Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor
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’.1 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 Chrétien 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.2 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?3 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.4 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.5 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