Author’s Note
It is hardly surprising that the Arthurian period of British history is known as the Dark Ages for we know almost nothing about the events and personalities of those years. We cannot even be certain that Arthur existed, though on balance it does seem likely that a great British hero called Arthur (or Artur or Artorius) temporarily checked the invading Saxons sometime during the early years of the sixth century AD. One history of that conflict was written during the 5408, Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, and we might expect such a work to be an authoritative source on Arthur’s achievements, but Gildas does not even mention Arthur, a fact much relished by those who dispute his existence.
Yet there is some early evidence for Arthur. Around the middle years of the sixth century, just when Gildas was writing his history, the surviving records show a surprising and atypical number of men called Arthur which suggests a sudden fashion for sons being named after a famous and powerful man. Such evidence is hardly conclusive, any more than is the earliest literary reference to Arthur, a glancing mention in the great epic poem Y Gododdin that was written around AD 600 to celebrate a battle between the northern British (‘a mead-nourished host’) and the Saxons, but many scholars believe that reference to Arthur is a much later interpolation.
After that one dubious mention in Y Gododdin we have to wait another two hundred years for Arthur’s existence to be chronicled by an historian, a gap that weakens the authority of the evidence, yet nevertheless Nennius, who compiled his history of the Britons in the very last years of the eighth century, does make much of Arthur. Significantly Nennius never calls him a king, but rather describes Arthur as the Dux Bellorum, the Leader of Battles, a title I have translated as Warlord. Nennius was surely drawing on ancient folktales, which were a fertile source feeding the increasingly frequent retellings of the Arthur story that reached their zenith in the twelfth century when two writers in separate countries made Arthur into a hero for all times. In Britain Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his wonderful and mythical Historia Regum Britanniae while in France the poet Chretien de Troyes introduced, among other things, Lancelot and Camelot to the royal mix. The name Camelot might have been pure invention (or else arbitrarily adapted from Colchester’s Roman name, Camulodunum), but otherwise Chretien de Troyes was almost certainly drawing on Breton myths which might have preserved, like the Welsh folktales that fed Geoffrey’s history, genuine memories of an ancient hero. Then, in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur which is the proto-version of our flamboyant Arthur legend with its Holy Grail, round table, lissom maidens, questing beasts, mighty wizards and enchanted swords.
It is probably impossible to disentangle this rich tradition to find the truth of Arthur, though many have tried and doubtless many will try again. Arthur is said to be a man of northern Britain, an Essex man, as well as a West Countryman. One recent work positively identifies Arthur as a sixth-century Welsh ruler called Owain Ddantgwyn, but as the authors then note that ‘nothing is recorded of Owain Ddantgwyn’ it does not prove very helpful. Camelot has been variously placed at Carlisle, Winchester, South Cadbury, Colchester and a dozen other places. My choice in this matter is capricious at best and fortified by the certainty that no real answer exists. I have given Camelot the invented name of Caer Cadarn and set it at South Cadbury in Somerset, not because I think it the likeliest site (though I do not think it the least likely), but because I know and love that part of Britain. Delve as we like, all we can safely deduce from history is that a man called Arthur probably lived in the fifth and sixth centuries, that he was a great warlord even if he was never a king, and that his greatest battles were fought against the hated Saxon invaders.
We might know very little about Arthur, but we can infer a lot from the times in which he probably lived. Fifth- and sixth-century Britain must have been a horrid place. The protective Romans left early in the fifth century and the Romanized Britons were thus abandoned to a ring of fearsome enemies. From the west came the marauding Irish who were close Celtic relatives to the British, but invaders, colonizers and slavers all the same. To the north were the strange people of the Scottish Highlands who were ever ready to come south on destructive raids, but neither of these enemies was so feared as the hated Saxons who first raided, then colonized, and afterwards captured eastern Britain, and who, in time, went on to capture Britain’s heartland and rename it England. The Britons who faced these enemies were far from united. Their kingdoms seemed to spend as much energy fighting each other as opposing the invaders, and they were doubtless divided ideologically as well. The Romans left a legacy of law, industry, learning and religion, but that legacy must have been opposed by many native traditions that had been violently suppressed in the long Roman occupation, but which had never entirely disappeared, and chief amongst those traditions is Druidism. The Romans crushed Druidism because of its associations with British (and thus anti-Roman) nationalism, and in its place introduced a welter of other religions including, of course, Christianity. Scholarly opinion suggests that Christianity was widespread in post-Roman Britain (though it would be an unfamiliar Christianity to modern minds), but undoubtedly paganism also existed, especially in the countryside (pagan comes from the Latin word for country people) and, as the post-Roman state crumbled, men and women must have clutched at whatever supernatural straws offered themselves. At least one modern scholar has suggested that Christianity was sympathetic to the remnants of British Druidism and that the two creeds existed in peaceful cooperation, but toleration has never been the strongest suit of the church and I doubt his conclusions. My belief is that Arthur’s Britain was a place as racked by religious dissent as it was by invasion and politics. In time, of course, the Arthur stories became heavily Christianized, especially in their obsession with the Holy Grail, though we might doubt whether any such chalice was known to Arthur. Yet the Grail Quest legends might not be wholly later fabrications for they bear a striking resemblance to popular Celtic folktales of warriors seeking magic cauldrons; heathen tales on to which, like so much else in Arthurian mythology, later Christian authors put their own pious gloss, thus, burying a much earlier Arthurian tradition which now exists only in some very ancient and obscure lives of Celtic saints. That tradition, surprisingly, depicts Arthur as a villain and as an enemy of Christianity. The Celtic church, it seems, was not fond of Arthur and the saints’ lives suggest that it was because he sequestered the church’s money to fund his wars, which could explain why Gildas, a churchman and the closest contemporary historian to Arthur, refuses to give him credit for the British victories which temporarily checked the Saxon advance.