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."

Hercules and the Carolingians: corruption and classicism in the poetry of Theodulf of Orleans

 

A rather naturalistic depiction of Hercules from the Leiden Aratea (c.816 - 840), a Carolingian copy of an astronomical treatise by the Roman general (and father of Caligula) Germanicus Julius Caesar (15 BC - 19 AD), which is basically a Latin translation of the Phaenomena, a poem about the constellations by the 3rd century BC Greek poet Aratus. This manuscript was likely commissioned for and owned by the Emperor Louis the Pious himself. The Aratea is essentially a picture book, with the beautiful images of the constellations  captioned by the relevant verses of the poem written in Rustic Capitals (see the right hand folio in the image), the deluxe handwriting of the ancient Romans which the Carolingians liked to use for Classical texts. For the Bible and religious works they used Carolingian miniscule, which forms the basis of the handwriting we use today.

Hi everyone! Since its world poetry day, lets return to our old friend Theodulf of Orleans. Now, as you may remember from the post I did about him two months ago, as well as being a poet, courtier and bishop extraordinaire, he was a royal missus dominicus? But what the hell is a missus dominicus when it's at home? you might ask. 

The role of the missus dominicus in Carolingian government can be described as something of a hybrid of circuit judge and superintendent. Their job was basically to hear cases that the local courts (placita/ malla publica) were unable to deliver a fair verdict on, ensure that provincial governors (counts, dukes and margraves) and their teams subordinate officials were behaving themselves and generally ensure that everything was running smoothly and that the king's policies were actually being implemented in the localities. Typically, in each provincial circuit, the missi dominci would consist of one cleric (a bishop or an abbot) and a lay nobleman, both of whom would not be landowners/ provincial office holders in their own circuits so as to prevent conflicts of interest. They start appearing as ad hoc commissions under Charlemagne the late 780s, but their work had become more regularised by the end of the eighth century. They thus came to provide an important link between centre and locality - by 800, Charlemagne's Empire stretched from the Elbe to Catalonia and from the North Sea to Tuscany, so there was only so much work a peripatetic imperial court or even Charlemagne's sons being set up as regional sub-kings (Louis in Aquitaine and Pepin in Italy) could do.

A modern artist's impression of a pair Missi Dominici going on tour in the provinces

Theodulf of Orleans was indeed one of these missi dominici and as you might have gathered from the previous post, as a highly learned and energetic individual who commanded a lot of local power and respect (in the Loire valley area) and an enthusiastic supporter of Carolingian reform, he was the perfect fit for the job. Yet as we'll see in the poem, what he experienced in his activities, or at least claimed to have, as a royal missus he found sobering and darkened his outlook on the operation of the law and justice in the provinces and what is work as an agent of Carolingian reform could achieve. But, as we'll also see, there's a lot more to poem that kindles the historian's interest than that.

Theodulf and the antique vase

Too often I see that our judges relinquish the law to those 
Who bribe them with gold, fine food and delicious drink.
Often I am keen to prevent those who wish to accept bribes
But there are many wishing to take, few willing to say no.

Great crowds in gathering after gathering sought us out,
Every age and every sex was represented there:
Small ones, old and young ones, fathers, unmarried women and men,
Elders, youths, old women, husbands, wives, and children.
Why do I hold back? These people immediately offered us gifts,
Thinking that if they gave, they would receive what they wanted in return.
They tried hard to smash our resistance with this assault,
So that our will would collapse before the intense pressure.
One of them promises me gems and a crystal
If I can get for him the lands belonging to another.
Another showed me a huge number of golden coins,
Some of which bore Arabic lettering,
Some, these silver, bearing Latin inscriptions;
All to help him obtain estates, fields, and houses. 
In a hushed voice yet another whispered to my assistant, 
That he should carry the following message to me:
"I possess a vase decorated with ancient figures.
Its metal is pure and it is heavy to hold.
On its sides are engraved the crimes of Cacus:
The skulls of men stuck on stakes and rotting flesh,
His rocks chained down and evidence of rapine and theft,
The fields coloured with the blood of men and cattle. 
There Hercules in fury smashed the bones of Vulcan's son,
Who spits out his father's flame from his beastly jaw,
As Hercules knees him in the stomach and kicks his abdomen,
Shattering with his club the beast's smouldering face and throat.
There you can see the bulls emerging from the cave,
Afraid they might be dragged back again.
On the inner mouth of the vase, on a thin band,
Can be seen a series of small figures:
The Tirinthian infant [Hercules himself] slaying the two snakes,
And his ten labours shown in their proper sequence.
The outer surface of the vase, however, is well-worn from handling,
And a scene that once existed there is rubbed down. 
There Alceus, the river Calydon, and the centaur Nessus,
Fight over the beauty of Deianira.
The poisonous robe laced with the blood of Nessus is depicted,
Along with the frightening fate of the wretched Lichas.
As well Antaeus is seen losing life in the arms of the powerful Hercules,
For he is prevented from touching the ground as he needed to.
This vase I shall bring to you my lord - for he was calling me his lord -
If he heeds my requests.
There are a great many people - mothers, fathers,
Children and youths of both sexes -
Whom my father and mother left behind as free,
And from that fact they remain free.
If I could falsify their records, the lord would own the ancient vase,
I would own those people and you would soon receive gifts."
Another said, "I own a rug dyed in a variety of colours,
Which I believe a wild Arab sent.
On it a young calf can be seen following its mother and a heifer trailing a bull.
The colours of the calf and heifer are alike, while those of the cow and the bull are the same.
You can see the beauty of the piece, and the artistic use of colour.
And how a small circle is artistically joined to larger ones.
I am involved in a dispute with another man over some nice cows,
On behalf of which I am ready to give suitable gifts:
A calf for the calves, a bull for the bulls,
One cow for the cows, and one ox for the oxen.
Another man promises to give me some beautiful cups,
If I grant that he need not hand over what another demands ... 

Oh this foul plague [of bribery] which is found everywhere,
Oh this crime, this madness, this too savage habit.
Which lays claim to and evilly captures the whole world,
There is no one who does not give and no one who does not take bribes.

(Translation sourced from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 100 - 102)

This highly intelligently crafted poem, rich and vivid in its imagery and full of emotion deserves much by way of literary analysis, but that is not what is going to be done here - while I very much prefer this kind of stuff to charters, I'm a historian not a literary scholar. 

Theodulf gives us much insight into the kind of corrupt practices that the missi were confronted with in the localities in the time of Charlemagne. The man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the gold and silver coins, and the one mentioned in the previous two lines who tries to bribe him with the precious stones, seem to be trying to obtain a title deed to estates in the rightful possession of others that they have obtained illegally. The man who offers him the beautiful Arab rug depicting the four cows is trying to get Theodulf to give him a favourable judgement in a dispute he has with another free landed proprietor over the ownership of some cattle. And the man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the antique vase is hoping that Theodulf will forge some documents so that the erstwhile unfree men and women his parents manumitted will become slaves again. 

Theodulf himself is completely horrified by these corrupt practices, which are very well attested in other Carolingian sources, and feels deep sympathy for those victimised by them. What Theodulf is describing is fairly quotidian, and are certainly far from being one of the worst examples of corruption encountered by a royal missus. A generation later, Wala (d.836), serving as a missus for Emperor Louis the Pious in Italy in the 820s, encountered an elaborate cover-up of the expropriation and murder of an aristocratic widow in which people at all levels of Italian society were implicated. Its precisely because of stuff like this that historians' assessments of the Carolingian reforms have been so mixed in the last hundred years - see Chris Wickham, "The Inheritance of Rome", pp 390 - 392 for a very even-handed view of the debate. On the one hand, we a high-minded and dynamic royal government that is clearly able to make its presence felt in the localities. On the other hand, we have pervasive corruption at all levels of society that requires the skeletal Carolingian state bureaucracy to bite off more than it can chew. future posts I'll hope to cover more about the Carolingian reforms - the evidence, when looked at as a whole, certainly permits a far more optimistic view of them, which is what historians have increasingly swung towards in the last 30 years, than does Theodulf's poem by itself.

Other significant details include the importance of written documents over memory and orality hinted at by the need to forge documents in order for the litigants to get favourable verdicts. Theodulf was of course a Missus Dominicus in Aquitaine and the Midi, where the Gallo-Roman legacy remained very strong and with it a very strong tradition of written law and archival and notarial culture among the law - written wills never disappeared here like they did in Gaul north of the Loire following the Frankish takeover at the end of the fifth century. Another thing that's interesting is the references to coinage, the gold coins being described as having Arabic lettering and the silver ones bearing Latin inscriptions. The golden coins are clearly gold mancuses imported from nearby Muslim al-Andalus, some of which made their way as far north as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (see below).

A Gold dinar with Arabic writing, bearing the name of King Offa of Mercia (757 - 796) 

Meanwhile, the Franks, since the failure of the sub-imperial gold coinage in the late seventh century and the currency reforms of Pepin the Short (r.741 - 768) only minted in silver (see below).

A silver denier of Charlemagne with a cross on the obverse and the Carolingian monogram on the inverse

Gold coinage in eighth and ninth century Trans-Pyrenean Europe was thus a real prestige item that could only be acquired by contacts with the Muslim world, as Carolingian Aquitaine and indeed Anglo-Saxon Mercia both clearly had - there, here's your nice little dose of fashionable global history for you.

What I found most interesting about it, however, were the Classical elements, specifically the antique vase. Traditionally, scholars following the lead of Julius Schlosser in 1892 presumed that Theodulf was providing a straightforward description of an ancient Roman vase which has since been lost. However,  Lawrence Nees in "Theodulf's mythical silver Hercules vase, Poetica Vanitas, and the Augustinian Critique of the Roman Heritage", Dumbarton Oaks Papers Volume 41 (1987), pp 443 - 451 argues against this. He points out that, for starters, Theodulf in the poem isn't actually describing an object that he can see with his own eyes. Rather he is describing an object that the slave master trying to sweet talk Theodulf's servant has described to him, and because Theodulf did not accept the bribe after the servant relayed the information on to him he never saw the object himself. He also demonstrates well that the descriptions of Hercules' encounters with Cacus and Nessus are not drawn from any extant Roman artwork but straight from Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that what Theodulf was doing here fitted squarely into the poetic exercise of ecphrasis - describing an object or place (real or imagined) and extrapolating deeper meaning from it.

While I find Nees' arguments broadly convincing, I do think its overwhelmingly likely that Theodulf did have some interest in ancient Roman material culture. This is especially clear from the highly archaeological manner in which he describes it, such as mentioning how certain of its features are worn and erased by centuries of use, which strongly suggest that Theodulf had seen and handled a good few Roman antiquities in his time. And even if he had no real interest in them except as imaginary poetic devices, we know that other people in the Carolingian era did have an appreciation for them as physical objects which they used in their daily lives. See for example the "Cup of the Ptolemies" (see below), crafted from onyx in Alexandria sometime in the first century AD, which ended up in the possession of Charlemagne and his grandson Charles the Bald.

Concerning the broader meaning of this part of the poem, Nees argues that Theodulf's take on the labours of Hercules is far from celebratory. He points to how for all that the description of Cacus lair matches the one contained in Virgil's Aeneid, while the Roman poet portrays Hercules as a civiliser clearing the site in which the glorious city of Rome will one day flourish of a troublesome monster, Theodulf's Hercules comes across more like a thug driven by rage and a desire for violence. I think Nees goes a bit too far in claiming that Theodulf, like St Augustine before him, tries to cast a sympathetic light on Cacus - its clear from Theodulf's description that he thinks Cacus had been an absolute menace in the countryside of Latium, stealing cattle and terrorising innocent humans. And in describing Deianira, Theodulf emphasises how Hercules fights with Nessus out of lust for her beauty. And after the poisoned robe kills Hercules, there is of course no suggestion of his Apotheosis. Nees thus argues that Theodulf is using Hercules, a heroic figure yet one nonetheless, by his estimation anyway, driven by pride, lust and brutish impulses, as metaphor by which to attack pagan Roman culture as fundamentally inadequate, lacking as it did the higher truths of Christian revelation which would otherwise make people cast aside its flawed notions of heroism and virtue. He argues, fairly convincingly, that Theodulf was following in the tradition of St Augustine, who in his "City of God" (430) his extensive knowledge of pagan Roman literature and histories to turn the pagans own stories and symbols against them, which is what, as Nees sees it, Theodulf is doing with Hercules' exploits as recounted in Virgil and Ovid. 

Here it is interesting to note that Theodulf most likely wrote this poem in 799, in the build-up to Charlemagne's coronation as Roman Emperor in the West on Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne had just rescued Pope Leo III from the Roman mob, and talks must have already begun about him whether or not the pope should repay him by granting him the imperial title - contrary to what Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne claims, the coronation in Old St Peter's Basilica was almost certainly not a surprise to the emperor. Perhaps he might have seen his royal master taking up the mantle of the Caesars as another poisoned cloak, and in writing this poem was trying to weigh in against Charlemagne's other advisors, such as Alcuin, who were more positive about the idea of Roman imperial revival. This is incredibly speculative on my part, but perhaps Theodulf, in placing this in a longer excursus on judicial corruption, was trying to give a warning to Charlemagne. That being that he should not lose sight of the fact that, first and foremost, he is a Christian king with a duty to uphold justice and good morals among his subjects and to eradicate corruption and oppression of the poor by the powerful. Taking up the glamorous yet tainted mantle of Roman Emperor, synonymous with the celebration of power and might (represented in the poem by Hercules), makes him potentially risk losing sight of that, and from there all kinds of trouble begins.

Theodulf may be a figure very mentally remote from us in certain respects. If Lawrence Nees is right to see him as a thinker in the Augustinian tradition, which would later be a huge influence on mainstream Protestant Christianity in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, then Theodulf obviously believed that people could not be truly moral without being blessed with the divine revelations of Yahweh (in the Old Testament/ Jesus Christ (in the New Testament). As Martin Luther, probably one the greatest and most famous Augustinians (in both the narrow and the broad sense) who ever lived, and John Calvin would argue 700 years after Theodulf, Socrates and Cicero were not exemplary figures (contra Erasmus) and would be burning for all eternity in the fires of Hell. Why? Because, as Augustine had argued back in the early fifth century, they, unlike Moses or St Paul,  did not have God's revelation and grace and therefore could not be moral or be saved. Theodulf would have probably agreed, and I doubt that he, like Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), would have had Virgil guide him through Hell and Purgatory, let alone, like Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), imagine the pagan poets and philosophers being taken up to Heaven, along with the Old Testament Prophets, by Christ in the Harrowing of Hell. Except among extreme Protestants in places like the US Bible Belt, this way of thinking would come across as profoundly disturbing to most Christians, let alone most people generally, today. It seems self-evident to most of us that people in all times, place and cultures are capable of being good and virtuous, and the idea that people can rightly to be condemned to eternal punishment and alienation from God simply for not knowing about him, indeed not being able to know about him, seems revolting to us. More than a generation after Theodulf, the heretic Gottschalk of Orbais (808 - 867) would anticipate the Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century in taking Augustinianism to its extreme. According to Gottschalk, not only are all non-Christians damned, but so are all but a small chosen group of Christians (God's elect), who have been destined to go to Heaven before they were even born on account of God being all-powerful and all-knowing. A brilliant book on this whole subject area is John Marenbon's "Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz" (2015) in which the author explores how medieval and early modern Christian thinkers grappled with the three thorny questions of whether pagans could provide valuable intellectual and moral wisdom to Christians, whether they could be virtuous and whether they could be saved without conversion, both in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquity and more contemporary encounters with Scandinavians, Mongols, Native Americans and Chinese. The story he tells is an incredibly erudite and complex one, and certainly not one of linear progression from medieval bigotry to early modern open-mindedness.

Yet at the same time, there are many ways in which Theodulf isn't actually that mentally removed from us secular liberal humanists in the twenty-first century at all. This is a man who, as is evident from the poem, believes in the rule of law and an honest and equitable judicial system, and despises official corruption and the oppression of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and powerful. Indeed he points to the invaluable contribution medieval Christianity made to shaping our western liberal values and how, while we like to see them (with some justification) as having their ultimate roots in Classical Greece and Rome, the pagan ancient world perhaps wasn't as amenable to them as we think and its contribution to them has been overstated. This is very much the argument pursued in Larry Siedentop's "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism" (2016), one of the books I read in the summer before I applied to university, and more recently in Tom Holland's "Dominion" (2019) - Tom Holland is the creme de la creme of popular historians and I'm a huge fan of his "The Rest is History" podcast which he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook. See here the debate between Tom Holland and A.C Grayling on the subject of Christianity's contribution to Western values - its great good fun to watch, and in my opinion it was Tom Holland who carried home the day. 

Indeed, late antique and early medieval history whom we expect to be completely removed from us mentally, but we actually find quite a lot of common ground with. John Chrysostom (347 - 407), one of the Church Fathers, denounced wife beaters, corrupt politicians and people who didn't show compassion for the poor. Caesarius of Arles (470 - 542) rejected the double standard, denouncing male promiscuity, drunkenness and loose morals. Jonas of Orleans (760 - 843) and Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) are all about denouncing corruption in church and state and aristocrats oppressing their social inferiors. Agobard of Lyons (779 - 840) even went so far as to attack the institution of slavery. This is a huge contrast to a lot of modern Christian moralists, who focus only on attacking women and the poor and neglecting the abuses committed by rich and powerful men, above all, the 45th President of the United States. There's no doubt that any early medieval Christian would have harboured beliefs we'd now consider highly distasteful, though frankly nothing one wouldn't also find in earlier or later periods. But that shouldn't conceal some aspects of their thought that are quite genuinely admirable and arguably formative to the moral universe in which we live in today.

I will return in future posts to the importance of the Carolingian age in shaping our ideas about power, accountability and good government. But as Theodulf is also demonstrative of, is its importance to shaping how we approach the past. For all that Theodulf might have been downbeat about the pagan ancient world, he was deeply fascinated by it and had studied its literature so extensively. And he clearly saw the Greek myths as invaluable cultural artefacts that imparted necessary moral lessons, even if the lessons he extrapolated from them weren't entirely the same as those that the Classical Roman poets and their readers would have done, and as many modern writers are now doing, especially in the recent trend towards feminist retellings of the Greek myths and explorations of their "subversive power." Yet he approached it nonetheless as a culture separated in time and in many other ways removed from his own. As Anthony Kaldellis points out in relation to how Theodulf's contemporaries in the East Roman world approached the same issues in "Byzantium Unbound" (2019) Chapter 3, this sense of critical distance from the classical culture is in fact precisely what is needed for classical studies to emerge. If you treat it as a living culture that you yourself continue to inhabit, its not classical studies, its just literary studies. Theodulf combines fascination with and serious stud of the literature and beliefs of the ancient world with an all too keen awareness that this is not his own culture, but rather one of a bygone age, that needs to be approached with care. Indeed, and here I'm deliberately being provocative and controversial, it might even be fair to say that he was one of the first ever Western European classicists, as opposed to participants in a living classical culture (as Desiderius of Cahors more than a a century and half before arguably still was, being the last participant in a continuous tradition of letter writing as an art going back to Cicero and Seneca). All in all, Theodulf is a reminder that for all that the Carolingians, and early medieval more generally, feel mentally remote from us, they played a critical role in shaping Western Civilisation and the world we live in today.

International women's day special: an early medieval mother's advice to her son (back to solid Carolingian content again)

Happy International Women's Day

After my wild excursion into the history of post-Roman Britain, that ended up becoming a monster post that went into some at once very exciting yet uncomfortably speculative territory, I can now say we're back in more familiar territory for me. It is of course, now, International Women's day. It is thus on this day that I want to celebrate and express my gratitude towards all the amazing women in my life, past and present. 

First and foremost among them, however, would be my mother. Besides providing all the parental love one could possibly desire for the past 22 years, it suffices to say that, without her advice, encouragement and support, I would not be the historian I am now and I wouldn't be on such a successful path as I am currently on. As someone who studied Litterae Humaniores at Oxford (1986 - 1990) and has taught Latin and Greek for over thirty years, I owe to her my love of the ancient world, almost as enduring as my (obviously greater) love of the Middle Ages, and if it weren't for that a lot of my interests would be very different. I probably wouldn't be at all fixated on the Carolingians and classical reception in the Middle Ages if I hadn't been so into ancient Rome as a kid, which was very much thanks to my mother introducing me to classical mythology and history and taking me round so many ancient sites from as early as I can remember. Through all the conversations we have had, mostly on our weekend runs together, she has provided me with immeasurable intellectual stimulation, and lots of constructive criticism of my ideas from her learned and intellectually-engaged outsider's perspective. It is also thanks to her that the very idea of this blog came into being, though it would take another year for me to finally get that one going. And without her providing me with lots of informal teaching, I wouldn't be nearly as confident with my Latin.

She's not the only one who has made me the historian I am now, though. I would love to give a shout out to my Granny (on my mum's side), who studied history at Oxford (1956 - 1959) and is a published historian and translator in her own right, though sadly she was never able to have an academic career for two very specific reasons which I shall not go into. I've had many immensely enjoyable historical discussions with her, and she's been very supportive of me going down the medievalist route, which was what she would have taken herself had she been able to do a PhD, and she provides me with an exemplar of how you can remain committed to historical scholarship even if your academic career never takes off - which is the overall likelihood for me. I would also like to thank one of my closest friends (if you're reading this, you'll know who you are) who works on the period just before mine, late antiquity (though I guess we both share the fifth century AD). She's helped me embrace who I am, including all my nerdy eccentricities that do much to fuel my work, more than most people. And our historical conversations are absolutely legendary, being both stimulating and downright hilarious. The one we had back in July about when did the (Western) Roman Empire really fall, is one I always look back on with a smile and a glow of nostalgia. Her influence has also probably been a contributing factor in me making the jump from late medievalist to early medievalist, especially in embracing the fact that less really is more in terms of sources.

Meeting Dhuoda

 It is in honour of my mother and all the amazing advice she has given me, and continues to do so to this day, that I chose to write about Dhuoda and her Liber Manualis. There are so many colourful, courageous and creative women who made history, albeit in circumstances very much not of their choosing, across the period I loosely specialise in (400 - 1200 AD) which I could have chosen from - from Galla Placidia and Clotilda to Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet I chose Dhuoda, a Frankish noblewoman from roughly the very middle of my period. I did so not because she's one of the more famous and consequential figures of this period, but because she's a rare example of an early medieval woman whose own authentic voice survives to us this day, in the form of an advice manual she wrote for her son. Its a very rich and wonderful text, as we'll soon see.

Firstly, a bit about Dhuoda's life. As is very typical with early medieval people generally, even the most well known ones (historians still argue over whether Charlemagne was born in 742 or 748), we do not know when Dhuoda was born. Most historians think she was born c.803, but that's only a rough guess. We don't actually know her family background, though its generally presumed that they were high nobility. What little we can say about childhood and upbringing is also a matter of educated guesswork. Modern scholars can't make their minds up about which part of the Frankish Empire she grew up in, and whether she spoke a Romance language or some Old High German dialect as her mother tongue - there's tentative evidence for both propositions. She definitely received some kind of literate education as a girl, but whether it was in a convent, from a private tutor or indeed from her own mother, we simply do not know. 

We do know, from Dhuoda's own testimony no less, that on 29 June 824, in the imperial palace chapel at Aachen, she married Bernard of Septimania (795 - 844). Bernard was a prominent courtier and the son of the great William of Gellone (755 - 812), duke of Toulouse, who would later be canonised as a saint by Pope Alexander II in 1066 (the year of Hastings) and become the subject of one of the earliest chivalric romances, the chanson de Guillaume (1140). In 826, her husband was appointed Count of Barcelona and military governor of the Spanish March by Emperor Louis the Pious, and Dhuoda accompanied Bernard on his early campaigns against the Muslims on the frontier. On 29 November 826, again according to Dhuoda's own writings, she gave birth to her son William - the recipient of the Liber Manualis. By 829, Bernard was becoming such a rising star on the Spanish March that Emperor Louis decided to make him the royal chamberlain at Aachen. This led to Bernard sending his wife to stay at Uzes, near Nimes, having assigned the administration of his counties of Barcelona, Toulouse and Carcasonne to his brother Guacelm, who became the new military governor of the Spanish March. Why he decided to do this, rather than taking his wife to court with him, we can only speculate about. Some use this to support the theory that Dhuoda was a native Romance speaker from what is now Southern France - it is thought that Bernard did this so that Dhuoda could use her local connections to help consolidate his political influence in Septimania (the region between the river Rhone and the Pyrenees that includes the southern French cities of Nimes and Narbonne). Others suggest something else was Bernard's mind on the basis of what happened next. 

In 830, Bernard of Septimania was accused of adultery with none other than Empress Judith, the second wife of Emperor Louis. We can only guess how Dhuoda herself felt about these rumours, but we know very well how the imperial court reacted. Thegan the Astronomer, who wrote a biography (Gesta) of Emperor Louis, believed these rumours to be malicious lies. Its quite revealing that when Bernard offered to prove his innocence in the eyes of God through trial by combat, none of his accusers came forward. The consequences of this were nonetheless explosive. Bernard of Septimania was forced to leave the imperial court and had his county of Autun, in Burgundy, confiscated. Emperor Louis' three sons (Pepin, Lothar and Louis) from his first marriage, to Ermengarde, who resented the influence of their stepmother at court anyway, were incited to rebel against their father, and the final decade of Louis' reign was filled with on and off civil wars between him and his sons. 

Almost immediately after Emperor Louis died in June 840, Dhuoda was visited again by Bernard in Uzes and become pregnant with his second child. Bernard took part in the fresh bout of civil war that followed, which I've covered in a previous post, in which he sided with Lothar and Pepin II of Aquitaine (Lothar's nephew and son of the previous Pepin), who wanted to keep the Empire united, against Lothar's brother Louis and half-brother Charles (son of Empress Judith), who wanted it to be divided up. Bernard was present at the extremely bloody and traumatic battle of Fontenoy in 841, on the losing side. As a show of good faith to his new royal master, Bernard sent William as a hostage to Charles. Dhuoda was thus caught up in the high political dramas of the ninth century Carolingian realm, It was in this context that, later on in 841, that Dhuoda sat down to write the Liber Manualis.

The Stuttgart Psalter (c.820), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, folio 33v. While this does not depict Dhuoda, Bernard and William, the three figures here from left to right might as well stand in for them, as no contemporary image (or indeed from any subsequent period) of any of them exists. 

The Liber Manualis

Dhuoda begins the preface of the Liber Manualis with an a brief account of her marriage to Bernard of Septimania - this itself is quite remarkable as we otherwise have barely any autobiographical writings by women (however brief) between the late Roman period (Perpetua and Egeria) and the twelfth century (Heloise). She shows a remarkable capacity for remembering precise dates - it is, after all, from her that we know when she married Bernard of Septimania and when William and his unnamed younger brother were born. 

Dhuoda then introduces the purpose of her decision to write the Liber:

But since I have been parted from you for a long time and am living, on the orders of my lord, in this city where I now rejoice in [Bernard's] struggles, I have taken the trouble, because of my love for both of you, to have this little book (its size in keeping with my intelligence) copied and sent to you. Although I am beset with many difficulties, nevertheless let this one thing happen according to the will of God, if he so wishes, that I might look upon your face once. Indeed I would wish for this, if the power [to do so] was given to me by God, but because salvation is far away from me as a sinner, I [can only] wish for it, and in this wishing my determination grows weaker.

I have heard that your father, Bernard, has commended you into the hands of the lord, King Charles [the Bald]. I urge you to do your dignified duty in this business to the best of your will. All the same, as the Scriptures say, "Seek the kingdom of God in all things and other things will then be given" (Matthew 6:33), those things which are necessary for you to enjoy your soul and body.

I don't have access to the whole text, nor can I give you a convenient summary here. Instead I'll take you through some of the highlights. In Book Ten, she provides a poem titled "Concerning your times"

You have finished now four times four years.

If my second child were to reach the same age,

I would copy out another little book for his person.

And if you were to reach the age of 36,

And if I were to see you again,

I would with more words urge upon you even stronger things.

But because the time of my end hastens towards me,

And sickness everywhere wears my body out,

I have rushed to put this book together for the use of you and your brother.

Knowing that I shall not live another twenty years.

I urge you to savour this book as though it were a pleasant drink

And honey-laced food meant for your lips.

For the date when I married your father

And the date you were born occurred on the

[same Kalends] of [different] months, as I told you above.

Know that, from the first verse of this little book,

Until its last syllable,

Everything has been designed for the purpose of your salvation.

That you may more easily follow what is written there,

Read the acrostic verses.

The little verses written above and below, and everything else,

I myself have composed for the benefit of your soul and body,

And I do not cease even now urging you to read them and keep them close to your heart.

A subsequent poem in the Liber, in the original Latin, has the first letters of each of the seventeenth stanzas spell out Versi ad Wilhelmum (verses for William): 

That you might be strong and thrive, O best of sons, 

Do not be reluctant to read the words that I have composed and sent to you and may you effortlessly discover things that please you.

The word of God is alive; look for it diligently and learn its sacred teaching,
For then your mind will be stuffed with
great joy forever.

May the immense and powerful King, be radiant and kind,
Care to cultivate your mind in all things,

Young man, and to guard and defend you
Every minute of every day.

Be humble in mind and chaste in body,
Be ready to give proper service,
Show yourself constantly kind to all people,
Both the great and the not so great.

Above all, fear and love the Lord God,
With your full heart and soul and expend all your strength,

Next fear and love your father in all things.

Do not regret continually serving,
The glorious offspring [Charles the Bald] of [that Carolingian] race,

With its line of ancestors, for he shines,

With the great.

Esteem magnates and respect those of high rank at court;
Be humble with the low;
Associate yourself with the well-intentioned; be sure not to
Submit to the proud and imprudent.

Always honour the true ministers
Of the sacred rites, the worthy bishops,
Always commit yourself simply and with outstretched hands,

To the custodians of the altars.

Frequently give assistance to widows and orphans,
Give food and drink to pilgrims;
Offer hospitality; stretch out your hands
With apparel to the naked.

Be a strong and fair judge in legal disputes;
Never take a bribe
Never oppress anyone, for the great Giver will repay you.

Be generous with gifts, but always vigilant and modest,
Make a sincere effort to get along with everyone,
Rejoice in humble things, for the image of this will
Stay with you.

There is One who weighs up everything,
A bestower who grants to each according to merit,
Assigning for [good] words and works the greatest of gifts:
The constellations of the heavenly stars.

Thus, my noble son, you should take care
And seek constantly to obtain
The great advantages [of heaven], and spurn
The fires of pitch-black wood.

Although, at sixteen, you are in the very flower
Of your youth, your delicate limbs
Age [along with you] step by step
As you proceed through life.

I long to see your face,
But the prospect seems distant to me.
Even if the power should be given to me,

Yet I still do not deserve this.

Would that you might live for Him who shaped you,

May you enter into, with gentle spirit, a fitting association
With his servants; may you with joy rise up again when your
Life is done.

My mind surely turns to thoughts of death,
But still I want you to read carefully the pages of this book,
As I have written them [for you], and keep them constantly
Foremost in your mind.

These verses, with the help of God, are now done

As you finish your sixteen years
At the start of December, on the Feast of Saint Andrew [30 November],
And the Advent of the Word.

Christine de Pizan (1364 - 1431) advises her son, Jean, before he goes to live in the Earl of Salisbury's household. British Library, Harley 4431 folio. 261v. Dhuoda was far from unique among medieval mothers in giving her son wise advice and caring for his well-being even when he was going to be absent from her for an indefinite period of time - some would say that motherly instincts never change.

Later on in the text, Dhuoda returns to talking about herself and her personal anxieties and shortcomings. She laments the frailty of her body, her slothfulness in failing to pray the seven canonical hours every day (this would become a major feature of lay piety in the later middle ages with the popularity of Books of Hours), sinning in thought and speech and taking on too many debts from Christian and Jewish creditors. Above all, she is gravely uncertain over whether she merits salvation.  She requests that William, maintain a spiritual link with her even if they can never have a physical one again:

While you see that I am [still] alive in this world, alertly attempt in your heart to exert yourself so that, not only through vigils and prayers, but also by giving charity to the poor, I might deserve, when finally seized from my body and from the chains of my sinning, to be received kindly in every way by our kind Judge.

At the end of the book, Dhuoda composes her own epitaph, in which she reflects on the transience and insignificance of the physical body, and requests that whoever looks upon her tomb pray for her soul.

Source for the text: Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 336 - 343

Thoughts and analysis

The Liber Manualis is a beautiful, intelligently written, moving and deeply humane text, that in itself is a fitting monument to its author and her intellect and personality. A lot of early twentieth scholars, no doubt motivated by sexism to at least some degree, were remarkably rude about it, especially its Latinity. But as Peter Dronke has argued in a highly sympathetic defence of Dhuoda, while her Latin style was orthodox and incorrect, both by Classical or Carolingian standards, and is often difficult to translate, that is because she was trying to express thoughts that were very much her own and which she could only express her own unique way. Unlike a lot of correspondance in this period, there is nothing that could have been ripped straight from, say, Cicero or Ambrose of Milan, and the only literary trope she really uses is that of personal unworthiness, which is to be found in just about every Carolingian writer - Einhard is full of it in his Life of Charlemagne and personal letters. Indeed, like Einhard and a number of other Carolingian authors, Dhuoda really stands out as someone who saw herself as a unique somebody and wanted to express it, which very much goes against what we've been taught to expect of early medieval people, and early medieval women in particular. 

For all that many historians may caution us that we cannot access the real thoughts and feelings of medieval people through literary texts, Dhuoda’s here, which were so complex and authentic she struggled to put them into learned Latin,  feel as real as those in any text of any age - her love and concern for her son, her sadness at being parted from him and the uncertainty of whether she’ll ever see him again and her anxiety for the fate of her soul. 

For all that Dhuoda laments her physical and spiritual weakness, things very much associated with femininity, she does manage exert a distinct kind of authority that the patriarchal society of Carolingian Francia can nonetheless afford to her, that of a mother. As Janet Nelson reminds us, Carolingian patriarchy depended on mothers as much as fathers and they were owed respect and obligations. And this is another respect in which Dhuoda nonetheless manages to stand out as a unique individual - while mothers may have advised their sons all the time in this period, none put it down into writing, nor for that matter did fathers. As Nelson points out, Dhuoda is unique among Carolingian moralists in standing on a parental platform - all the others were either celibate monks and clerics (Alcuin, Jonas of Orleans, Hincmar etc) or lay noblemen who, so far as we can tell, had no biological children of their own (Einhard and Nithard). 

The content of what Dhuoda writes reflects a wealth of not only personal wisdom but also knowledge of ancient and contemporary texts, including the Bible, the late Roman grammarian Donatus, the works of the Church Fathers like Augustine and Gregory the Great, the Rule of St Benedict, Charlemagne's General Admonition of 789 and Rabanus Maurus' treatise on Computation. This is testament to the depth and richness of learning that at least certain lay women were capable of achieving in this period.

Given her familiarity with all these texts, it is not surprising that what Dhuoda writes resonates so much with the aims and rhetoric of the Carolingian reform programme, which tried to create a moral lay elite and which concerned itself as much with inward spiritucal disposition as with outward public display of good morals - very apparent from Dhuoda's work. Indeed, her Liber Manualis is demonstrative that this reform effort didn't fall on deaf ears amongst the Carolingian aristocracy, even if the results across the board were very mixed to put it bluntly. It also shows how women could play a role in reinforcing it and not just in a family context - more than three copies of the Liber survive, more than do for a lot of later medieval moralistic texts like the Livre de Chevalerie of the fourteenth century knight Geoffroi de Charny (one of the texts I read for my undergraduate thesis). In a sense, Dhuoda wrote not just as a mother advising her son but as a public intellectual, and it does seem she had a public impact. Whether or not women in general had a Carolingian Renaissance (an inevitable play on feminist historian Joan Kelly’s famous article “did women have a Renaissance?”), and I think they did, if not quite the same as that of men, Dhuoda truly was a Carolingian Renaissance woman. 

As is clear throughout the text, Dhuoda wrote this when she was suffering from some kind of long term illness. If she lived much longer past 841, and we really don’t know if she did, her life, which had already been filled with much drama and misfortune, wasn’t going to get anymore uplifting for her. In 844, Bernard of Septimania was executed by Charles the Bald for switching sides too many times in the various civil wars and most recently having sided with Pepin II of Aquitaine in revolt against Charles the Bald. In 850, William, who managed to get awarded some of his fathers counties after his death, was judicially murdered by Charles’ partisans as part of the ongoing political turmoil in the South - ninth century Carolingian politics is depressing like that!

Dhuoda’s story is demonstrative of why the Carolingian period is so fascinating relevant to us today. It may not quite deliver what we, living in a post-Game of Thrones world, think we want from medieval history - the Carolingians want to limit violence, sex, and political corruption and scheming in favour of high mindedness  and building a better world, yet fail because various reasons and that hits too close to home and leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Yet it does show us how intellectuals, male and female,  clerical and lay, reflected on themselves as unique individuals and on the human condition, and sought creative solutions to their own personal challenges and those facing society more generally. They remind us how deeply human and indivisible people in the medieval past really were, something that us moderns have often been minded to forget, and how they struggled and did their best to cope with a chaotic world, which is very much what we are confronted with now.