The fact is that there is no contemporary or near-contemporary evidence for Arthur playing any decisive part in these events at all. No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.
J N L Myres, 1986
How many
other instances can you think of, anywhere on the globe, in any time period,
where a literate people simply failed to record their own history?
Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries is, it seems, unique. Here, the
sequence of ‘one damned thing after another’ goes unrecorded
for almost two hundred years. This gaping hole in our past is now termed
the Dark Ages.
The professional historians who study the period seem to have no doubts about
who is responsible for this lamentable state of affairs: the blame must rest
with the British themselves.
The era is bordered by two dominions. In the first decade of the fifth century
Roman Britain came to an end. By 410 AD the Roman Empire, weakened by internal
pressures and under threat from invading barbarian tribes, lost control of
Britannia, her most northerly province. By the last decade of the sixth century
the bulk of that province, the fertile lowlands of the south east, was in the
hands of Britain’s own barbarian invaders, the Germanic peoples who became
the English. Their dominion was acknowledged by the head of the western Roman
Church, Pope Gregory the Great, who sent missionaries to convert them to the
religion of the Empire. His emissary, St. Augustine of Canterbury, landed on
Thanet, off the Kent coast, in 597 AD. In between these dates, in the Dark
Ages, Britain was ruled by the natives.
By 410 AD Britain had experienced almost four centuries of Roman rule, and
the native elite, at any rate, were literate. They were also Christian, and
Christianity is a book-based religion. The new faith did not leave with the
Romans. We know from Pope Gregory’s own letters that the British Church
was still in existence when Augustine arrived. The natives did not forget how
to write. They left inscriptions carved on stone. Indeed, they even left a
few documents. But the Dark Age British left to posterity no account of their
political and military affairs, no record of the sequence of events that unfolded
in the two centuries of their dominion. Today’s Dark Age historians find
themselves faced with an absence of evidence for this crucial period of transition.
There is no reputable historical data from which to construct a coherent narrative
of how Roman Britain turned into Anglo-Saxon England, of how the British dominion
was reduced to the western margins of the island. What we have, instead, is
a legend.
The gap in our history is where the British of an earlier era positioned their
greatest hero, King Arthur. His tale is familiar to most of us: With its magic
and enchantment, the wizard Merlin, the mysterious Holy Grail and the tragic
love story of Lancelot and Guinevere, it has been told and retold for over
eight hundred years and still finds an audience with each retelling. But behind
this figure there is an earlier Arthur, a British political messiah, the defender
of his people from alien invaders. He, likewise, was brought down by treachery,
but his tragedy was not personal and romantic, it was political and military,
and it engulfed the whole island.
The Dark Age Britons passed no written record down to today’s historians,
but their descendants treasured their own account of ‘what happened next’,
after the Roman Empire ended in Britain and the British were left to rule their
own lands. In time the creation of England confined the independent British
to the western territories of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, but here they upheld,
throughout the middle ages, a version of history in which they were the rightful
rulers of the whole island. It was their land before the Romans came. After
Rome’s departure treacherous pagan Saxons arrived, originally invited
in as allies and mercenary soldiers who turned savagely on their hosts and
took over their country. But they were driven back. Under Arthur’s leadership
the natives resisted, and gained the victory. Britain was restored to British
rule. Tragically, civil war and renewed invasion undid Arthur’s achievement;
the pagan Saxons eventually prevailed. Yet hope remained. Arthur would return
to lead his people again, for Arthur had not died. His earthly career ended,
in the earliest extant account, exactly as in the later stories: “Arthur
himself, our renowned king, was mortally wounded and was carried off to the
island of Avalon, so that his wounds might be attended to.” So says Geoffrey
of Monmouth, in his infamous, twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain.
According to Geoffrey, Arthur fell at Camlann in 542 AD. His History of
the Kings of Britain was written in 1138 AD. So the earliest extant account of
Arthur’s reign was written six centuries after his own era. Even in his
own day Geoffrey was accused of fabricating. But he did not invent Arthur’s
military career as the victorious leader of the Christian British against the
invading pagan Saxons. Arthur was already recorded in that role by the ninth
century. And he did not invent the belief in our ‘once and future king’.
By Geoffrey’s time, as the written record testifies, the entire British
people, the Welsh, the Cornish and the Bretons, believed passionately that
Arthur would return and restore their dominion over the whole island: one twelfth-century
chronicler, aghast at their audacity, records, “Openly they go about
saying that in the end they will have all, by means of Arthur they will have
it back... They will call it Britain again.“ And Geoffrey didn’t
invent the Dark Age British restoration that pushed back the first Saxon advance.
That event is presented as a fact in one of the very few Dark Age documents
we possess, Gildas’ The Ruin of Britain. The date of this sermon is disputed,
but most hold it to be mid-sixth century. The writer is quite clear that, in
his own day, the treacherous pagan Saxons who once drenched the island in blood
have ceased to be a threat. He tells of a war between natives and incomers
which was resolved in the natives’ favour a generation previously. If
Gildas is to be believed, then at some point in the late fifth or early sixth
century there was a British victory, followed by decades of British rule. So
was there a real King Arthur?
The question has been the subject of vitriolic controversy from Geoffrey’s
day down to our own. For a time it did seem that the heat had gone out of the
debate. Beginning in the late nineteenth century a consensus developed among
professional historians which allowed that the pre-Galfridian Arthurian tradition
really was rooted in historical fact, and that the Britons really did remember
something of their own history. There was, after all, no getting away from
Gildas, contemporary witness to a sixth-century British restoration. And the
victorious British forces must have had a leader. Even the name was unexceptionable:
Artorius was a Roman family name and there are inscriptions suggesting a member
of that family served in the Roman army in second-century Britain. A likely
character could, it seemed, be constructed from the surviving evidence. Of
course he could be nothing like the Golden Age king of legend. The real Arthur
would have to have been a man of his era, and that, historians knew, was a
dark age. But a Romano-British general, struggling to defend Roman civilization
against the encroaching barbarians in a lost outpost of the Empire, would seem
to fit the circumstances. For most of the twentieth century, most historians
accepted that there must have been such a man behind the myth of Arthur. But
this view was decisively overthrown in the late 1970s, just when Thatcherism
overthrew the post-war consensus in British politics.
The question ‘Was there a real King Arthur?’, though still of intense
interest to the general public, is now one which no professional historian
can even ask. The academic consensus which has held sway for the past thirty
years has ruled it out of court, on the grounds that the early British texts
which name Arthur have no more relevance to the study of the British Dark Ages
than Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous book. Academic study of Arthur is
now restricted to his legend, and the period where his own people located his
earthly career is unknown and unknowable, its political history forever unwritten
because no contemporary record exists. Like the man said, these aren’t
called the Dark Ages for nothing.
It is my contention that this darkness is not a result of the record’s
inadequacies, it is a construct of the Dark Age historians themselves. It is
a consequence of their political and racial bias, whether conscious or unconscious;
of their refusal to understand the surviving texts on their own terms; and
of their strange willingness to accept a two hundred year gap in the record
without any real explanation as to how it came about. Most of all it results
from their antipathy to the Arthur of history and to his earliest known biographer.
If Geoffrey of Monmouth had not been dismissed as a fabricator, but treated
with the respect due to one of the greatest propagandists ever known, Dark
Age historians could have avoided wasting quite so much of their precious time.
The political history of Britain can indeed be written, if only in outline.
As the ideal materials for writing such a history do not exist, we must make
use of what we have. We must draw out the evidence of all the available sources,
the contemporary and the derivative, the insular and the continental, the historical
and the legendary, the respectable and the thoroughly disreputable. What emerges
is a clear and comprehensible picture of independent Britain; of the forces
which lead to its creation and its destruction; and of Arthur’s role
in this critical period of our history.
We must begin somewhere, so let’s start where Arthur himself, according
to our most disreputable source, had his beginnings. Tintagel, in Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s story, is where our once and future king was conceived.
Heretic Emperor: The Lost History of King Arthur
Copyright © V M Pickin 2009