Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

(#litres_trial_promo) Even so, his message is abundantly clear: Anglo-Saxon expansion is divine retribution for the moral laxity of the Celtic/British nobility.

The absence of any mention of Arthur in this important early source is surprising—the more so since Gildas is the first to mention the Battle of Mons Badonicus (Mount Badon), which was supposedly the most significant event of Arthur’s life. If he wanted a stick with which to castigate his audience, Arthur would have been ideal for the purpose. But his name is never mentioned. Instead we are told that the victor of Mount Badon was one Ambrosius Aurelianus—although Alcock, a strong advocate of Arthur being the victor at Badon, doubts whether that was what Gildas meant. Alcock does not deny, however, that Gildas does say that Ambrosius Aurelianus was a successful leader of the Britons in battle.

According to some readings of his text, Gildas mentions that Badon was fought in the year of his own birth, which was probably around, or shortly after, AD 500. In a difficult passage, Gildas appears to imply that he is writing forty-four years later. Some dispute this, and believe (as did Bede, who had access to earlier and more authoritative versions of Gildas) that what is referred to as having occurred forty-four years earlier is some event other than the author’s birth. But, taken together, the evidence suggests that Mount Badon was fought in the decades on either side of the year 500.

The name Arthur probably derives from the Latin gens or family name Artorius, although in manuscripts it often appears as Arturus. It may also be derived from artos, the Celtic word for a bear. The first account of a person named Arthur is by the anonymous author (once believed to have been Nennius) of the Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), a collection of source documents written and assembled around 829-30. Although the Historia draws on many earlier Welsh sources, it is its ‘highly contemporary political motives’

(#litres_trial_promo) that are most important if we are to understand it—and indeed nearly all medieval and earlier Arthurian literature. In this instance the motives relate to politics in ninth-century Wales.

The author of the Historia Brittonum was writing for the particular benefit of King Merfyn of Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, and his supporters, who were resisting English conquest and Anglicisation. They needed a heroic Celtic leader that people could look back to, and the Historia provided one. The Historia was also created as a counter to the ‘Englishness’ of the Venerable Bede’s history, which was then very popular. As Nicholas Higham points out, the élite surrounding King Merfyn resisted external pressures successfully: ‘The separate existence of Wales is a lasting tribute to their achievement.’

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It is always difficult to make use of documents that only exist in the form of later copies or translations, as subsequent copyists may have added their own personal touches to flesh out the events being described. Arthur was very popular in the early medieval period, and it is probable that his name was interposed in earlier histories in this way. One example of this is the account of two important Arthurian battles in the Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals), written around 1100, but drawing on earlier sources. Historians and others have tended to concentrate their attention on Arthur, but these documents, which were probably produced in south-west Wales, are actually far more concerned with the threat from Gwynedd, to the north, which completely overshadowed the issue of ‘racial’ struggle with England.

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The Welsh Annals, a record of significant events, were included in the Historia Brittonum of Nennius.

(#litres_trial_promo) The two crucial references are to the two most famous battles of the Arthur cycle: that at Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon, in which Arthur and his British army defeated the Anglo-Saxons; and Arthur’s final battle at Camlann. In translation they read as follows:

[Year 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 Britons were victors.

[Year 537] The strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Modred perished. And there was plague in Britain and Ireland.

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Modred (or Mordred) was Arthur’s nephew, who is supposed to have usurped his throne. There is little doubt about the historicity of Badon, as the battle is mentioned by name in Gildas, who was not writing to promote the British cause. That is not to say of course that Arthur was the British leader—and plainly, if he did carry a cross on his shoulders for three days, he could not have done much actual fighting. The problem is to know when these accounts were written. Were the references to Arthur added later, when the Annals were compiled? Or were the individual annual entries indeed written year-on-year, in which case they would have a greater claim to historical accuracy? Leslie Alcock opts for year-on-year composition, but most historians now believe that the Badon entry was actually written around 954, some 450 years after the event itself.

Given the strong political motives that we know lay behind the writing and compilation of the Historia Brittonum, we must treat these entries with enormous caution. The substitution of Arthur for Gildas’ Ambrosius Aurelianus as the victor of Mount Badon might partially be explained by the political impossibility—given the Historia’s intended audience—of citing a general with a Roman name as a heroic British leader.

As I have said, these events have been discussed interminably. The Welsh Annals state that Camlann took place twenty-one years after Badon, but there is no absolute agreement as to the date of Badon, except, as we have seen, that it probably happened in the decades on either side of 500, and probably not after 516. The Welsh Annals add further confusion to an already confused picture by mentioning ‘Bellum baronies secundo’ (the second Battle of Badon), which Alcock believed was fought in the year 667. The actual sites of the two battles are also unknown.

The most distinguished writer and scholar of the eighth century was the Venerable Bede. This remarkable man was born near Monkwearmouth, County Durham, some time around 673, and died about 735. He is widely associated with the then new monastery at Jarrow, near Newcastle in Northumberland, where he was ordained priest in 703, but he probably lived most of his life at the monastery that was twinned with Jarrow, at Monkwearmouth. His major work, which tradition has it was written at Jarrow, is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which he finished in 731.

(#litres_trial_promo) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is a highly important source of early English history. It is both well written and well researched, but like the man, Bede’s intentions in writing it were complex.

Bede’s primary motive was the salvation of his people, and he saw the Church as the means of achieving it. Although not an ethnic Anglo-Saxon himself, he wrote from their perspective, and his history is essentially about the anarchy and power vacuum that followed the end of Roman rule. He describes a period when southern Britain was subject to marauding bands from the Continent. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by St Augustine in 597 was for Bede the great turning point. As he saw it, the Church imposed order in a world where structure was lacking. He was hostile to the British, whom he saw as chaotic, and he used the writings of their own historian, Gildas, against them—in the process he edited and greatly improved the overelaborate language of the De excidio. Bede fails to mention Arthur, and follows Gildas, his source, in attributing the victory at Mount Badon to Ambrosius Aurelianus.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the last of the major pre-Norman histories of Britain, was established by King Alfred some time in the 890s. In form it was an annal, written in Old English, and was maintained and updated at major ecclesiastical centres. It begins with the Roman invasion and was still being updated in the mid-twelfth century. Surviving manuscripts are associated with Canterbury,Worcester, York and Abingdon. The Chronicle can be patchy as a source on early events, but it is much better in its later coverage, of the reigns of Alfred (871—99), Aethelred (865—71), Edward the Confessor (1042—66) and the Norman kings. It is also an important document for the study of the development of Old English; but while it is not particularly relevant to the Arthur myths, it does provide a useful account of the early Anglo-Saxon histories of south-eastern England, especially Sussex and Kent.

The first major source of full-blown Arthur stories is the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s.

(#litres_trial_promo) It would be fair to call Geoffrey (c.1100—55) the father of the mythical King Arthur, who was largely his invention. He did, however, use the principal earlier authors Gildas, Bede and Nennius, together with current oral sources, which as we will see could have had very much older roots. His History was also based on an unnamed earlier British or Welsh work which he had seen and which is often assumed to have been the ‘source’ for his own considerable inventions. This famous ‘lost source’ has itself become a Holy Grail of modern Arthurian enthusiasts and theorists.

(#litres_trial_promo) Geoffrey’s book was to prove enormously popular and influential, particularly as an inspiration for the later Arthurian literature in the medieval courtly tradition.

In the previous chapter we saw how Geoffrey produced the Brutus legend to account for the origins of Britain; Arthur was by no means his only invention. Later in his life he wrote a less successful Latin epic poem about the life of the prophet Merlin, the Vita Merlini. Geoffrey was undoubtedly a very capable author, but like everyone else concerned with Arthur, he had his own motives for writing. He lived in very troubled times. England was in the throes of a civil war between the followers of King Stephen and those of Matilda, daughter of Henry I; the war started when Stephen seized the throne in December 1135, and ended when he died in 1154 and Henry II ascended the throne. During this period, generally known as the Anarchy, the country grew weary of warfare and strife. There was a widespread desire for peace, which may help to explain why Geoffrey’s largely fictional history met with such success both in Britain and on the Continent, where it provided the source for a rich tradition of medieval Arthurian romances.

Geoffrey wrote his history in order to provide an honourable pedigree for the kingship of England that was then being fought over so keenly. He was writing for the benefit of the Anglo-Norman aristocratic élite, and he set out to show how their predecessor, King Arthur, had performed mighty deeds. Arthur had, according to Geoffrey, defeated the Roman Emperor and conquered all of Europe except Spain. That went down well with an audience of Norman knights whose families, friends and relations controlled not just England and Normandy, but large parts of Europe too.

But Geoffrey’s work went further. Significantly, he made use of earlier sources to give the appearance of authenticity for those who possessed some historical knowledge. As Nicholas Higham puts it:

It provided the new Anglo-Norman kings with a predecessor of heroic size, a great pan-British king in a long line of monarchs capable of countering pressures for decentralisation, as had occurred in France, and reinforcing claims of political superiority over the Celtic lands. Existing claims that the Normans were descended from the Trojans gelled easily with the descent of the Britons from the same stock…At the same time Arthur offered an Anglo-Norman counterbalance to…Charlemagne as an historical icon.

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Geoffrey’s account of Arthur and his exploits is both remarkably full and detailed, and hard to put down. These, however, are more than mere tales of adventure; there is something transcendent about them. It seems to me beyond doubt that Geoffrey intended to create this sense of ‘otherness’, of the stories being somehow close to the supernatural.

Most reviews of Arthurian history talk in terms of pre- and post-Galfridic sources.* (#ulink_dc6856b1-a29f-560c-a9e0-1320e50db9c7) Pre-Galfridic sources are seen as having more historical value than Geoffrey’s own work and those that followed him. All, however, are chronologically separated from the events in question by several centuries. All their authors, too, have their own motives for writing. Nicholas Higham was the first to point out that pre-Galfridic sources such as the Historia Brittonum or the Annales Cambriae should not ‘be treated very differently from, for example, Geoffrey’s Historia, or other later texts. All are highly imaginative works, none of whose authors saw their prime task as the reconstruction of what actually happened in the distant past. Rather, in all cases, then as now, the past was pressed into the service of the present and was subject to the immediate, and highly variable, purposes of political theology.’

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The story of Arthur’s conception at Tintagel Castle, which involves magical changes of identity, harks back to Biblical tradition and the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary. As Pearsall and others have noted, there is more than a little of the British Christ to King Arthur. Even given the extraordinary power of Geoffrey’s writing, it is still remarkable just how rapidly the Arthurian tradition took off not in Britain alone, but in Europe too. This is largely down to two gifted translators of the original, and to a French writer whose literary skills were the equal of Geoffrey’s.

Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae was translated into French by Robert Wace, a churchman who was originally from Jersey, but who lived at Caen in Normandy. He called his translation the Geste des Bretons (History of the Britons), but it was renamed the Roman de Brut (a topical reference to Romance and Britain/Brutus) by the scribes who copied it out for a wider readership. The new title stuck. Wace’s was a very free translation, with many additions—Pearsall describes it as an ‘expanded adaptation’—but it was a very successful one. It was presented to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the imperious and flamboyant new queen of England’s Henry II, in 1155. This puts the work at the heart of European courtly culture, for the court of Henry II (1154-89)† (#ulink_ce78acc6-1e2e-5ebc-99a8-6da44414cac4) and the glamorous divorcee Eleanor was the most exciting in Europe. Henry’s power extended over most of France as well as England, and the court and literary language of his kingdom was French.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Wace added much new and important material to the Arthur story, including the Round Table, and he renamed Arthur’s magical sword—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Caliburn—Excalibur.

It was another author-cum-translator, a rural priest nearWorcester named Layamon (‘lawman’), who took the Arthurian tradition, or Brut as it was now known, and transferred it to Middle English verse around 1200. Layamon’s Brut stands as an extraordinary work of literature in its own right. It takes a different course from the courtly vision of Wace. Layamon was inspired by strong feelings of patriotism. He clearly loved traditional Anglo-Saxon battle poetry, heroism and what Pearsall calls ‘kingliness, steeped in religious awe’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pearsall sums up the differences between Wace and Layamon thus: ‘Throughout Wace is calm, practical, rational, with an eye for the realities of war and strategy; Layamon is aggressive, violent, heroic, ceremonial and ritualistic.’

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Post-Galfridian writers on Arthur take the romance forward wholly in the realms of fiction. Arthur was hugely popular in Anglo-Norman circles in France, where his exploits were further elaborated in verse by Chrétien de Troyes, a prolific author of Arthurian romance. Between 1160 and 1190 his works included Lancelot ou Le Chevalier de la charette, Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion, and the unfinished Percival ou Le conte del graal. Chrétien may have used Breton verbal sources in the composition of his works, which were important because they lifted Arthur and his court out of a narrowly British context.

It was Chrétien who introduced the quest for the Holy Grail, but at this stage in the development of the story the Grail was still just the mystical chalice that had been used by Christ in the Last Supper. It had yet to acquire its connection with the Holy Blood, a fascinating process to which I will return later. Effectively, Chrétien made Arthur a figure of heroic romance who transcended nationality. Derek Pearsall notes: ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth gave shape and substance to the story of Arthur, but it was Chrétien who invented Arthurian romance and gave to it a high-toned sensibility, psychological acuteness, wit, irony and delicacy that were never surpassed.’

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It is not my intention to provide a history of the Arthurian literature which thrived on both sides of the Channel in the medieval period,* (#ulink_5960de79-b9ce-568f-aef2-6f13f777ce11) nor can I attempt to cover the wealth of creative writing he has given rise to in more recent times, ranging from Tennyson’s cycle The Idylls of the King to T.H. White’s novel sequence The Once and Future King. However, one author, Sir Thomas Malory (d.1470), must be mentioned if we are to understand how the Arthurian legends were subsequently used in Britain.

Malory’s great work, written in English, was Le Morte d’Arthur.

(#litres_trial_promo) The original title, given to it by the author himself, was The Book of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This title has the not inconsiderable merit of describing the contents to a T, but it is hardly marketable, which Malory’s astute publisher and editor William Caxton realised immediately. Caxton (c.1420—c.1492) was, of course, England’s first successful printer and publisher, working from his press inWestminster. It was he who gave Malory’s great work its mysterioussounding and slightly ominous title, which he lifted from the last tale in the book, ‘The Death of Arthur’, and it was his inspiration to translate it into French. Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur as a loosely connected cycle of tales. Caxton edited them together into a single text, which he published in 1485.

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As we have seen throughout this chapter, the various authors of Arthurian tales had their own, sometimes complex, agendas and motives. This is true of Malory too. Le Morte d’Arthur was written some fifteen years before it was published. 1485 happened to be the year of the Battle of Bosworth, in which Richard III was killed and a new royal dynasty began under Henry Tudor (Henry VII). Bosworth signalled the final phase of the Wars of the Roses, which ended when Lancastrian forces under Henry VII defeated a Yorkist army at Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, in 1487. It was of course in the Tudor interest to portray the Wars of the Roses as being long, drawn-out and bloody, and Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur around 1470 as a tribute to an earlier and now vanishing age of heroism, honour and Christian chivalry. Like Bede and Gildas before him, he saw the past as providing an example to the present that could not be ignored. It was perhaps an accident of history that the Tudors should have shared his vision, if in an altogether more self-interested fashion.

Just who Thomas Malory was is far from certain. There are four contenders, of which perhaps the most likely is a Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire. He was knighted in 1445, and elected to Parliament the same year, but he seems to have been an unsavoury character. In 1440 he was accused of robbery and imprisoning (although we know nothing about any consequent court case). Then in 1450 he was accused, along with several others, of lying in wait to attack Sir Humphrey Stafford, Second Duke of Buckingham and one of the richest men in England. Again, the allegations were never proved. After this Malory appears to have pursued a life of crime, which included cases of extortion with menaces and straight robbery. Then rapes start to appear on the list of offences he was accused of committing, along with yet more robbery and violence.

Several attempts were made to catch him, and he spent some time in custody—sometimes managing to escape from it. Eventually the law caught up with him and in 1452 he was held in London’sMarshalsea Prison, where he is supposed to have written his masterpiece. He died on 14 March 1470, and was buried at Greyfriars Chapel near Newgate Prison, from which he had been released following a pardon from Edward IV in 1461. Towards the end of his life he appears to have acquired some degree of wealth, but we have no idea whether this was from his previous life of crime or from a patron such as Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (known as ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’).

Was this unpleasant individual the author of the Morte d’Arthur? Certainly the events of his life were colourful, and the book itself is nothing if not colourful. But could a thug and a rapist be the creator of a work which espouses high ideals of honour and chivalry? Frankly, I cannot answer that question. But I earnestly hope that some other plausible candidate will one day be found. Meanwhile we must make do with the flawed Sir Thomas of Newbold Revell.

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