Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

For the chivalric Arthurian romances also had a political context: the Matter of Britain. Arthur’s lasting accomplishment was supposedly the fact that he had fought to unite the fractured polities of the British Isles under his own rule. At the end of the thirteenth century this was no longer some obsolete matter lost in the mists of the half-remembered past. It was live public policy. The central goal of Edward I’s reign was the king’s drive to stamp English royal power over Scotland and Wales so that he alone could claim to be the master of the British—preeminent over the kings of Scots and native princes of Wales. In theory it was the Welsh who had the strongest historical claim to kinship with Arthur—as descendants of the Romano-Britons who had been forced west and corralled beyond the river Severn during the Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries a.d. But by co-opting Arthur, Edward was stripping the Welsh of their claim to kinship and the legitimacy of their independence.