CHAPTER 4
Diana’s death was still in the future when, in 1995, I paid my first visit to a ruined chapel on a windy hilltop. At the time she was still married to the Prince of Wales , and I had no inkling that this chapel could be in any way connected with her. On the contrary, as far as I knew, the Principality of Wales – especially South Wales – was a backwater. It had little archaeology worth mentioning, or so I thought, apart, that is, from the wreckage of its former coal industry and the ghosts of steel works that had long been closed. It shortly became apparent how wrong my assumptions were.
Accompanying me, acting as my guide, was Alan Wilson – one of the very few people in recent times to champion the traditional, ancient history of Britain. A stocky man in his sixties, with a shock of hair tied back in a ponytail, he reminded me of the late Professor J R R Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings. Wilson had previously made his living in the shipbuilding industry, but now that he was retired from that profession, he was at last able to put to good use the degree in History and Archaeology that he had earned at Cardiff University in his youth. His passion was the legend of King Arthur, who, he informed me, was from Wales and not England, as I thought. It quickly became clear that I was going to have to relearn a lot of history.
Wilson, along with Tony ‘Baram’ Blackett, a research colleague, had first come to my attention about six months earlier when I read about them in a Sunday newspaper. The article concerned their discovery of what they believed to be the true burial place of the legendary King Arthur. I knew that, according to the legends, he was born at Tintagel in Cornwall and was eventually killed not far from there, at a bend in the river Camel. This was the first time anyone had suggested to me that he was buried in Wales! As I understood it, he was interred at Glastonbury in Somerset.
Wilson and Blackett disputed this account in almost every detail and claimed to have the evidence that the famous King Arthur of legend was actually from Wales. However, he was not as isolated a character as the legends imply. According to them, there had been not one but two Dark Age kings called Arthur; we don’t realize this today because their stories have been muddled up. Arthur I, they said, lived in the late 4th to early 5th centuries and fought against the Romans. He was the eldest son of Magnus Maximus, a well-documented personage who, at the head of an army from Britain, invaded Gaul (France) in AD 385. There, he defeated and killed the Emperor Gratian, usurping, for a time, the Western Roman Empire. Their ‘Arthur I’ was evidently called Andragathius by the Romans, and he was a General as well as being Maximus’ eldest son. In fact, it was he, they said, and not his father who killed Gratian after pursuing him from Soissons (where the Battle of Sassy took place) to Lyons.
Victory over the Romans was to prove short-lived, for three years later the usurpers were themselves defeated by a huge army sent by the Eastern Emperor Theodosius. Magnus Maximus was beheaded at Ravenna, but what became of Andragathius is far from clear. According to Wilson and Blackett, he returned to Britain to his power-base in Warwickshire. However, hard evidence for any of this was thin on the ground.
The second Arthur they mentioned lived in the 6th century and is much better documented than the first. According to them, his power-base was the Glamorgan–Gwent area of South Wales, which was then called Siluria. He was not just a local king, though: he was also a ‘Pendragon’. This meant he was the head (pen) military leader (dragon) of all the Britons who were then fighting the Anglo-Saxons. Neither he nor the first Arthur was buried at Glastonbury as is generally supposed. In reality, they said, the first was most likely buried near Atherstone in Warwickshire, while the second was interred in Wales, in the vicinity of the ruined church I was now visiting.
At first sight, Wilson and Blackett’s theories concerning not one but two Arthurs seemed preposterous. For one thing, I had visited Glastonbury on many occasions and had even stood on the spot in the Abbey ruins where, prior to the Reformation, there was an elaborate shrine to King Arthur. In addition, I knew that this romantic, mysterious town is also closely connected with other legends concerning the Holy Grail and Joseph of Arimathea, which explained why King Arthur (singular) had been buried there. Joseph is described in the Bible as having been a member of the Sanhedrin or Jewish Council of elders, while also being a secret follower of Jesus Christ. Because of his high status, he was able to obtain permission from Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, to take down Jesus’ body from the cross and have it buried in his own prepared tomb. The corollary to this story is that Joseph used a cup from the Last Supper to collect some drops of blood from the still-bleeding body of the Christ. Then, after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, he took this precious relic (the Holy Grail) to Britain. Here, he and his companions were given land at Glastonbury, where they built a church, the Vetusta Ecclesia, and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary. It was on the site where this church had once stood that the monks of Glastonbury built the Lady Chapel of their later abbey in Norman times. That the Britons would have wanted to bury King Arthur in such a holy place seems obvious, and, indeed, while digging in their graveyard, the monks even found the bones of a tall man along with a lead plaque identifying him as Arthur.
Faced with such a powerful legend, Wilson and Blackett’s claim that there were two Arthurs and that neither of them were buried at Glastonbury seems highly suspect. Nevertheless, this was not just idle speculation on their part. The article revealed that they had carried out meticulous research over many years; they also made use of all manner of historical records, a large proportion of them ignored by earlier writers and researchers as they were written in Welsh. Furthermore, following clues contained in these texts, I found that they had actually bought the ruined church I was now to visit and had organized an archaeological dig to look for his remains.
This dig, conducted by professional archaeologists and under the auspices of CADW (the Welsh Heritage Agency), took place in 1990. Though Arthur’s remains were not found, they ascertained that the derelict church was only the latest in a sequence of buildings on that site that seemed to go right back to the 1st century AD, the very dawn of Christianity in Britain. One of the succession of buildings – provisionally dated to the fifth or sixth century – had been a round ‘beehive’ structure. Given its shape and age, they thought it was probably a hermitage rather than a church. What was more interesting was that, at the very centre of this round building, the archaeologists found a votive cross. It was about eight inches long and had been cast from an amalgam of mainly silver with some copper and small amounts of other metals as impurities.
Figure 1: The King Arthur votive cross.
The percentage proportions of metals in the cross – 79.5% silver, 14.6% copper, 2.03% lead, with just traces of other elements – was consistent with it having been cast during the Dark Ages. As if to confirm its Arthurian credentials without ambiguity, it also carried a Latin inscription: PRO ANIMA ARTORIUS, meaning ‘for the soul (of) Arthur’.
This was not the only Arthurian relic to be found on the site. The reason the dig had been conducted in the first place was because of an earlier discovery by Wilson and Blackett: a large, L-shaped stone in the graveyard. This too had a Latin inscription, which read: REX ARTORIUS FILI MAURICIUS. Leaving aside the poor Latin grammar (it should more properly have read Rex Artorius filius Mauricii), the meaning was clear enough: ‘King Arthur the son [of] Maurice’. They knew from various sources that there had been a 6th-century king of Glamorgan called Maurice (‘Mauricius’ in Latin, Meurig in Welsh) and that he had been succeeded by his eldest son who was, indeed, called Arthur (‘Artorius’, Athrwys). Thus, the discovery of this stone and the buried silver cross in the centre of the beehive structure seemed pretty good evidence that this ‘King Arthur’ was probably buried in the vicinity of this church. Faced with this evidence, on the ground as well as in libraries, I felt compelled to think again and reassess all that I knew about King Arthur, Wales and the history of the Dark Ages in general. First, though, I needed to take another look at the Glastonbury legends that claimed that Arthur was buried in Somerset and not Wales at all.*
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* See Chart 2: Saints and Kings of Glamorgan, page 225