The King Arthur Mysteries KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 11 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 22 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 The King Arthur Mysteries Arthur’s Britain and Early Mediaeval World Timothy Venning KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 33 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Pen & Sword History An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd Yorkshire – Philadelphia Copyright © Timothy Venning 2021 ISBN 978 1 52678 390 5 The right of Timothy Venning to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. Typeset by Mac Style UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY Printed and bound in Pen & Sword Books Limited incorporates the imprints of Atlas, Archaeology, Aviation, Discovery, Family History, Fiction, History, Maritime, Military, Military Classics, Politics, Select, Transport, True Crime, Air World, Frontline Publishing, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing, The Praetorian Press, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe Transport, Wharncliffe True Crime and White Owl. For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Or PEN AND SWORD BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Rd, Havertown, PA 19083, USA E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.penandswordbooks.com KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 44 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 Contents Introduction: The Need for King Arthur vi Chapter 1 Arthur In History: Arthur’s Real Context: The End of Roman Britain 1 Chapter 2 Arthur’s Predecessors? Vortigern and Ambrosius 38 Chapter 3 King Arthur in Mediaeval Culture. An Anachronistic Picture 54 Chapter 4 Decline and Revival. Arthur after Malory. More Anachronisms 81 Chapter 5 Arthur and Associated Romances. Totally Myth, or Some Genuine Facts Too? 111 Chapter 6 Arthurian Connections – Persons and Artefacts. Arthur’s Queens, Knights, and Swords: Their Development 148 Chapter 7 Interpreting the Early Written Evidence. ‘Legend’ and Propaganda Not History? 165 Chapter 8 Camelot and The Round Table 207 Chapter 9 ‘Original’ Arthurs. The Silurian Arthur – A Credible Candidate or a Coincidence of Names? 216 Notes 236 Bibliography 249 Index 255 KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 55 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 Introduction: The Need for King Arthur he Arthurian story, the ‘Matter of Britain’, has long exercised a Tfascination over writers and their public – a career of over eight hundred years in the English imagination and longer in Wales. But it has equally been a matter of controversy among ‘serious’ historians, who have been at odds with the literary romancers at least since the time around 1125 when the monastic chronicler William of Malmesbury was separating the ‘real’ Arthur from the literary edifice created around him. Already at this point the implausibilities in the myths surrounding the warrior-king were being used to suggest that he had never existed. Unlike the parallel ‘Matter of France’ surrounding the career and exploits of the late eighth-century Frankish hero-king Charles ‘the Great’, a.k.a. ‘Charlemagne’ (crowned Emperor in 800), Arthur had no definitive place in the history and royal genealogies of his people. He had not founded a verifiable empire and long-lasting dynasty as Charles had done, and even his exact dates were uncertain. When he first emerged in the historical consciousness of the new Anglo-Norman kingdom of England in the early twelfth-century, romancers presented him as a ruler of ‘Britain’ (and an ever-wider empire like Charles’) in the period following the end of Roman rule in ad 410. Even in the context of Welsh oral and literary myth where he was a major figure from the ninth-century onwards, he was not given a precise geographical context or clear career as a ‘fixed’ member of a prominent dynasty. He was a hero fighting monsters and Otherwordly foes in Welsh myth as well as in mediaeval knightly tales – a fact which recent ‘debunkers’ have enthusiastically latched onto. Unlike France where Charles’ empire was the verifiable forerunner of the contemporary French kingdom and he was the ancestor of its kings, Arthur’s ‘Britain’ was separated from contemporary Britain by a gulf of time and culture. Not only was Arthur seen as ruling around 600 years KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 66 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 Introduction: The Need for King Arthur vii before William’s time, 300 years before Charles, but ‘his’ Britain had been a conglomerate of obscure post-Roman kingdoms subsequently conquered by the ancestors of the English. The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ peoples conquered by the Normans in 1066, whose coming to Britain from north-west Germany in Arthur’s time was chronicled by Bede in the 730s, had no political or cultural/‘ethnic’ connection to Arthur and his subjects, unlike the twelfth-century French had with Charles and his empire. Indeed, there was no mention of Arthur in Bede’s meticulously detailed account of the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; details of his exploits in battle against the Anglo-Saxons had only survived in the patchy chronicles and later mythologizing of the conquered British. These peoples, referred to as the ‘Welsh’ (‘foreigners’) by the Anglo-Saxons, had not even spoken the same language as the Germanic incomers and were believed to have been driven out of what became ‘England’ into the western hills of Cornwall and Wales. Bede was dimly aware of the British ‘fight-back’ against the Anglo-Saxons, their leader Ambrosius Aurelianus, and their victory at ‘Mount Badon’; and the 820s Welsh Church writer Nennius was aware of the legendary wars of ‘Hengest’ in fifth-century Kent. But no such common agreement as to perceived ‘fact’ involved Arthur. So the new ‘Matter of Britain’ presented a major problem from its creation; its hero had fought against, not for, the ancestors of the majority of its readership in twelfth-century England. It was noticeable that English interest in Arthur only became apparent after the Norman Conquest, as the new Europe-wide literary culture of knightly ‘chivalry’ (centred on France) took hold in England. Before 1066, the secular national literary culture in Anglo-Saxon England seems to have centred on heroic Germanic poetry on Northern Continental themes – as with the epic of Beowulf, presented as a king of the Swedish ‘Geats’ in the early sixth-century. Religious literary culture was centred on the ‘foundation- myth’ of the English Church as transmitted by Bede – a picture in which Christianity came to a pagan England from Papal Rome in 597 and there was no mention of post-Roman Christian Britain or its kings. Cultural contact with the actual political heirs of ‘Arthurian’ Britain, the Welsh kingdoms of the West, was minimal and marked by incomprehension and hostility. Coincidentally or not, the Norman conquest of 1066 not only saw lowland Britain’s conquerors conquered in turn; it brought to England an important group of Breton lords and knights in Duke William’s train, KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 77 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 viii The King Arthur Mysteries from a people descended from British expatriates of Arthur’s time who had settled in Brittany. Interest in Arthur and pre-Saxon Britain escalated under the new Norman kings and ruling class, not least as they launched a comprehensive conquest of lands in Wales which brought the new rulers and settlers of the ‘March’ there into close contact with the Welsh. The first great fabulator of Arthurian stories in the twelfth-century, Geoffrey of Monmouth, came from this area of cultural mix – and may have had Breton blood; and the other great twelfth-century creator of new ‘Arthur’ stories in a contemporary setting, Chretien de Troyes, may also have had access to Breton legends in northern France. Equally importantly, the idea of a powerful British king ruling over many sub-kings – and in due course Continental lands – was to answer the political needs of the Anglo-Norman kings of the early twelfth- century. The creation of a joint rule of the kingdom of England with his ancestral Duchy of Normandy in 1106 brought Henry I a realm straddling the Channel and the first beginnings of a Continental dominion which was to endure until the loss of Calais in 1558. The Duke of Normandy (and later the Count of Anjou and Duke of Aquitaine), the English kings’ Continental titles, remained titular vassals of the King of France, descendant of Emperor Charles. Creating the idea of an equally powerful and wide-ruling ancestor for the English Kings to match Charles was a valuable asset, even if it so happened that ‘Arthur’ was not ‘English’ at all. Equally, in linguistic terms he was not unambiguously a ‘King’ to the first Welsh writers to mention him. e.g. ‘Nennius’ c.829. The use of this term to denote sovereignty was Germanic and only came into existence after the Anglo-Saxon political and linguistic takeover of his realm. Assuming that he had had royal status at all (which the Welsh literary sources left ambiguous), his royal title would have been expressed in Latin or a British language and in fourth/fifth-century Late Roman terminology. The differences between the mythical and any ‘original’ Arthur Arthur was primarily seen as the epitome of a mediaeval chivalric order by the most detailed writers and poets to cover his career, from Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s to Sir Thomas Malory in the 1460s. Writers thought of him in contemporary terminology, without a thought about any concept of anachronism. A paragon of kingly virtues and arguably KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 88 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388 Introduction: The Need for King Arthur ix developed as a British counterpart to the great French hero-king (and multi-national ruler) ‘Charlemagne’, he was the British member of a select body of mediaeval Christian heroes, the chivalric ‘Seven Worthies’. The updating of his setting to a contemporary one was not an unusual phenomenon either, as seen by the French treatment of Charlemagne and his nephew as proto-leaders of the ‘Reconquista’ in Spain. The centrepiece of Arthur’s literary presentation was his magnificent and well-attended court, from the mid-twelfth-century placed at ‘Camelot’ – though by French writers but at Caerleon by the better-informed ‘local’ Geoffrey of Monmouth. Initially Arthur’s military career was the centrepiece of the stories, with Geoffrey presenting him as conqueror of much of Europe and defeater of the Romans. The French writers from Chretien de Troyes moved attention to the knightly virtues that predominated at his court and told tales of his knights’ exploits, many of them symbolic and/or involving magic and Otherworldly figures. The ‘Round Table’, first referred to in the mid-twelfth-century by Jersey mythographer Wace (see Chapter Three), came to be the lynchpin for a chivalric order of knights dedicated to using their prowess to aid women, the poor, and the downtrodden against injustice – and thus served as a template of an ideal for contemporary knights to follow in the ‘Age of Chivalry’. To add to the identification of Arthur with what his twentieth-century interpreter T.H. White called ‘the Middle Ages as they should have been’, the visual imagery presented by the illustrators of Arthurian romances also showed his Court in contemporary clothing and buildings. The concept of anachronism was not one with which such writers were familiar – or which they saw any need to correct. This contrast between the ‘real’ and the literary Arthur has continued to the present day. All of this was of course not the world of a real ruler of the late fifth or sixth-century, the period in which the few historical references placed the ‘real’ Arthur. It was accepted that Arthur’s place in history belonged in the fifth-century after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but where real people were used they were shadowy figures from the post-Roman origins of mediaeval dynasties. The errors and fabulations began early, and cannot be blamed on the example set by Geoffrey of Monmouth; before him William of Malmesbury was already complaining of this.1 It is now argued that even the early Welsh references to Arthur (none contemporary) were as much affected by the need to ‘create’ an inspiring KKiinngg AArrtthhuurr MMyysstteerriieess..iinndddd 99 0077//0044//22002211 1144::3388