DID KING ARTHUR REALLY EXIST?

Possibly the best-known and least-known figure of the Celtic Dark Ages. Everyone knows the name of Arthur, but there are many different views about his historicity. Some scholars think he was a real British king, though not the king of all Britain, while others think he is a complete fiction. My own view is that he was real.

There are two certain dated references to Arthur in the Easter Annals, which show that he existed as a prominent historical figure:

516: Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the British were victors.

537: Strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut perished [or fell].

There are various scraps of evidence of his celebrity as warrior and war leader, for instance in The Gododdin (a series of elegies) a warrior is compared unfavorably with Arthur—he fought well, though “he was no Arthur.”

The inscriptions on scattered stone memorials created in the sixth century are consistent in content and date with genealogies and other documents that we only have in copies written down much later. In other words, some of the later documents are corroborated by evidence dating from Arthur’s time. A pedigree from Pembrokeshire running to 31 generations mentions a prince named Arthur who lived in the later sixth century and was probably born around 550, just about the time of Arthur’s death according to the Easter Annals. It is possible that the child was named in memory of the king who had recently died.

An argument against Arthur’s existence is that he is not mentioned in The Ruin of Britain by the monk Gildas, written in about 540. “The silence of Gildas” can be explained fairly easily. First, Arthur was so well known by Britons living in the mid-sixth century that they didn’t need Gildas to explain who he was. Secondly, Gildas refers to kings obliquely, by nickname. Contemporary readers would have known exactly who he meant, even if we don’t, and it was his contemporaries Gildas was addressing. But Gildas describes a king called Cuneglasus as “the Bear’s charioteer.” The identity of the Bear is not immediately obvious to us, but Gildas played word games with the names of other kings, referring, for example, to Cynan or Conan as Caninus, the Dog. “The Bear” in Welsh is Arth, which brings us equally close to the name of Arthur. King Cuneglasus might as a young princeling 20 years earlier have served in Arthur’s army, and he might have been given the privileged position of driving Arthur’s chariot. So, Arthur does appear to be mentioned by Gildas after all, even if in disguise.

Some of those scholars who believe that Arthur did not exist argue their case on something very close to conspiracy theory. They begin from the presupposition that he never existed, therefore all the references to him, even in otherwise authentic documents, must be unhistorical, later interpolations, anachronistic intrusions, and corruptions of the text. Once a decision is made that Arthur cannot have existed, any evidence that he did exist must be fake. This is not so far from the conspiracy theory about the Apollo moon landings, which some people like to see as an elaborate hoax. The more evidence that is brought forward to show that the flights to the moon really happened, the more elaborate and cunning it proves the hoax to be.

We could contrast the historic Arthur and the mythic Fionn. Fionn is alleged to have fought with Vikings, but he died in AD 283, which is too early for him to have encountered them. Conversely, the Easter Annals strongly imply that Arthur fought his major campaign against the Saxons in the sixth century, between the Battle of Badon in 516 and the Battle of Camlann in 537, which is exactly the right time—according to the archeology—for him to have been doing that on the eastern boundary of Dumnonia.

WHO WAS ARTHUR?

This scenario converges on the idea that Arthur was primarily the King of Dumnonia. This ancient kingdom is now the English West Country, consisting of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. Gildas’s peculiar account of the state of Britain, The Ruin of Britain, is really a tortured lament about the poor leadership shown by the Dark Age kingdoms that occupied the English West Country and Wales in the first half of the sixth century. This region coincides exactly with the fourth-century Roman administrative province of Britannia Prima, and it implies that after the Romans abandoned Britain some vestiges of the Roman administrative structure remained.

Certainly by AD 314, when the names appear in the Verona List, Britain was formally divided into four provinces: Prima, Secunda, Maxima Caesariensis, and Flavia Caesariensis. It is possible to visualize a loose confederation of Dark Age kingdoms still functioning in the sixth century within the boundaries of Britannia Prima.

Perhaps the kings of this province went their separate ways most of the time and came together only when there was a common danger. That common danger was the approach of the Saxon colonists, so the many small war-bands of the separate kingdoms needed to be coordinated. In Gail, the Bibracte council in 52 BC agreed on a common strategy: to join forces and resist Rome under the war leadership of one of their kings. In exactly the same way the kings of Britannia Prima agreed to resist the encroachment by the Saxons; and their choice of war leader was Arthur. He was to be dux bellorum, the leader of battles, while that threat existed.

The dates for Arthur’s first and last battles, 516 and 537, give us the span of his later military career, and they imply that he was born in about 475. This would have made him 41, a mature and accomplished commander at the time of Badon, and 62 at the time of Camlann.

A pedigree of unknown reliability exists in the Welsh radition. Here Arthur was the son of Uther and Ygraine (or Eigr). Ygraine was the daughter of Amlawdd Wledig, who married Gwenn, daughter of Cunedda Wledig. Wledig or gwledig means “king” or “overking,” so Arthur’s maternal line at least was royal. Ygraine had a sister Reiengulid, who was the mother of St. Illtud, which is how Illtud comes to be Arthur’s cousin.

The lack of a well-authenticated (paternal) pedigree for Arthur can be interpreted in many ways. Some say it shows he never existed, while others see it as evidence that he was not of royal blood and others as evidence that he was a usurper. Whatever his origins, Arthur became a king, then overking, and probably through prowess more than birth.

WHERE WAS CAMELOT?

Elsewhere, I have argued that Arthur was initially the sub-king of a small north Cornish territory called Trigg (meaning “three war-bands”), with his home at Castle Killibury, not far from the modern town of Wadebridge. Killibury was a small and discreetly defended hideaway that had a superb view down the Camel estuary, which Arthur probably used as his harbor. In fact imported Dark Age pottery wares have recently been discovered near the seaward end of the estuary.

It is highly significant that early Welsh tradition gives Kelliwic as the name of Arthur’s favorite residence; even the Welsh saw Arthur’s principal home as Castle Killibury. A Welsh Triad lists the places where Arthur held court in Three Tribal Thrones of the Island of Britain. The northern one was at Pen Rhionydd—a place that has not been identified, but thought to near Stranraer in Galloway. The Welsh throne was at St. David’s and the Cornish tribal throne was at Kelliwic. Kelliwic was firmly recognized as Arthur’s base long before any idea of Camelot came up. The poem Culhwch and Olwen mentions five times that Kelli Wic was Arthur’s port. An old name for Castle Killibury is Kelly Rounds and an Anglo-Saxon charter mentions a place called “Caellwic.”

Not far away is Tintagel Island. A significant amount of very high status and very expensive pottery imported from the Mediterranean confirms it as a royal focus of some kind. It was not a permanent settlement but a place for special occasions. The footprint carved into the living rock at the island’s summit marks it as the coronation place: the spot where kings of Trigg (north Cornwall), and perhaps kings of all Dumnonia, came to take their oath and assume the mantle of kingship. This was where Arthur drew his power from the stone.

Like other Dark Age and medieval kings, Arthur was always on the move. Kings had to peregrinate around their kingdoms in order to be seen by their subjects and maintain the bond of loyalty between king and subject.

Arthur had various muster points where the Dumnonian war-bands could gather before being marched east to engage the Saxons: Warbstow Bury and Lydford were two in the center of Dumnonia; South Cadbury was the major one close to the eastern border, the “war zone.”

One of the many mysteries surrounding Arthur is the location of Camelot, that place of special mystique. It is unlikely to be Castle Killibury. The name “Camelot” strongly suggests a connection with the Celtic war god, Camulos, and if Camelot was named for the war god it is likely to be associated with fighting and with gatherings of the war-bands. Camelot is elusive, for the simplest of reasons: it was not one place, but several. It was mobile; it was wherever Arthur was encamped with his warriors.

THE LAST BATTLE

The site of the last battle, Camlann, has been discussed endlessly. Every author who has written about Arthur has their own favored site. I have discussed elsewhere the reasons for thinking that the likeliest place is Pont ar Gamlan: a boulder-strewn fording-place at the confluence of the Eden and Mawddach rivers a few miles north of Dolgellau in North Wales. A third river, the Gamlan, flows down the steep mountainside from the west to join the Mawddach close by. It flows down through an oak forest and over some impressive waterfalls: the Black Falls, just above Ganllwyd. The name “Gamlan” is very close to the traditional name of the last battle, and in Welsh a cadgamlan is an utter rout, a complete massacre, and this is likely to be the original meaning of the battle’s name, now commemorated in the name of the river.

This may seem an odd place for Arthur to be fighting a battle in that the threat from the Saxons was from the east. But the various traditions about the last battle have in common the idea that it was a fight amongst the British. Arthur was betrayed by a relative, perhaps a nephew, called Modred or Medraut. With that in mind, the final battle might have been fought well inside the frontiers of Britannia Prima, in Devon, Cornwall, or anywhere in Wales.

The North Wales location suggests that Arthur was making his way north into the kingdom of Gwynedd along the major south–north Roman road known as Sarn Helen. The King of Gwynedd was Maelgwn, and his fortress was Castell Degannwy, perched on a rocky, twin-peaked hilltop overlooking the Conwy estuary. Like many other Dark Age strongholds, this was a refortified Iron Age fort. The site has yielded sixth-century pottery and there is a tradition that it was the seat of Maelgwn, though, like Arthur, Maelgwn had a less conspicuous refuge residence, at Aberffraw on the west coast of Anglesey. Degannwy was Maelgwn’s frontline fortress, and this was where Arthur was heading. The last battle took place in an atmosphere of distrust and civil war, and Arthur was probably hoping to deal with Maelgwn’s disloyalty.

Maelgwn had a reputation for ruthlessness. We know from the outright condemnation of him by Gildas that he murdered his own uncle in order to become King of Gwynedd; now he was envious of Arthur’s High Kingship and determined to get it for himself. Maelgwn was Arthur’s enemy; the king who was destabilizing the British confederation and who wanted him dead so that he could be dux bellorum himself.

Whether Arthur and his war-band rode into Gwynedd to quell an overt rebellion and open and anticipated hostility or were lured there by some guile of Maelgwn’s and fell unsuspecting into a trap at Ganllwyd cannot be determined from the existing evidence. Certainly the site, confined by steep valley sides and dense forests, is ideal for an ambush.

Two things are known for certain: Maelgwn did gain the High Kingship shortly after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur’s disappearance—in 546, according to one version—and gained it by deception. There is also the tradition that Arthur was in the end the victim of treachery at Camlann: perhaps the treachery was Maelgwn’s, not Modred’s. And just possibly Arthur was the murdered “uncle” mentioned by Gildas.

If Maelgwn was indeed responsible for the death of Arthur and for bringing the Arthurian peace to an end, Gildas’s extraordinary hatred and condemnation of Maelgwn’s many-sided wickedness becomes understandable. Arthur was behind the golden years of relative stability and justice between the Battles of Badon and Camlann, and those years came to an end with his final defeat. Gildas mentions specifically that Maelgwn removed and killed many tyrants (meaning kings, not necessarily tyrants in the modern sense), that Maelgwn was “last in my list but first in evil,” and that Maegwn “cruelly despatched the king your uncle.” Here, too, is the uncle-slaying regicide motif that would later be attributed, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and possibly mistakenly, to Modred.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ARTHUR

What happened to Arthur after the Battle of Camlann is shrouded in mystery. One version of the story is that he was carried from the battlefield mortally wounded and either died elsewhere or simply disappeared. One explanation is that locally the truth of the matter was known—that Arthur had died on or near the battlefield—and this tradition was preserved and passed on through Welsh families, like the details about the few fellow warriors who survived the battle. Meanwhile, Arthur’s subjects in Cornwall had less detailed information about what had happened to the king. All they really knew was that he had not returned. In the days and weeks following the Battle of Camlann, all kinds of misinformation and rumor may have circulated.

Writing in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth was aware of the uncertainties. In his version of Arthur’s disappearance he describes him as “mortally wounded” on the battlefield, yet moved to Avalon “to have his wounds healed.” Some scholars have argued persuasively that Geoffrey was deliberately ambiguous about what had happened because he had on his desk two different versions of the king’s fate: one originating in Wales and giving Arthur as killed in battle; the other from Cornish or Breton sources and giving Arthur as surviving the battle and being transported elsewhere to recover or die.

This is persuasive and goes a long way toward explaining the post-Camlann confusion, but it may be that the contradictory stories carried a different clash of scenarios. It may have been known, to a privileged few in Wales, that Arthur had been wounded, rescued from the battlefield, and taken north to a place of safety; meanwhile, in Cornwall, the story was that Arthur was “missing presumed dead.”

Great play has been made of the absence of a grave for Arthur. The sixth or seventh-century poem Songs of the Graves gives the locations of many Dark Age heroes, for instance:

The grave of Owain ap Urien in a secluded part of the world,
Under the grass at Llan Morvad;
In Aberech, that of Rhydderch Hael. (Stanza 13)…
The wonder of the world, a grave for Arthur. (Stanza 44)

The missing grave became a major element in the mystique surrounding the vanished king. If Arthur was the great overking, chief of the kings of Britain and dux bellorum, we might expect to find an impressive monument of some kind raised over his grave, or at any rate for its location to have been remembered, but there is nothing. On the other hand, where is the grave of Aelle, the first Saxon bretwalda? Where is Vortigern’s mausoleum? Even the whereabouts of the tombs of King Alfred and King Harold are uncertain. So perhaps we should not be surprised that we have no grave for Arthur.

There is a tradition that he was buried secretly. The Life of St. Illtud credits Illtud with being the priest who conducted the secret funeral. Probably only those who were actually present—perhaps only ten people altogether—ever knew where the king was buried, and as likely as not those ten took the secret with them to their own separate graves.

One question naturally arises: why should those close to Arthur have wished to bury him in secret? Obviously his death was disastrous to the British cause. If he had succeeded only recently in re-cementing the loyalty of the kings of southern and central Wales to a common cause, the news of his death could have precipitated immediate fragmentation, laying Wales open to attack from the east; alternatively, and equally dangerously, it could have exposed Powys and the southern kingdoms to attack from Gwynedd first, rendering them powerless to resist Saxon incursion from the east. The continuing expansion of Gwynedd a century or two later seems to show that this was an ever-present danger. If news of Arthur’s death had reached the Saxons, who had been held at bay by his power for 20 years, they would have pushed westward with confidence and ease; if it had spread widely among the Britons, they would have been demoralized and given in under the renewed Saxon onslaught. In every way and for every reason it was important to conceal the death of Arthur, and those close to him may have hoped to hide the catastrophic truth long enough for a successor to be found and for him to establish his position as overking before too many people realized what had happened.

It may be that an alternative fate was concealed, but for the same reasons. If Arthur was not killed at Camlann but so badly wounded that he was going to be unfit to fight or even ride for a long time, he would have been forced to retire. It was common for Dark Age kings to retire when they became physically incapable of fighting through age or infirmity. They withdrew from public life completely by entering monasteries.

Several examples are known from these times. In around 580 Tewdrig or Theodoric, King of Glevissig (Glamorgan) abdicated in favor of his son Meurig and retired to a religious house at Tintern. He made the mistake of coming out of retirement in about 584, when his son engaged the Saxons in battle nearby, and was mortally wounded in the battle. Pabo Pillar of Britain, King of the Pennines, similarly abdicated in favor of his sons and went to live in seclusion in a remote monastery in Gwynedd, far from his own kingdom; he later died and was buried there, in the church at Llanbabo in Anglesey. A link between the Pennine kingdom and Gwynedd is suggested by another example. In the church at Llanaelhaearn on the Lleyn Peninsula is a fifth or sixth-century memorial stone inscribed with the words “Aliortus, a man from Elmet, lies here.”

There are hints in the medieval genealogies that a much earlier Dumnonian king, Coel Godebog, also retired a long way from home: he died and was buried in the far north, in York, in 300.

Did Arthur, now aged 62 and badly wounded, decide to abdicate and retire immediately after Camlann? The Legend of St. Goeznovius, a Breton saint, includes some information that is corroborated in other sources, such as the migration of British saints to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries. It may overstate Arthur’s achievement, in boasting that the Saxons were largely cleared from Britain by “the great Arthur, King of the Britons” but, in a telling phrase, it relates how Arthur’s career ended when he “was summoned from human activity.” This is equivocal, in that it holds back from saying that Arthur died, even if most of us reading the story would infer that that was meant. The expression might equally be taken to mean that Arthur withdrew from secular, worldly affairs in order to lead a purely religious life.

If Arthur’s reign ended at Camlann but he lived on in retirement, it could explain the discrepancy between the date of 537 or 539 given in the Welsh Annals for Arthur’s fall at Camlann and the date of 542 given by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Perhaps Geoffrey had access to a tradition of Arthur living on for another five years after the battle.

The idea that Arthur did not die but somehow lived on and will one day return may seem to remove Arthur completely from history and place him safely in the world of myth and mysticism. Yet Arthur is but one of many great charismatic leaders, many of them kings, who were believed to have lived on after their “official” deaths. The last Saxon King of England, Harold Godwinson, officially died at the Battle of Hastings close to the site of the high altar of Battle Abbey and his remains were buried at the same spot. The Bayeux Tapestry is unambiguous—“Harold interfectus est”—but even in 1066 doubts were circulated about the official story. The Norman chronicler William of Poitiers reported that the Conqueror contemptuously ordered Harold’s body to be buried on the beach. More uncertainty arose because of the mutilation of the corpse, so even a burial in Battle Abbey might have been that of another battle victim. By the thirteenth century an Icelandic story was told of Harold being found alive on the battlefield by two peasants who were looting corpses the night after the battle. They took him home with them and it was suggested that he should rally the English once more, but Harold knew that many would have sworn fealty to William and he did not want to compromise them. He would retire to a hermitage at Canterbury. Three years later, when Harold died, William was told and he saw that Harold was given a royal burial. Gerald of Wales, writing in 1191, also affirmed that the Saxons clung to the belief that Harold was alive; as a hermit, deeply scarred and blinded in the left eye, he is said to have lived for a long time in a cell at Chester, where he was visited by Henry I.

Similar survival stories have been told about other historical figures: the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, Richard II, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Alexander I of Russia, Holger Danske, Sebastian of Portugal. These were real people, yet elaborate stories adding layers of mystery to their deaths are still told. The mystery elements added to Arthur’s life do not mean that he never existed at all.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF ARTHUR

Why did this particular king so fascinate his contemporaries and those who came after? The most immediate reason is that his military prowess halted the westward progress of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of southern Britain for 20 years. His time would afterward be remembered as the sunset of Celtic England. A distinctive feature of the Celts is dwelling on defeats; there is wailing, keening, lamentation, and nostalgia. A. L. Rouse commented, “It was the hero of the losing side, King Arthur, who imposed himself on the imagination.” Arthur became a symbol of the glory of Britain as it once was and might yet have been, but for its destruction by the Saxon invaders. He was the perfect symbol of a kingdom and a culture lost.

The image of the king hung over the aristocracy of the Middle Ages like a faded, tattered, war-torn battle standard hanging in a royal chapel, redolent of past greatness and signifying virtues that could never be matched by the living. The idea of Arthur became a force in politics. Henry II wanted to prove that Arthur was dead in order to remove any hopes the Celts may have nursed that he would rise again to do battle against the Plantagenets. It was probably for this reason that in 1190 Henry II arranged for Arthur’s coffin to be “discovered” at Glastonbury and exhumed. We know that, when Henry II visited Pembrokeshire in 1179 and met the bard who told him where Arthur’s grave was, he was also told of the tradition that Arthur would ride once more. If Henry could produce Arthur’s bones, even the most superstitious would be able to see that there was no chance of Arthur riding again.

King Edward III identified himself as Arthur’s successor when he contemplated re-establishing the Round Table as an order of chivalry. In the end, in 1348, he founded the Order of the Garter instead, but still in imitation of King Arthur’s order of Round Table knights.

By Rodney Castleden in "The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts", HarperElement (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), London, 2013, excerpts part 1. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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