277235d42420)In Latin Geoffrey of Monmouth translates as ‘Galfridus Monemutensis’, hence ‘Galfridian’. ? (#ulink_acab26de-b9d5-54f4-b183-f6cd902d9211)All royal dates refer to the period on the throne. * (#ulink_170c1cb0-c8d2-5da7-8ffb-9a8916155cbf)There were differences in French and English readers’ appreciation of the stories, however. For example, the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight was more popular in England than the exploits of Sir Lancelot, who was particularly favoured in France. * (#ulink_ec0336b5-3468-58f4-a727-1441d28dd024)The notional date for the end of the medieval period is generally taken as 1485, the year of the Battle of Bosworth. ? (#ulink_e4551e5f-9895-5412-855e-ffbfc1f721d0)The term ‘Vulgate’ refers to the fact that the romances were written in French, not Latin. French was the vulgar tongue, or language of the people. Both ‘vulgate’ and ‘vulgar’ derive from the Latin verb vulgare, to make public or common. * (#ulink_044aaa4b-8b96-52b3-8cac-d649bc3326af)At Burgh Castle on the Norfolk coast there is a stained glass church window which celebrates the links that were believed to exist between Victoria and Alfred. When I first saw the window I thought Alfred was Arthur, until I read his name. CHAPTER THREE Ancient Britons (#ulink_5385b63a-24b8-5345-8472-a59266cfa040) IT IS MY BELIEF that one cannot understand what was happening in late-Roman and ‘Dark Age’ Britain unless one has a grasp of what life was like before the Roman Conquest. The Roman period was indeed important to the development of British history, but the actual number of incomers was relatively small, given a minimum estimated population in Britain then of about 1.5 million. Certainly large elements of the southern British populace were fully Romanised by the close of the period, but others outside the south-east were not. It makes no sense to discuss post-Roman events against a backdrop of Roman Britain alone. One must look farther back in time. When the Roman legions came ashore in the first of Caesar’s two visits to Britain in 55 BC, they encountered well-orchestrated and stiff resistance. The Roman army was the most formidable military machine in the ancient world, yet the British tribesmen were able to give almost as good as they got (as Edward Gibbon would not have put it). The great Caesar’s second expedition to Britain a year later, in 54 BC, was on a much larger scale, and it met with greater military success. Then he departed. The Romans did not invade Britain again for three years short of a century, in AD 43. This time the Roman Emperor was Claudius, and the general who commanded the invading armies was one Aulus Plautius. South-eastern Britain was overrun relatively swiftly, between AD 43 and 47, which Barry Cunliffe puts down to ‘a measure of incipient Romanisation’. (#litres_trial_promo) In other words, as we will see in Chapter 5, the invaders were not entirely unwelcome, especially to those tribal leaders who had already formed political alliances with the Roman Empire. The facts, as baldly stated here, do not suggest that pre-Roman Britain was a thinly populated peasant society with a weakly developed sense of political purpose. Far from it. What emerges from a study of pre-Roman Britain is that the islands featured a diverse mix of different societies. Often these cultural groupings were in conflict - or perhaps a state of rivalry - with each other, but there are archaeological reasons to believe that they were also united by strong bonds of belief and ideology. Put another way, it seems likely that the various inhabitants of later prehistoric Britain shared a common ‘world view’ or cosmology. (#litres_trial_promo) Many aspects of this world view would have been shared with Iron Age people on the Continental mainland, but in certain respects even Roman writers acknowledged that Britain was preeminent. For example the Druids, those politico-religious leaders perhaps best seen as the Iron Age equivalents of the Muslim Mullahs, helped rally resistance to the spread of Roman rule both in Britain and on the other side of the Channel. (#litres_trial_promo) Graham Webster describes the stiffening effect that Druidism had on British resistance to Roman rule: Perhaps it is not surprising that the most savage and devastating wars Rome ever fought were against the Jews and the Britons, since Judaism and Druidism had a strong political bias and the passions they aroused were directed against Rome with a fanaticism which could be broken only by a crushing defeat that destroyed the majority of the devotees. (#litres_trial_promo) We will see, however, that while many of the most militant followers of Druidism were slaughtered by Roman troops, both during Boudica’s revolt in AD 60-61 and on the island of Anglesey in AD 59, it takes more than martyrdom - albeit on a large scale - to destroy a society’s long- and deeply-held religious convictions, especially if those beliefs are fundamental to one’s world view. We will also see that the religious beliefs behind Druidism had roots that may well have extended as far back as the Bronze Age, or even earlier. There is increasing evidence for the survival of prehistoric British religious customs through, and indeed beyond, the Roman period. I will discuss this further in Chapter 5. I remember being taught at university that the Druids had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge, which had been built over a millennium before the Iron Age, the period when Druidism flourished. The emphasis on this chronological separation was a way of saying that the modern Druids and their New Age fellow-thinkers had got it all wrong. How laughable, we were told it was, that the latter-day Druids dressed up in sheets and pranced around the stones on the night of the midsummer solstice. How misguided they were! Today, however, most prehistorians would accept that the religious beliefs that formed the core of Druidism had very ancient roots indeed, at least as old as Stonehenge, and probably a great deal older. (#litres_trial_promo) It came as no surprise when we found that the small Early Bronze Age timber circle known as Seahenge was entirely made from oak trees. The choice of oak must have been deliberate, because other locally occurring woods such as ash, willow, alder or poplar, would have been just as suitable, and rather less work to cut down. Oak was, and still is, the best British constructional timber, and it must have been held in high regard in prehistory. It was the structural steel of its day. Barry Cunliffe quotes a revealing passage from Pliny the Elder, writing about the Druid priesthood: They choose groves of oak for the sake of the tree alone and they never perform any sacred right unless they have a branch of it. They think that everything that grows on it has been sent from heaven by the god himself. (#litres_trial_promo) Pliny goes on to describe how mistletoe is cut from oak trees, with a great deal of ceremony and the use of a golden sickle; a superb Late Bronze Age sickle, complete with its wooden handle, was found alongside a contemporary timber causeway through wet ground at Shinewater Park, near Eastbourne, and we now know of several sites in Britain where identical Bronze and Iron Age religious rituals continued without a break. When it comes to the matter of pre-Roman ritual and ideology, I’m now inclined to think that the much-derided people wearing sheets actually had a better idea of what was going on in prehistory than my lecturers at Cambridge, who were unable to take a sufficiently long or broad view of the way that prehistoric beliefs arose, developed and matured through the centuries of later prehistory. Most prehistorians are now agreed that the modern Western distinction between the sacred and the profane - between religion and domestic life - is a product of the way we organise our time. If you like, it reflects our world view, which is largely based around the need to work - and to work with the greatest possible efficiency. In medieval times the Church impinged on domestic life to a far greater extent than it does today, and a sizeable proportion of the population, who lived in the hundreds of monastic foundations across the land, devoted their entire lives to the service of God. The sixteenth-century Reformation was to change all that. Over succeeding generations religion became increasingly confined to church on Sunday. In most households today people no longer say grace before meals - the last vestige of religion within the domestic sphere. In pre-Roman times religion and daily life were closely integrated. People would probably not have been aware of when their thoughts were within the realms of ideology or practicality, because the distinction was meaningless. The shades of the ancestors inhabited the countryside around them. Their presence within burial mounds along the edges of communal grazing ensured that animals were not allowed to stray too often onto pastures where they were not welcome. The prevailing cosmology in pre-Roman Britain seems to have been structured around the cycle of the seasons, and the movements of the sun and moon in the sky. These things gave form not just to the great religious (archaeologists prefer the term ‘ritual’) monuments such as Stonehenge, but to the arrangement of ordinary houses, which in Britain were almost invariably circular in plan. By the same token, the interior arrangement of communal tombs, such as Maes Howe in Orkney, replicated the way that houses were laid out. The one was seen as a reflection of the other - which tells us something about the way in which the sacred and the profane were seen as being part of the same entity. If we see integration, we also see longevity, which suggests that prehistoric religious beliefs addressed themes that were deeply rooted within society. These themes doubtless included the role of the family as a means of structuring society, the place of human institutions within the natural world, and of course the continuing cycle of the seasons - and with it the replenishment of food, fuel and shelter. Today many of these concerns can be addressed through science and secularity. Religion does not need to be invoked. Having said that, prehistoric ideologies also addressed the traditional territory of religion, which may be seen as ‘rites of passage’, to use an anthropological term: birth, puberty, marriage and death. When we look at prehistoric ritual activity it’s hard not to see constant reiteration. There is a long-standing concern with water, for example: all sorts of things are placed in or thrown into rivers, bogs, lakes, ponds and wells - swords, shields, weaponry in general, pottery vessels, bones, bodies and so forth. (#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes these things are fabulously valuable, at other times they are more humdrum. Sometimes they have been deliberately smashed before being offered to the waters, at other times they are in perfect condition. Items used in the preparation of food, and particularly corn-grinding stones, known as quern stones, are often placed in the ground or in water as offerings. It would be a mistake to regard the items placed in the ground or in water as mere things. Certainly they could be very beautiful, but like many objects they possessed a symbolic life of their own. Thus a sword could indeed be a weapon, but it could also be a symbol of an individual’s rank or authority, so that its breaking before being offered to the waters would have symbolised that its owner had passed out of this life. Maybe the broken sword was thought to become whole again in the realm of the ancestors. We can only speculate as to what these things originally symbolised, but there are now literally thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of prehistoric offerings known in Britain alone, and certain patterns are beginning to emerge. Water probably symbolised both separation and travel. Beneath it you died, yet it was also a substance in which you saw your own reflection - something we take for granted today, but which rarely happened in prehistory. A journey across water, whether by boat or on foot along a causeway, could symbolise the journey from this world to the next - or any other rite of passage. Prehistoric causeways which played an important ritual role often led to offshore islands, which again could be seen as symbolising other worlds or states of being. As for the corn-grinding stones, they possibly reflected the importance of the meal as a means of keeping the family together, but they could also have expressed a wealth of other ideas, including the role of women within society, motherhood or family life. These rites first become evident archaeologically from around 4200 BC, at the onset of the New Stone Age or Neolithic period, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that their roots lie even further back in time - maybe even as far as post-Glacial times, around ten thousand years ago. The prevalence of certain themes over thousands of years does not indicate that a particular religion held sway for that length of time; it’s doubtful whether one could have talked of ‘a religion’ in Neolithic times. What this longevity or persistence indicates is a phenomenon termed by French anthropologists the longue dur?e. Practices which persisted in certain cultures over huge stretches of time owed their longevity to the fact that they were embedded or rooted within aspects of society that were seen to be essential to that particular community. In prehistoric Britain, the most persistent theme was a concern with the cycle of time and the movement of the celestial bodies. One could speculate endlessly on what it was that made the passage of the seasons, the sun and the moon so important in prehistoric Britain, but it may owe something to the prevalent way of life, which was based on animal husbandry, a choice which in turn was influenced by the British maritime climate, which grows grass superbly well. We always suppose that the ancient arable farmer worried about the germination of the next season’s crops, and that this gave him an interest in seeing that the days lengthened after the midwinter solstice. The same goes for the livestock farmer: grass too effectively ceases to grow in winter, and the appearance of calves and lambs was, I am sure, as eagerly awaited as the first sprouts of a freshly germinated crop of wheat. Farmers have a natural concern for the passage of the seasons. Nevertheless, I’m doubtful whether one can attribute something as fundamental as a society’s world view merely to climate or livelihood. Such things come from deep within people themselves. Fully formed ideas need time to appear, but when they do, they are taken up very rapidly if they are right for the society and the times. This is what probably happened in the Later Neolithic period in Britain and Ireland, with the first appearance of circular tombs known as passage graves, whose entrances were often aligned on the sun at solstice. Before that time (say 3200 BC), many of what were later to prove persistent ritual themes had been in existence for several centuries or more, but it was the appearance of passage graves beneath round mounds, and slightly later the erection of the great henge monuments, that gave formal expression to these long-held beliefs. The longevity of the religious ideas of pre-Roman Britain suggests they were deeply embedded within society. They were not mere superstitions. The placing of swords and shields in a river was not the pre-Roman equivalent of tossing coins in a fountain ‘for luck’. We should think more in terms of christening, Holy Communion or the funeral service. If these rites were deeply rooted within British culture, they were also part and parcel of everyday life: they fitted that life and expressed the way people viewed themselves, their families and their world. They were, if you wish, a ceremonial or ritualised expression of the beliefs that motivated people to get up in the morning. The idea of the longue dur?e also suggests that when we find pre-Roman rites surviving into Roman and post-Roman times, we are witnessing the survival of far more than mere ritual or superstition.We are actually seeing the survival of ancient patterns of social organisation, family structure and cosmology too - because you cannot separate the rituals from the societies and the belief systems that gave rise to them. Certainly some will have been modified through time and changing circumstances, but the core of the beliefs must remain constant, or the rites become irrelevant - in which case they wither and die. With certain notable exceptions, such as Navan Fort in Northern Ireland, the religious sites of the last prehistoric period, the Iron Age, are less obviously eye-catching than the elaborate monuments of the Later Neolithic and Bronze Age periods such as Stonehenge and Avebury in England,Maes Howe in Orkney and Newgrange in Ireland. (#litres_trial_promo) By this period, too, the archaeological evidence for actual settlement is becoming more prominent, largely as a result of the steady growth of the British population. In this chapter I want to give an impression of what Britain might have looked like to a visitor arriving in, say, AD 42 - the year before the Roman Conquest. I start with a simple question: was Iron Age Britain very different from Roman Britain? I believe that it wasn’t, for the simple reason that, setting aside shortlived introductions such as towns, the army and the imperial administration, Roman Britain was Iron Age Britain. The survival of ‘native’ British culture and traditions into post-Roman times only makes sense if we understand its age and scale. Take, for example, the longevity of British society before the arrival of Roman forces in AD 43. In common with other parts of Europe there had been well-organised societies living in settled communities for at least three thousand years before Christ. Before that there were two millennia or so when societies were less settled, but no less organised. Even in the millennia after the Ice Ages (around ten thousand years ago) the British population was thin, but the landscape was already being parcelled up by the people who inhabited it. Life for hunter-gatherer groups was by no means an anarchic free-for-all. It is simply wrong to suppose that the Romans brought civilisation to a barbarian Europe: they brought their own style of civilisation, which was founded on ideas that flourished in classical Greece in the fifth century BC, and they imposed it, with greater or lesser success, on pre-existing settled populations who possessed their own social rules and regulations. The landscapes that Caesar’s legions marched across were not dense primeval forests: most of them had been cleared of trees for several millennia. His men tramped their way through fields, roadways, farms and villages. I doubt whether the average modern person, if dropped into a rural village in pre- or post-Roman Britain, would be able to tell them apart. He would probably only spot that he was in Roman times if a visiting government or military official was in the neighbourhood, or if he happened to be shown a family’s best dinner service (which seems somewhat unlikely). If pre-Roman society consisted of a handful of skin-clad savages eking out a frugal existence on nuts and berries, its ideas and culture could not have survived into post-Roman times. There has to be a critical mass of people for their ideas to persist if their culture is overtaken by outsiders. In the case of pre-Roman Europe that critical mass certainly existed. Any lingering notions of skins, nuts or berries should be replaced by woven cloth, wine, beer, bread, cheese, mutton, lamb, beef and pork. Estimates of Britain’s population in the last centuries BC are hard to arrive at, but few would place it much below 1.5 million, and some would put it as high as 2.5 million. (#litres_trial_promo) Whatever else it was, it was not a small handful. Who were these people, and what would it have been like to have lived in Britain during the century or so before the Claudian conquest of AD 43? The second half of the last century BC and the first half of the first century AD is sometimes seen as a period of ‘almost-’ or ‘proto-history’, because although written records had yet to develop in Britain, Julius Caesar and other Roman authors were busily writing in Gaul (France) and elsewhere; sometimes they even referred to Britain. In Britain there are early indications of writing that did not simply arrive, fully finished, from elsewhere: there are, for example, numerous examples of Iron Age coinage, some of which bear clear inscriptions, such as ‘CAM’, which we know was an abbreviation (much needed) of Camulodunum, present-day Colchester in Essex. Writing, rather like farming, seems to have been an idea that people wanted to grasp even before they understood precisely how it worked. Maybe members of ?lite society in southern Britain liked the concept of literacy before they possessed it fully themselves. The great Roman general and future Emperor Julius Caesar made two visits to England in 55 and 54 BC. These expeditions were essentially to gather intelligence, and should be seen as a part of his campaigns in Gaul, which began in earnest in 59 BC. Caesar’s first expedition to Britain in 55 BC involved ninety-eight transport ships carrying two legions (each of ten thousand men), plus cavalry and many accompanying warships. The landing in Kent was resisted, and there were numerous skirmishes with the British. Eventually Caesar retreated back to Gaul. The following year he did things on a larger scale. This time there were eight hundred ships, transporting five legions and two thousand cavalry. This huge force met stiff resistance under Cassivellaunus, leader of the Catuvellauni, a tribe centred on Verlamion (St Albans) and parts of what is today called ‘Mid-Anglia’ (Hertfordshire and areas around). Caesar had a hard fight through Kent. He crossed the Thames into the Catuvellaunian heartland, and eventually British morale broke down and Cassivellaunus sued for peace. Caesar returned victorious, with many hostages, but he had met fierce opposition, and was probably relieved to leave Britain with his honour intact. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/francis-pryor/britain-ad-a-quest-for-arthur-england-and-the-anglo-saxons/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.