Did Arthur Actually Exist?

And why I don't think this is the right question to be asking...

Hello there! I’m Holly, and I’m currently studying for a PhD in Archaeology at Oxford, researching the role of women in the social and political developments of 6th- and 7th-century England and France. A bestselling newsletter with over 6,000 readers worldwide, I help curious minds go from “I’ve heard of the Saxons” to “Now I get how it all fits together”, one relatable, richly-narrated story at a time.

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Did Arthur Actually Exist?

And why I don’t think this is the right question to be asking...

‘Dubricius … set the crown upon Arthur's head. Arthur was then fifteen years old, but a youth of such unparalleled courage and generosity, joined with that sweetness of temper and innate goodness, as gained him universal love. When his coronation was over, he, according to the usual custom, showed his bounty and munificence to the people. And such a number of soldiers flocked to him upon it, that his treasury was not able to answer that vast expense. But such a spirit of generosity, joined with valour, can never long want means to support itself. Arthur, therefore, the better to keep up his munificence, resolved to make use of his courage, and to fall upon the Saxons, that he might enrich his followers with their wealth. To this he was also moved by the justice of the cause, since the entire monarchy of Britain belonged to him by hereditary right.’¹

The people’s hero

Few of us will have made it through our childhoods without encountering the enthralling tale of the powerful warrior born into a world swirling with magic and prophecy, whose tale seems to be vitally enmeshed with the history of our island home.

Countless TV adaptations and fantasy fiction retellings have firmly placed Arthur in our sights, even 1500 years after he is supposed to have lived. While we’re pretty sure that enchanted swords and wizards didn’t feature in the historical Arthur’s life, we can never really be too certain, so mysterious are the ‘Dark Ages’ in which he is said to have lived.

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So who was he, really?

In this week’s essay, the fourth in our deep-dive into early medieval kingship (find everything linked HERE), we’re exploring perhaps the most iconic ‘Dark Age’ king. Capturing imaginations for over a millennium with a story that has shape-shifted beyond recognition, Arthur seems to defy all attempts to identify who he truly was, which is why I’ll be arguing that this is the wrong question to be asking the surviving sources. We’ll spend the bulk of our time looking at the earliest mentions of him, those that exist from the early medieval period, before closing with a reflection on how we can use his story more usefully to understand his time.

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This essay is completely free to read, but I just wanted to put a reminder here that you have less than 24 hours to upgrade to a full paid membership with a 20% discount.

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King Arthur, detail from the Nine Heroes Tapestries, c. 1400; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

God’s Honoured Leader

As with so much of the story of medieval Britain’s earliest days, the written sources that survive to tell Arthur’s tale are fragmentary and relatively late at best.

The earliest securely-datable reference to Arthur comes in the History of the Britons (‘Historia Brittonum’) traditionally ascribed to Nennius but more recently attributed to an unknown, anonymous author. Believed to have been written in the first half of the ninth century, the earliest manuscript surviving into modern times, produced within a century of the text’s creation, was destroyed during bombing in the Second World War, meaning that we now rely on an eleventh-century manuscript.²

For those who know Gildas’s On the Ruin of Britain, the History of the Britons feels very familiar; indeed, there are similarities also with the opening chapters of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the early entries of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The History of the Britons gives a broad overview of events that took place in the world since its creation; this it locates in the biblical narrative, beginning with Adam. Focus quickly shifts to events that took place in Britain, setting these within the frameworks provided by biblical and classical history.

‘Respecting the period when this island became inhabited subsequently to the flood, I have seen two distinct relations. According to the annals of the Roman history, the Britons deduce their origin both from the Greeks and Romans…’³

The passage relating to Arthur is very short, and places him in the post-Roman context that we have become familiar with over the past month as we have explored the origins of ‘Dark Age’ kingship. The TL;DR, for those not up to speed, is that after the Romans left Britain in c.410AD, the former province was subjected to frequent and devastating attacks from foreign invaders, whom Gildas and Bede describe as ‘Saxons’ and ‘Picts’. At the same time, no natural leader emerged to step into the power structures vacated by retreating Roman rulers, leaving the door open for locally-significant men to try their hand at uniting their people against the invaders.

For the author of the History of the Britons, Arthur was one of these men.

We learn about him in a passage detailing a series of battles, likely to have taken place in the fifth or sixth century. In the narrative so far, the wicked tyrant Vortigern has invited in the Saxons and suffered the heavy consequences of their deception, before fleeing or dying (the author isn’t too sure of his eventual end).

‘Then it was, that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror. The first battle in which he was engaged was at the mouth of the river Gleni. The second, third, fourth, and fifth, were on another river, by the Britons called Duglas, in the region Linuis. The sixth, on the river Bassas. The seventh in the wood Celidon, which the Britons call Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was near Gurnion castle, where Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, mother of God, upon his shoulders, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the holy Mary, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter. The ninth was at the City of Legion, which is called Cair Lion. The tenth was on the banks of the river Trat Treuroit. The eleventh was on the mountain Breguoin, which we call Cat Bregion. The twelfth was a most severe contest, when Arthur penetrated to the hill of Badon. In this engagement, nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance. In all these engagements the Britons were successful. For no strength can avail against the will of the Almighty.’⁴

Again, for those familiar with Gildas, this final battle at Badon Hill is mentioned in the closing lines of his work, where he describes ‘the siege of Bath-hill’ [equated with Badon Hill’], where ‘not the least slaughter of our cruel foes’ took place ‘forty-four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity’. ⁵ Gildas does not, however, name any of the leaders of the British forces at this battle.⁶

The poet’s favourite

If we turn to the Welsh-language sources, these are potentially earlier than the History of the Britons, but survive in later manuscripts. They may preserve orally-rehearsed memories of an Arthur figure, though we should be alert to the possibility that later ideas became suffused with the original tales.

The earliest of these Welsh-language sources connect Arthur with specific individuals and battles; much like the picture presented in the History of the Britons, he seems to have been a local war leader active in those unsettled years following the fall of Roman rule in Britain.

Y Gododdin is a poem formed of a series of elegies to the great men who died defending the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin, in what is now the far north-west of England, against foreign invaders. Its original date is highly disputed, with estimates ranging from the seventh to eleventh centuries, and it survives in the thirteenth-century ‘Book of Aneirin’ manuscript.

Unfortunately for us, Arthur’s exploits are not recorded in this text, but he is used as a point of comparison to describe the activities of one of the leaders who died at Catraeth around the year 600AD.⁷

He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur
Among the powerful ones in battle
In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade

What’s exciting about this passage is that whether it was written down immediately after the battle, in the mid-seventh century, or belongs to a later period closer to the manuscript’s date, it’s clear that Arthur has by this time become a well-known figure in oral tradition. His story, however embellished it became, was circulating to such a degree that a throwaway reference could be made to his exploits on the assumption that everyone knew what the writer was talking about.

Credit: https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/why-is-king-arthur-a-giant-of-history/

Legacy over legend?

And this is where I think we really need to be focusing our attention when it comes to Arthur.

We will, in all likelihood, never truly know who he was or how he acted in history. There are some truly incredible scholars out there working on piecing together what we can derive, particularly from some of the Welsh-language sources that have often been overlooked. As for many of his contemporaries, however, so little survives anyway for the period, let alone for specific individuals, that it will be difficult to do more than sketch out a shadow of his character and exploits.

What we can be asking, however, is why he became such an important figure in Anglo-Saxon⁸ and later medieval cultures, and indeed to the present day. What was it about him, and the stories that swirled around him, that have captivated imaginations for over a millennium?

For early medieval, ‘Dark Age’ people living before the establishment of Anglo-Saxon rule, he may have become a popular heroic figurehead for British resistance against the incoming Anglo-Saxon invaders. I wonder if this is why the sources from eastern England go relatively quiet about him from around 650AD onwards, when Anglo-Saxon political authority became established.

Later, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his epic ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, perhaps the new ruling elite found a common enemy in the Anglo-Saxons that they, too, had fought (and won) against.

How would we articulate our own fascination with Arthur? Do we, too, identify with the underdog valiantly fighting against the powers-that-be? Is it the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of political power, one that threatens to wipe out what we value as important, that chimes with us? Or is it something else entirely, perhaps a longing, deep down, to inhabit a magical world driven by the promise of a better world ruled by a better leader?

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What do you think?

💬 Will we ever truly know Arthur’s identity, or are we better leaving those questions aside to focus on how and why he became so central to British culture and identity?

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Bibliography

Primary Written Sources

Anonymous. ‘History of the Britons (Historia Brittonum)’. Project Gutenberg: Net Library. 2000.Available at: https://research.ebsco.com/c/dlpr3w/ebook-viewer/pdf/o2davf2ugf/page/pp_4.

Anonymous. ‘Y Gododdin’. Stanza 99. Accessed at: https://storytellingdb.com/y-gododdin/

Geoffrey of Monmouth. ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Accessed at: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/geoffrey-of-monmouth-arthurian-passages-from-the-history-of-the-kings-of-britain.html

Gildas. ‘On the Ruin of Britain’. translated by J. A. Giles. Project Gutenberg, 1999.

1. Geoffrey of Monmouth. ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Bk.IX, ch.1. Accessed at: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/geoffrey-of-monmouth-arthurian-passages-from-the-history-of-the-kings-of-britain.html.

2. The current earliest surviving manuscript is held in the Vatican Library, shelf mark Reg. Lat. 1964. It was published in the 1970s by eminent early medieval scholar David Dumville.

3. Anonymous. ‘History of the Britons (Historia Brittonum)’. Ch.10. Project Gutenberg: Net Library. 2000. p.4.

4. Ibid, ch.50. p.18.

5. Gildas. ‘On the Ruin of Britain’. XXVI. translated by J. A. Giles. Project Gutenberg, 1999. p.11.

6. Indeed, neither Gildas nor Bede explicitly mention Arthur in their narratives. This doesn’t mean he didn’t exist, and doesn’t mean they didn’t know about him; but it might suggest that the sources they depended on didn’t include his name in their accounts.

7. Anonymous. ‘Y Gododdin’. Stanza 99. Accessed at: https://storytellingdb.com/y-gododdin/

8. As ever, this phrase is used in its technical academic sense to refer to the period c.410-1066 in England, without any political connections.