The Mammoth Book of King Arthur Read online

  Table of Contents

  Author biography

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Contents

  Tables and Charts

  Preface: Peeling Back the Layers

  Section 1: The Historical Arthur

  1 An Introduction to Arthur – What’s in a Name?

  2 Before Arthur – The Roman Background

  3 The Darkness Descends

  4 The Chroniclers

  5 Gildas – The Man Who Knew Arthur

  6 Nennius’s Old Papers

  7 Arthur’s Battles – Seeking the Sites

  8 The Welsh Tradition – The Other Arthurs

  9 The Creation of Arthur – Geoffrey’s Version

  10 The Real King Arthur – The Twenty Claimants

  Section 2: The Legend Grows

  11 Arthur’s Bones

  12 From Monmouth to Malory – The Crusader Dimension

  13 Tristan and Iseult – The Romance Begins

  14 Gawain – The First Hero

  15 Merlin – The Magic and the Madness

  16 The Holy Grail

  17 Lancelot and Guenevere – The Romance Ends

  18 The Forgotten Adventurers

  19 Malory – Camelot in a Prison Cell

  20 The Victorian Revival

  Section 3: The Big Picture

  21 Scribes of the Round Table – Modern Arthurian Novels

  22 Visions of Camelot – Arthurian Cinema

  23 Friend or Foe? – An Arthurian Who’s Who

  24 Lost Worlds – An Arthurian Gazetteer

  25 Further Quests – Arthurian Societies and Websites

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Mike Ashley is an author and editor of over seventy books, including many Mammoth titles. He worked for over thirty years in local government but is now a full-time writer and researcher specializing in ancient history, historical fiction and fantasy, crime and science fiction. He lives in Kent with his wife and over 20,000 books.

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005

  Copyright © Mike Ashley 2005

  The right of Mike Ashley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. 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 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.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84119-249-9

  eISBN 978-1-78033-355-7

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Preface: Peeling Back the Layers

  Section 1: The Historical Arthur

  1 An Introduction to Arthur – What’s in a Name?

  2 Before Arthur – The Roman Background

  3 The Darkness Descends

  4 The Chroniclers

  5 Gildas – The Man Who Knew Arthur

  6 Nennius’s Old Papers

  7 Arthur’s Battles – Seeking the Sites

  8 The Welsh Tradition – The Other Arthurs

  9 The Creation of Arthur – Geoffrey’s Version

  10 The Real King Arthur – The Twenty Claimants

  Section 2: The Legend Grows

  11 Arthur’s Bones

  12 From Monmouth to Malory – The Crusader Dimension

  13 Tristan and Iseult – The Romance Begins

  14 Gawain – The First Hero

  15 Merlin – The Magic and the Madness

  16 The Holy Grail

  17 Lancelot and Guenevere – The Romance Ends

  18 The Forgotten Adventurers

  19 Malory – Camelot in a Prison Cell

  20 The Victorian Revival

  Section 3: The Big Picture

  21 Scribes of the Round Table – Modern Arthurian Novels

  22 Visions of Camelot – Arthurian Cinema

  23 Friend or Foe? – An Arthurian Who’s Who

  24 Lost Worlds – An Arthurian Gazetteer

  25 Further Quests – Arthurian Societies and Websites

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  TABLES AND CHARTS

  2.1 The Roman Civitas


  3.1 The Arthurian patriarchs

  3.2 The ancestors of Cunedda and Coel

  3.3 The descendants of Coel

  3.4 The descendants of Ceretic of Strathclyde

  3.5 The rulers of Dál Riata and the Picts

  3.6 The rulers of Dyfed

  3.7 The rulers of Gwent and Glywysing

  3.8 The rulers of Gwynedd and other descendants of Cunedda

  3.9 The rulers of Powys, Gwrtheyrnion and Brycheiniog

  3.10 The rulers of Dumnonia and Armorica [Brittany]

  3.11 The ancestors of the Saxons

  6.1 The family of Vortigern

  6.2 Chronology from Roman withdrawal to Badon

  7.1 Nennius’s Battle Sites

  7.2 British Pendragons and Wledigs

  8.1 Arthur’s maternal family

  9.1 An Arthurian chronology according to Geoffrey

  10.1 The Composite Arthur

  12.1 Arthurian Literature and Events from Monmouth to Malory

  12.2 The Kings of Jerusalem

  12.3 Constantinople and Jerusalem

  The Angevin connection

  19.1 The sources for Malory’s Morte Darthur

  23.1 Malory’s Knights of the Round Table from Le Morte Darthur

  Maps

  1 British Kingdoms of the Fifth Century

  2 Fourth-century Britain

  3 Principal Roman Roads

  4 Suggested sites for Vortimer’s Battle Campaign

  5 Possible sites for Cerdic’s battles

  6 Suggested Sites for Arthur’s battles in Armorica

  7 Suggested Sites for Arthur’s battles

  8 Possible British Frontiers

  9 Arthur’s Hunt for Twrch Trwyth

  10 The Saxon Campaigns adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth

  PREFACE: PEELING BACK THE LAYERS

  What’s it all about?

  You may ask: why do we need another book on King Arthur? Aren’t there enough already?

  It’s the very fact that there are so many that makes this book necessary. There is such a profusion of material that it’s all become a little confusing, and anyone trying to understand the Arthurian world has problems knowing where to start and what it all means. Add to that books about the Arthurian legend, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenevere and the Holy Grail, and you have a library of books, articles and academic studies vast enough to daunt even the most dedicated enthusiast.

  In this book I will bring everything together – the facts, the theories, the legend – and try and make some sense of them all. I’ll even present a few theories of my own, and provide maps, family trees and a chronology. That way not only can you see how I arrive at my conclusions but it will allow you to draw your own.

  The book is divided into three main parts. The first covers the historical Arthur. It looks at the world in which Arthur lived (roughly between 400 and 600AD), and explores what evidence has survived to prove or disprove his existence. It also looks at the many theories that have been put forward to identify Arthur and sets them against the historical background in the hope that the real Arthur will stand out. You might think it ought to be straightforward. If Arthur existed, if he was as famous as he’s supposed to have been, whether under that name or another, then he’ll appear in the historical record, just like Alfred the Great or Canute or Macbeth, other great kings from a thousand years ago whose existence is easily provable and not in doubt and whose exploits have become as much a part of legend as Arthur’s. But it’s far from straightforward and there’s a lot of work needed to peel back the layers and reveal Arthur in all his glory.

  The original Arthur dates back to those Dark Ages in the fifth and sixth centuries when the people of Britain were fighting for their lives against invaders, famine, plague and civil war. No one had much time to keep written records, and those that may have been kept have not survived the centuries. The single sobering fact is that there is not one single piece of genuine historical evidence to support the existence of someone called King Arthur.

  Ironically, it is this lack of evidence that makes the search for the real Arthur so compelling, because there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to show that someone who was a great leader must have existed. That someone was the man who defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Badon so decisively that the Saxon invasion was held at bay for at least a generation. Whoever did that – and for simplicity’s sake I shall call him Arthur of Badon – had to exist because his victory at Badon is a certain historical fact.

  I believe that the original stories about Arthur are based on several historical people, at least three of whom were also called Arthur. Their lives, which only show dimly through the veils of history, soon became submerged into the oral tradition that created the Arthur of legend, a whole amalgam of historical and legendary characters spread across a wide period of history. That is one of the reasons why there are so many theories about the real Arthur and why he is so difficult to pin down.

  The second part of this book, therefore, takes us into the legend, the Matter of Britain as it’s become known. We follow the story of Arthur as it was created by the poets and bards through the Welsh and Breton tales, into the Norman world, culminating in Thomas Malory’s famous Morte d’Arthur. This section looks at each of the legends in turn and sifts the facts from the fiction. It will help us identify not just further aspects of King Arthur, but the world of the Round Table, of Merlin and of the Holy Grail. The Arthur of legend has been constantly recreated and reborn, a multiple personality composed of a myriad of historical Arthurs. This section retells his story, and those of his companions, allowing us to identify the originals.

  The final section looks at the modern interpretation of the Arthurian legend in both fiction and cinema. Although these works are pure fiction, many authors have brought their own interpretation to the legend, advancing theories every bit as intriguing as those of the historical scholar. The twentieth century passion for fantasy fiction has seen a remarkable growth in the number of books about the Arthurian world, from the pioneering works of T.H. White and Mary Stewart, to the blockbusters of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Bernard Cornwell and Rosalind Miles. This section includes a “Who’s Who” and a Gazetteer to the Arthurian world to provide you with a complete picture.

  Fifteen hundred years of legend is a lot to cover in one book, but before launching into the hunt we need to ponder for a moment the problems and pitfalls ahead.

  The great puzzle

  Arthur lived at that one period of British history when historians looked the other way. In fact, apart from a few Continental writers who commented briefly upon the state of Britain in the fifth century, there is only one possible contemporary of Arthur whose work survives – Gildas, who is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Unfortunately, Gildas was not interested in recording history, and certainly not in noting dates, being more concerned with reprimanding the aberrant rulers whose waywardness had brought down the wrath of God by way of the Saxon invasion. Even more unfortunately for the Arthurian scholar, Gildas doesn’t mention Arthur at all.

  Nothing significant by any other contemporary writer survives, apart from a few church writings which tell us virtually nothing about the state of Britain. Even the surviving text of Gildas’s work dates from the eleventh century, five hundred years after he wrote it. The same is true for other surviving texts, especially the Welsh Annals and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as the copies we have were created several centuries later from long-lost sources. No matter how diligent the copyists were, mistakes could have crept in – in fact, some mistakes are all too obvious, as we shall see.

  Then there is the problem of names – both personal and place names. Any individual could be known by a title, a personal name or a nickname. For instance, the name of the British king Vortigern is possibly not a name at all but a title meaning High King. Likewise the names of the Saxon chieftains, Hengist and Horsa, were probably nicknames; both names mean horse (or, more precisely in Hengist’s case, stallion). This is more common tha
n you might think. “Genghis Khan” was actually a title meaning “very mighty ruler”; the great Mongol ruler’s real name was Temujin. Perhaps the same happened with Arthur. It’s fine if we know the alternative names and titles for people, but hopeless if we don’t. How do we know when we come across a new name that it isn’t someone we already know? In the time of Arthur and in later writings about his period, the name could be recorded in Celtic (both British and the later Welsh variant), Latin or Anglo-Saxon. If these variants are also used for titles, real names and nicknames, then it means one individual could be called by nine different names, and that doesn’t allow for misspellings, copyists’ errors or mistaken identity. The same applies to place names, which are further complicated by their having evolved over time, and by many places throughout Britain having the same name. Just think how many rivers are called Avon or towns called Newtown. If original Celtic or local names have died out and been superseded by Saxon or Norman names, and no documentation survives to identify the place, then tracking it down is as likely as winning the lottery.

  The biggest problem is one of dates. The method of recording years from the birth of Christ may seem simple today, but it wasn’t in the fifth century and had only really been introduced a few decades before. Copyists trying to update records from ancient documents encountered several problems. Firstly, they could not be sure whether the year recorded was calculated from the birth of Christ or from his baptism, usually treated as twenty-eight years later, or from his death and resurrection, variously thirty-three or thirty-five years later. Thus a year recorded as, say, 460 years from the “incarnation” of Christ could, by our reckoning, be 432, 427 or 425.

  Some annals recorded events on an Easter cycle. The dates for Easter more or less repeat themselves every nineteen years. But it was entirely possible, if working from an incomplete manuscript, to lose track of which Easter cycle was being covered. The copyist would use his best judgement, but could be out by 19 years. This is certainly evident in early entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as we shall see.

  Finally, the copyist might simply misread a figure, especially if working from a crumpled or charred document all but destroyed in a Viking raid. Years were usually recorded in Roman numerals, but it’s easy to make a mistake, copying ccclxviii (368), for example, as, perhaps, ccclxxiv (374). Once the mistake is made and the original lost, who is there to correct it?