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Camelot

When I first began my search for King Arthur’s tomb and the origins of the Arthurian legend, I decided the best way to start was by trying to locate the fabled Camelot. After all, this was said to have been Arthur’s capital and seat of power. Before continuing I should explain that the place I was looking for was not a castle; at least it would not have been originally. If Arthur lived around AD 500, as the legend holds, then he would never have occupied a huge stone keep, surrounded by battlements, towers, and decorative turrets, with a portcullis, drawbridge, and moat. British fortifications of the late fifth and early sixth centuries were not massive Gothic castles but wooden stockades built atop earthen banks. Camelot would have been a fort, or fortified town, rather than a castle. Furthermore, Arthur and his warriors would have appeared very different from the shining knights so familiar today; armor was generally leather and chain mail, in the fashion of the late Roman army. The reason Arthur is now perceived as a medieval-style king of many centuries after his alleged lifetime is that writers of the Middle Ages tended to set ancient stories, such as the legends of Greece and Rome, in their own historical era and in a context of knighthood and chivalry. They couldn’t do much else. It took modern archaeology to reveal how people of that bygone time really lived.

Searching for the supposed site of the magnificent Camelot was easier said than done; no place with that name exists today, nor is its location revealed by any historical documentation or map. Although the Arthurian romances from the late twelfth to the fourteenth centuries portray Camelot as a fabulous city, the grandest in all Britain, remarkably none of the authors tell us where it actually is. The earliest surviving reference to provide any specific location for the legendary Camelot was by the English author Sir Thomas Malory in the late 1400s. Thomas Malory wrote the most famous of all the medieval Arthurian romances between 1450 and 1470. Published under the French title Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur), it was an amalgamation of many of the previous King Arthur tales that had appeared since the purported discovery by the Glastonbury monks in 1191. These earlier works were widely read, but Malory’s rendition was to take the Arthurian legend to an altogether different level of popularity. Before this time, all books and documents were handwritten and so took a multitude of scribes countless hours of painstaking work to laboriously copy. Obviously, this severely limited the number of people who actually got to read the early Arthurian tales. Malory’s The Death of Arthur was to change everything.¹

Although it had been invented by the Chinese as early as the 1040s, the printing press did not reach Europe until four centuries later, and the first operational device in England was introduced by William Caxton of London in 1475. Caxton was delighted to print Malory’s work, and it was he who chose to publish under the French title. Although the book was written in English, Caxton evidently considered French to be more sophisticated. Malory actually titled his work The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table. The Death of Arthur was originally only the name for the last section. The catchier title clearly shows the wily Caxton had his eyes firmly set on sales, and sales he achieved. When it was published in 1485, it became an unprecedented success. As one of the first extensively available books to be printed in England, it became the country’s first bestseller. (Even the bestselling book of all time, the Bible, was not printed in English for another century.) The Death of Arthur is pretty much the Arthurian tale we know today, in essence the theme for many of the modern Hollywood epics, including the famous John Boorman movie Excalibur.

In his work Malory breaks with something of a literary tradition dating back three hundred years by being the first Arthurian author to provide a precise location for Camelot. He reveals that it was Winchester Castle in the county of Hampshire in central southern England. In Malory’s time Winchester Castle was indeed an impressive structure, and it had served as a royal residence until the fourteenth century. However, it was not so much the building itself that persuaded Malory that it was the site of Camelot but something it contained. In the castle’s Great Hall was none other than King Arthur’s round table. We know it was there in Malory’s time as it is referenced by the English chronicler John Harding in 1463.² From what he tells us, it seems that Winchester Castle was widely regarded as Camelot during his day. Although much of Winchester Castle has long since been demolished, the Great Hall still survives. More remarkably, so does the round table. Eighteen feet in diameter, made of solid oak, and weighing approximately one and a quarter tons, it is now a table top without legs hanging on the wall. It resembles an enormous dartboard, painted in green and white segments said to indicate where the king and his knights once sat, and in the segment indicating King Arthur’s place is the painting of an enthroned and bearded king. Around the rim are written the names of Camelot’s knights, and in the middle there is a huge red and white rose encircled by the words: “This is the Round Table of King Arthur with 24 of his named knights.”

So was Malory right: Is Winchester Castle really the fabled Camelot? Well, the building that survives today, and the larger castle that was there in the 1400s, was certainly not Camelot. It was only built in the thirteenth century, but fortifications of various types had existed on the site from as early as Roman times (AD 43–410), when Winchester was one of the largest cities in Britain. During the Saxon period (AD 550–1066), it even became the principal city of all England for a while, and a statue of the most celebrated English king to rule from here, Alfred the Great, stands proudly at the heart of the town. In theory, therefore, the site of Winchester Castle could have been the seat of a King Arthur who is said to have lived around the year 500. Nevertheless, the castle’s case for being Camelot relies principally on its round table. Is it really a genuine Arthurian relic as Malory and his contemporaries clearly believed? Or is it, like the Glastonbury lead cross, just another medieval fake?

Well, to start with, we have the same old problem. Like the association between Glastonbury and Arthur’s burial site, there is no surviving reference to King Arthur having a round table before the twelfth century, over six hundred years after the alleged Arthurian era. Nonetheless, the oldest known historical reference to Arthur having a round table does date from almost forty years before the purported discovery of Arthur’s grave. It is found in the work of a Norman poet named Wace from the Isle of Jersey off the coast of France. (At the time few people had surnames. They were either called “someone of somewhere,” such as Geoffrey of Monmouth [“de” in French, as in Robert de Boron], or they were simply known by their Christian names, such as Wace.) Completed in 1155, Wace’s Romance of Brutus—or Roman de Brut in its original French—is a history of Britain in poetic verse.³ According to Wace the round table was a royal conference table that seated fifty of Arthur’s knights. The reason for it being round, rather than rectangular, was to promote a sense of equality among Arthur’s noblemen. No one could sit at its head. Wace claims he was not the source of the round-table story, saying that he learned of it in Brittany, a part of northern France where many Britons had fled after England was progressively invaded by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons in the late fifth and sixth centuries. Unfortunately, much of Wace’s Romance of Brutus is as much fiction, or at least mythology, as it is historical reality. For example, the title is derived from the name of one Brutus of Troy, a purely mythological figure who is said to have been Britain’s first king. Wace includes this medieval fallacy as a historical event in his narrative. So how seriously should we take his Arthurian theme of the round table?

In support of Wace some literary scholars have indicated the similarities between his account of the round table’s purpose and historical references to ancient Celtic courts, where chieftains and their leading warriors would sit in a circle so that feuding over precedence could be avoided. The Celts were the native peoples of Britain before, during, and immediately after the period of Roman occupation, usually referred to as the Britons (as other parts of Western Europe such as Ireland were also Celtic). It is possible, therefore, that this evidently common tradition may have led to a British king conceiving the idea of a round table during the sub-Roman period (the term archaeologists use for fifth-and sixth-century Britain). Alternatively, the round-table motif may have originated in France where Arthur could have been confused with another ancient hero, Charlemagne the king of the Franks (the early French). Charlemagne, who reached the height of his power around the year 800, when his empire united much of Western Europe, did possess a celebrated round table. According to his biographer and courtier Einhard, Charlemagne’s round table was decorated with a map of Rome.⁴

The round-table concept may have been associated with the early Arthurian legend as Wace claims, or it may have been a later interpolation. When I first visited Winchester in the early 1990s, there seemed no way of knowing one way or the other. However, my suspicions concerning the Great Hall’s “round table” were aroused when I learned that it was the fashion in Thomas Malory’s day for castles to house such round tables to emulate the Arthurian court. Just a few years before Malory was writing in the 1450s, the powerful René, Duke of Anjou in France, not only had a magnificent round table assembled but also had an entire castle constructed in the style of Camelot to house it.⁵

Soon after Arthur’s grave was said to have been found in Glastonbury and the Arthurian romances began to appear, it became the trend across Europe for festive events known as “Round Tables” to be staged. These involved feasting and jousting and nobles dressed in costume as King Arthur’s knights. The first of such Camelot scenarios is recorded in 1223, and by the late thirteenth century, the events were commonplace to celebrate victories, weddings, births, and sometimes—in the case of unpopular individuals—even deaths. In England, for instance, King Edward I held one at his wedding in 1254, another in 1284 to celebrate his conquest of Wales, and yet another in 1290 for the betrothal of his daughter, and he supported still more held by his barons.⁶ His grandson Edward III took the tradition a step further and decided to create an order of knighthood based on the Knights of the Round Table. This he inaugurated as a round-table tournament held in 1344 and erected a huge circular building for the purpose.⁷ (Incidentally, the institution he founded still survives today and is called the Order of the Garter; it is one of the highest awards to be bestowed by the monarch. Its knights include former prime minister John Major, the queen’s husband, Prince Philip, and, believe it or not, the emperor of Japan.) Such pageants continued during the Middle Ages, right through the fifteenth century, when Malory was writing, and as late as 1566 Mary Queen of Scots had a round table made for an Arthurian masquerade held in Scotland to celebrate the baptism of her son.⁸ Many such events are recorded as having a round table made specifically for the purpose. It seemed, therefore, that in Malory’s day there may have been dozens of fake “round tables” kicking about. Was the Winchester item merely one of them?

At the time I was pondering Winchester’s Camelot connection in the early 1990s, the tourist literature I obtained at the Great Hall appeared noncommittal concerning its round table’s authenticity. It did, however, reveal that the surface painting was a later addition. The inscription around the center of the design is in Middle English, a language that did not exist until the late twelfth century, but the central rose motif can be dated more precisely. It is a red and white Tudor Rose, the emblem of the Tudor dynasty, which only came to power in 1485. As Middle English had pretty much died out to be replaced by what we would recognize as “Shakespearean English” (technically, Early Modern English) by the early sixteenth century, the painting can therefore be dated as somewhere between 1485 and 1525. However, the pamphlet assured the visitor that the table itself was very much older. In essence, it implied the jury was still out on the matter of its true age. On the contrary, after a bit of digging through Winchester’s city library (there was no Internet back then, remember), I found that the jury had in fact returned its verdict as long ago as 1976. In that year the eminent British archaeologist Martin Biddle, later professor of medieval archaeology at Oxford University, had the table scientifically examined. Two types of dating were employed: dendrochronology, which could determine the age of wood by studying tree rings, and radiocarbon dating, which could establish the age of organic remains by chemical analysis. The first estimated a date of around 1270, and the second around 1290. These should not, though, be considered precise results. The margin of error for the radiocarbon dating was some fifty years, and the dendrochronology some thirty years either way. Additionally, the tree-ring analysis only determined when the tree was felled (when it died), not when the wood was actually used for the table. Even taking all this into account, the earliest possible date for the Winchester Round Table is around 1240—seven centuries after King Arthur’s perceived era. Unfortunately for the Great Hall, its relic was almost certainly one of the feasting “round tables” made in the thirteenth century for Edward I, most likely the one constructed for the betrothal of his daughter in 1290, particularly as the event is recorded on April 20 of that year as having occurred in Winchester itself.⁹

The Winchester Round Table may explain the belief that the town was Camelot in Thomas Malory’s time in the mid-1450s, but today we know it cannot be considered as evidence that Winchester was the celebrated capital of King Arthur. But there is a more damning indication that the town was never originally regarded as Camelot. Although it is claimed that Arthur did rule from a splendid, impregnable castle in earlier accounts, the oldest surviving reference to the name Camelot is found in the work Lancelot by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes (pronounced “Cret-ee-an de Twor,” Troyes is a town in north-central France), written around 1180.¹⁰ In this poem Chrétien also refers to the town of Winchester; significantly, however, he treats it as a completely separate place. Sadly, Winchester’s claim to being Camelot had pretty much dissolved.

Soon after I published these findings, Winchester’s Great Hall tourist literature was updated to include Radford’s results, just as Glastonbury’s “Avalon” signboards had been removed. Luckily, I avoided a potential lynching as visitor levels remained unchanged, while many of Winchester’s Camelot advocates continued undeterred. Whereas some of Glastonbury’s unflinching Avalon proponents had used the argument that monks would never lie, Winchester’s devotees began muttering about the unreliability of scientific tests. All the same, Winchester was yet another British town I should probably best avoid.

But if Winchester was not King Arthur’s capital, where was I to concentrate my search? Well, to start with, wherever the legendary city might have been, it is unlikely to have borne the name Camelot. As I mentioned, the oldest extant reference to the word is found in the poem by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180. Although earlier writers, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, talk at length about Arthur’s magnificent city, not once do they record its name. The inference, therefore, is that the true name of the legendary city had been long forgotten by the twelfth century. This obviously made my search for a historical King Arthur considerably difficult. Like the subsequent Arthurian romancers, Chrétien fails completely to provide any indication as to where Camelot might be found. But are his predecessors of more help?

Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing around 1136, does say that Arthur held court for a while in the town of Caerleon in south Wales, over one hundred miles west of Winchester, and some modern historians have suggested that it may have inspired the concept of Camelot. In Roman times it was a military outpost with a large civilian population, and Geoffrey says the ancient Roman ruins were still visible during his time. Modern excavations have again uncovered these remains, including an amphitheater (arena) that some local enthusiasts have suggested might have been the origin of the round-table legend. Personally, I failed to see how a stepped, stone structure built to accommodate over six thousand spectators to such venues as gladiatorial contests could be regarded as a round table. Nevertheless, many of the guides I encountered on my visit to the Roman arena in 1991 were convinced by the idea. Questioning them concerning Caerleon’s claim to be Camelot, I pointed out that, like Winchester, the first author to name Camelot, Chrétien de Troyes, also refers to Caerleon as a completely separate place¹¹ and that Geoffrey of Monmouth only included it as a location where Arthur held court for a short period during campaigns. They were, however, undeterred. Indeed, some were positively hostile. Caerleon, it seemed, was yet another place I should probably steer clear of.

Another tourist site that makes claim to being Camelot is Tintagel (see plate 2) on the north coast of the county of Cornwall in the far southwest of England. I arrived at the height of the holiday season to find it teeming with sightseers of all nationalities. Like Glastonbury, Tintagel’s tourism has been bolstered by its Arthurian links. The streets were filled with stores bearing names like The Camelot Gift Shop and restaurants such as Merlin’s Café. There were hotels decked out in Arthurian style and a museum dedicated to the King Arthur legend. Known as King Arthur’s Hall, it even had its own round table made from solid granite. Along with the impressive building, it had been created in the 1930s by a somewhat eccentric millionaire who made his money from custard. Tintagel has a real castle, though. It stands just outside the town on what is virtually an island surrounded by foaming sea, linked to the mainland by a narrow ridge of rock. The ridge crumbled long ago, so to reach it I had to cross a dizzying footbridge and ascend a tiring flight of steps. The castle appeared much older than Winchester’s Great Hall. Its ruined stone walls, resplendent with archways, battlements, buttresses, and arrow slits, stood ancient, weathered, and spectacular above the Atlantic breakers crashing against the cliffs below. This, according to the tourist literature, was the true site of Camelot.

Tintagel is yet another location first associated with the Arthurian legend by Geoffrey of Monmouth, asserting that it was here that Arthur was born. Although Geoffrey presented his History of the Kings of Britain as a historical text, his portrayal of Arthur’s birth is, to say the least, somewhat fanciful. He tells us how Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, had designs on Igraine, the wife of Gorlois the Duke of Cornwall. Aided by a magic potion prepared by Merlin the magician, Uther was transformed for a time into the form of Gorlois, and as such he visited the duke’s castle at Tintagel and made love to Igraine. Thus Arthur is conceived. On the death of Gorlois, Uther makes Igraine his queen, and Arthur is born at Tintagel Castle.¹² Whether or not I was to believe any of this, or even if it had been based on some earlier tradition, it all seemed completely irrelevant to my search. Not once does Geoffrey say that Tintagel was the site of King Arthur’s magnificent capital. Indeed, as far as I know, none of the original Arthurian romances ever suggested it was. It was simply said to be Arthur’s birthplace. Even so, although the castle is very old and it did indeed once belong to an Earl of Cornwall, it cannot have been the birthplace of someone who lived around the year 500. It was only built in the early 1100s. In fact it was built for a Lord Reginald, the Earl of Cornwall, who, perhaps more than coincidentally, was the brother of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patron—the man who commissioned him to write his book. Most historians I spoke to believed that Geoffrey had concocted the story in order to please his sponsor. As with Glastonbury and Winchester, the publication of my research made little difference to Tintagel’s tourist industry; today there’s even a stunning cliff-top lodge called Camelot Castle Hotel, done out in the most elaborate style, complete with four-poster beds and even a mock round table in the lobby. Despite my reservations concerning its Arthurian authenticity, I happen to like Tintagel. Not only was I shown absolutely no hostility by the locals, but its shops and museum still sell my books even today. It was, at least, a place to which I could fearlessly return.

Fig. 2.1. Proposed Camelot sites in England and Wales.

In stark contrast with the thronging Tintagel, the next stop in my search for Camelot was a lonely and isolated spot in the county of Somerset, around ten miles southeast of Glastonbury. This huge grass-covered earthwork called Cadbury Castle has been claimed by local people to have been the site of Camelot for a good few hundred years. No castle stands there today; in fact none ever did. Surrounded by a band of woodland, the hilltop site consists of a series of roughly circular ditches and high, steep-sided banks approximately fifteen hundred feet in diameter, enclosing a flat expanse large enough to encompass a modern English village. Cadbury Castle is what is known as a hill fort, a defensive earthwork built in pre-Roman times, perhaps as early as twenty-five hundred years ago. Originally the ring of embankments would have supported wooden stockades, and the central area would have contained a fortified settlement of thatched dwellings of heavy timber and rough stone. Although it predates the supposed Arthurian period by as much as a thousand years, such sites were refortified in the fifth and sixth centuries. Indeed, archaeological excavations conducted here in the late 1960s showed that it was reoccupied around the year 500, precisely the time Arthur is said to have lived. Leslie Alcock, the director of the dig, actually titled his book on the excavation Cadbury/Camelot.¹³ So unusual was it for an esteemed archaeologist to link his name with the Arthurian legend that many Arthurian enthusiasts even today accept that Camelot has been unearthed at Cadbury.

You may guess what’s coming next. Yes, I had my doubts. Although it was extensively refortified during the period Arthur is said to have lived, so were many other similar pre-Roman hill forts throughout Britain. These include the hill forts of Dinas Powys and Lodge Hill in Wales; Old Oswestry and The Wrekin in central England; Chûn Castle and Castle Dore in Cornwall; and Barbury Castle, Hod Hill, and Maiden Castle in southern England. In fact, there are literally dozens all across the country where archaeology has shown intensive reoccupation during the supposed Arthurian time. After the Romans left Britain in AD 410, law and order quickly broke down in many parts of the country, and by the year 500 there were invasions from Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and Ireland. The old hill forts proved to be the most readily defensible locations. Nothing discovered during Leslie Alcock’s excavations even remotely suggested that the fabled King Arthur had any more links with Cadbury Castle hill fort than any of the others. In fact, contrary to popular belief, Alcock himself never said Cadbury was Camelot. He merely named his book in reference to local folklore that held the location was Arthur’s capital (and perhaps with his eye on sales). The oldest known reference to Cadbury Castle being Camelot is found in the work of Henry VIII’s antiquarian, John Leland (the man who examined Glastonbury’s lead cross), who visited the district in 1542, reporting that local people believed it was the site of Camelot, probably as the word Camel was found in the name of the nearby village of Queen Camel.¹⁴ Queen was added in the thirteenth century, coming from Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry III, who owned the land at the time. Previously, it was just called Camel, which many Arthurian enthusiasts have seen as evidence that this was the location of Camelot. However, this was not its original name; in the tenth century it is recorded as Cantmael, derived from the Celtic meaning “District of the Bare Hill.” Considering the fact that the local folklore appears based on a name the location did not have until many centuries after the Arthurian era, Cadbury Castle’s specific case for being Camelot pretty much evaporates.

Just how much of the country was I to wander before finding anywhere with a substantial or at least a truly ancient claim to being Arthur’s legendary capital? There were two other places that had been suggested by various authors as possible candidates for Camelot, but these I soon rejected. The Roman name for Colchester in the county of Essex to the northeast of London was Camulodunum, which might, with some imagination, be regarded as being the origin of the name Camelot. It was certainly the principal city in early Roman Britain, but by the time Arthur is said to have lived around the year 500, it was firmly within the territory conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and had been for around fifty years. Then there was the town of Camelford in Cornwall. It does not even seem to have existed before being recorded in the thirteenth century, as it is not so much as mentioned in the Domesday Book, an exhaustive survey of England commissioned by King William I and completed in 1086. In any event, it seems that both of these locations could be dismissed, as the word Camelot most likely originated in the fertile imagination of the poet Chrétien de Troyes or one of his close contemporaries, as no one before the 1190s gave a name to the fabled city.

I had, it seemed, run out of places to go: my hunt for Camelot—for the time being at least—had led to a complete dead end. In my search for the historical King Arthur, I decided to turn to another Arthurian theme. What about the legend of Excalibur, the sword in the stone, and the Lady of the Lake? Could they help in my quest to discover the true origins of the Arthurian saga? As unlikely as it might seem, the story of King Arthur’s fabled weapon may well have emerged from genuinely ancient traditions.