King Arthur

by Christopher Hibbert

In the heart of the quiet countryside of southwest England, a yellow limestone hill rises sharply above the village of South Cadbury. Old men who have lived all their lives in its shadow have strange tales to tell. It’s a hollow hill, they believe, and if, on St. John’s Eve, the summer solstice, you could find the golden gates that lead inside, you would discover King Arthur holding court. Sometimes, they say, on stormy winter nights, you can hear the king trot by along the well-worn track. As one man put it, "Folks do say that on the night of the full moon King Arthur and his men ride round the hill, and their horses are shod with silver and a silver shoe has been found in the track where they do ride, and when they have ridden round the hill, they stop to water their horses at the Wishing Well.”

The myth has become so real that most people forget the existence of a historical Arthur. He may not have been a king or even a particularly good or idealistic man. Yet, despite the vague historical record, he must have been a remarkable person because fame does not come without merit, and Arthur’s fame seldom has been equaled.

Nennius recounts two stories that illustrate this; he calls them mirabilia - marvels. The first concerns Carn Cavall, a cairn, or monument, made from stones piled on top of each other, in the Welsh county of Breconshire. On the top of the cairn was a stone bearing the footprint of Arthur’s dog, Cavall, who had marked it by treading on it during a boar hunt. Arthur had built the cairn as a memorial to his beloved dog; whenever the stone with the footprint was removed, within twenty-four hours, it would be back on its heap.

The other story was of the miraculous tomb of Arthur’s son Anir, who was buried beside the River Gamber in Herefordshire on the Welsh border. Anir “was the son of Arthur the soldier,” Nennius writes, “and Arthur himself killed him there and buried him. And when men come to measure the length of the mound, they find it sometimes six feet, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, and sometimes fifteen. Whatever length you find it at one time, you will find it different at another, and I . . . have proved this to be true.”

Here, Arthur appears as the great romantic hero of the Celtic tradition. He has a magical sword, shield painted with the likeness of the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, spear “thirsty for slaughter,” and helmet whose crest is “carved in the shape of a dragon.” His court is described as magnificent as that of the Emperor Charlemagne, and its atmosphere is pervaded with twelfth-century chivalric ideals: “For none was thought worthy of a lady’s love, unless he had been three times approved in the bearing of arms. And so the ladies were made chaste and the knights the better by their loves.”

Yet Geoffrey of Monmouth’s place in this story is important, for it was he who created the Arthurian legend that fired the imagination of the Christian world. His popularity can be judged from the fact that nearly 200 of his manuscripts have survived, some dating from the twelfth century. Throughout the Middle Ages, Geoffrey’s History remained the primary source for all writers about Celtic Britain.

About thirty years after this mosaic was laid down, an English visitor to the island of Sicily, not far distant, reported that its inhabitants believed Arthur could be found in the volcanic depths below Mt. Etna. He had also been seen on a Sicilian plain by a groom in search of a runaway horse. This man had crossed the plain, entered an ornate palace, and found King Arthur lying on a bed. The king told him of his last battle and that each year, on the anniversary of that battle, his wounds broke out afresh. It is surprising that the tradition of Arthur’s survival traveled so far from its British origins, but the island of Sicily was ruled at this time by a Norman dynasty. The legend well could have been imported by storytellers in their service and transplanted into a Mediterranean setting by their eager listeners.

One of the most magnificent of all medieval tournaments was held at Windsor Castle in 1344 by Edward III, who ordered it to celebrate two resounding victories against England’s traditional enemies, France and Scotland.

So it was that the Round Table of King Arthur became the original inspiration of the Order of the Garter. This order, which took its name from the badges worn by the knights who competed in a tournament held at Windsor in 1348, was to become, and still remains, in the twenty-first century, the most noble and respected order of knighthood in Europe.

On July 31, 1485, Caxton published his sixty-second title from the sign of the Red Pale in the London parish of Westminster. Within a month, the first Tudor king of England would ascend the throne; a new era was about to begin. The book Caxton printed that July, though, was the most renowned of all medieval romances, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur - a book that looked back to the glories and heroic achievements of a more chivalrous age, already forgotten and idealized.

Caxton called it a “noble and joyous book,” but Le Morte d’Arthur is also full of a sense of doom that foreshadows the “dolorous death and departing out of this world” of its great hero and his valiant knights. Its author was a prisoner when he wrote it, a prisoner who longed for the day of his deliverance. He was probably Sir Thomas Malory, a Warwickshire gentleman who once served in Parliament. Later, however, he apparently turned to a life of crime. Accusations of rape, robbery, cattle thieving, extortion, and attempted murder are recorded against him, and he was imprisoned for years in Newgate Prison in London. It seems unusual that such a lawless character should write a book full of knightly adventures and noble deeds, but the fact that Malory was accused of these crimes does not necessarily mean that he was guilty of them. There is no record of a trial or of sentence being passed upon him.

Some historians, however, believe Le Morte d’Arthur was written by Thomas Malory of Studley and Hutton in Yorkshire while he was a prisoner of war in France. It also is possible that its author was yet another Thomas Malory, whose identity remains unknown. All that can be said with certainty is that Le Morte d’Arthur is the only medieval romance that has held the imagination of more than five centuries of readers, down to the present day. Skillfully, painstakingly, the prisoner-knight gathered its threads from the countless existing Arthurian romances – English, French, some in verse, others in prose - and this is the story he told.

“Sir Arthur,” replied the damsel, “that sword is mine, and you shall have it. Go into yonder barge and row yourself to the sword and take it and the scabbard with you.” Arthur did as she instructed, and he called the sword Excalibur, which means “cut steel.”

Sir Lancelot of the Lake, son of the King of Benwick.

Although Lancelot tried with all his strength of body and mind, although he did penances, humbled himself, and wore a hairshirt for more than a year, he never could do more than glimpse the Holy Grail from a distance, for no knight could complete the quest who was not free from sin. Only Galahad, Percival, and Bors were pure enough to be worthy, and after they successfully found the Grail, the sacred vessel was borne up to heaven and never seen again.

“Yet some men say in many parts of England King Arthur is not dead but had by the will of our Lord Jesus into another place. And men say that he shall come again and he shall win the Holy Cross. And many say this was inscribed upon the tomb: HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS. (Here lies King Arthur, the Once and Future King.)

Since stories of the Holy Grail began circulating in the twelfth century, belief in its existence and curiosity about its whereabouts have never ceased. Several churches have claimed ownership of the Grail, but most historians agree it resides in the Holy Grail Chapel of the St. Mary of Valencia Cathedral in Spain. This chalice – a hemispherical cup of dark red agate, with a knobbed stem and two curved handles – is about seven inches tall, less than four inches in diameter, and is inscribed along its base in Arabic. In 1960, Spanish archaeologist Antonio Beltrán inspected the chalice, and determined that it was made between the fourth century B.C. and first century A.D. The Roman Catholic Church has embraced it as the Holy Grail; it has been the official chalice for many popes, as late as Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.

The Roman Empire was disintegrating. For years, Rome had been defending its frontiers, which stretched some 10,000 miles, from the North Sea along the Rhine to the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea; and from Constantinople to the Strait of Gibraltar, then northward through Spain and Gaul to Britain. But the once-civilized and disciplined Roman way of life had become decadent. Rome’s emperors were merely puppets in the hands of their generals, who frequently assassinated them and took their places on the throne. The administration that had enabled the Roman government to keep control of an unwieldy conglomeration of nations and provinces had degenerated into a bureaucracy riddled with corruption. Trade declined as taxes increased. The Roman army, once noted for its legions of well-equipped soldiers, now consisted of troops of mercenaries, hired to defend the empire against steadily increasing pressure from other forces - Goths, Huns, Saxons, Vandals - moving southward and westward from Scandinavia, the lands around the Baltic, and the Russian steppes.

For almost a century, Britain had been under intermittent attack. From the north, fierce, tattooed Picts came down from the Caledonian mountains of Scotland. In the second century A.D., the Emperor Hadrian had built a wall from east to west between the River Tyne and the Solway Firth to keep the Picts out of the Romanized country farther south. But once the legions that had defended it were gone, the Picts clambered over the abandoned ramparts and swarmed south toward the Humber. The Picts were followed by the Scotti, marauders from Ireland, who sailed across the Irish Sea in their light skin-and-wood boats called currachs. They pillaged the western coasts of England and Wales, terrifying the fishermen and farmers, spearing and stabbing those who could not escape, and setting fire to their thatched-roof huts. The Saxons were more aggressive than either the Picts or the Irish war bands.

Roads intersected the island, linking northern fortress with southern port, garrison with tribal capital, stretching from the forts along Hadrian’s Wall to the clustered villas of the South Downs, from the legionary fortress at Chester in the west to the large town of Caistor-next-Norwich on the east coast. And at the center of this complex of roads stood Londinium, one of the most impressive cities north of the Alps.

In 446, the Britons made a final plea for help from Rome. Those parts of Romanized Britain that still were able to act collectively dispatched an urgent message to Aetius, the Roman general in Gaul: “To Aetius, three times consul, the groans of the Britons; the barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two forms of death, we are either massacred or drowned.”

At a ferocious battle at Crayford in Kent in 457, the Britons lost 4,000 men on the field and “fled to London in great terror.”

“The seventh battle was in the wood of Celidon - that is, Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was the battle by the castle of Guinnion, in which Arthur carried upon his shoulders an image of the Blessed Mary, the Eternal Virgin. And the heathen were turned to flight on that day, and great was the slaughter brought upon them through the virtue of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and through the virtue of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother.

At this point, there is no evidence in the record that Arthur was a king. But his name, which in its Latin form is Artorius, suggests that he may have come from a distinguished family in some way connected with Rome. More than one Roman named Artorius lived in Britain during the empire’s occupation, and one, Lucius Artorius Castus, led the sixth legion on an expedition to Armorica in the middle of the second century. Some scholars have proposed that an ancestor of the British Arthur may have served under him and that, proud of this service, he gave his son his leader’s name, which was handed down from generation to generation. But such a conjecture is not necessary. The name Artorius implies that Arthur was of Roman descent, and the fact that he succeeded Ambrosius as leader implies that Arthur may well have been related to Ambrosius. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Ambrosius was Uther Pendragon’s brother and therefore Arthur’s uncle - although Uther is probably a product of Geoffrey’s imagination. Another possibility: that after his triumph over the Saxons, Arthur’s men might have named their leader king, following the example of the Roman legions in fourth-century Britain who proclaimed their general, Maximus, emperor.

It is not until the late eleventh century that records show Arthur regularly and unequivocally as a king.

Several biographies of Celtic priests and monks, upon whom the Welsh and Britons rely, describe him as a monarch, although they also somewhat freely bestowed the title of saint. In more than one of the biographies, however, Arthur is called a tyrant king and presented as a ruler with little respect for the church, or as a rex rebellus, who remains committed to evil until converted by some miracle worked by a saint whose holy career is presented for the reader’s admiration. Although few of these tales about Arthur are credible, they show that the monks who wrote them realized any connection with him, however fanciful, would lend credibility to their forgotten, saintly heroes. Their unflattering portrayal of Arthur also ma...

Gildas was the son of a minor British chieftain whose small domain in Scotland was overrun by Picts. He and several of his several brothers abandoned their homeland and fled to Wales, where they were given the protection of King Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd. Gildas married in Wales, but his wife soon passed away, and he turned to a religious life. At times, he seems to have resided in Ireland, on a remote island in the Bristol Channel, where he lived as a hermit and subsisted on fish and gulls’ eggs; in Brittany; and at Glastonbury in Somerset. On his death, he was deemed worthy of canonization. He wrote his most significant work, the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, circa 540 and refers to it as a book of complaints. In it, he castigates his contemporaries for their lack of foresight and their blindness to the lessons of the past and attacks the local kings of Britain for immorality and tyranny. “They have many wives and all of them adulteresses and prostitutes. They often take oaths and always break them. They wage wars, and the wars are unjust on their own countrymen. They hunt down thieves in the countryside, but they have thieves at their own tables, whom they love and load with gifts.”

In his attacks on the corrupt rulers of his time, Gildas refers to one Welsh king, Cuneglas, as a “despiser of God, an adulterer, and an oppressor of monks.” Yet as a youth, Cuneglas had driven “the chariot which carried The Bear.” Who was this great man, known as The Bear, who should have a prince drive his chariot? Gildas does not say. But the Celtic word for “bear” is arth or artos.

By the time Nennius was writing 250 years later, Arthur had been accepted as the victor at Mount Badon and as the paragon of British heroes - not only in Britain proper, but also in Brittany, where so many Britons had fled after the Saxon invasions.

The common people, the descendants of the people Arthur had fought to defend, never lost faith in their champion. Indeed, their belief became more fervent: “If you do not believe me,” wrote a twelfth-century French theologian, “go to the realm of Armorica [to Brittany] which is lesser Britain, and preach about the market places and villages that Arthur the Briton is dead as other men are dead, and facts themselves will show you how true is Merlin’s prophecy, which says that the ending of Arthur shall be doubtful. Hardly will you escape unscathed, without being overwhelmed by the curses or crushed by the stones of your hearers.”

Delighted to have confirmation of their ancient foundation from such a respected authority, the monks at Glastonbury made and circulated several copies of his De Antiquitate Glastomensis Ecclesiae. They went on to issue revised editions of the work, still listing William as the author but adding new material embellishing the abbey’s history and reputation. One of these revisionist accounts discussed how the abbey had been founded by “no other hands than those of the Disciples of Christ,” who had come to England in 63 A.D. to preach the Gospel. The group was led by Joseph of Arimathea, the follower of Jesus who had Christ’s body laid to rest in the sepulcher. A British king, impressed by their conduct, gave them land on which to settle at Glastonbury. There they were visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who told them to build a church, the original Vetusta Ecclesia, and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Gradually, as new editions of William’s book were issued by succeeding generations of monks, each hand written with considerable care and artistry, further details were added. St. Joseph of Arimathea had brought with him to Glastonbury, if not the Holy Grail itself, at least a pair of vessels, one containing the blood, the other the sweat of Christ, and these vessels had been buried with him in the abbey grounds. At the foot of Glastonbury Tor, the hill that rises above the abbey, Joseph had knelt to pray, leaning on his staff, and the walking stick had taken root and budded. Thi...

But the idea to search for King Arthur’s tomb had taken hold at the abbey, and the monks went to work in earnest. In 1191, they claimed to have discovered Arthur’s grave. The story of the discovery is related by Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), a historian who visited the abbey soon afterward and met the abbot. Giraldus may be a reliable authority because he refused to accept much of the Arthurian legend and condemned Geoffrey of Monmouth for propagating the fancies that had appeared in the History of the Kings of Britain. According to Giraldus, the monks at Glastonbury were given an indication of where to search by Henry II, who had been told by “an ancient Welsh bard, a singer of the past, that they would find the body at least sixteen feet beneath the earth, not in a tomb of stone, but in a hollow oak.” It had been buried at such a depth “that it might not by any means be discovered by the Saxons, who occupied the island after his death, whom he had so often in his life defeated and almost utterly destroyed.” The monks roped off an area in the abbey grounds, erected a fence around it, and began to excavate. They had dug only a foot or two when a spade struck a slab of stone. Beneath the stone was a lead cross engraved with the Latin words: HIC IACET SEPULTUS INCLYTUS REX ARTHURUS CUM WEN-NEVERIA UXORE SUA SECUNDA IN INSULA AVALLONIA Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur with Guinevere his second wife in the Isle of Avalon

Excavating further, the monks unearthed a coffin made from a hollow oak trunk; inside they found the bones of a tall man at one end and those of a woman at the other. The skull of the woman was encircled by “a yellow tress of hair still retaining its colour and its freshness.” But when a monk reached down to touch the hairs, they crumbled into dust. The bones of the man were recovered less clumsily, and as each one appeared, the monks marveled at their size. His shin bone, Giraldus recounts, “when placed against that of the tallest man in the place, and planted in the earth near his foot, reached, as the Abbot showed us, a good three inches above his knee. And the skull was so large and capacious as to be a portent or a prodigy, for the eye-socket was a good palm in width. Moreover, there were ten wounds or more, all of which were scarred over, save one larger than the rest, which had made a great hole.” Arthur and Guinevere had been found at last. Now Glastonbury Abbey could be sure of an ongoing stream of visitors and pilgrims bearing gifts. New buildings slowly replaced those destroyed in the fire; a church that eventually would be the largest in England took its splendid shape, although the sprawling ruins of the abbey still may be seen. And in 1278, when King Edward I and Queen Eleanor visited the abbey, the remains of Arthur and Guinevere were moved to a black marble tomb in the center of the choir and laid to rest. Two stone lions were placed at each end of the tomb...

Certainly the lead cross did not date from the sixth century. A first-hand drawing made of it by a seventeenth-century historian shows a script of a much later date. In addition, the reference to Arthur as king indicates it was made long after his death at a time when his kingship had become part of the legend. It is impossible to be certain about the bones; they may have been those of an Iron Age man and woman, buried in a dugout canoe from the Glastonbury lake village after its destruction by the Belgae. The monks may have found the...

Yet the monks’ story is likely true. In 1934, an archaeological team digging in the abbey ruins came across the base of King Arthur’s shrine, and in 1962, another team identified another grave the monks claimed to have dug up. It is possible that it was Arthur’s grave and that it originally had been marked by the stone slab the monks discovered, but over the years had been covered by earth and lost to view. The cross could have been placed beneath the stone when the grave was marked as Arthur’s in the tenth century when St. Dunstan was Abbot. Experts contend that its lettering could have been done then; the placing of lead crosses in graves was a common tenth-century practice. This evidence makes the story more complicated, as other Glastonbury claims were quickly discredited. Geoffrey Ashe, a well-known writer on the Arthurian legend, has pointed out: “The bones of St. Patrick and St. Dunstan were denounced as spurious by indignant voices from Ireland and Canterbury. But the Welsh made no comment on the depressing exhumation of their national chief. They offered no alternative legend, they produced no counter-Avalon [indeed, no place in Britain other than Glastonbury ever has claimed to be the Isle of Avalon], such an acquiescent hush has its own eloquence. It hints at a longstanding tradition of Arthur’s death and interment in the monastery, not widely familiar, but so fully accepted . . . that once the secret was out the English assertions could not be denied.”