CHAPTER 7
In his book The History of the Kings of Britain , Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us that King Arthur was crowned by St Dubricius at Caerleon – formerly a city, but today just a village in South East Wales. That the Arthur of legend is usually identified with the South West of England seems curiously at odds with this simple statement: if Arthur came from that part of Britain, why was he not crowned at Exeter or Winchester or even London? Furthermore, Geoffrey’s Arthur fights wars against both the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons. This makes no sense. Arthur’s Saxon wars would have taken place in the 6th century, and by then the Roman Empire, at least as far as Britain was concerned, was little more than a memory. For Arthur to have fought both the Romans and Anglo-Saxons in the way described by Geoffrey, he would have needed to have lived for well over 100 years.
As we have seen, one answer to this conundrum is the possibility that there was not just one but two ‘King Arthurs’, their separate careers having later been merged into one. Wilson and Blackett, my co-authors of The Holy Kingdom, identified the first Arthur as a Romano-British general who the Romans called Andragathius. He, they suggested, was the same person as someone called ‘Annun ddu’, who is listed as a son of Magnus Maximus (Macsen Wledig) in the genealogies contained in the Harleian 3859 MS. This is the same MS that contains Nennius’s Historia Brittonum and is kept today in the British Library in London. The physical book we have today is much older than Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which was only published in 1135; however, some of the genealogies are older still and go way back in time to long before the Roman conquest. These genealogies are contained in a section called ‘The Wedding Lists of Owain the Son of Hywel Dda’ and are probably the oldest extant source of their kind. Hywel Dda (Howell the Good) died in AD 950. His core kingdom was South West Wales, but spread to most of the rest of the country. He was also an ancestor of Rhys ap Tewdwr, who, in turn, was ancestral to many later Welsh and Norman-Welsh noblemen. Thus, ‘The Wedding Lists of Hywell’s Son Owain’ is, today, a priceless resource for tracing ancestry.
The usurpation of Magnus Maximus is well documented in history and so, too, is the negative effect it had on the defences of Britain. Most of the men he took with him never returned, many being settled by him in northern Gaul, thereby giving rise to the colony of Brittany or ‘Little Britain’. Others died in battle or were taken prisoner by the Romans. These were either enslaved or absorbed into the opposing army. Either way, they did not return home to Britain. The result of this loss of manpower was significant: the walls protecting northern Britain from the Picts and the coastal forts along the southeast coast that protected southern Britain from Anglo-Saxon pirates were left undermanned. In AD 406, this situation was made much worse when another king of Britain, Constantine III, took a fresh army to Gaul. This army also did not return, which meant that when the Romans finally withdrew from Britain completely in AD 410, there were very few men of fighting age left to defend the former province.
Viewed from across the North Sea, Britain, wealthy but weakly defended, was a plum ripe for the picking. This situation was at its most acute in the east of the country, where the Roman influence has been strongest. In Wales (and Cornwall), which had always been more independent and where Roman rule had had much less impact, the people were not as soft and defenceless as in the east.
Accordingly, it seems likely that this first Arthur (perhaps the same individual the Romans called Andragathius) was in reality a ruler over ‘Cornwall’, the ‘horn’ of Britain, which in those days included the whole South West Peninsula and not just the modern county of that name. This scenario would certainly explain the presence on the ground of some very long ditch and bank earthworks that appear to date from this period. These defences, in places called Bokerley Dyke and in others Wansdyke, run, with breaks, from the Dorset–Hampshire border to just south of Bath. Cutting across older Roman roads, they appear to be boundary fortifications separating a province or kingdom in the southwest of England from the rest of the island of Britain. However, even if this was the kingdom of ‘Arthur I’ (Andragathius), there doesn’t appear to be any connection between him and the later legends concerning Camelot and the Round Table.
As I looked into this mystery further, it became clear to me that the story of the second King Arthur had been merged with the first. This added to the confusion because details that really applied to Arthur II, and therefore had a Welsh context, had been moved to South West England.
An example of this occurred in the 1960s following a dig at South Cadbury Castle in Somerset. This ‘castle’ is actually an Iron Age hillfort rather than the sort of stone building we normally associate with the name. Its relative proximity to Glastonbury and the village of Queen Camel – it is about 11 miles from the former and much closer to the latter – caused John Leland, in his Itinerary of 1542, to claim that it was the site of King Arthur’s Camelot. This identification subsequently became fixed in the minds of scholars, thereby leading them further astray. Between 1966 and 1970, Professor Leslie Alcock of Cardiff University carried out a dig on South Cadbury, proudly producing evidence that, although it dated back to the 1st millennium BC, it had been reused by the Britons during the Arthurian period. On this slender base, Geoffrey Ashe, a history writer who lived in Glastonbury and had been involved with the dig, promoted the idea that far from being a king, Arthur was simply the leader of a small war-band. His ‘Camelot’, far from being the glittering city of Arthurian romance, was in reality the collection of Arthurian period wooden huts that archaeology had identified on this hilltop. Of course, there was no real evidence for any of this other than the simple fact that the hilltop had been reused as a fortification during the 5th and 6th centuries. It did, however, dovetail nicely with the assumption that Glastonbury was the real Avalon, where Arthur had been taken for burial after the Battle of Camlann. What few people realized, then or later, was that Glastonbury’s own claims were highly suspect.
The process of transforming the reputation of Glastonbury from a muddy fen to the most important religious institution in Britain seems to have started at the time of St Dunstan and King Edgar (mid 10th century). It was pretty much complete when, in 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth published his translation of the Welsh annals as The History of the Kings of Britain. Fortunately, Geoffrey’s book is not our only source for the story of Arthur or even the first. However, these earlier sources all suffer from the same weakness: in the form that we have them, none is contemporary with Arthur. Even when the content is old in composition, we are not in possession of the original documents, only of medieval copies.
The very earliest source to mention Arthur by name is Nennius’s Historia Brittonum. This is contained in the Harleian 3859 collection, a small, leather-bound book that is kept today in the British Library. I have examined this book, which, being written on vellum (sheep’s skin), is notable for its repulsive smell. Yet even this book, old as it is, is only a copy. It dates from around 1100, while the original text is thought to have been put together roughly AD 825. Like Geoffrey’s work, it is therefore open to accusations of medieval forgery and wishful thinking. However, even if we had the original manuscript of Nennius to hand, it would still have been written nearly two centuries after Arthur was fighting his battles.
The location of Arthur’s capital of Camelot has been identified in many other places besides South Cadbury Castle: from Camelford (in Cornwall), to Camelodunum (Colchester in Essex), to Carlisle (in the very north of England on the borders of Scotland). However, one clue to its true location is that according to the legends, Arthur’s wife Guinevere was the daughter of ‘King Leodegrance’, and his capital city, or so we are also told, was called Carmelide/Cameliard. Now ‘Leodegrance’ is clearly a corruption of the French Leo-de-Grand, meaning ‘Leo the Great’. Since lion is leon in Welsh, Caerleon, which is often translated as ‘Castle of the Legions’, can also mean ‘Castle of the Lion’ – that is, Castle of Leo. Therefore, it seems likely that Camelot/Carmelide/Cameliard are really one and the same place: Caerleon.
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, this is where Arthur was crowned and where he held his plenary court. It is also where, shortly before his coronation, he fell in love with and married Guinevere. For a wedding present, and as part of her dowry, her father, King Leodegrance, gave Arthur the Round Table.
This got me thinking. Given that Arthur was crowned at Caerleon and this town had a connection with Leodegrance, it seemed logical that the Round Table would be similarly connected. Anxious to ascertain what this might be, I decided to go back to Wales to follow up on this clue.