The Real History Behind King Arthur - Myths, Kings and Medieval Power

We all know the medieval Arthurian myths, the great king ruling wisely over his kingdom from Camelot, supported by his round table of brave knights. They seek for the holy grail, they fight evil and right wrongs throughout the kingdom. It's a legend that's been engaged with by English kings since the 13th century and by the 14th it was providing a model for their kingship. But what you may not know about is the clash of cultures that occurred in the 12th century that led to the making, the breaking and then the redefining of Arthur's story. The Celtic and Norman worlds would clash head-on in a bitter struggle for supremacy and survival and one king of England would be forced to kill King Arthur once and for all. By the end of the 15th century Thomas Malory was writing his famous Le Morte d'Arthur, the real version of Arthur that we would know and recognise today. But Malory is building on earlier work by Chrétien de Troyes at the end of the 12th century who compiles several stories of Arthur and even Chrétien is adding to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth earlier in the century who wrote probably the first version of Arthur that we would recognise as the story of the great king and his round table of knights. Geoffrey of Monmouth finishes his history of the kings of Britain in 1138 and this is the first time we see what we might recognise as the story of Arthur emerging. He's the son of Uther Pendragon, he's advised by a wizard named Merlin and Arthur goes on to conquer all of Britain adding Iceland to it before he turns his attention to the continent, conquers Denmark, Norway and Gaul bringing him into conflict with the Roman Empire. But Arthur is dragged back home by problems with Mordred and he's mortally wounded in battle taken to the Isle of Avalon for treatment and here Geoffrey leaves his story with a tantalising theory that Arthur just might still be alive. Sure Geoffrey may have made up large chunks of his work, William of Newburgh said that Geoffrey's book was a flight of fancy based on his inordinate love of lying, ouch! But Geoffrey was pulling together myths and stories and legends that had been around for centuries and some of the places and people that Geoffrey mentions can be traced back through Welsh mythology to the sixth century or earlier. In some stories he's an undefeatable warrior, in others he's the protector of all Britain defending the Isle from foes human and superhuman, giants, dog heads, dragons and any other monster that invaded his lands. One of the earliest of these references is in the medieval Welsh poem Igedodin. In stanza 99 the poet praises a warrior saying he fed black ravens on the rampart of a But what Geoffrey did is pull all of those together into the first account that we would recognise as the story of King Arthur. King Arthur continues to inspire fascination and debate to this day. Was he a real person? Some Celtic warlord or some Roman remnant left in the aftermath of the empire's evacuation of England? Is he a melding together of lots of real people to create one epic medieval hero? Or is he just a moral tale altogether made up to teach us about the temptations of the flesh destroying the perfect society? Some new Eden lost forever in England's green and pleasant lands. Nestled here in the Somerset Hills is Cadbury Castle, an old iron age and bronze age hill fort. But in the 16th century the Tudor antiquarian John Leyland called it Camelot Castle and local legend still holds to this day that this was the seat of the great King Arthur. There's no evidence that this was really King Arthur's Camelot. Lots of places lay claim to that title but it's easy to see why this would appear to be a brilliant defensible position that can see for miles around. It's the perfect position to dominate the countryside and an ideal notion for locals of where Arthur might have based himself to pass out his wisdom across his kingdom. There are innumerable local myths about Camelot Castle, Cadbury Castle. My personal favourite is that if you were to come here on Midsummer's Eve the whole hill would turn as clear as glass and inside you'd be able to see Arthur sat with his knights of the round table. But for many people Arthur wasn't just a myth he was a real figure who might rise again and this hope undermined the rule of any living monarch. For one great king the figure of Arthur and the hope his promised return gave to rebels became a problem that was proving impossible to solve. King Henry II, the first Plantagenet monarch and the founder of the Angevin dynasty had a problem. He had several but he was finding many of them easy to resolve. Few were able to stand against his mighty will and he was a man famous for being able to reduce castles to surrender faster than any other alive. But one place remained frustratingly beyond Henry's control. That place was known as Cymru, the land of the people, Wales. In common with all post-conquest kings Henry II wanted to get proper control of Wales. In 1157, just three years into his reign, he summoned all of his barons to North Hampton and secured their agreement to accompany him into Wales. Henry's target was Owain, the Prince of Gwynedd in North Wales and his plan was to replace Owain with his disgruntled little brother Cadwaladr and so have a pliant prince on one of the thrones of Wales. Henry mustered his army at Chester and they followed the estuary of the River Dee into Gwynedd. But unfamiliar with the terrain, Henry made his first mistake when he rushed his army into enemy territory. They were ambushed by the Welsh at Flint and Henry's army was pummeled, decimated and scattered. Henry of Essex, the king's standard bearer, suddenly appeared but his master was nowhere to be seen. Terror ran through the army that the king must be dead. Henry of Essex threw down the royal standard and fled for his life and many followed him. But some waited long enough to see the king emerge, breathless but unscathed and sending out orders for his army to rally around him again. Reorganised and refreshed, the army pressed on into Wales, this time much more cautiously. Henry ordered a fleet of ships to shadow them along the north coast of Wales, ready to resupply the army whenever they needed it. Owain realised that the King of England wasn't going to just go away this time and so he and other local rulers came to make their peace with Henry. Henry had found a challenge in Wales but adjusted his tactics and won something like a victory. But if he thought that was the last of his problems from that quarter, Henry really hadn't paid attention to his history. In 1163, Prince Rhys in Dehobarth began to trouble in mid Wales. Henry marched in with an army and this time he managed to capture Prince Rhys. Bringing him back to the Royal Palace of Woodstock in England, Henry summoned all of the other princes of Wales as well as the King of Scots and demanded that they do him formal homage. Henry was determined to place the tacit acceptance that he was the most powerful ruler in the British Isles onto a much more formal footing. He wanted them to recognise him as their overlord. In the King's presence, in the King's Palace, the Welsh princes had little choice but to agree. But as soon as they were allowed to return home they did what they did best. They rebelled again. In 1165, Henry was determined to impose himself on Wales again. He mustered an army at Shrewsbury and led them into Powys heading again for Owain's kingdom of Gwynedd. But the summer was torrentially wet. It left all the mountains and the paths slick with mud. The supply chain couldn't keep up with Henry's damp and demoralised army and they were forced to pack up and go home. Once again, Henry's eagerness to be obeyed had got the better of him. Henry had been unable to crush Welsh resistance, in part because they clung to that Arthurian myth. And so he went about tackling the problem in a new way. A propaganda battle for the soul of Wales. The remains of the 14th century St Michael's Church still dominate the top of Glastonbury Tor to this day. Remembered as the Isle of Avalon once surrounded by water, it's always been closely linked to the legends of King Arthur and still draws tourists to imbibe not only the beautiful views but of those legends of the great King Arthur. The part of the Arthurian legend that really bothered Henry II was Geoffrey of Monmouth's ending. Geoffrey has Arthur mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann in Cornwall and brought to the Isle of Avalon. Believed by contemporaries to be Glastonbury Tor, sticking out from the surrounding marshland here. Arthur is treated for his wounds but Geoffrey leaves us with a tantalising possibility that he didn't die at Glastonbury Tor and that he lived on. He engages with some Welsh mythology that Arthur is the once and future king who will one day come back to save his people. The problem for any man sitting on the throne is that a once and future king becomes a threat, a challenge to his authority. Arthur was being used by the resurgent Welsh to give them hope and Henry didn't want the Welsh to have hope, he wanted them to despair so that they would submit to him. Henry ordered research into the legends of Arthur. People poured through his books in his libraries and he listened to the tales of English storytellers and all of this came together to paint a really vivid picture for Henry of Arthur's burial place between two stone pyramids some 16 feet deep in an oak hollow. After Arthur's death his followers had gone to great lengths to hide the location of his burial from his Saxon enemies. This Gerald of Wales claim was why there was room for the myths like that of Geoffrey of Monmouth that Arthur was still alive. Gerald goes on to tell us that in 1190 or 1191 a year or two after Henry's death the grave was found exactly where Henry's research had said it would be. Between two stone pyramids 16 feet deep in an oak hollow the monks of Glastonbury Abbey The grave was covered by a large stone that appeared plain when they lifted it the monks found a large lead cross when they removed the cross they found an inscription on the stone underneath it read here lies entombed King Arthur with Gwynevere his second wife on the Isle of Avalon and so it appeared it really was King Arthur's grave buried with Gwynevere who is described as his second wife though who he'd been married to before is nowhere recorded. There was a perfectly preserved braid of her golden hair in the grave and one over enthusiastic monk jumped down but when he lifted it up to show it to his brothers it disintegrated and blew away on the wind. The monks also found in the grave a perfectly preserved sword the sword of King Arthur the legendary Excalibur. The monks who had sweated away digging 16 feet in the ground to find Arthur's remains embraced the discovery the grave was said to be here on the south side of the Lady Chapel and it became a magnet for pilgrims almost immediately. Why would a medieval monastery engage with the story of an early medieval warlord? The answer is both simple and complicated but the answer is cash. Holding relics was a form of income for any cathedral or church and the more important the relics the more money they brought in. As King Arthur's star rose higher in the firmament having his relics here was something like a blank check for Glastonbury Abbey and at a time when Richard I is beginning to squeeze every penny he can from his new kingdom to fund his crusading passions then having Arthur here was suddenly a new form of income for Glastonbury Abbey that was too good to turn down. I've come to meet Dr Cindy Wood an expert in ecclesiastical history to get to the bottom of this bizarre medieval mystery. So Cindy we're here at Glastonbury Abbey the site of one of Arthur's graves here. Why might the monks of Glastonbury in 1191 have been willing to engage with the myth and legend of King Arthur? Well I think there's there's lots of reasons that Glastonbury would like to bring Arthur here. One is the great fire of 1184 when the whole church burnt down and they relied very heavily on Henry II for funds to rebuild the church they needed the royal patronage so in 1191 having miraculously found the remains of Arthur and Guinevere it suited the king to be seen to be part of this reburial of this ancient important even at that point chivalric king and it suited the abbey to raise their profile because at that point they're in great rivalry with actually Canterbury Cathedral this is the premier church in the west at that point and in the 11th century by 1191 there had already been two publications in the medieval sense of books about Arthur so he's the very current and hip happening event in this period which Glastonbury can claim as their own. We know that in 1278 Arthur's remains are moved to this site does this mark a change in Arthur's reputation? Well in 1278 this church that we're standing in today was finished it had because in 1191 the remains were built in the lady chapel at the west because this is still a ruin after the fire so it's a symbol of Arthur's significance that he's placed in this most religiously significant place but I do think you need to look at the context for these kings I don't think you can ever divorce the story of Arthur from how the medieval kings used him Here we have in 1278 is the year after Edward has returned from the crusade in the Holy Land he's taken up his throne and he's using Arthur to bolster his position as well. So he's also been a piece of propaganda for everybody? I think so absolutely yes. So they get moved later to this marble tomb and they become a pilgrimage hot spot. Arthur is a really interesting medieval conundrum in that sense because most pilgrimage is to the to a religious site to the site of the the remains of a saint that has benefit to the soul of the person who visits there after death. Well Arthur was never a saint. In many ways we could see Arthur as perhaps the more tourist side of pilgrimage of this period rather than the religious and I don't want to be cynical about this because I think it should be pragmatic in the period. They could capitalise on these visitors going to other spaces and he has connections and great resonance in Wales. This church is on the Welsh pilgrimage route. The Celtic church obviously has great strength and depth in Ireland. This church is on the pilgrimage route from Ireland so they came in from Bristol. So you have an increasing Englishness of Arthur and perhaps a forgetting of the Celtic. So just in case any Welsh people are looking for their hero Arthur they can be sure he's dead and buried in here but also that he was English as well. Absolutely. Glastonbury had claimed this ancient Celtic king and made him very very English. In 1278 Edward I and his wife Eleanor of Castile were here to oversee the translation of Arthur's remains to their new grave site before the high altar. The relics remained here until the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey in 1539. The stone slab that had been across the top of the tomb is last recorded as being in the possession of William Hughes the Chancellor of Wales in the early 18th century. What happened to the relics after Glastonbury Abbey was dissolved unfortunately remains a mystery. There's very little evidence about what happens. We have the two surviving letters from the commissioners to Thomas Cromwell about Glastonbury Abbey in which they're really just talking about how much plate, how much cash because the last abbot here Richard Whiting is actually executed on Glastonbury Tor. But we know that all of the relics of these things were just thrown into midden heaps. Even though he's a secular pilgrimage point I think he probably suffered the same fate. So it's interesting how Arthur's reputation changes. He goes from this Welsh folklore hero to being claimed by the English to being killed off by Henry II and then reclaimed and reused by future English kings. I think he's a very useful way of viewing the medieval period. He's actually like a prism and you can view Arthur through religious grounds. You know the founding of the first church in England is meant to be in Glastonbury and Arthur's links to that. You can look at it through politics and the politics especially of Henry II and Edward I and Edward III and how they used Arthur. Then you can see his chivalric role which is not confined to England and chivalry across Western Europe uses the idea of Arthur and the round table and his idea of chivalry. In all of those different contexts you can look at Arthur and see they are a way of looking at medieval life and medieval thoughts which is our biggest challenge as historians to actually see what people thought in the period. Whether or not they believed he was real is actually immaterial because it's how he was used that we as historians see it. He is a useful tool whether they saw it in those terms. It's a very modern way of looking at it but they did use him. And what of the other great find in Arthur's grave, that sword Excalibur? We know that Richard I takes possession of it and that he takes it with him when he goes on crusade to the Holy Land but the sword never reached Jerusalem. En route Richard stopped at Sicily and found that his sister Joan was a prisoner of the new king Tancred there. As part of the negotiations to secure her release Richard gave away Excalibur. Why would he do this? Why would he part with such a potent symbol of power and authority? Perhaps like his father Richard was keen to denigrate the memory of Arthur to remove him from the Welsh consciousness to prove that he meant nothing. There is another possible explanation. While he was in Sicily Richard designated his nephew Arthur as his heir if he should die in the Holy Land without any children of his own. As part of the peace negotiations a wedding was arranged between one of Tancred's daughters and Arthur. Perhaps Richard left the sword there meaning Tancred to knight Arthur with it when he came there to be married and returned the sword to him so that there would be a new King Arthur, King of Britain bearing the legendary sword Excalibur. Richard felt able to engage with a new myth of Arthur as a great English king. What became of Excalibur remains a frustrating mystery. Tancred's daughter never married Arthur and Arthur would never become King of England and so there would be no new King Arthur bearing Excalibur at least not for 300 years or so when King Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs engaged with his own Welsh heritage and the new Arthurian mythology and named his own first son Arthur, a brand new King Arthur to bring hope to a country that had been through a civil war but unfortunately Arthur Tudor would die at the age of 15 and would never be King. The stories of King Arthur were integral to the fabric of our medieval past and nowhere is that more evident than at Winchester once the capital of the Kingdom of Wessex and the seat of England's medieval treasury. I've come to the Great Hall to meet Dr Catherine Wykert, a senior lecturer in early medieval European history at the University of Winchester. We're going to come face to face with the most famous surviving object of the Arthurian legends, Edward I's magnificent round table. Catherine what can you tell us about this fantastic painted round table hanging here in Winchester Hall? Isn't it an amazing thing just to start off with? I mean the first thing you notice is simply how big it is. It's absolutely monumental and it's a really unique survival from the medieval world. We don't have tables of this size that really survived to us and I think what's so fascinating about this one is in so much is that it's pretending to be you know maybe from the 5th century. This is actually something that's quite late in terms of Arthur but it's right in the height of when Arthurian literature, Arthurian mythology, the height of chivalry starts really coming into play in medieval England. So this is probably here from about the turn of the 14th century when Edward I had a magnificent tournament just outside of Winchester celebrating the forthcoming nuptials of one of his sons and two of his daughters all at the same time and we don't know much about that particular festival and that particular tournament except that it was sort of within the Arthurian ideals and Edward was a really passionate Arthurian. He believed in these ideals, he loved these stories and so it's thought that that's perhaps one of these points when Edward I thinks about building this table, having this idealized Arthurian object, this round table of mythology here in the heart of Winchester in this great hall. And how does Winchester become so closely associated with the Arthurian myths? Geoffrey of Monmouth talks about Winchester a lot by it, by calling it an ancient capital in essence and Winchester was never in any sense a capital of early England. It was a major city but it wasn't a central, it wasn't a capital as we think of it today. Geoffrey of Monmouth's history is sort of notoriously unreliable mythological. He claimed that he had a source written in the ancient Brittonic language by which he means Welsh actually and we don't have that source, we don't know if he's working from something and then Monmouth's tale just kind of keeps getting told over and over. It's a very typical story of medieval adaptation. The Norman French historian Weiss takes Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin history and translates it and adds to it and flourishes it into a French prose, a poem essentially in Norman French. And this is about the middle of the 12th century and then by the end of the 12th century you have Lehmann in England taking Weiss, re-embellishing it and putting it back into English verse, into English poetry. So you've got this story being batted around within about a century. So it starts becoming a really popular tale but we don't necessarily have that Winchester connection yet and that actually starts coming slightly later with Cretin de Troyes. So his very famous works on Arthur places an Arthurian court here at Winchester. That's the first start of that association. We then have stories like Arthur having his tournament, you know calling a tournament. So even though his main city is not Winchester in this particular tale he calls the tournament to be held outside of Winchester which is what Edward I emulates in 1290. So that association just really picks up and just really kind of keeps going and it's these high medieval English kings that are really kind of going with this Winchester connection as well. And what's really funny about it too is that by the time you hit Edward III and he forms the Order of the Garter, this really important chivalric ideal of a brotherhood of knights in essence and he's very specifically drawing on Arthurian legend on this but he's trying to place it in Windsor. He was born at Windsor, not a coincidence and by this time too you've got the idea of Arthur at Windsor as well but you've got this honking huge table here in Winchester, it is a feat of monumental proportions to move this thing around. The hall is getting rebuilt at about the same time so this ceiling that we see above us, part of this is from that decoration. So you have these wonderful bosses up there, if you look at them closely you see basically a rose in the center and then rays coming out of it which is often thought to be the rose and sun essentially which is a very kingly kind of symbol but there's also medieval iconography that represents winds as rays such as that so either wavy or pointed as we see above us and so there's an idea that this might be one of these really great medieval puns of those bosses represent Windsor, winds made of gold, Windsor, right? So even though this table stays here, Edward III is trying to draw this connection between Arthur at Winchester and more specifically Windsor to meet his purposes but the Order of the Garter has another specific Winchester connection and that the Bishop of Winchester is the prelate for the Order of the Garter and still is today so maintains that really close connection between the chivalric ideas, the Order of the Garter, King Arthur's ideas and Winchester between the table, the bishop and this really terrible pun of the Windsor trying to bring that all kind of, you know, triangulate for Edward III. So the whole Windsor-Winchester-Arthur connection is really being stretched but by 1486 Prince Arthur, the first Tudor prince, is being born here at Winchester to cement that connection as Camelot. Is that right? Yeah, the Tudors have a lot to answer for with this whole Arthurian thing, I think and that goes back to this idea of legitimacy. You know, if you're Henry VII, you've basically become king by right on battlefield. Richard III is dead and so therefore it's a pretty easy answer as to why you have the throne, regardless of any claim that he has. So even though a battlefield legitimacy is a very specific kind of legitimacy, you also don't have that link to that line that either the Yorkists or the Lancastrians could have in their roundabout ways. So the Tudors are really drawing on this Arthurian legends. You know, Arthur, the once and would-be and future king here, you know, sort of actually personified, embodied in this young prince. And of course, when Arthur dies before coming king, Henry VIII has to then take on that mantle. He has to sort of, in some ways, become an idealized Arthur both in the sense of being his brother and this king from the past. So this Arthurian connection to the Tudors was hugely important in terms of legitimacy and also the sort of dangerous ways in which the throne could and might actually get claimed in different ways at this time. So it's sometimes about providing the routes that some monarchs didn't really have. Exactly, and that's something that's really common throughout the medieval period too. You have kings claiming Charlemagne on the continent. Of course, the Roman emperors find themselves descended from gods, funny enough. So this idea of drawing legitimacy through a deep past is something that is really, really constant in history. In Britain, in England in particular, Arthur was kind of that ideal that could be held up both as a future king, the once future king, the rightful king, a good king, and then giving you that sense of that deep past that you don't have otherwise. So the table and the whole building are being used as a theater and a stage to deliver a message. Absolutely, this whole of the Great Hall and every iteration of it, every build of it was a part of a great theatrical performance of what it was to be king. So when Henry III rebuilt this place in the middle of the 13th century, the decoration on the gable and on one side you had a map of Mundi, so a map of the entire world, and on the other side you had a wheel of fortune. So the idea that fortune can turn for any person, king, god, or man. So this is a part of staging your kingship. So this table was initially a table when Edward had it made. It was sat probably on the floor somewhere here. There's evidence for where a pedestal would have been in the middle and 12 legs around the side to support it. So it was a flat table. But by the time that Edward III is trying to make that Windsor connection, it's no longer really serving that purpose. So he hangs it up on the gable end behind the dais and then it becomes a cloth of estate. It becomes a part of that performance of highlighting that hierarchy, highlighting the idea that this is the high end of the table. This is where the elite, this is where the king sits. And there's a really great irony, of course, of what's meant to be a representation of an egalitarian, 12 knights sitting around a table with no head directly behind the king to use that to point out that I'm the king here, actually. It's all staging. Throughout the rest of history, Arthur has been embraced by England as a national hero, the once and future king, the great monarch who led chivalrous knights on holy deeds. By the 16th century, Henry VIII is embracing the Arthurian myth for his own purposes. He has the round table repainted with the Tudor rose in the centre and a figure of King Arthur at the top that bears a striking resemblance to Henry himself. The Victorians held him up as the ideal of English medieval knighthood and Camelot became something that slipped out of time. It became a late medieval palace in an early medieval world. When Winchester Hall was refurbished in the 1870s, the Victorians gave us these fantastic stained glass windows and they really speak to a lingering interest in heraldry and chivalry and those heroic kings. We see Edward III, the king who led England in the Hundred Years' War. Beneath him is his son, Edward, the famous black prince. And next to Edward III is Henry V, the great victor of Agincourt. And these colourful depictions really speak to an Arthurian medieval fascination with heraldry and chivalry and trumpeting achievements. A little further along we can see the coat of arms of Arthur, Prince of Wales, the boy who was born here at Winchester to be a new King Arthur, born at Camelot. And next to him we can see Edward IV, the man who would have his own genealogy role crafted to include King Arthur as one of his own ancestors. This is a man who was really embracing the Arthurian myth, bringing him into the family, into the fold and attaching English kings to Arthur. If the once and future king had been a threat, then the dead Arthur became a boon to medieval kings. They would trace their lineage back to him to reinforce and anchor their rights in ancient history. It was this killing of Arthur that allowed later medieval kings to adopt him as a revered ancestor at the pinnacle of chivalry and an ideal of kingship. All of this was only possible because Henry II had found King Arthur's grave. Or at least, so they said.