From the sources 12: Hilary the Englishman, a gay poet of the twelfth century

 

Happy LGBT History month everyone. Since its that time of the year, I thought I’d explore something I’ve barely ever touched on here – the history of medieval sexuality.

Why might the abduction of Ganymede by the lusty Zeus be the subject of a Romanesque column capital in the twelfth century monastery of Vezelay in Burgundy? More about that later ...

Scene from the Moralised Bible of Vienna, (Codex Vindobonensis 2554); Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, thirteenth century. The not so tolerant side of medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, which did get more severe in the Later Middle Ages.

The problem with studying LGBT history before about 1800 is basically twofold. The first is that the modern concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism are all very recent concepts for classifying people – the first three are all essentially Victorian, while the latter was first used in 1965. And for most of human history, people wouldn’t have identified themselves according to the type of person they felt a physical and psychological attraction to. In Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (I’m less confident talking about non-western societies here), sexuality was about what you did to others or to your own body, not what you felt deep down inside. That’s not to say that there weren’t people back then who, in our modern terms, would be called straight, gay, bi or trans. In the same way, people of different skin colours have existed for millennia, yet it was only in relatively recent times that people started thinking in terms of “white people” and “black people.”

The second problem follows from this. How can we identify anyone who lived before the nineteenth century as gay? Its not as easy as you might think in the premodern sources named historical people who we can definitely show were exclusively attracted to their own biological sex.

Take for example one of the most famous gay men of Medieval England – Edward II. Did he have long-term sexual relationships with his right-hand men, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger? The evidence generally suggests that he did. Was his marriage to Isabella of France a marriage of dynastic political necessity? Yes. But contrary to all the ingenious efforts of historical fiction writers to cast doubt on Edward III’s paternity (Mel Gibson making William Wallace a time-travelling paedophile has to be the most atrocious example), Edward II could get sufficiently aroused by his wife to father a son and heir. And while his wife Isabella was still a prepubescent girl, he fathered an illegitimate son, Adam Fitzroy, from an unnamed mistress in 1307. So, Edward II would be bisexual in our terms, right? That would probably make most sense.

 Similar things could be said about hundreds of other people from premodern history, from Alexander the Great to James VI of Scotland and I of England. That’s of course not to disregard the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, and that very few people are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their inclinations.

 And for some other noteworthy premodern gays, its all a matter of speculation. Take for example Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519). We know that he was arrested for sodomy with the goldsmith’s apprentice and gigolo Jacopo Saltarelli by the Florentine authorities in 1476. The charges were soon dropped, Leonardo never faced trial and no one made such accusations ever again. Was Leonardo homosexual? It’s a reasonable inference that he was. He certainly loved drawing and painting the (nude) male figure, he never married or had any known sexual relationships with women and he had a number of apprentices who weren’t very talented artists but were quite good-looking young men. At the same time, while it’s a reasonable inference to draw from the facts, even when put together they don’t exactly constitute proof either.

Thus for many figures in premodern history, especially from less well-documented periods (the late middle ages/ early modern period are much better in terms of sources than the early middle ages), we’re left with this dilemma. To say the historical figure in question was likely not gay can come across as mildly homophobic, or at the very least unable to read between the lines. This is brilliantly parodied in the popular meme format “historians … they were roommates.”

On the other hand, to say that these historical figures were gay without firm proof, bearing in mind of course that proof to the historian is somewhat different to proof for the lawyer or the scientist, can invite accusations of modern progressive wishful thinking.

Therefore, some historians would argue that it’s best not to focus on finding gay people in the medieval past. Instead, they would argue for focusing on how medieval people themselves thought about sexuality and what they saw as normal or deviant sexual behaviour, and how these things can be very different from our assumptions about human sexuality now. This is essentially the divide between LGBT and queer history explained, just how gender history differs from women’s history or the history of race differs from black history.

Still, I think we can find plenty of people who we can justifiably call gay in the Middle Ages. While there’s definitely too few sources to make medieval LGBT history anything more than a fairly small sub-field, what survives is actually quite rich and amounts to a lot more than political accusations of sexual transgression or records of homophobic persecution. For the pre-1200 period, the bit of the Middle Ages I’m mostly interested in, we have a surprising amount of Latin poetry written by clerics, monks and nuns that is undoubtedly homoerotic in tone. Whether monasteries were secret refuges for LGBT people or even gay subcultures hiding in plain sight, like the mollyhouses of eighteenth-century England, is debatable at best. And the very idea that LGBT people would have been more attracted to the religious vocation than straight people in the Middle Ages relies on all kinds of modern assumptions about masculinity and sexuality. To understand medieval monks, you’ve got to take seriously the idea that forsaking marriage and sex was once a lot more manly than it is now. Early medieval historian Rachel Stone has done some very good posts about why speculating about gay monks (but interestingly, not lesbian nuns) is fraught with problems but also a worthwhile historical exercise.

But anyway, here’s an example, one from the twelfth century by a certain Hilary the Englishman. We know almost nothing about him, except that he was apparently from England and he was one of the pupils of the great Peter Abelard, after his castration and separation from Heloise, at the Paraclete in Champagne in 1125. The poem is called “To an English boy” and goes thus:

Hail fair youth, who seeks no bribe,
Who regards being won with a gift as the height of vice,
In whom beauty and honesty have made their home,
Whose comeliness draws to itself the eyes of all who see him.

Golden haired, fair of face, with a small white neck,
Soft-spoken and gentle – but why do I praise thee singly?
Everything about you is beautiful and lovely; you have no imperfection,
Except that such fairness has no business devoting itself to chastity.

When nature formed you, she doubted for a moment
Whether to offer you as a girl or a boy,
But while she sets her mind’s eye to settling this,
Behold! You come forth, born as a vision for us all.

Afterward, she does finally extend her hand to you
And is astonished that she could have created anyone like you.
But it is clear that nature erred in only this one thing:
That when she had bestowed on you so much, she made your mortal.

No other mortal can be compared with you,
Whom nature made for herself, as if an only child;
Beauty establishes its home in you,
Whose sweet flesh shines brightly as the lily.

Believe me, if those former days of Jove should return,
His handservant would no longer be Ganymede,
But you carried off to heaven; by day the sweet cup
And by night your sweeter kisses you would administer to Jove.

You are the common desire of lasses and lads,
They sigh for you and hope for you, because they know you are unique.
They err or, rather, sin who call you “English”:
They should add letters and call you “angelic.”

(Translation is from John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the fourteenth century”, Chicago (1980), pp 373 – 374)

The poet is definitely trying to demonstrate how learned he is here. He of course imagines the youth he is infatuated with replacing Ganymede on Mount Olympus, which of course shows knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid Book V and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X both ancient Roman texts a well-educated twelfth century cleric with a good grasp of Latin would know. And at the end he humorously includes the incredibly famous pun (to medievalists anyway) supposedly said by Pope Gregory the Great in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History when he saw fair-haired slave boys in Rome in 590. Gregory’s pun of course works best in the original Latin where its non angli sed angeli. In another of his poems, to a certain boy of Anjou, Hilary refers to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus from Seneca, and to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife from the Hebrew Bible.

Thus some historians and literary scholars might argue that these poems were little more than just writing exercises used as a pedagogical tool for practicing writing poetry like Classical Roman authors, or were just playful intellectual games. But if so, that begs a lot of questions. Why do so by writing love lyrics? Surely the other genres of Classical Latin poetry, like epics, odes and even satires would be more appropriate. Or indeed, why did these twelfth century clerics focus so much on the literature of the Augustan age? Why not instead make your main schoolroom texts the Christian Roman poets of the fourth and fifth centuries? Why Horace, Ovid and Virgil rather than Claudian, Prudentius and Rutilius Namantianus?

What all of this demonstrates is two things. One, twelfth century Western Europe’s reverence for Classical antiquity was very deep indeed. If they were simply in need of poetic eloquence, they could find it elsewhere. The second is that Hilary’s poems and others like it were most likely written as genuine gay love poems. Indeed, there is evidence that some monasteries and cathedral schools were worried that routine poetry composition exercises in the scriptorium were being used to deviant ends. Our old friend, Guibert de Nogent, a few generations before Hilary, got into trouble when he wrote sexually explicit and obscene poems inspired by his adolescent reading of Ovid. Some might call it in his case the medieval equivalent of a geeky teenager writing a Kirk and Spock, Legolas and Gimli or Nico DiAngelo with half a dozen different characters from the Percy Jackson universe (before his relationship with Will Solace became canon anyway). Websites like Wattpad are basically devoted to this stuff. Of course, Guibert was writing his juvenile compositions in a conservative Benedictine monastery, Saint Germer de Fly. The world of the twelfth century schools that Hilary the Englishman inhabited may have been a bit more liberal in this regard, making it all the more possible to sneak in some gay love poems to fellow students while you’re busying yourselves with the trivium.

I aim to, in future posts, explore more of these gay love poems from the twelfth century, including some by women. I also want to look at what general medieval attitudes to what we would now call homosexuality were like.

William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

 

William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

In this series of posts, I’m going to do something really quite exciting and unconventional. I’m going to compare William the Conqueror (1027 – 1087) and Henry IV of Germany (1050 – 1106). Why is this such a radical idea? After all, both of these eleventh century rulers were each other’s contemporaries, though William was of an older generation. Both rulers of course knew of each other, which wouldn’t be true if I was attempting a comparison between William the Conqueror and the Seljuk Turkish sultan Alp Arslan (d.1072) or between Henry IV of Germany and the Song Chinese emperor Yingzong (r.1067 – 1085).

Indeed, both had quite strong reputations in each other’s kingdoms, and chroniclers in each kingdom followed the other kingdom’s affairs with great interest. William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s chief propagandist, claimed in 1075 that when William the Conqueror was planning his invasion of England, he sent embassies to the court of King Henry IV to secure his support as well as to the court of Pope Alexander II, though importantly not that of William’s notional liege lord King Philip of France. Its of course unlikely that the embassy happened, given that William of Poitiers, a highly articulate yet unreliable narrative historian, is our only source for it. But the fact that William of Poitiers would make the claim at all in a work intended to praise the Conqueror to high heaven, indicates just how esteemed Emperor Henry IV was in England and Normandy, as he was everywhere else in Western Christendom – the German king-emperor was the most important monarch of them all. Likewise, from the German side, Bruno of Magdeburg, writing in 1082, claimed that in 1074 when King Henry IV was facing a full-scale rebellion against his rule in the duchy of Saxony, he requested that William the Conqueror send military support. William then curtly replied that he had claimed his kingdom by violent conquest, and that if he left it alone for too long there would be rebellions. Bruno might have simply been relying on gossip, but it does show (and we know this from other German chroniclers too) that the Norman Conquest of England was much talked about in Germany – perhaps Henry IV wanted to the Normans to harry his own rebellious North.

Map of the German Empire in the eleventh century. By Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg: Sémhurderivative work: OwenBlacker | Discussion - Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg, originally based on HRR 10Jh.jpg (2005)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16239633

Indeed, even if diplomacy was quite tenuous between England/ Normandy and the German Empire at this time, they would later be joined at the hip when William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, Matilda (1102 – 1167), married Henry IV’s son, Henry V (1086 – 1125). Some people easily look over this, but Matilda did not have the title of empress for nothing, and she wasn’t happy that for her second marriage she had to settle for a mere French count, Geoffrey of Anjou. Had Henry V lived for 20 more years, then the “Anarchy” would have taken a much more interesting turn with Swabian and Bavarian knights causing mayhem in the Home Counties and the Midlands. Perhaps we would have had German kings of England five and half centuries before we actually did, the Hundred Years’ War would have been completely avoided and Shakespeare would have written plays about kings called Otto and Conrad as well as, of course, Henry.

Perhaps most importantly of all, both rulers are remembered as highly significant in their respective countries. Their reigns are seen as turning points, indeed the pivotal moment, in English and German medieval history respectively – everything before them is inevitably seen in their shadow, and everything afterwards flows from them. What the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is to the English, Henry IV’s penance at Canossa in 1077 is to the Germans – they’re the dates that every schoolchild knows (or at least is supposed to know) and which you should never set your credit card PIN number to. If you ask the average educated English person to name five memorable medieval kings, William the Conqueror will almost certainly be one of them, and if you said the same to the average educated German, they’d probably name Henry IV. And the period they lived in was one of genuine cataclysmic change in both of their countries, which was driven by many of the same forces – the rise of knights, the proliferation of castles, a whole umbrella of economic and social changes and of course the growing power and authority of the papacy. So why have they normally been studied in isolation from each other?

You see, medieval political history has traditionally been written on national lines. English historians of medieval politics focus on England, German historians of medieval politics on Germany, French historians on France and so on. From the nineteenth century through to after WW2 this was very much the established way of doing things, though since the 1970s that has changed. Notably though, there are a lot more British and American historians of medieval Germany than there are German historians of medieval England. Nonetheless, this still means there’s traditionally been the presumption that Medieval English and medieval German history have very little to do with each other.

 Still, national traditions of scholarship leave a long shadow. As a result, until a few generations ago historical scholarship on Medieval English politics was shaped by the question that preoccupied the Victorians: why did a powerful and centralised national monarchy that gave birth to the common law, Parliament and ultimately Great Britain and the British Empire emerge. Meanwhile, German historians, like their predecessors in the Imperial and Weimar eras, still return to the opposite question: why did the German emperors increasingly lose control so that Germany ended up a loose confederation of squabbling principalities, suffered the tragedies of the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleonic occupation and was only unified in 1871 by the iron will of Bismarck. The Norman Conquest and the Penance of Canossa respectively have traditionally been identified as key turning points for both. 

What makes all of these traditional scholarly preoccupations important is that English historians have since the nineteenth century traditionally focused on the state, the law, bureaucracies, court cases and constitutional matters, and many still do. Since the 1950s and even more so since 1990, however, there has been a widespread interest among political historians of early and high medieval England in the social side of politics. There’s been a lot of work on lordship (personal power over people of lesser status), patronage networks, family relationships, aristocratic identity and stuff like that.

 On the German side of things, historians increasingly from the 1920s onwards and overwhelmingly so since the end of WW2, have generally ignored the study of medieval government and administration (the Verfassungsgeschichte that was much more fashionable in the Imperial period) in favour of a way of looking at medieval politics that focuses on the personal relationships between the king/ emperor and the political community – ties of lordship, patronage, family and friendship. A successful medieval king wasn’t one who issued laws that dictated how things were to be run across the country, taxed his subjects rigorously, punished criminals with harsh justice and generally worked to increase the power of the central government and the bureaucracy against the nobility and other vested local interests. Rather, as German medievalists have tended to see it, a successful medieval king was one who worked hard to get all the nobles on the same page as him and be on as friendly terms with them as possible, play by the time-honoured “rules of the game” (to use Gerd Althoff’s phrase) of kingship and generally act like the just and gracious lord of his people. Kings who succeeded in all this could then achieve lots of stuff by bring the nobility of the kingdom/ empire together in royal assemblies and armies. German historiography also stresses the importance of ritual and symbolic actions in how this consensus was built up between kings and aristocrats, such as displays of anger, the shedding of tears, kneeling or prostrating oneself to ask for forgiveness, bringing in holy relics to court gatherings or army musters, seating plans at assemblies and feasts and the like. And yet people talk about "gesture politics" like its a new thing!

What this means is that, in more than just a literal sense, English and German historians speak a very different language when it comes to discussing medieval politics. As a result, it seems like the two political systems of England and Germany in the middle ages were profoundly different and cannot be understood in each other’s terms, making any kind of meaningful comparison impossible. And on the surface of it, its easy to see this as just a natural state of affairs because the actual content they work on is very different. Lets turn to the two rulers we’re comparing. William the Conqueror was able to defeat and kill a rival contender for the throne, Harold Godwinson, in one decisive battle on 14 October 1066, and just over two months later he had seized control of the effective capital of England (London) and with it the machinery of government and was crowned king. Then over the next five years, he was able to completely subdue the whole country by force and replace the majority of its ruling class with foreigners loyal to him. By contrast, Henry IV faced betrayals, rebellions and civil war for almost all his reign and temporarily lost all authority over his kingdom when in 1076 the Pope released his subjects from their oaths of loyalty to him. This he could only regain if he approached the pope as a humble penitent begging for forgiveness. The sources are also hugely different. For example the most famous document from Norman England is of course the Domesday Book – a government survey of (almost) his entire kingdom that records land ownership, economic activities, wealth, tax assessment and the (adult male) population. Likewise there are lots of writs and charters and other administrative records surviving from Norman England. There are plenty of detailed narrative histories for the Anglo-Norman period - Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon - but they're counterbalanced by these administrative records. Meanwhile, Henry IV’s Germany is very different. While poor in administrative records it is rich in chronicles, many of them written by historians hostile to Henry IV like Bruno of Merseburg and Lamprecht of Hersfeld. These provide lots of "thick description" of rituals, assemblies and battles, but have little to say about the workings of government. Thus, in contrast to the Anglo-Norman case, they do so much more to colour how historians view the workings of politics in the period.

Thankfully, over the last fifty years, some historians, almost all of them English and most of them specialising in Continental European medieval history (though also including some intrepid and outgoing Anglo-Saxonists) have tried hard to bridge the scholarly great divide and challenge the insularity and historiographical navel-gazing of English and German medievalists alike. To give a short list of them (in chronological order) they include Karl Leyser, Timothy Reuter, Janet Nelson, Sarah Foot, Catherine Cubitt, Simon MacLean, Charles Insley and Levi Roach. There’s been a lot of work recently on the importance of just the kind of ritual and symbolic communication stuff that German medievalists like Gerd Althoff focus on, in relation to late Anglo-Saxon England, though Anglo-Normanists have been slower to follow up on this trend. Indeed its frankly bizarre that its taken so long for English medievalists to see the importance of demonstrative behaviour and symbolism in medieval kingship. After all one of the most famous episodes in English medieval history opens with a king throwing a tantrum and ends with the same king making a humble pilgrimage to Canterbury and being whipped bloody by monks to apologise to the archbishop whose death resulted from his anger. The whole saga of Henry II and Thomas Becket makes a great deal more sense if you have in mind Henry IV at Canossa in 1077, or from an even earlier time Emperor Otto III in 1000 making a pilgrimage to Gniezno to visit the tomb of the martyred Adalbert of Prague and greeting Duke Boleslaw the Brave of Poland in the humble garb of a penitent. And Anglo-Normanists have tried to look at the Norman Conquest in a more pan-European perspective as well, as exemplified by work from people like David Bates, Robert Bartlett, Stephen Baxter and (again) Levi Roach.

Canterbury 1174, when even the most old school historians finally realise that the politics of Norman and Angevin England weren't a ritual free-zone after all

But enough of the historiographical detour. In my view, William the Conqueror and Henry IV, while they mostly don’t match up, nonetheless make a really stimulating comparison for thinking about how eleventh century kingship worked (both through similarities and differences), the momentous changes going on all over Europe and how events almost a thousand years ago can still be so resonant and controversial today. In subsequent posts we’ll be exploring both rulers’ childhoods, how they presented themselves as rulers and faced challenges to their authority and how their reigns were shaped by broader forces of change.

Sources cited

Primary

William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1998)

Secondary

Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, 500 – 1200, translated by Christopher Carroll, Cambridge University Press (2009)

Elisabeth Van Houts, ‘The Norman Conquest through European eyes’, English Historical Review 110 (1995)

Charles Insley, “‘Ottonians with pipe rolls?’ Political culture and performance in the kingdom of the English, c.900 – 1050’”, History 102 (2017)

Encounters with the medieval past 1: the early middle ages in ten objects part 2 (800 - 1200)

Happy New Year! Its now 2023 and we're back for the next half of the early middle ages in ten objects. When we left off we had reached the eighth century and were in Indonesia. Let's see where our journey will take us next.

Object number six: the hunting knife of Charlemagne, made in Anglo-Saxon England or Scandinavia, 750 - 800 AD (Aachen Cathedral Treasury, Germany, visited 13 May 2022)

Moving away from Indonesia to the other end of the Eurasian supercontinent, to the area I actually have expertise in, lets look an object from the same century. This is the so-called "hunting knife of Charlemagne." We don't actually know if it belonged to Charlemagne, since its existence is not documented, but we do know that the knife is at least contemporary to him and somehow found its way to Aachen. Its got a simple horn handle with a silver hilt. But where the craftsmanship that produced it really comes into its own is with the blade. It is made from steel that has been pattern-welded. Pattern-welding is a metallurgical technique that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples living around the North Sea had mastered by the early seventh century - quite a lot of the weapons found in the Sutton Hoo hoard were made using this technique.

Pattern-welding involved the use of steel (an iron alloy typically containing 0.2 - 1% carbon) and another iron alloy (typically phosphoric iron). The bars of the two alloys then got hammered together, twisted and welded into the body of the artefact. After this, the artefact would be grinded and polished on a whetstone (there was a thriving trade in these in the eighth century) and the metal would be etched with acid, revealing the decorative patterns - typically they would appear rope-like. Stuff like this really brings home the basic truth that people in the "Dark Ages" weren't stupid.

So how did the knife get to Charlemagne? Well, it could have been purchased through trade or given as a diplomatic gift. What has become abundantly clear, ever since the publication of Richard Hodges' seminal work "Dark Age Economics" (1982), is that from the seventh century onwards there was a thriving North Sea trading zone that linked up the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in lowland Britain with northern Francia, Frisia, Denmark, Norway and southern Sweden. Anglo-Saxon ports like Hamwic (Southampton) in Wessex, Lundenwic (London) which came under Mercian control by the 730s, Gipeswic (Ipswich) in East Anglia and Eoforwic (York) in Northumbria traded with Continental trading towns or emporia like Quentovic in Francia, Dorestad in Frisia, Ribe in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway and Birka in Sweden. There were also diplomatic ties between Anglo-Saxon and Continental rulers. Indeed, in 796, Charlemagne had sent a letter to King Offa of Mercia. The Mercians had by this point conquered Kent and Sussex, while the kings of Wessex and East Anglia recognised Mercian overlordship, making Offa the most powerful ruler in Britain and a near neighbour to Charlemagne's Empire separated only by the English Channel. Before the letter was sent, a diplomatic incident had occurred in which Mercian merchants were barred from all the ports in Charlemagne's Empire because Offa had refused Charlemagne's offer of a marriage alliance in which one of his daughters would marry into the Mercian royal family. The letter was sent to remedy the situation and itself discusses the following:

1. Mercian pilgrims coming into Frankish ports, presumably on their way to Rome, are to be granted complete free movement. 
2. Mercian merchants have to pay tolls on their goods when they arrive in Frankish ports, but will also enjoy full legal protection on Frankish soil and can have any business disputes with the locals resolved in the Frankish courts. 
3. On behalf of the late Pope Hadrian I, all the Mercian bishops will receive gifts of ecclesiastical vestments, and Charlemagne himself presents Offa with a gift of a ceremonial belt, two silk cloaks and an Avar sword (the Frankish conquest of the Avar Khaganate was taking place at exactly this time).

While the letter of 796 doesn't provide us with an answer as to how the knife got from Anglo-Saxon England to Francia and into Charlemagne's possession. But it does provide us with the necessary context and some possibilities as to how it might have - it could have been acquired through trade, or it could have been given as a diplomatic gift by Offa or another Anglo-Saxon ruler to Charlemagne. Like with a lot of other objects from this period, we simply can't know anything conclusive about its provenance or early history unless it found its way into the documentary sources. And a lot of the objects mentioned in the documentary sources sadly no longer survive - like the Avar sword Charlemagne gave to Offa.

Charlemagne would have undoubtedly been pleased to receive the knife. One of the things we can most clearly establish about Charlemagne's personality is that he enjoyed hunting. Einhard, his friend and biographer, of course talks quite a bit about Charlemagne's love of hunting. Notker the Stammerer, writing three generations after Einhard, tells a number of anecdotes about Charlemagne's love of hunting, including one about how he shamed his courtiers for dressing in fancy silks and satins on a hunting trip while he himself dressed in simple wool and sheepskin. At the same time, hunting was a sensible thing for any early medieval king to do. It provided fresh game for dinner. It gave opportunities to display masculine strength and courage such as when taking down a wild boar. It also allowed the king to bond with his aristocrats over a shared experience (much like a corporate teambuilding event in today's world) whilst at the same time reinforcing rank and precedence. The hunt was a formal and ritualised affair (much like foxhunting still is in the UK today), and as Notker's anecdote suggests things like dress (or indeed weaponry) could be very important in showing social distinctions. Charlemagne's decision to reside permanently at his new palace at Aachen from the mid-790s may well have been influenced by his love of hunting - it was very close to the forests of the Ardennes, teaming with wild beasts of all kinds. Though it probably also had something to do with his love of swimming (the thermal springs there had been used for bathing since at least Roman times), and the fact that it was located in the original powerbase of the Carolingian family (roughly where France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany intersect with each other).

Yet it is worth noting that the sheath, which is made of leather, gold, precious stones and glass, was actually made later, sometime in the eleventh century. This shows that the knife had a history of use after Charlemagne's death in 814. And with any historical artefact, you have to ask the question: how and why does it survive to us today?

The answer to this comes with later politics. In the year 1000, the nineteen-year-old Emperor Otto III opened up Charlemagne's tomb in Aachen and found that the Carolingian monarch's body had not decayed and was in perfect condition - commonly identified as a sign of holiness and potential sainthood since at least the sixth century. Otto III trimmed Charlemagne's nails and replaced his nose with a gold one, but may have fiddled around with the emperor's tomb in other ways. Why Otto III did this has created much debate and controversy among historians, as has just about everything else he did during his remarkably short life (he died before his twenty-second birthday). He's quite possibly the most controversial ruler in medieval German history, and there's some stiff competition there. For this particular incident, its a question of whether Otto was planning to make a case for Charlemagne's sainthood as part of his political programme, or whether this was just an episode of teenaged silliness. We don't really know either way, because Otto did not last very long after that. But more than a century and a half down the line, another German emperor actually did do what Otto might have been planning. 

On 29th December 1165, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa held a magnificent ceremony at Aachen, and Charlemagne was officially declared (canonised) as a saint. That this was done to make a very explicit political point, there's no reasonable doubt. You see, Frederick I Barbarossa had refused to support Rolando of Siena in the papal election of 1159, because he was anti-imperial. Indeed, as papal legate in 1157, Rolando had suggested to Barbarossa that the Empire was nothing but a fief of the papacy, and that the emperor therefore owed homage to the pope as his feudal lord, and for that was nearly run-through with a sword by Otto von Wittelsbach, Barbarossa's right-hand man, narrowly saved by the emperor's timely intervention.  Frederick Barbarossa thus backed his own candidate, Cardinal Octavian, known for his pro-German and imperial sympathies, and thus in 1159 two popes (Alexander III and Victor IV) were elected, who then promptly excommunicated each other. The Empire thus entered a state of cold war with the papacy, and when Victor IV (Cardinal Octavian) died in 1164, Barbarossa proceeded to elect another pope of his own - Paschal III. Barbarossa thus desperately needed to show that the authority of the German emperors came directly from God, not from being crowned by the popes. Already in 1158, his chief propagandist, Rainald Von Dassel, archbishop of Cologne, had claimed that the emperors ruled in direct succession from Augustus Caesar. Before then the Romans had enjoyed a special place in God's plan for humanity since the foundation of the city of Rome itself by Romulus. The Empire, the imperial office and its sacred authority were thus older than Christianity itself. But Barbarossa needed more than that. He needed to show that Charlemagne, the first emperor to be crowned by the pope, didn't actually need the pope to make him holy and give him sacred authority. And what better way to do that than make Charlemagne a saint!

Now every saint needs their relics. So Frederick Barbarossa and his advisers got them together. Like with a lot of saints' relics, many of the ones they chose were completely fake - the so-called "hunting horn of Charlemagne" was actually made in tenth century Egypt and so it couldn't possibly have ever been in Charlemagne's possession. But the hunting knife of Charlemagne was indeed from his lifetime, and so far as we can tell today it did actually belong to him. Still, many people at the time remained totally unconvinced. And in 1177, Frederick Barbarossa gave up with his struggle against Pope Alexander III and came to terms with him at the Peace of Venice. Two years later, at the Third Lateran Council, Pope Alexander III declared Charlemagne's sainthood invalid, along with all other decisions made by Barbarossa's anti-popes Victor IV and Paschal III. Alexander's successor, Innocent III (r.1198 - 1216), softened his position somewhat and allowed Charlemagne to be a figure of purely local veneration in Aachen and four other German towns. 

The ultimate failure of the German emperors to canonise Charlemagne is a huge contrast to what happened elsewhere. Other European monarchies were much more successful in getting a royal saint and thus proving that their authority was sacred. Norway acquired its royal saint, Olaf Haraldsson (r.1015 - 1028), within a generation of its conversion to Christianity when Bishop Grimketel of Nidaros canonised the recently deceased king as a saint. Though this was of course before the papal revolution, the papacy did not retrospectively quibble with it. Hungary got its royal saint, King Istvan I (r.1000 - 1038), when Stephen's grandson King Laszlo I got his wish on 15th August 1083 from none other than Pope Gregory VII. Around the same time as Frederick Barbarossa was locked in his cold war with the papacy, King Henry II of England, who had backed Pope Alexander III in the election, got his wish (and that of the monks of Westminster Abbey) granted on 7th February 1161 when Alexander issued a papal bull declaring Edward the Confessor to be a saint. And past the end of our period, the French monarchy got St Louis IX (r.1226 - 1270) canonised in 1297 as part of a compromise over church-state relations between King Philip IV the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII. So really, how well you got on with the legitimate pope was what decided everything. Its a huge myth that the papal revolution of the eleventh century secularised kingship, and that royal authority only became sacred and God-given again with the Reformation and the rise of absolutism in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, of course, the knife of Charlemagne was preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aachen, where it still is to this very day. 

Object number seven: a monumental lapidary inscription of Abbot Audibert, 838 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022) 

This monumental inscription on a large medallion of white marble was made in the year 838 by Abbot Audibert. That Audibert chose a circular shaped block of stone rather than the traditional rectangular one is itself noteworthy, though as is so often the case we can't know his reasoning. Following in the tradition of ancient Roman monumental inscription, such as the one we saw on the tomb in part 1, it is written in square capitals. Some basic religious imagery also features in that the image of the cross has been carved onto the stone medallion and part of the inscription is written inside it. The inscription itself is fairly simple and reads (again, all faults with the translation are my own):

Abbot Audibert renovated this oratory of Saint Donatus in the twenty-fifth year of the lord emperor Louis [838].

Apart from this, we know nothing about Abbot Audibert. Unlike Alcuin, Theodulf of Orleans, Adalhard of Corbie, Benedict of Aniane, Rabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrieres, Hincmar of Rheims and a whole host of other Carolingian churchmen I haven't cared to name, this Veronese abbot didn't write any books and stayed well-clear of court politics. Nor is there any mention of him in any published ninth century charters (from a quick google search). By his work shall ye know him!

What we can tell is that Audibert obviously wanted to be remembered for posterity as a builder and restorer of churches, otherwise he wouldn't have put up this inscription. In this sense, he followed expectations of what made a good bishop or abbot that went back to at least the fifth century Roman Empire. We can also tell that his education was not up to the standards expected of a senior cleric in the Carolingian period. For example, he uses the ablative oratorio where the accusative oratorium would be more appropriate and domino where the genitive domini should go. Alcuin or Lupus of Ferrieres would be senseless with rage if they saw these grammatical mistakes. This taps into the question that historians have debated a lot since the 1970s - how far down did Carolingian educational reform really go? 

As a final thing to note, Audibert dated his inscription according to the year of the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840) he wrote it in. Emperor Louis the Pious had been crowned as co-emperor and Charlemagne's successor in 813, so twenty-fifth year of his reign mentioned on the inscription would have been 838. All official documents of the Carolingian monarchs were dated according to regnal year, as indeed are those of British monarchs today - Elizabeth II passed away in her 71st regnal year and we are currently in year 1 of the reign of Charles III. That a relatively minor, local figure not connected to the Carolingian court and not living in a Carolingian powerbase would date his inscription like this is indicative of the strong royal authority and legitimacy the Carolingians had across their empire by the 830s. By contrast, the use of AD dating, which began to enter mainstream use in Western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, or other alternative methods of reckoning the years on an official document or inscription would indicate an ebbing-away of royal power or that an attempt to replace the reigning dynasty was on the cards. Indeed, some regions, like Catalonia in the years after 987, continued to date their charters according to the regnal years of the Carolingian monarchs even after Carolingians ceased to reign anywhere. 

Object number eight: an ivory casket panel of the rape of Europa, made in Constantinople, 980 - 1010 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Moving eastwards and towards the end of the first millennium, the next object I've chosen is an ivory panel which belonged to a casket made in Constantinople sometime in the closing decades of the tenth century, or possibly at the beginning of the eleventh. It depicts the Greek and Roman myth of the Rape of Europa. In the centre of the panel is Europa riding on the back of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is disguised as a white bull. Europa is clinging on to the bull's neck as he swims through the sea whilst waving her scarf. A cupid flies down to crown her with a laurel wreath, while another cupid wades into the sea with a flaming torch before the bull. On the left, Europa's female companions watch in amazement with their arms outstretched. On the right, Ares/ Mars and Aphrodite/ Venus begin to embrace each other on the further shore where Europa and the bull are headed, perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come - Zeus, being Zeus, would go on to have sex with Europa, and King Minos was born.

This isn't the only ivory casket panel from the tenth and eleventh century Roman Empire (what most historians would now call the Byzantine Empire) to show scenes from Classical mythology. Just opposite this object in the exact same room in the V&A, you can find the much more intact Veroli Casket, also made in Constantinople and in roughly the same timeframe. The panels on the Veroli Casket show various images of the god Dionysus/ Bacchus, as well as scenes from the stories of Bellerophon and Iphigenia. We're clearly dealing with a cultural environment in which knowledge of the Greek and Roman myths was highly prized. Wealthy people would thus have stories from them displayed on their more luxurious household objects, to demonstrate how learned and cultured they were. The fact that the casket panel is made from carved elephant ivory, imported to Constantinople from Africa at great expense, shows that it was also meant to demonstrate the owner's wealth. Whoever it belonged to must have been a very wealthy member of the Roman elite, possibly a high-ranking bureaucrat or military officer at the imperial court in Constantinople or a senator - the Roman senate still existed in the East until the thirteenth century. 

Of all the objects in this series, this is the second-most secular. This is because, while it depicts gods, these were gods that no one believed in by the time this object was made. The Roman East had been thoroughly Christianised in the fourth to sixth centuries. Some isolated pockets of paganism survived until quite late. The Maniotes, who lived in the middle finger of the Peloponnese and claimed descent from the ancient Spartans themselves, weren't converted until the reign of Emperor Basil I (r.867 - 886) according to the manual on statecraft and foreign policy written by his grandson Emperor Constantine VII (r.913 - 959). Needless to say, the Mani peninsula was an exceptional case, being a remote, mountainous, wild and effectively ungovernable region. Later on, French crusaders, Venetians and Ottoman Turks alike had only the most shaky control over the Mani, and the bandit clans and pirates that still dominated the region in the nineteenth century gave the modern Greek state a massive headache. It suffices to say that by the 980s, worship of Zeus and the other Olympian gods was no longer in anyone's living memory. Asides from a small Jewish minority, who were generally free of persecution, everyone in the Roman Empire was a Christian. 

Indeed, Christianity, specifically Greek Orthodox Christianity, is such a big part of how we view the medieval Roman Empire, or as we now prefer to call it, Byzantium. When "Byzantine Art" comes to mind, we tend to think of mosaics and icons with ethereal gold backgrounds, of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) in shapeless robes of lapis lazuli, of stern-looking and majestic-looking Christ Pantokrator (literally as ruler of the universe) and saints and emperors wearing timeless garments. Yet, like with a lot of what we think we know about Byzantium, this view of Byzantine art is ultimately misleading. Plenty of secular art of a very different style existed in the Roman Empire of the tenth to twelfth centuries.

Around the time this casket was made, the Roman Empire was going through what historians call "The Macedonian Renaissance." Under the so-called Macedonian dynasty of emperors (867 - 1056), contemporaries to Alfred the Great and the West Saxon kings of England, the Roman Empire enjoyed a new period of military success and cultural revival. A series of reconquests against the Arabs and Bulgarians led to Cilicia, Armenia, Northern Syria, Cyprus, Crete and the Balkans being reconquered. By 1025, at the death of Emperor Basil II, one of the greatest soldier emperors, the Roman imperial frontier was once again at the Danube and Euphrates for the first time since the seventh century. Just like in the time of Augustus, Trajan and Constantine, the Roman army was still the strongest, most disciplined and professional fighting force in all of Europe, and its generals had such a strong grasp of military tactics and strategy, they even wrote treatises on them.  A new building-boom for churches, both in the capital and in the provinces, was in motion and would continue into the twelfth century. And the study of Classical Roman literature and history was thriving. Great encyclopaedias of ancient Greek and Roman authors like the Excerpta Constantiniana and the Suda were compiled in the mid-tenth century under the orders of Emperor Constantine VII. Meanwhile, good working knowledge of Homer, Plato and Dio Cassius were essential parts of education for anyone who wanted to be a member of the governing class, as a civil servant, bishop or general. It was this kind of cultural milieu that produced art like this. Indeed, judging from the artistic style of the ivory panel, which pays a great deal of anatomical detail to the human figure and shows Europa, her companions, Ares and Aphrodite wearing recognisably Classical garb, its clear that the craftsmen who made it had some familiarity with Hellenistic and early Imperial Roman art. Indeed, Constantinople in this period was something of a veritable art museum that contained the best of ancient sculpture, almost all of which has since vanished without a trace. Thus this artwork represents a revival of Classical culture, and how the now thoroughly Christian Roman Empire still looked back fondly on its pagan past.

Object number nine: A coppery alloy statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, made in Thanjavur in southern India, 1000 - 1200 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, visited 10 December 2022)

Now for the penultimate object, we will be going yet further east and to a region, or should I really say, a subcontinent, whose history I know very little about. Of course, this ignorance of Indian history is far more widespread. Indeed, the recent move towards a "Global Middle Ages" hasn't done a particularly good job of integrating India into it, as opposed to China or West Africa. Often those who try to include the Subcontinent in global comparative histories make a frankly token effort and read just one book. Yet, from my perspective as a western early medievalist, India definitely belongs to a "Global Middle Ages." India was very much in the minds of early medieval westerners in ways that China and West Africa were not. The ancient Greeks and Romans had almost nothing to say about those latter two regions, and Western Europeans had no direct contact with them until the thirteenth century. The Islamic world, on the other hand, did have direct contacts with both China and West Africa through trade by the ninth century. Thus some would interpret this as simply indicative of Western Europe being a peripheral, backwater region in the early medieval period. That argument can be had, though as you can guess I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.

But India definitely was on the minds of early medieval Western Europeans. It was often mentioned by the Classical authors who were read in the fifth to twelfth century West. Early medieval Christians believed that in 53 AD St Thomas the Apostle had sailed over to Kerala in southern India and established a Christian church there. Our old friend Gregory Tours, writing in 590, describes how a certain passing acquaintance of his called Theodorus had visited the shrine of St Thomas in India and told him about it. Indian pepper was consumed at the Merovingian royal court in the seventh century and was known to the Venerable Bede in the early eighth. And in 883, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great sent two envoys to India to provide gifts for the shrine of St Bartholomew - Caitlin Green has made a strong case for this being an event that actually happened. India also appears on an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon world map, whereas China doesn't. 

This object came from the Chola kingdom, located in the tip of the Indian peninsula. The Cholas wrote and spoke the Tamil language, one of the official languages of southern India and Sri Lanka. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which means its a language that was historically spoken by the indigenous pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Indian Subcontinent, and still is spoken by their descendants today. By contrast, in northern India, the lingua franca was Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, related distantly to Latin and Greek, which occupied a similar position to Latin in the early medieval West, as a language of religion, administration, classical literature and elite culture. From my very limited outsider knowledge, the Cholas are fascinating but not easy to study. They have very different sources that we do for early medieval Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World or China. We have no narrative histories for them, though we do have Tamil poems, king-lists and royal sagas. We also have lots of surviving copper-plate inscriptions in Tamil, which mostly record land transactions and other economic arrangements. We also have an abundance of temples and artworks surviving from the Chola period, though they're very difficult to precisely date. 

The history of the Cholas goes back a very long way indeed. Indeed, they're first mentioned in northern Indian sources in the third century BC, as southern neighbours of Ashoka (304 - 232 BC), the ruler of the Mauryan Empire (321 - 185 BC). The Mauryan Empire was the first proper empire in Indian history, which controlled almost the entire subcontinent except the southern tip (where the Cholas were) but only for two generations before it broke up. Graeco-Roman sources also briefly mention the Cholas, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the Geography of Ptolemy. However, the Cholas only really start to generate writings of their own from the seventh century AD. Alfred the Great's envoys, Sigehelm and Aethelstan, probably visited the Chola court if they ever made it to the Shrine of St Thomas in India in the first place - if they did, its a shame no records of it survive as I really want to know what it would have felt like to be Anglo-Saxon visiting India in the ninth century. In the late ninth and tenth centuries, the so-called Imperial Cholas formed a powerful Empire in southern India that by 1000 covered all of the modern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Naddu and most of Karnatka and Andhra Pradesh, as well as the northern half of Sri Lanka. Their most powerful ruler was Rajaraja I (r.985 - 1014 AD), a contemporary of Aethelred the Unready, Basil II, Hugh Capet, Otto III and so many of the other people I'm interested in. He was an very skilled military commander who expanded the Chola Empire to its furthest extent and centralised government, turning the local tribute-paying vassals, autonomous chieftains and client kings into appointed officials dependent on the state. In the early decades of the eleventh century, Rajaraja created anthologies of all the great early Tamil poets, much like Constantine VII had done in the Roman Empire a few generations earlier. And In 1000 he organised a massive land survey of his entire empire, and reorganised all the administrative districts - its too tempting to make comparisons between Rajaraja and William the Conqueror (both of whom did live in the same century) here. Finally, Rajaraja also established trade links with Song China and Chola embassies were received at the Chinese imperial court in Kaifeng on multiple occasions in the eleventh century. After the mid-twelfth century, the Cholas went into decline but their dynasty didn't end until 1279. One has to be impressed with how long they lasted - more than a millennium and a half. Only the Imperial House of Japan (the Yamato), in continuous existence since 660 BC, can compare with them for sheer longevity. 

The Cholas were a staunchly Hindu dynasty and this is reflected in this artefact. It depicts the Hindu god Ganesh, and it was produced in Thanjavur, one of the most important Chola cities where Rajaraja I founded the great 66 metres tall Brihadisvara temple in 1010 AD. The statue shows Ganesh standing. In his four hands, he holds a noose, an elephant goad, a wood apple and a broken tusk. He wears a coronet, a necklace, armlets, anklets and a loincloth and has a regal bearing about him. His plump belly reflects his fondness for sweetmeats. According to some Hindu texts, Ganesh was beheaded by his father, Lord Shiva, when he accidentally mistook him for a rival. He promised to his wife, Parvati, to replace Ganesh's head with that of the first animal that would come along, and that happened to be an elephant. This statue of Ganesh would be used for religious processions, in which he would be carried on the parade up to the temple on a palanquin behind the statues of his mother, Parvati, and father, Lord Shiva. The statue would also receive prayers and offerings from people about to embark of business ventures. You see, Ganesh had originally been a God of agriculture, but by the eleventh century he was starting to be seen as a patron of merchants and commerce. Indeed, Chola India was experiencing an economic and commercial takeoff in the period this statue was created, much like the one going on simultaneously in Western Europe. Just like in eleventh and twelfth century Western Christendom in Chola southern India the explosion of religious devotion, artistic production and economic growth all went hand in hand. 

Object ten: Champleve enamel reliquary box of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket from Limoges, France, 1180 - 1190 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Our final object continues the previous object's theme of religious devotion, but brings me back to much more familiar historical territory and much closer to home. It is a reliquary casket, made to house the relics of the saint for veneration. which shows the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights (though only three are depicted here) on 29th December 1170. The drama of the whole scene is very well-captured by the artist who designed it here. A knight decapitates the Archbishop of Canterbury while he nonchalantly picks up a chalice from the altar, appropriately laid out for religious services, as part of his duty of performing the mass. This makes him appear both if he has no care at all about what is going on around him and is just going to carry on with his duties to God (performing the mass was and is literally called "divine service"), and like he has heroically accepted martyrdom. There's no indication that he's trying to fight back, run away or bargain with the knights. He thus appears the perfect martyr for Christ. The knights, who are not wearing their armour like they are often depicted, appear suitably thuggish and menacing. The first knight decapitates Becket, while the other two advance with drawn axes and swords. Meanwhile two monks of Canterbury cathedral priory stand with their faces aghast and their arms held up in terror. On the rectangular roof panel above, we see on the left the dead archbishop of Canterbury in his funeral shroud while a bishop and a number of other clerics perform the customary funeral rites. On the right we see Thomas Becket's soul ascending straight up to Heaven, flanked by two angels carrying his shroud.

This reliquary box was one of 52 showing the same scenes (the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, his funeral and ascent up to heaven) made in Limoges in the Duchy of Aquitaine in France, using the champleve enamelling technique. Limoges was one of the three leading production centres of champleve enamel objects in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, along with Cologne in the German Rhineland and Liege in what is now Belgium. Its been estimated that 7,500 champleve enamel objects manufactured in Limoges survive from the period 1160 - 1370; Limoges enamels went into swift decline following the Black Prince's sack of Limoges during the Hundred Years' War, though some were still being produced as late as 1630. The technique required to make champleve enamel caskets like this involves the following steps (you can also watch the video of it being done here):

1. A regular wooden casket is made.
2. Plaques are cut out from a larger sheet of copper and designs are drawn onto them using a mathematical compass or pointed tool.
3. Holes are drilled using a bow drill in the borders of the plaques to allow them to be nailed onto the wooden core.
4. Troughs are cut into the metal to hold the enamel.
5. The enamel is made by grinding glass with mortar and pestle, and mixed with water. 
6. The wet enamel is then laid on the plaques using a quill.
7. Once all the colours have been laid on to the copper plaque, the kiln is then fired up to 1000 degrees Celsius and the plaques are placed inside it - a medieval enameller would have needed to rely on his own judgement as to when the kiln was hot enough.
8. The plaques get fired in the kiln for a few minutes, then left to cool before the process gets repeated two or three times.
9. The plaques are then cleaned with a special stone, additional engravings for decoration are added and the exposed bits of copper get gilded.
10. The enamel plaques get hammered onto the wooden casket with nails.

Those medieval craftsmen were truly capable of some incredible things weren't they!

Its artworks like this reliquary box (and the fact that there are 52 others almost exactly like it) which really illustrate the historical significance of Thomas Becket's murder. In 1178, less than a decade after it happened, William II (r.1166 - 1189), the Norman king of Sicily, had a mosaic of Thomas Becket created in the cathedral-monastery complex he was building at Monreale in the hills just outside Palermo. I had the pleasure of visiting Monreale last July - its a wonderful place. In 1191, 21 years after Becket's murder took place, it was carved onto a baptismal font in a church in Skane in southern Sweden (then a part of the kingdom of Denmark). Across the next three hundred years, Thomas Becket's story would be told in countless artworks not just from England and France but also from Spain, Germany, Italy and Norway, and in 1232 in Poland a new Cistercian abbey church was dedicated to him. King Henry II of England, whose anger at the archbishop was generally acknowledged by contemporaries to be the root cause of Becket's murder, decided to make amends for it by building masses of new churches. These required vast amount of lead for pipes, roofs and stained glass windows, which were mined and smelted in the Peak District and Cumbria. The atmospheric lead pollution created by all this lead-smelting shows up in the cores of glaciers in the Swiss Alps. Close analysis of these by modern researchers has shown that this building boom in response to Thomas Becket's murder caused levels of lead pollution not seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and which would not be equalled again until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Thomas Becket's murder was thus a significant event in environmental history.

Significant is generally a word one would choose to apply to Thomas Becket. Becket's martyrdom provided the main inspiration for one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that is still on the UK statute books today "the English Church is to be free in perpetuity and to have its rights in full and its liberties intact." Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury eclipsed that of St Cuthbert at Durham as the most popular pilgrimage site in England, and had it not been for that then one of the greatest works of English literature (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) would likely never have been written. As pointed out earlier, he was venerated in churches across Western Europe. Thomas Becket became such a powerful symbol of resistance to royal authority that Henry VIII had the saint's shrine destroyed and his bones pulverised to dust in 1538. And as a trainee secondary school history teacher, I can confirm that he's one of the most popular topics to teach in secondary schools at Key Stage 3 level (11 - 14 years old). Even schools with the most minimal commitment to teaching medieval history at Key Stage 3, as per the broad-brush, inspecific requirements of the National Curriculum, and which teach none at GCSE (14 - 16 years old) and A Level (16 - 18 years old), will teach Thomas Becket's murder. The other topics typically included within the bare minimum of medieval history taught at Key Stage 3 are the Norman Conquest, the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt and some more general stuff on medieval life, religion and justice. Its interesting to consider why Becket is such a popular topic to be taught to schoolchildren, typically in year 7 (11 - 12 years old). I have yet to teach it myself, though I suspect that among the reasons are that its an inherently gripping and dramatic story with some big personalities involved (Henry II and Becket) and lots of gore. Its a good topic for introducing Key Stage 3 pupils to the second order concepts of historical significance (ditto) and evidence and enquiry (we have plenty of contemporary sources and even an eyewitness account from Edward Grim, one of the monks who saw the murder). Finally, its the perfect case study for exploring the key theme of the relationship between the crown and the church in the Middle Ages. 

Which brings us on to the final thing for us to think about. Why did I choose to end the series of ten objects with this one? And does Thomas Becket belong in the early middle ages at all? I've tried to evade the question of periodisation until this point. But I don't think I can any longer. What I can say is that most historians would not consider Thomas Becket as early medieval. The general agreement among academic historians is that the Middle Ages, conventionally spanning about a thousand years of European history, make no sense as a single period and have to be broken up into smaller sub-periods. But what are those sub-periods and where do we draw the cut-off points. French and Italian medievalists generally divide the Middle Ages in two - into an "upper" and lower" medieval period, with the cut-off point typically being somewhere in the eleventh century. Meanwhile, British and German medievalists typically divide it into three - into an early medieval period, a high or central medieval period and a late medieval period. As to where exactly the early middle ages becomes the high or central middle ages, there is no agreement. Some would go as early as 900, with the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire giving birth to the early forerunners of the European states we now know and love (France, Germany and Italy), as well as generally pointing the way to a post-imperial future for the European Continent (tell that to Frederick Barbarossa, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler). Others would go as late as c.1100, with similarly earth-shattering events like the Investiture Controversy and the First Crusade. Parochially, most English historians can't resist the power of 1066 as a marker for the great divide. But generally, from a European perspective, most Anglophone historians would go for sometime in the half centuries on either side of the year 1000 as the dividing line between early and high middle ages. Its between 950 and 1050 that the last of the barbarian invasions (Vikings and Magyars) cease and the final remnants of ancient Roman society disappear from Europe (i.e., agricultural chattel slavery). Its also when general signs that Europe is really entering the "real" Middle Ages start appearing - monastic orders, castles, knights, serfdom, primogeniture, giant Romanesque cathedrals and popular heresy. Very few historians, however, would take the early middle ages into the twelfth century. Partly because, if your early middle ages go beyond 1100, then you haven't got much of a high middle ages left before you have to move on to the late middle ages sometime around 1300 - unless, of course, you believe the middle ages really end in the eighteenth century (as some do). Also, can you really call the century that sees the invention of tournaments, Gothic architecture, the scholastic method, universities, Arthurian romances and windmills, as well as the earliest beginnings of merchant capitalism, the middle class and modern bureaucratic government, "early medieval" by any sane definition? 

Personally, I would go for 1000 as the end of the early middle ages - it really is as good an end-point as any. But I include the eleventh and twelfth centuries within my remit, just like how I include the fifth and sixth centuries there too despite some people's protests that that's still late antiquity. Change doesn't happen overnight and everything comes from somehow. And the period 400 - 1200, the timeframe covered by this series and more broadly by this blog, is quite simply what fits in all the bits of history that I love the most.

But for more than just completely subjective reasons, I think Thomas Becket deserves a place here in the story of the early middle ages in ten objects. In part, its to show that we have well and truly left the early middle ages. Lurking in the background of Thomas Becket's story is the papal revolution. The original dispute that led to Henry II and Thomas Becket falling out in 1164, over whether or not the clergy should be put under the jurisdiction of secular courts, was a direct result of the papal revolutionaries' sustained attempts since the mid-eleventh century to decrease the control of kings over the clergy. And the fact that Becket was canonised by the Pope in 1173, only three years after his death, is indicative of how the papacy was taking control of the process of making saints, one which would be complete by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Becket's story thus illustrates how the papal revolution of the eleventh century had irreversibly changed medieval power relations and the church. The fact that Becket became venerated in places as far apart from each other as Scandinavia, Spain and Sicily also demonstrates how much Latin Christendom had both expanded and become more unified in the post-1000 period.

But some of Becket's story would have still been familiar to people from the early middle ages. In particular, what came towards the very end of it. On 12th July 1174, Henry II walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, entered the cathedral, ordered the very monks who had witnessed Becket's murder to whip him and received 300 lashings from them. The next morning he heard that the Scottish king, William the Lion, had been captured and northern England was finally safe from invasion. Shortly after that, his rebellious barons sued for peace and his sons, Henry and Richard, and wife Eleanor also surrendered, thus ending the three year political crisis and civil war that had engulfed England after Becket's death. Now this kind of phenomenon, of a king performing penance for the health and salvation of the state, would be completely recognisable to the Carolingians. There are echoes of Emperor Louis the Pious' penance at Attigny in 822 for the blinding of his nephew Bernard of Italy here. Political penance was generally a very early medieval thing as went with the grain of a very early medieval conception of kingship, originating in the seventh century, that the king was personally accountable to God for the moral and spiritual welfare of his people. Before the Carolingians, Visigothic kings had pioneered political penance, and after them the Ottonians and Anglo-Saxons made use of it too - Otto III and Aethelred the Unready would have congratulated Henry II on what he did in 1174. But as it turned out, Henry II's pilgrimage to Canterbury was the last great act of political penance done by a medieval king. In that sense, if in that sense only, the Becket controversy did indeed mark the end of an era. 

And so ends our story of the early middle ages through ten objects. I apologise for it not providing a coherent narrative. But what I have tried to do is at least provide some common themes and show the sheer richness of Eurasian history and material culture in this period. I hope that at least in that endeavour, I have succeeded. And as this is the first post of 2023, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to you all. 

Did King Arthur exist, and was Camelot really a silly place?

 

Now this is every bit what you expect a Once and Future King to look like: A colourful Flemish tapestry woven c.1400 (now in the Cloisters Museum, New York City) depicts King Arthur enthroned under a sumptuous Gothic architectural canopy. Royal magnificence really has been dialled to the appropriate maximum here.

Imperial Arthur? A miniature of King Arthur from a manuscript containing multiple historical works, including Pierre Langtoft's chronicle, produced in Northern England sometime between 1307 and 1327, now in the British Library. Arthur is depicted in the armour typical of the first quarter of the fourteenth century (mostly mail but with plate vambraces on his elbows, poleyns on his knees, greaves on his lower legs and sabatons on his feet). He is armed with a lance and has his sword Excalibur at his belt, and so he is equipped with all the weapons befitting of a knight. On his left arm is a shield with an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child emblazoned on it (interestingly, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain's shield is similarly decorated but on the reverse side), which symbolises that he is a pious man, that he trusts the Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin to protect him in battle and that he is willing to shed blood in defence of the Christian faith - as any good knight damn well should be! Below him in the box is a list of thirty kingdoms subject to Arthur's rule. Among them are, besides England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, the city of Rome itself and even Egypt and Iraq. Such an image of Arthur mattered a lot to people in late medieval England - it gave English history a great conquering hero to rival Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Charlemagne, someone to take great pride in. There's a great irony in a figure originally intended as a Welsh hero fighting against invading Anglo-Saxons becoming an icon of English nationalism. Its doubly ironic in how the figure of Arthur was used by thirteenth and fourteenth century Englishmen to justify the subjection of Scotland, Wales and Ireland to England, as the great historian Sir Robert Rees-Davies pointed out in the introductory chapter to The First English Empire: Power and Identity in the British Isles 1093 - 1343 (2000). This manuscript was itself produced in the reign of Edward II, when Plantagenet imperialism had succeeded in Wales but was failing in Scotland.

A "historical" King Arthur on the big screen? Clive Owen and Keira Knightley as Arthur and Guinevere in "King Arthur" (2004). Arthur is reimagined as Lucius Artorius Castus, a fifth century AD Roman cavalry officer, his knights as Sarmatian auxiliaries and Guinevere as a Celtic warrior woman. Whether it actually lived up to its claims to be a more "historical" take on the legend is questionable, to say the very least, as we'll soon see.

So here we are. The blog has now surpassed seven months, making it more than half a year old, and, following some reflection, I've decided to shift the balance a bit away from educational posts and a bit more towards giving my own takes on some of the million pound questions of early medieval history. I think I might also do some posts in which I give my thoughts and theories on questions of a more general historical nature and what the purpose of early medieval history is in the present day. I thought we'd start off with something that links to a previous monster-post of mine and which touches on a subject that's always been of much personal importance to me - King Arthur.

I guess I've always been interested in King Arthur. I guess it came naturally from being interested in knights and castles as a kid, which was more or less the foundation stone of all my subsequent love of history. I listened to lots of stories and read lots of picture books about Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, pretended to be them in imaginative games and enjoyed watching movies like "The Sword in the Stone" (1963) and "Quest for Camelot" (1998). Later on, me and pretty much all of my family, friends and acquaintances would hugely enjoy watching the BBC Television series "Merlin" (2008 - 2013). For those not familiar with it, "Merlin" is an absolutely brilliant reimagining of the traditional Arthurian legend - Arthur becomes an arrogant, bumbling Bertie Wooster-ish figure while his butler Merlin (the Jeeves to his Wooster) saves Camelot time and again from the forces of evil without Arthur knowing. When I got hooked on ancient Rome in years 3 - 6 (7 - 11 years old) at primary school, I began to get in the possibility of a historical King Arthur. We covered the fall of Roman Britain in year 3 (the same year I went dressed as a Saxon invader with a proper seax on World Book Day), in which the existence of King Arthur, as a Romano-British warlord rather than as a medieval king, was presented as fact. Subsequently, I watched "Last Legion" (2008) and my mum read to me "The Lantern Bearers" (1959) by Rosemary Sutcliffe, both of which go into that territory. Closely linked to that was my growing fascination with the late Roman army and the fall of Rome, which I loved reading about in my various children's history books about ancient Rome. And at the age of 12 I fell in love with "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", in which the Arthurian stories of my earlier childhood were subverted and parodied with the Pythons' trademark irreverent and surreal humour. Indeed, to really nail my colours to the mast, I would say that any medievalist worth their salt should have heard of and enjoyed Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

"You fight with the strength of many men Sir Knight ... Will you join me ... You make me sad, so be it! Come Patsy!" The Black Knight sequence is one of my favourite bits from that 1975 classic, and its actually a remarkably accurate illustration of chivalry as a twelfth century knight would have understood it. Arthur recognises that the Black Knight, who has just slain the Green Knight in single combat, has its central tenet (prowess) in spades, and so invites him to join his knights at Camelot. The Black Knight, however, sees an opportunity to further demonstrate his prowess by challenging this armed stranger to an honourable roadside duel, something which we know some twelfth century knights actually did.

Thus, to summarise, throughout my life I've had a deep fascination with both of the two Arthurs - on the one hand the historical Romano-British warlord who fought back against the Saxon invaders; and on the other, the mythical once and future king and paragon of chivalry. In a way, he represents the link between my two childhood fascinations that got me into history - ancient Rome, on the one hand, and medieval knights, on the other. 

Most historically aware people know that the Arthur of myth, legend and romance is just that - a twelfth century fiction invented to fit the new chivalric ideology of the medieval aristocracy who has been continuously reimagined by every subsequent era and reshaped in its image. The movies and TV series I enjoyed as a kid are demonstrative, trying to recast the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table for a more egalitarian age. But does the same hold true of the "historical" Arthur? Did he really exist? Or was he himself just as much a fiction/ historical back-projection (albeit of an earlier era) as his mythical counterpart?

"Tis I, Arthur, King of the Britons, Defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England" ... "Pull the other one": The Arthurian legend begins

So, first things first, lets examine the sources for the historical King Arthur and how the legend came to be. Arthur is meant to have lived sometime in the period c.450 - 600. Now I hate to be politically incorrect and break a professional taboo for me as an early medievalist, but unlike on the Continent this period in British history really is a Dark Age. Our only written historical source produced in these Isles during this period is the sermon On the Ruin of Britain by the Romano-British priest Gildas, in which he lambasts the Romano-British rulers of his day and bemoans the onslaught of the invading Anglo-Saxons. Gildas does mention a number of British victories against the Saxons, including the battle of Badon Hill, but he does not mention Arthur anywhere. The key thing to remember, however, about Gildas is that he is writing a hell-fire sermon that's mainly focused on Romano-British moral failure and imminent doom and gloom. It is not a comprehensive historical narrative of this period, and no one can make their mind up as to when exactly Gildas was writing it - a tentative date of c.540 has been raised but he could have been writing two generations earlier or later. 

Next we have a poem, attributed to the early seventh century Welsh poet Aneirin, called Y Gododdin, that basically takes the form of a catalogue of elegies. The poem tells of how 363 Welsh warriors ride out from the fortress-palace of Gododdin (Edinburgh) to attack the fortress of Catraeth (Catterick in North Yorkshire), defended by 100,000 Anglo-Saxons, and nearly all of them were slain. From then on, each verse of the poem takes the form of an elegy to an individual warrior, narrating his heroic deeds and death. When gets to the warrior Gwawrddur in verse 99, the poet writes 

He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress

Though he was no Arthur

Among the powerful ones in battle

In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade.

Now you might be thinking "well this is an almost contemporary throwaway reference to, well you know who. Its clear that he was a real figure from the preceding century and a half, and had become a natural reference point for a martial hero/ formidable fighting machine by the time the poet was writing." Well no, unfortunately its not that simple. You see, like with a lot of the sources for early medieval history, the seventh century original Y Gododdin does not survive to us today. Instead, what does survive is a much later (thirteenth century) copy of Y Gododdin. Thus, like with a lot of other early medieval written sources that have a similar textual history, there are always some scholars who doubt whether the original ever existed, whether in fact Y Gododdin is a high medieval forgery that was then falsely attributed to Aneirin in order to get more people to read it. And while most scholars would argue that a seventh century original did indeed once exist, they would nonetheless argue that the reference to Arthur is likely an interpolation by a later scribe - adding bits in was a very common practice in the transmission of ancient texts. Its for this reason that the nineteenth century German scholars who founded that great collection of medieval texts known Monumenta Germaniae Historia,  obsessed over finding the original manuscript (Urtext) of every source. And where they couldn't, they tried speculatively to recreate it by minimalizing the detail as much as possible on the grounds that many of the details in the (later) extant copies were likely interpolations.

Gododdin or, as it now goes by the name of, Edinburgh Castle today 

A modern artist imagines what the 363 Welsh heroes at the battle of Catraeth (c.600), if it ever did happen, would have looked like. Perhaps the military forces commanded by the historical King Arthur would have looked like this too.

Early in the eighth century, we get some historical writing on the other side, that of the now thoroughly settled Anglo-Saxons. The Venerable Bede, who we know had access to Gildas, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c.731) does not mention anyone called Arthur. One might think that Bede, as an Anglo-Saxon living in a Northumbrian monastery, wouldn't want to record the deeds of a Romano-British/ Welsh hero and so would give him the silent treatment. At the same time, Bede does speak of a heroic Romano-British leader called Aurelius Ambrosius, briefly mentioned by Gildas as the "last of the Romans", who successfully fought back against the Saxons c.450 - c.480 and won some great victories. Bede's reputation as a historian over the centuries has generally been very high, and we'll see later, some later historians have taken Bede's silence on the matter of King Arthur as a clear indication that he didn't exist.

"Hey, I'm looking for King Arthur?" ... "Sorry pal, nothing to see here!" An early ninth century manuscript of Bede's Ecclesiastical History stored in the British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius C II.

It is in the early ninth century that we at last get our first concrete historical references to King Arthur. Around 829, the History of the Britons was written, an account of Welsh history from earliest times to the present - traditionally, this work was ascribed to the Welsh monk Nennius, but modern scholars reject this view and see the author as an anonymous compiler. 

The History of the Britons firstly tells of how the Welsh were, like the Romans, the descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, and the author displays a good amount of familiarity with Virgil whilst obviously adding stuff that the Roman poet never mentioned. Then he tells the story of Caesar's invasion of Britain, of the return of the Romans under Emperor Claudius and then a brief narrative of the various Roman emperors who ruled Britain. After the defeat of the usurper Magnus Maximus (d.388), who used the legions stationed in Britain and the support of native chieftains to launch his bid for the imperial throne, the author claims that Britain stopped being part of the Roman Empire and a chap called Vortigern ruled over the Britons as king. The Picts from north of Hadrian's Wall and the Scots from Ireland started to give the Romano-British trouble, so Vortigern welcomed the Saxons, led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, from over the North Sea to give him a helping hand. Hengist even persuades Vortigern to marry his daughter. But then the Saxons betray the Britons and start conquering the island off them, and Vortigern goes and hides away in North Wales. His son Vortimer successfully leads resistance to the Saxons and kills Horsa, and so the Saxons have to fetch more and more reinforcements from Germany. Hengist then invites all the chiefs of the Britons to a feast under the pretence of making peace, telling his men to conceal their seaxes (short swords), and then they massacre them all except Vortigern, who purchases his freedom by giving the Saxons the regions of Kent, Essex and Middlesex. Vortigern is then condemned by St Germanus of Auxerre, who we know visited Britain in the 430s, and divine retribution is brought down on him - the author is unsure whether Vortigern's palace with everyone inside was burned to ashes by fire and brimstone at night or if the earth opened and swallowed him up. Then after that Aurelius Ambrosius, whom the author refers to as a "king", and Vortigern's sons lead resistance to the Saxons. But once they've passed away, who's gonna lead the resistance against the Saxons? The author says 

Then it was, that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror. The first battle in which he was engaged, was at the mouth of the river Gleni. The second, third, fourth, and fifth, were on another river, by the Britons called Duglas, in the region Linuis. The sixth, on the river Bassas. The seventh in the wood Celidon, which the Britons call Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was near Gurnion castle, where Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, mother of God, upon his shoulders, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the holy Mary, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter. The ninth was at the City of Legion, which is called Cair Lion. The tenth was on the banks of the river Trat Treuroit. The eleventh was on the mountain Breguoin, which we call Cat Bregion. The twelfth was a most severe contest, when Arthur penetrated to the hill of Badon. In this engagement, nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance. In all these engagements the Britons were successful. For no strength can avail against the will of the Almighty.

And there you have it folks - the first concrete historical reference to King Arthur. All except, he's not actually a king. Rather he's a war leader (dux bellorum) commanding the combined military forces of the various petty kings of the Romano-British. And of course, given that Arthur is turning up in the history books roughly three hundred years after he's supposed to have lived, it does beg the question of how much distorted memory, oral accounts getting more garbled as they pass down the generations and down-right myth-making has taken place in between. Further problems are raised by the fact that the locations of Arthur's battles mentioned in the History don't appear to map on to any present day locations. Also Arthur appears like a massively overpowered superhero - no one has the physical strength to kill 940 men singlehandedly in one day with sword and spear - though it must be said in the author's defence that, so far as we can tell, he sincerely believed that anything was possible with God's intervention. And let's not forget the political context in which the History of the Britons was written. The decades on either side of c.800 were a time of much Anglo-Welsh border conflict. Lets not forget that back in 785, possibly within the author's living memory, King Offa of Mercia (r.757 - 796) had built Offa's Dyke, Britain's largest post-Roman fortification to date, to fend off against Welsh attacks. So in that kind of climate, heroic Welsh war-leaders of exceptional charisma and martial prowess who won battle after battle, pushing back the tide of the Germanic invaders, were very much in demand to provide hope and inspiration in the present day.

Offa's dyke: invaluable context for all these histories of ethnic conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Britons being penned down by both sides in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Arthur and his battles were recounted again in the Annals of Wales (c.954), which used the History of the Britons as its source material. The Annals give a precise date of Arthur's victory at Badon Hill to 516 AD, and claim that Arthur died in battle against his nephew Mordred (who makes his first appearance here) in 537. Again political context is key - between 927 and 975 various Welsh kings did homage and paid tribute the West Saxon kings of a now-unified English kingdom. Thus histories of Welsh triumphs against the Anglo-Saxons would provide uplifting reading in the tenth century present, when the West Saxon kings held quasi-imperial hegemony over all of Great Britain. Arthur also appears as a character in various Old Welsh poems written in the ninth to eleventh centuries, which strongly suggest that he was already becoming a figure of myth and legend. 

King Arthur comes of age

The genius behind the "King" Arthur we know and love is Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095 - 1155). As his name suggests, he was from Monmouthshire in Wales, but his ethnicity is unknown and subject to dispute - he might have been a native Welshman, a Norman or even a Breton (William the Conqueror had installed many Breton lords in Cornwall and on the Welsh Marches, including in Monmouth itself). We know he was based in Oxford from 1129 - 1151, where he appears as a signatory to six charters along with Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. In some of the charters, Geoffrey signs with the title of "teacher" (magister), which strongly suggests that he was an academic at the twelfth century schools in Oxford, which would evolve into Oxford University the following century. It was in 1136 - 1138 that Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down and wrote his History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey claimed in the preface that he was simply writing a Latin translation of "an ancient book in the British language [Welsh] that told in orderly fashion the deeds of the kings of Britain." Modern scholars now almost universally accept that the History of the Kings of Britain is a thoroughly original work. Geoffrey drew his historical "facts" from the History of the Britons, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Gildas' On the Ruin of Britain, all of which we've discussed earlier, before filling in the gaps with stories from Welsh bardic poetry and his own invented tales. His History begins with the legendary Brutus of Troy, a great-grandson of Aeneas who settled in Britain, drove out the race of giants that lived there and from whom all kings of Britain and Welsh princes are descended, and ends with the death of the thoroughly historical Welsh king Cadwaladr in 682 AD, whose exploits are recorded by Bede. Geoffrey of Monmouth's History is also the oldest source to mention King Lear and Cymbeline, both of whom Shakespeare would later write plays about for James I. 

King Lear and his three daughters depicted in the margins of Matthew Paris' Chronicle (c.1250)

But first and foremost, Geoffrey of Monmouth is famous for the King Arthur stuff. Geoffrey elaborates more on Arthur's backstory. In his History, Arthur is the grandson of the the late Roman usurper Constantius III (d.421), and the son of Uther Pendragon, the youngest of Constantius' three sons, the elder two being Constans and Aurelius Ambrosius, making them Arthur's uncles. The evil Vortigern kills Constans, and becomes the tyrannical ruler of Britain. It is here that the figure of Merlin is introduced for the first time - when Vortigern is building his fortress of Dinas Emrys in Snowdonia he meets Merlin, who shows him two dragons, a red one symbolising the Welsh and a white one symbolising the Saxons, fighting in a cave underneath the castle, and prophesises all the historical events in Britain that will follow, as well as the ultimate triumph of the Welsh over the Saxons (as of yet, still unfulfilled but, with Boris Johnson being so all-around crap, almost like a latter day Vortigern, maybe Plaid Cymru will get their chance!)

Merlin shows Vortigern the two dragons at Dinas Emrys, as depicted in a mid-fifteenth century manuscript

After Vortigern meets his much deserved end, Aurelius and Uther take over ruling the Britons. Aurelius dies and Uther takes over. Uther holds a feast for all his vassals, and during the feast gets the hots for Igraine, the wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. Igraine realises that Uther is interested in her in that way, and so hides away in her husband's castle of Tintagel. Uther declares war on Gorlois and lays siege to his castles. While Gorlois is out fighting Uther's armies, Merlin gives Uther a magic potion that will enable him to temporarily assume Gorlois' form. Uther sneaks into Tintagel, Igraine is under the illusion that its her husband, they passionately make love and Igraine gets impregnated with Uther's baby - none other than our hero, King Arthur! I'm not sure how medieval people felt reading about the circumstances of Arthur's conception, but to modern audiences Uther's behaviour would come across as creepy.

Tintagel, Cornwall, site of Arthur's conception according to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Luxury goods dating to the sixth century from the Eastern Roman Empire have been found at Tintagel, a strong indication that it was a seat of power for a Romano-British tribal leader or king in the fifth and sixth centuries - its certainly quite an imposing site, perfect for building a palace or stronghold. Maybe the folk memory of this survived in Geoffrey of Monmouth's time. Richard, earl of Cornwall (1209 - 1272), the younger brother of King Henry III was so into Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthurian tales that he had his own castle built at Tintagel of which only part of the rampart still survives, as you can see in the image.

Duke Gorlois dies in battle that night, and when Igraine hears the news she wonders "who the fuck slept with me last night then!" For her own security, she marries Uther, and together they raise the boy child, the true identity of his father being kept secret. When Uther dies, Arthur succeeds him and defeats and subjugates the invading Saxons in a sequence of epic battles (the same as given in the History of the Britons but with the detail more fleshed out). With England and Wales under his command, Arthur then proceeds to conquer Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, Iceland (of all places), Norway, Denmark, Germany and France. Twelve years of peace and prosperity ensue. Then, after the Britons refuse to pay tribute to the Romans like they did in the past, the Roman Emperor Lucius declares war on them, but Arthur defeats Lucius in battle, kills him and conquers Rome. But just before Arthur can sit down to rule his empire, spanning the whole of Western Europe, his nephew Mordred betrays him, by marrying Queen Guinevere and usurping the throne. They fight a battle at Camlann, Mordred is slain but Arthur is mortally wounded and in his dying moments he is carried off the Isle of Avalon to be put into an enchanted sleep. He gives his kingdom to his cousin, Duke Constantine of Cornwall. War with the Saxons resumes, and in the end they conquer all of Lloegyr (England) and the Britons are confined to Wales and Cornwall.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain was an immediate bestseller. It gave England and Wales an ancient history of comparable richness and depth to that of Greece, Rome or France, and a great leader to rival Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Charlemagne. Combine that with Geoffrey of Monmouth's contemporaries, William of Malmesbury (c.1090 - 1143), Henry of Huntingdon (c.1100 - 1157) and Geoffrey Gaimar (fl. 1130s), writing about the glories of the Anglo-Saxon past, and what you had was a cocktail to make the still fairly recently established Norman aristocracy absolutely euphoric. 

Not only did Geoffrey help the Normans identify more strongly with the lands and peoples they had conquered since 1066, he also provided some solid epic foundations for poets to build on. These poets, who depended on the patronage of royal and noble courts for their living, proceeded to adapt Geoffrey's work to meet the demands of the secular, courtly noble and knightly audiences that would be consuming them. 

In 1155, the Norman poet Wace wrote an Anglo-Norman French rendition of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History called the Deeds of the Britons. Wace did his best to adapt Geoffrey to his audience. He removed the prophecies of Merlin in Book 7 as they were too politically charged for King Henry II and the Norman aristocracy. To fit in with the refined sensibilities of his courtly audiences, he cut out the descriptions of exaggerated sentiment and excessively brutal and barbaric behaviour from Geoffrey's History. He provided more dialogue and more detailed descriptions of battles, the splendour of King Arthur's court, the beauty of its ladies and the gallantry of its knights. But, most importantly of all, Wace wanted to meet the twelfth century aristocracy's demand for fiction, that is to say for literature that treated its characters as unique individuals and explores their thoughts, emotions, motivations and interior worlds. All of this was very much in step with the general direction of twelfth century culture more generally - in particular the growing celebration of the individual, the leisured life and romantic love. Emblematic of this, as Laura Ashe has observed, is a dialogue Wace writes between two of Arthur's knights, Cador and Gawain (later to be of Green Knight fame), after its been announced that Arthur is going to war with the Emperor Lucius. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's original, Cador says that going to war is good because the twelve years of peace and prosperity have made the Britons grow soft and cowardly, and so they must regain their reputation for martial valour. Wace includes this, but deviates from his source material by adding a response from Gawain. Gawain tells Cador that peace is good, for the land and people prosper from it, and then adds "Pleasant pastimes are good, and so are love affairs. It's for love, and lovers, that knights do knightly deeds."

This example also reflects one of the main purposes of the emerging genre of chivalric and courtly literature that Wace's work was pioneering in - to encourage debate amongst its readers. Twelfth Norman century knights, who would have listened to this being read aloud at mealtimes in the royal and noble households they served in, would have had to ask themselves these question "Is Cador or Gawain right?" "For who and for what should we perform great deeds of prowess and courage?" "Is it better to live the austere, disciplined life of the the straightforward warrior, or the leisured, sensual life of the knight as courtier, poet and lover." This was, in effect, one of the central debates on chivalry for the next 350 years or so. 

A knight from the Hunterian Psalter, c.1170. Wace and subsequent Arthurian writers wrote with people like this guy, and their desires, aspirations and struggles, in mind.

I emphasise debate because that's fundamentally what chivalry was. Chivalry was NOT something static and written in stone. It was a living, contested and evolving ethos. Too often modern scholars make the error of slipping into talking about a "Code of Chivalry" as if knights had a special pocket in the mail hauberks for a parchment scroll containing "Ye Olde Code of Chivalry" (or whatever local vernacular equivalent), which conveniently told you what the chivalrous thing to do was in any given situation. What was universally agreed upon was that there was a certain set of (roughly) six values that all knights should uphold - prowess, courage, loyalty, generosity, piety and courtesy. Beyond that, everything, including which order of precedence these values came in (though, almost consistently, prowess came at the top), was open to debate. Every work of chivalric literature, especially the Arthurian romances, was in its own way a contribution to that debate, as well as being designed enable its consumers to see themselves, their aspirations and their struggles in the fictional knights performing superhuman feats in a magical landscape. This is why Arthurian romances absolutely SHOULD be taken seriously as historical sources. Like with any historical source, so long as you know how to read them carefully, contextually and critically, they are as valid as any other kind of source. 

Enough digressions! One of Wace's most lasting contributions to Arthurian romance was the Round Table. Wace explained the table's circular shape on the grounds that Arthur's barons and knights would not argue over precedence, as would inevitably be the case with seating arrangements on any polygonal table. Aristocratic societies, especially ones so focused around royal and princely courts, are inevitably very conscious of rank, status and lineage and whether they are being correctly observed and given due respect. But in many ways, Wace and other early chivalric writers are trying to argue against that tendency - that rather than there being a complex pecking order, there should be a sense of oneness and common purpose at court. And in much subsequent chivalric literature, we find the idea that the measure of a man's worth should not be his rank, status or lineage but his character and deeds. Indeed, in 1173, 18 years after Wace wrote his Deeds of the Bretons, Henry the Young King, son of King Henry II, chose not to be knighted by his father-in-law, Louis VII of France, but by a household knight from the lowest rung of the landed aristocracy called William Marshall, "the greatest knight there ever was, or ever will be." This is a process that modern historians call the "birth of nobility." In 1100, the nobles (dukes, counts and barons) saw themselves as a class apart from the knights, whose landholdings (if they had them at all) were relatively small and most of whom were the third, second or even first generation descendants of peasants. By c.1225, however, all knights had been accepted into the nobility, all male nobles of whatever rank identified as knights, with the dubbing ceremony now being a universal right of passage, and they all intermarried and followed the same code of conduct. The work of early chivalric writers like Wace were both witness to and actively shaped this social transformation.

The first ever known artistic depiction of Stonehenge, in an early fourteenth century manuscript of Wace's Deeds of the Britons

Thus with Wace, the Arthurian legend lost all of its original moorings in the world of sub-Roman and early medieval Britain, which were still to some degree there in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Instead, it became anchored in the world of the twelfth century present - to meet the demands for new kinds of literature and as a vehicle for exploring new sensibilities, values and ideas to shape the new ethos of chivalry. 

After Wace, the poet Chretien de Troyes (c.1130 - 1190) wrote Old French Arthurian romances for the courts of the Dukes of Brittany and the counts of Champagne and Flanders. It is he who really delves into the stories of Arthur's individual knights, making Arthur into a bit of a supporting character. Lancelot and Percival are introduced into the Arthurian universe by Chretien, each of them being the central protagonist of one of his romances, and thus Lancelot's adulterous courtly love affair with Guinevere and the quest for the Holy Grail are brought into the mix too. 

Perhaps Chretien de Troyes' most important (and incendiary) contribution to the Arthurian canon). Lancelot kisses Guinevere with Galahad and the Lady of Malohaut as his witnesses in the Book of Lancelot (c.1316). Whether Lancelot or Galahad was a better role model for knights was never entirely clear. On the one hand, Galahad's celibacy was a difficult act to follow for most knights - indeed, it was meant to be. On the other hand, woe betide any knight who tried to seriously emulate Lancelot in an having affairs with a high-born married lady! In 1175, Count Philip of Flanders caught his wife Elizabeth of Vermandois having an affair with a courtier, Walter de Fontaines, and had her lover beaten bloody and left to die hanging upside down over a cesspit. The best course of action for most was to stick to casual flirting games with the ladies of court, but never escalate things any further, and wait till a sensible woman, or if you were lucky a rich heiress or widow, came your way.

After Chretien de Troyes, the Arthurian universe just keeps expanding, with various characters, places and events touched upon only cursorily in previous romances getting their own storylines. One can see the Arthurian romances kind of like the MCU Avengers or the DC Justice League, constantly generating spin-offs, fan-fictions and next generation retellings. Something like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1400) written in Middle English by the anonymous Gawain poet, can be seen in this light potentially. Every addition to the great expanse of Arthurian literature reflected the particular flavour of the moment and the interests and concerns of its author. By the time of the Wars of the Roses, it would befall a certain Thomas Malory to tie all the disparate threads together in his Le Morte d'Arthur (1485). The author, a practicing knight himself, drew from all the Arthurian literature available to him in Latin, Old French and Middle English to create a comprehensive epic that would meet the demands of a readership that now had a very large middle class component. It is Malory's Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that have inspired poets, artists, novelists, composers, film-makers and video games designers ever since, and thus it is they that form the basis of the Arthurian legend as we know it.

An Arthurian Avengers assemble? The frontispiece of the 1634 edition of Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I can imagine John Milton would have read this as he does allude to the Arthurian romances in Paradise Lost, and Charles I and all the red-blooded Cavaliers definitely would have. Godly Puritans would have likely found much of it totally objectionable (Lancelot and Guinevere, for starters!), and Thomas Hobbes would have likely turned his nose up at it too. But this is just me engaging in idle speculation.

Medieval debates on King Arthur's existence

This is in fact a debate that's been going on since the twelfth century. Indeed, as soon as King Arthur mania had consumed England and France and was poised to engulf the whole of Latin Christendom, William of Newburgh (1135 - 1198) attempted to deliver a blow with a sledgehammer to this new historical hero and cultural icon. In Chapter One of Book One of his History of English Affairs he wrote:

 "A writer in our times has started up and invented the most ridiculous fictions concerning them (the Britons) … having given, in a Latin version, the fabulous exploits of Arthur (drawn from the traditional fictions of the Britons, with additions of his own), and endeavoured to dignify them with the name of authentic history; moreover, he has unscrupulously promulgated the mendacious predictions of one Merlin, as if they were genuine prophecies, corroborated by indubitable truth, to which also he has himself considerably added during the process of translating them into Latin… no one but a person ignorant of ancient history, when he meets with that book which he calls the History of the Britons, can for a moment doubt how impertinently and impudently he falsifies in every respect… Since, therefore, the ancient historians make not the slightest mention of these matters, it is plain that whatever this man published of Arthur and of Merlin are mendacious fictions, invented to gratify the curiosity of the undiscerning… Therefore, let Bede, of whose wisdom and integrity none can doubt, possess our unbounded confidence, and let this fabler, with his fictions, be instantly rejected by all.”

William of Newburgh would not have the popularity and influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace or Chretien de Troyes. To top it all up, in 1189, the monks of Glastonbury had 'proved' King Arthur and Queen Guinevere to have really existed by unearthing their graves, making their abbey something of a tourist attraction. So one might presume that William of Newburgh's sound, source-based historical criticisms were simply falling on deaf ears.

"The most ridiculous fictions": A copy of the "History of the Kings of Britain" produced c.1160 at Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, now contained in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris. The fact that we have 220 surviving medieval manuscript copies of this work is no mere accident, being instead demonstrative of its widespread popularity. See below for another manuscript folio from a twelfth century copy of Geoffrey's "History."

Yet its nonetheless interesting to note that in the late fifteenth century, around the time Sir Thomas Malory was penning down the most complete and authoritative version of the Arthurian legends, Le Morte d'Arthur, a substantial number of educated lay men were expressing opinions remarkably similar to those we saw earlier from William of Newburgh on King Arthur's supposed historical existence. In his preface to the first printed edition of Le Morte d'Arthur in 1485, the great businessman, diplomat and translator William Caxton (1422 - 1491) stated that "many noble and dyvers gentylmen" pushed for him to publish a book about King Arthur, one of the "Nine worthy" men. The Nine Worthies were a pantheon of heroes serving as moral exemplars to all lay men, which also included Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon. Caxton then recounted that when he had presented a book on the deeds of Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of the First Crusade and first "King" of Jerusalem, to King Edward IV, the Yorkist king requested that his next book be about Arthur because he was "English" and there were so many sources about him.

Yet, and here is where it actually gets interesting, Caxton responded to the king by saying "that dyvers men holde oppynyon that there was no suche Arthur, and that alle suche books as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables ... bycause that somme cronycles make of hym no mencyon ne remember hym noothynge, ne of his knyghtes.”

Unless Caxton really was just playing devil's advocate for the sake of it, this would seem to imply that in the late fifteenth century, a substantial lay reading public in England were becoming so well aware of their country's chronicle record that they were capable of fairly sophisticated historical criticism of Arthur's existence. Caxton himself however, did not doubt Arthur's historical existence and pointed to learned authorities, including Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Ranulf Higden's (1280 - 1360) Polychronicon, Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313 - 1375) On distinguished men, as well as physical evidence - the graves at Glastonbury, the Round Table at Winchester, the ancient seal at Westminster in "reed [red] waxe closed in beryll” bearing a Latin inscription that translates as "Arthur the Patrician, Emperor of Britain, Gaul, Germany and Denmark [Dacia]," Gawain's skull at Dover castle and Lancelot's sword at an unspecified location. Caxton concluded  “al these thynges considered, there can no man reasonably gaynsaye but there was a kyng of thys lande named Arthur,” but he did also say “for to passe the tyme, thys book shal be plesaunte to rede in; but for to gyve fayth and byleve that al is trewe that is conteyned herin, ye be at your lyberté.”

In the Middle Ages, King Arthur was far from being a parochial figure or even an Anglo-French one. While debates were raging in England about his historicity, the elites rest of Latin Europe were absolutely obsessed with Arthur and his knights. Above is an early fifteenth century image of King Arthur from the Nine Worthies fresco cycle at the Castello della Manta in Piedmont, Italy, commissioned by Tommaso III, Margrave of Saluzzo (1356 - 1416). Tommaso was a cultured and learned man who took chivalry very seriously, to the point that, like a number of other knights in the late middle ages, he even wrote a treatise on it in Middle French, Le Chevalier Errant (all Italian aristocrats of his day would have been fluent in French as well as their native dialect - it was invaluable for business and diplomacy, and was on track to replacing Latin as the leading literary language of Europe).

Not only did King Arthur and the Round Table make their way over the Alps, they even managed to corner the literary market in Eastern Europe as well. This fresco was commissioned sometime in the 1330s to decorate the great hall of the tower-house of Duke Henryk I of Jawor (1292 - 1346) at his manor of Siedlecin in Poland. This fresco tells the story of Sir Lancelot, one of only two surviving frescoes of its kind and the only one in its original location and context - the other Lancelot fresco is at a museum in Alessandria, near Turin in Italy. The fresco is meant to be read clockwise. The first scene depicts Camelot and Queen Guinevere and her entourage setting out. Then Lancelot defeats the villainous Malageant in single combat after he tries to abduct Guinever and her entourage. Finally, while Sir Lionel sleeps under a tree, Lancelot, who has been beguiled by Guinevere's exceptional beauty, begins his adulterous affair with her.

Our stereotypes of Medieval Jews would tells us that they were aloof from this pan-European Arthurian mania. They were all sober traders, moneylenders, doctors, philosophers and rabbis weren't they? Wrong! Jews were more integrated into the mainstream of medieval culture than we've often been taught to think, and they loved stories of magical adventures, epic conflicts, daring and courteous knights, beautiful women in need of rescuing and steamy romantic affairs as much as anyone did in the Middle Ages. Indeed they even wrote their own versions of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, like the Melekh Artus, written in 1279 as an abridged Hebrew version of the early thirteenth century Old French Vulgate Cycle (a complete rendition of the Arthurian legends), and sometime in the fifteenth century a Yiddish speaking Jew sat down and wrote Viduvilt, an adaptation of the Middle High German Arthurian romance Wigalois (c.1220) by the knight Wirnt von Grafenberg. Jews also wrote chivalric romances with their own imagined, Jewish knights and ladies like Maskil and Peninah (thirteenth century) and the Bovo Bukh (1541). The image above is from a Jewish prayer book c.1320, now in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which shows that  chivalric imagery was even interwoven into Jewish religious devotional activities.

The Renaissance in the service of Arthuriana: John Leland and the King Arthur debate in Tudor England

In the sixteenth century King Arthur's existence still had plenty of learned defenders. John Leland, one of the greatest historians of the English Renaissance and an early pioneer in the archaeology of Roman Britain, would write in 1542 that not only did King Arthur definitely exist but that he had pinpointed the location of his capital, Camelot, to the ancient British hillfort of Cadbury, located between the villages of Queen Camel and West Camel in Somerset:

 "At the very south ende of the chirch of South-Cadbyri standeth Camallate, sumtyme a famose toun or castelle, apon a very torre or hille, wunderfully enstregnthenid of nature.... The people can telle nothing ther but that they have hard say that Arture much resortid to Camalat" (Leland's Itinerary). 

"Camelot! Camelot! Camelot!" The hillfort of South Cadbury in Somerset, more about that later ...

In identifying South Cadbury as Camelot, Leland had actually broken with his twelfth century predecessors, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes, who had identified the location of King Arthur's court as "the City of the Legions", Caerleon in Gwent, southeast Wales. William Caxton had also pinpointed the location of Camelot as being in Wales, and was probably referring to Caerleon when he wrote in his preface to Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur that many people had seen in "Camelot" great stones, marvellous works of iron and royal vaults lying underground. In this respect Caxton disagreed with Malory himself, who believed that Camelot was at Winchester in Hampshire on the basis of the surviving Round Table there, though he did believe Arthur had been crowned at Caerleon. What Caxton says raises interesting questions. Did more of the Roman site at Caerleon survive in the fifteenth century than does today? And were archaeological excavations already going in late medieval England?

The Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon in Wales. Unlike a lot of Roman amphitheatres, like the one at Chester, its remains survived above ground, and thus Geoffrey of Monmouth himself saw it, as presumably did the fifteenth century English men and women mentioned by Caxton. 

Leland would write two stand-alone treatises in the 1540s defending the historicity of King Arthur and Geoffrey of Monmouth's credibility as a historian against all doubters. As a patriotic Englishman he saw them as integral to the glorious history of his native land. In these endeavours, he made use of a range of literary, toponymical (place name) and archaeological evidence, as well as local oral traditions and folklore he'd picked up on his travels through England and Wales, which may otherwise have never been preserved. I must say that I find John Leland a really admirable figure. However much we might ridicule him as credulous and parochial for believing in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Pseudohistory and local folklore, he was a highly intelligent scholar and a real pioneer in Roman archaeology. At Lincoln, for example, he noted three stages of the development of the settlement - the first being the British settlement at the top of the hill where "much Romaine mony is found", the second being the Saxon and medieval settlement to the south and the third being the recent suburb of Wigford on the riverside. He correctly identified that the existing masonry above ground at Ripon cathedral, founded in 672, "indubitately was made sins the Conquest." He also successfully identified the brickwork at Verulamium in Hertfordshire, Richborough, Dover and Canterbury in Kent and Bewcastle in Cumbria was Romano-British. Most extraordinarily, at the hillfort at Burrough Hill in Leicestershire, he produced what was in effect the first archaeological field report - he pulled some stones he found at the gateway to establish whether the earthen ramparts had had a wall on them, saw that they were mortared with lime and deduced that it had been. Figures like him really make us think about the boundaries we draw between medieval and renaissance. One the one hand, Leland was a humanist scholar trained at the University of Paris whose methods as a historian and antiquarian were cutting edge for the sixteenth century. Yet on the other he still believed resolutely believed in the twelfth century Arthurian legends and romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes, unlike the much more sceptical and source-critical William of Newburgh more than 300 years before him.

An engraving of an eighteenth century bust of John Leland at All Souls' College, Oxford

The Round Table at Winchester, originally made (c.1300) for an Arthurian re-enactment tournament by Edward I, which Henry VIII then had re-painted in 1520 with a Tudor Rose in the middle, to impress his nephew Emperor Charles V. There's no doubt that Henry VIII believed that King Arthur was a real person, and took belief in him very seriously. Henry's father, Henry VII, had claimed descent from King Arthur via his Welsh princely ancestors to help bump up his shaky legitimacy, and Arthur's Empire spanning half of Europe, including Rome itself, described by Geoffrey of Monmouth served as a model, along with the Christian Roman Empire of Constantine and Justinian, for Henry VIII when he declared England to be an Empire in 1534 to signify his independence from the pope's authority.

The King Arthur debate in the modern era 

Now what have scholars thought of King Arthur's historicity in the modern era? When history as a formal academic discipline taught in universities emerged in the Victorian Era, the great English medieval historians of the nineteenth century - Edward Augustus Freeman, Bishop William Stubbs, Frederick William Maitland and John Richard Green - were not at all interested in questions of what was going in the fifth and sixth centuries from the Romano-British side. The chivalric King Arthur that Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory had written about, stoked the fires of the imaginations of the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892) and the pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones (1833 - 1898), William Morris (1834 - 1896), John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917) and Edmund Blair Leighton (1852 - 1922) - who associated the medieval past with truth, beauty and innocence, in contrast to modern industrial society, and Arthur and his knights as models for what the modern man should be. In great contrast, the historians of nineteenth century England didn't give two flying monkeys about this legendary figure, or what historical reality might have been behind him.

King Arthur and Sir Lancelot (1862), a mock fourteenth century stained glass window by William Morris. The Latin inscriptions read (my translation) "Arthur The Great, England's Most Powerful King" and "The Lord Lancelot, Unconquered Knight"

"Last Sleep in Avalon" (1881) by Edward Burne-Jones

Perhaps the most famous pre-Raphaelite painting of all, "The Lady of Shallot" (1888) by John William Waterhouse, inspired by Tennyson's 1833 poem which was in turn inspired by a thirteenth century Italian ballad

"The Attainment of the Grail" (1895) by Edward Burne-Jones, in a cycle of tapestries about Sir Galahad designed for the British businessman William Knox d'Arcy, one of the principal founders of the oil and petrochemical industry in Iran (then called Persia) for his dining room at Stanmore Hall.

"Tristan and Isolde: The End of the Song" (1902) by Edmund Blair Leighton, based on an Old French Arthurian romance written no later than 1240. It really is a wonderful painting with a lot of high drama. Tristan has just finished serenading Isolde and is about to lean in for a kiss, Isolde is like "I don't know, Tristan. What if someone sees us?", and King Mark of Cornwall (Isolde's husband), completely oblivious to what is really going on, is about to walk in on it all.

Instead, what they wanted to tell was a different story, yet one that would ultimately turn out to be at least as mythological. The story went thus. In the fifth and sixth centuries an unstoppable onslaught of Anglo-Saxon immigrants from across the North Sea drove the Romano-Britons into the hills and valleys of the far west (Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria) and put the rest to the sword. These Anglo-Saxons were of superior Teutonic racial stock, and they brought with them their self-governing proto-democratic institutions from the forests of Germany, as described by the Roman historian Tacitus. Thus, as Victorian English historians told it, the English were born as liberty-loving Germanic nation, and thus it was almost written in their DNA that they would dominate the insular Celts, create the "mother of all parliaments" and through the British Empire spread liberty, prosperity, the rule of law and democratically-elected assemblies around the globe. It was for this reason that the preoccupation of Victorian British medievalists was with constitutional history - the evolution of English law and governmental institutions from those primeval Germanic origins all the way through the Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Angevins to the "Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment" with parliamentary government, the aristocratic anarchy (as they saw it) of the Wars of the Roses and the despotic monarchy of the Tudors. In great contrast to Leland's day, English nationalism had completely outgrown King Arthur - it was now abundantly clear that the Arthur of later medieval romance couldn't have existed, England's history was glorious enough without him and he was a Celt, not a Teuton; biological race was now integral to the construction of nationhood. So far as the worship of great men (as opposed to that of institutions like parliament, the shire-moot and the common law) was needed, the solidly historical Alfred the Great - unifier of the Anglo-Saxons, defeater of the Viking invaders, great law-giver and respecter of the rights of freeborn Englishmen, founder of the Royal Navy, intellectual monarch and paragon of muscular Christianity - had filled up the Arthur-shaped hole. Victorian English historians were thus content to write off Arthur as a mythological figure and leave him to the fertile imaginations of the poets and artists.

Victorian triumphalist Anglo-Saxonism: The statue of Alfred the Great at Winchester erected in 1899 to mark the thousandth anniversary of his death. 

As you would expect, this essentially racist narrative of what happened in post-Roman Britain was met in Wales, Scotland and Ireland with much offence. It was thus up to Welsh, Scottish and Irish scholars to give a more sympathetic view of the Romano-British, argue for them having put up a bit more of a fight against the Continental invaders and explore the question of whether or not King Arthur was a real person. 

There were various views on this issue. The Scottish historian William Skene argued in 1868 that there was a real, historical King Arthur behind the later, wildly implausible legends and that he really had put up a strong, effective resistance to the invading Saxons, though interestingly he suggested the Arthur was not based in Wales or the South West but in the North. The Welsh scholar Sir John Rhys argued in 1891 that there were two Arthurs. One was a mythical figure, with his ultimate origins as an ancient British god, a kind of "Celtic Zeus." The other was a historical figure, a fifth century Comes Brittaniarum in charge of the small remnants of the late Roman field armies who defended the island from the Saxons. The great Welsh historian J.E Lloyd also argued for a historical King Arthur, but placed him southern England, fighting the incoming Saxons there. As he saw it there were two Romano-British military commands (based on the Roman provincial structure), one led by firstly Vortigern and then Arthur guarding against the Saxons in the south and east of Britannia, and one in the north and west fighting against the Picts and Irish. The latter front saw more success for the British, who secured lasting supremacy in Wales and Cumbria. He also argued that there was no British migration westwards which would leave as the only option for proponents of a racially pure English nation the improbable level of slaughter and genocide proposed by John Richard Green. 

In the interwar period, R.G Collingwood and J. Myres'  Roman Britain and the Germanic Settlements (1935) in the pioneering new Oxford History of England helped stimulate some interest in the Romano-British as more than just passive victims and in the possibility of a historical King Arthur among the English academic establishment. Using texts and archaeology, Collingwood and Myres argued for an effective Romano-British resistance to the Saxons and for Arthur as a formidable Romano-British dux bellorum (warleader) who won many victories and held back the Saxons for some decades. The big game changer was, however, going to be WW2. WW2 made the Germanist thesis beloved of Victorian historians politically and morally repugnant with its celebration of Teutonic racial purity and Romano-British genocide, which sounded too eerily like what the Nazis were on about. And not long after that came the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, which advocated a clean break with the beliefs and attitudes of past generations and the casting away of all that Victorian cultural baggage mid-twentieth century Britons were still burdened with. In fashion, sex and religion alike, the generation that came of age in the 1960s was more different from their parents' generation than any generation before them. England was now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nation, and so it felt more than right to celebrate the Celtic contribution to Englishness, which also fitted in nicely with the other elements of cultural and spiritual change at the time. This they could do by focusing on the Romano-British side of things in the fifth and sixth centuries and their legacy going forward - to which they could enlist the maturing science of genetics,  which would help lay to rest the genocide theory once and for all. In popular culture Arthur felt like the perfect hero for Post-war Britons to look up to - a charismatic macho warrior hero but without the taint of Teutonism (which Alfred the Great could not protest in his favour), indeed one who had been victorious against invading Germans (Winston Churchill as a latter day King Arthur?) Indeed, what is very noteworthy, is that the British Union of Fascists never appropriated the figure of King Arthur, to which we may thank the legacy of Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites - Arthur was clearly too tweedy, cuddly and sentimental and not enough of a stern-faced, Darwinian Ubermensch for Oswald Moseley and his gang of thugs. Indeed, in 1958, T.H White in his "The Once and Future King", sequel to his "Sword in the Stone" (the book that inspired the 1963 film) and retelling of Thomas Malory, had portrayed King Arthur as a democrat, pacifist and anti-fascist hero, the renegade knight Sir Agravaine as a Mosleyite figure and Merlin prophesising "an Austrian ... who plunged the civilised world into misery and chaos."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Camelot became a metaphor for the White House under the progressive presidency of  JFK, who dinted the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy by taking pride in his Irish Catholic heritage and was seen as a sort of latter day King Arthur. Celebrating Germanic heritage was out and celebrating Celtic heritage was in on both sides of the Atlantic, so Arthur appeared like the right kind of cultural icon to have for the post-1945 Anglosphere, while Alfred the Great (still receiving much attention from academic Anglo-Saxonists) became increasingly marginalised in popular culture. The Rosemary Sutcliffe novel I mentioned at the beginning of the post emerged very directly out of this post-war valorisation of King Arthur, and much of the Arthurian media I enjoyed as a kid ultimately stemmed from it. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1965, twenty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, in the year of Winston Churchill's state funeral and just as the cultural revolution was entering full swing on both sides of the Atlantic, a great victory for proponents of a historical King Arthur was scored. A team of archaeologists led by Ralegh Radford, who had previously excavated the fifth and sixth century Romano-British royal stronghold at Tintagel (the place where, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Uther Pendragon made love to Igraine and conceived Arthur) and the Iron Age ringfort at Castle Dore (both in Cornwall), and Leslie Alcock formed the Camelot Research Committee and began excavating at South Cadbury Hillfort (told you it would come up again!) From 1966 to 1970 they excavated the site and found that the site, which had once been a pre-Roman Iron Age hillfort, was resettled in the fifth century AD before being abandoned again by the early seventh century. Among the things they excavated there were a massive post-Roman rampart, the outline of a cruciform church and an isled hall in which luxury ceramics from the Mediterranean were found. All of these finds were clear signs that the site was inhabited by a Romano-British ruler of considerable wealth and power, and it was too irresistible to conclude that this ruler was none other than King Arthur! It thus seemed clear that John Leland hadn't been simply misled by silly West Country folktales after all - in fact, he'd been remarkably prescient in identifying South Cadbury as Camelot.

A putative reconstruction of what the hillfort of South Cadbury would have looked like c.500 AD according to Alcock et al's 1966 - 1970 excavations. Art by Peter Dennis - source: British Forts in the Age of Arthur, Osprey (2008). If not Camelot, then certainly the seat of power of a Romano-British tribal leader of more than average means.

The support for King Arthur from academic archaeologists gave a green light for historians. In 1973, John Morris, an ancient historian based at University College London, wrote the Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650. It was a bestseller and has never been out of print ever since, going through a number of editions. Its important to note that Morris was a serious academic scholar, not a romantic or a crank. Earlier in his career he had worked on the first two volumes (covering the period 260 - 527) of the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, in collaboration with two other eminent late Romanists, A.H.M Jones and John Martindale. Prosopography, one of those ghastly, long-winded words us historians have to use, essentially means writing a collective biography of all known individuals per se or of a certain profession or social group in a given period - it was first pioneered by German historians in the 1890s studying Roman aristocrats from the early imperial period. Basically, you ascertain all the facts you can know about a historical figure's life from the documentary record (the who, where, when and what) and then try to trace connections and patterns between them and their contemporaries of a similar occupation or social standing. Its a really sober, meat and potatoes, straight up and down, cheddar cheese, chicken tikka masala kind of historical enquiry that's very good for giving us the nuts and bolts needed for further research into the political and social history of a period. Outside of academic life, Morris was an outspoken socialist and anti-war campaigner. 

Morris made extensive use of all the textual sources and archaeology, to produce a monumental 665 page book, and he aimed at a comprehensive history of that murky 300 year-period that spanned either side of the traditional divide between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England or, in less parochial terms, between antiquity and the early middle ages. In many ways it was a really admirable project, but Morris was suffering from ill-health (he died in 1977, halfway through translating the History of the Britons) so he completed in a rush and ended up mixing his own nuanced interpretations of the scanty contemporary textual records with those of the larger quantity of literature written in the ninth century and later. His own experience of WW2 strongly shaped his history, leading him to shift all focus away from the Anglo-Saxons and onto the Romano-Britons and their struggle against them. For example, on p114 he wrote 

"Badon was the ‘final victory of the fatherland’ [Gildas, of course]. It ended a war whose issue had already been decided. The British had beaten back the barbarians. They stood alone in Europe, the only remaining corner of the western Roman Empire where a native power withstood the all-conquering Germans. Yet the price of victory was the loss of almost everything the victors had taken arms to defend."

Morris took King Arthur's existence as a historical fact and like Skene, Rhys, Lloyd, Collingwood and so many other scholars before him, he imagined him as a supreme commander of the Romano-British field armies who led them to victory over the Saxons in all the battles mentioned in the History of the Britons. After he saved southern England from the Germanic invaders, Arthur was, according to Morris on p 116:

"A just and powerful ruler who long maintained in years of peace the empire of Britain, that his arms had recovered and restored. Contemporary and later writers honour and respect the government he headed. A few notices describe events and incidents that happened while he ruled. None describe the man himself, his character or his policy, his aims or his personal achievement. He remains a mighty shadow, a figure looming large behind every record of his time, yet never clearly seen."

Thus in the years around 1970, it appeared that there was at last a growing consensus among historians and archaeologists alike behind the existence of a historical King Arthur. As the twentieth century entered its last quarter, however, the tide turned against the idea of a historical Arthur, in academic circles at least. In 1975, the same year that Monty Python and the Holy Grail debuted in cinemas all over the United Kingdom, so began the scholarly counter-attack against the historical King Arthur. 

James Campbell, one of my favourite historians, was characteristically kind and generous about John Morris' book. In the review he wrote in 1975, he called it "brave, comprehensive and imaginative", but then went on to write that Morris had clearly let his imagination get the better of him and that the book inhabited a space beyond what the actual evidence would allow. David Dumville, a leading Celtic scholar renowned for treating all written sources from early medieval Britain with maximum scepticism (he's also the main guy responsible for us no longer attributing the History of the Britons to Nennius), was much more acerbic. In his article 'Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend', History (1977), pp 173 - 192, Dumville argued that they had been completely misled by the written sources from the ninth century and later. In his view, these sources have no value as historical evidence for what was going on in the fifth and sixth centuries at all. And on the matter of a historical King Arthur, he made the following forthright statements (pp 187 - 188):

Arthur [is] a man without position or ancestry in pre-Geoffrey Welsh sources. I think we can dispose of him quite briefly. He owes his place in our history books to a ‘no smoke without fire’ school of thought ... The fact of the matter is that there is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books.

These two pages and the stringent comments made therein would, with almost immediate effect, decisively tip the scales against the historical King Arthur. Symptomatic of it all was how Michael Wood's In Search of the Dark Ages documentary series for the BBC from 1979 - 1981, a real landmark of cultural television (my mum remembers watching it as a kid), took the same sceptical approach to the existence of a historical King Arthur, which got Michael Wood some hate mail from Arthurian enthusiasts. A substantial number of academic historians, including Wendy Davies. Oliver Padel and Nicholas Higham, followed Dumville's lead. Indeed, Arthur denialism has become more and more in vogue since the 1980s as the very idea of fifth and sixth century Britain as an age of warfare between Saxons and Romano-Britons, or indeed the very idea of an Anglo-Saxon migration at all, has come under fire from some scholars. As you might know from my previous post, I do not sympathise with these views.

At the same time, the historical Arthur ain't dead yet. Outside academia, dozens of amateur scholars and self-appointed experts have, in the last forty years, have written books outlining their own particular vision of a historical King Arthur, even trying to pinpoint him to specific dates and places, and the reading public have lapped them up. I hate to be cynical, but the truth is, King Arthur sells. Probably the best comments from a non-academic historian on the matter of Arthur's historicity have to be from Terry Deary in his Horrible Histories: Smashing Saxons (2000), a book I remember enjoying back when I was 7:

"The Saxons were battering the Brits, but some Brits started fighting back. They wanted a Britain the way it was in the old Roman days of eighty years before. One leader managed to win forty years of peace. He was called ‘the last Roman’ and his name was Arthur. Five hundred years after Arthur died his name was remembered and storytellers came up with some great tales of Arthur’s deeds. Ina word they were bosh. In four words they were total and utter bosh. Any historian will tell you."

Most academic historians actually fall into what we can call the Arthur agnostic camp. Among them are Thomas Charles-Edwards, Christopher Snyder, Guy Halsall and Chris Wickham. Emblematic of this is position is Thomas Charles-Edwards' passing comment back in 1991 that "one can only say that there may well have been a historical Arthur; that historian can as yet say nothing of value about him", which is basically echoed almost verbatim in Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000 (2009) and Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur: Fact and Fiction of the Dark Ages (2013). Snyder says something similar, but also adds, as a deliberate riposte to Dumville, "so much similar evidence, circumstantial though it may be, must have some cause, and its hard to see the 'fire' as the tale of one creative medieval bard."

As of 2022, the issue is still far from settled, and our knowledge of what the hell was going in the fifth and sixth centuries in these Isles is forever expanding, especially in light of archaeology. Maybe we'll have a definitive answer sometime ...

And well that's the story of the debate. But now you'll be asking "But Joe, we came here to hear your view on King Arthur, not those of other historians for the last millennium." I apologise for having gone on at length and gone into digressions (these are my great flaws as a historian and communicator), though unfortunately all of this was necessary to set it up. But at last, here we are ...

Do I think King Arthur was real ...

Broadly speaking, approaching this as a historian I'd say I'm in the Arthur agnostic camp, though at a sentimental level I'm very sympathetic to the idea of a historical Arthur existing. Labels like "Arthur agnostic" are more than appropriate because a certain level, the King Arthur debates stops being a historical debate and essentially becomes philosophical. King Arthur sceptics have often brought up Russell's teapot, an analogy for the existence of God created by the atheist mathematician, philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970). Its premises are as follows:

1.  A man claims there is a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars - it is too small for us to see by telescope and since we can't journey out to space (Russell was writing in 1952), there's no way of proving that its not actually there. 
2. Russell's hypothetical man says "ah, since you can't prove the teapot isn't there, you must assume it is there."
3. Such a proposition is, of course, ridiculous - why must we believe in this teapot just because we can't prove it isn't there?
4. Therefore, proposes Russell, the burden of proof must lie with the person making the positive claim (that the teapot exists) rather than with the sceptic.

Russell wrote this analogy about the existence of God, arguing that the burden of proof lies with the religious believer, but it really isn't hard to see how its logic applies to King Arthur's existence as well. Indeed its there, explicitly or implicitly, in the arguments of most King Arthur denialists. And unlike God, Arthur can't protest in his favour to have created the universe, be the bedrock of an entire ethical system (you really can't say the same about Arthur and chivalry, and actual medieval chivalry really is dead now) or give billions of people their sense of meaning and purpose in the world.

I would respond to that kind of argument with another quasi-philosophical position, that being "well you can't prove a negative either." Since there's nothing inherently ridiculous or implausible about King Arthur, once stripped of all the anachronistic twelfth century mythology, we can't rule him out. After all, we have next to nothing in terms of written sources for what was going on fifth and sixth centuries, to the point its basically impossible to write any kind of continuous history of political events in this period, much as some, like John Morris, may have tried to. We simply do not know enough about the period to say definitively that Arthur could not possibly have existed. 

To really reach back to my A level Philosophy classes, I'd also bring in the problem of induction. The classic example of it is the black swan - traditionally, it was axiomatic that all swans were white until a Dutch sailor discovered a black swan in Western Australia in 1697. Like natural scientists, we as historians are always faced with the very real possibility that new material, written or archaeological, may be discovered that might either challenge our current assumptions or give support to previously discredited ideas. For example, around 1870 the consensus amongst Classicists and ancient historians was that the siege of Troy was just a myth and the city of Troy never existed. That all changed when Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman turned amateur archaeologist, found the site of Troy, at Hisarlik in Turkey, and excavated it in 1873. Then in the twentieth century scholars found the Tawagalawa letter (dated to c.1250 BC), a piece of official correspondence between a Hittite king and a king of Ahhiyawa (Achaea, home of the Mycenaean Greeks). In this letter, the Hittite king writes "Now as we have come to an agreement on Willusa over which we went to war." Willusa is remarkably similar to the ancient Greek name for Troy, Ilion, and modern scholars have argued it to be in the same location as the site excavated by Schliemann. Thus many modern scholars now think that the Trojan war did happen, though most, or all, of the exact details were distorted and embellished in subsequent oral accounts between the late Bronze Age and when Homer (or whoever he really was) sat down to write it in the eighth century BC. Funnily enough, as late as 1900, virtually nothing was known about the Hittites at all - what we now know about Hittite civilisation is thanks to the miracle of twentieth century archaeology.

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Homer wasn't a liar after all: the Tawagalawa letter (thirteenth century BC)

A similar story goes with the Viking discovery of North America. Until the 1960s, some scholars thought that the westwards voyages mentioned in the Vinlandsaga, written sometime between 1220 and 1280, were just fanciful tales. From 1960 - 1968 however, archaeologists Helge Ingestad and Anne Stine Ingestad discovered a Norse settlement dating to the first quarter of the eleventh century at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. Now most modern scholars accept that the Vikings did indeed settle in the North American mainland, if only very briefly.

The reconstructed Norse longhouse at L'Anse aux Meadows

I suspect that the same may well hold true of King Arthur as well. Perhaps some sixth century Romano-British text that has survived by pure chance somewhere will be found, confirming the existence of a British dux bellorum called Arthur who fought battles against Saxon warlords. Or maybe another archaeological discovery like the one at South Cadbury, but on an even grander scale, will be found, that will well and truly convince us that the Romano-Britons were at one point unified under a really powerful, charismatic, supreme leader who could just about fill in an Arthur-shaped mould. 

Indeed, as someone who specialises in early medieval Continental Western Europe, I'm very aware of the difference one source managing to survive can make. Take for example Syagrius, a late Roman field army commander who ruled a rump-state in Northern Gaul based at the civitas of Soissons until it was conquered by Clovis and the Franks in 486. I've written about him on this blog before. The only reason we know about him at all is thanks to the Gallo-Roman historian Gregory of Tours (538 - 594), who had access to sources now lost to us including a Life of St Remigius. Another example would be Riothamus, a Romano-British warlord who, in the 470s, took a military force over to Gaul to assist the West Roman army in fighting the Saxons, Goths and Franks in the Loire valley. The only reason why we know about Riothamus is thanks to a letter of the Gallo-Roman bishop and senator Sidonius Apollinaris to him, which refers to him as a friend, as well as passing mentions of Riothamus in the sixth century histories of Jordanes and Gregory of Tours. Indeed both these figures have a remarkably Arthurian feel to them, and given that the surviving documentary record is better for the Continent in this period than for the insular world, its far from inconceivable that there was a historical Arthur whose exploits simply weren't penned down, or the records of which have not survived the test of time or which await discovery. 

Finally, I would like to protest, in light of all that's been said, that the "no smoke without a fire" school does have some validity. As the Roman poet Lucretius wrote, ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) or as King Lear says in Shakespeare's play "nothing will come of nothing." Whatever the contemporary political forces at work, it seems implausible Arthur could have been created out of thin air by ninth to eleventh century Welsh historians and poets, however creative and original they were. 

Lets take the example of that other great cycle of chivalric epics - the Matter of France - and its central hero, Roland. Roland is a figure we know historically existed, though we know very little about his life. In The Life of Charlemagne, Einhard (770 - 840) writes of Charlemagne's first campaign in Spain in 778:

He was returning with his army safe and intact, apart from the fact that coming home, in the Pyrenean mountain range he had to experience a brief taste of the Basque treachery. For his army was advancing with a long baggage train, as the place and the narrow train required, and the Basques had set their ambush at the top of the mountain for, because of the density of the forests of which there are a great number, that is a spot most suitable for setting ambushes. They attacked the rear of the baggage train and drove the men of the rearguard and those who were marching in the rear down into the valley below. They joined battle with them and killed them to the last man, plundered the baggage and, protected by the night, went off in every direction as fast as they could. The Basques were aided by their light weapons and the place where this happened, while the Franks were disadvantaged both by the heaviness of their arms and the unevenness of the land. In this battle, Eggihard, the overseer of the king's table, Anselm, the count of the palace, and Roland, the prefect of the Breton March, were killed, along with many others.

By contrast, when The Song of Roland was written down sometime in and around the 1120s, the battle against the Basques had been changed to a battle against the Saracens to fit it in with the new crusading ethos. The character of Roland is massively expanded on by the poet - he becomes a Frankish superhero, incredibly brave and noble and a formidable fighter, if a bit too foolhardy and overconfident. And new characters - a traitor in the Frankish ranks called Ganelon, a sidekick for Roland called Oliver, a Saracen king called Marsilius etc - are completely invented by the poet. Could a similar process of invention have been at work firstly with the Welsh writers of the ninth to eleventh centuries and then with Geoffrey of Monmouth. Its thus possible that Arthur was a real figure whose exploits were simply distorted, embellished upon and fictionalised by later writers. But we ultimately can't know, above all because while statistically speaking more written sources survive for the Carolingian era than for any previous period in European history, fifth and sixth century Britain really is a Dark Age in that respect.

The death of Roland at Roncesvalles as described in The Song of Roland, in a miniature painted c.1455 by Jean Fouquet. 

So in sum, my view on King Arthur is thus: for the moment, we really can't know whether or not existed, but that does not rule out the possibility that he existed and it may well be demonstrated that he existed sometime in the future.

Last but not least: was Camelot a silly place after all?

In my view, absolutely not at all. A mythical place it is indeed. But myths are powerful, and central to any worldview. All identities are similarly grounded in myths. Camelot is no exception to all this. Whether its the chivalric and courtly aristocracies of Europe in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, progressive patriots on both sides of the Atlantic in the post-war era and Celtic and English nationalists in various assorted historical epochs, we're talking about the same holds true. Camelot was fundamental to how they saw themselves and their past, and played a crucial role in shaping their culture and social and political vision in the present, as we have seen. So I regret to say this but Monty Python, you were wrong after all, "Lets go to Camelot. Its a very interesting and historically significant place."