The Real King Arthur

King Arthur is arguably the most famous monarch in British history, the subject of countless films and books of both non-fiction and fantasy. But there's one tiny, but important question worth asking: did he even exist? Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory' See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:42Dana Schwartz?

  One quick and very exciting note before we begin today's episode. I have a brand new podcast. It's called Hoax, and I, with my co-host, Lizzie Logan, will focus on a lesser-known or famous hoax from history or relatively modern history, discussing the question of why people believe things that aren't true. Unfortunately, a question that seems all too relevant today. The very first episode about the Cuttingly Fairies was released yesterday. It should be in the Noble Blood feed. I hope that you like it, that you want to listen to the podcast. If you do, please subscribe, leave a review or rating. It absolutely

• 1:25Dana Schwartz?

  helps. Doing podcasts about history is my absolute favorite thing in the world, and your support means the absolute world. It means I get to do what I love to do. And don't worry, this podcast is not in any way a replacement for Noble Blood. Both are continuing on for as long as people want to listen. Hoax will drop every other Monday, and I hope you love it. And now into this episode, which you might be able to pick up, has a slight hoax theme.

• 2:00Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised.

• 2:11Dana Schwartz?

  In 1998, an archaeologist digging at Tintagel Castle had this sort of moment which, I imagine, makes people want to become archaeologists in the first place. Tintagel Castle, on the coast of Cornwall, is famous today mainly for being the ancestral home of King Arthur. Well, according to popular myth. There's actually no archaeological evidence that King Arthur or his family was ever associated with Tintagel. In fact, there's no actual archaeological evidence that King Arthur was real. But maybe all of that was about to change.

• 2:56Dana Schwartz?

  In 1998, the archaeological team from Glasgow was digging on the castle's eastern terraces when someone uncovered a piece of Cornish slate. The archaeologists pulled it away from the craggy earth and saw on the slate carved letters. The archaeologists saw an A, an R. We can only imagine the excitement he must have felt when he saw the third letter, a T. The Latin inscription on the stone, dated from the 6th century, is faint, but it's thought to read something that translates to: "Artgno, descendant of Paternus Colus, made this."

• 3:41Dana Schwartz?

  It's not exactly a smoking gun, but the fact that a Latin carving with a name similar to Arthur, dated from the historical period during which the mythological king might have lived, was enough to cause excitement in the media. Dr. Jeffrey Wainwright, the chief archaeologist at the English Heritage, was happy to play into that excitement. Quote, "Tintagel has presented us with evidence of a prince of Cornwall, in the Dark Ages, living in a high-status domestic settlement at the time Arthur lived. It has given us the name of a person, Artgno. Artgno was here.

• 4:26Dana Schwartz?

  That is his name on a piece of stone. It is a massive coincidence, at the very least. This is where myth meets history. It's the find of a lifetime." End quote.

• 4:40Dana Schwartz?

  The connection, in my view, is extremely flimsy. But you can't blame Dr. Wainwright for trying to get the public excited about what would otherwise be a fairly dull project about faint Latin inscriptions in 6th century stones. King Arthur is a marquee name, someone who, like King Henry VIII, or Anne Boleyn, or Elizabeth I, or Shakespeare, seems to get people interested in history. King Arthur is arguably one of the most famous historical figures in the world, but there's almost no evidence he ever existed at all.

• 5:23Dana Schwartz?

  So who is King Arthur? And how did someone who maybe never existed become so famous and so sought after? It's a story not about stones from the 500s, but a story about stories, about how sometimes a mystery that lets the audience play detective makes for a better version of history than the real thing. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

• 6:00Dana Schwartz?

  If King Arthur did really exist, most consensus estimates that he would have lived around the 5th or 6th century, a period after the Romans left Britain, during which the island was in institutional and economic collapse. Rome withdrew from Britain in 410 AD, while they were under siege from the Visigoths back home. And what was left on the island was, in a word, chaos.

• 6:33Dana Schwartz?

  Former Roman institutions were left abandoned and collapsing. Local economies were crumbling, and the people in fragmented fiefdoms were tormented by plague, drought, and invading Saxons. Mark Morris, the historian and author of the 2021 book, The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England (400-1066), puts it very succinctly, quotes, "It was a miserable time to be alive." So why do people think King Arthur would have existed during this period? Well, there are a few vaguely suggestive sources.

• 7:17Dana Schwartz?

  The oldest possible reference to a historical Arthur comes from a book called Historia Brittonum, or History of the Britons, written by a monk named Neneus around 828, although it only survives in copies from the 11th century on. Before we even begin, it's worth paying attention to the tenuousness of that source. It's a text from the 11th century, which is actually a copy of a book from two centuries before that, which is talking about a period several hundred years before that.

• 7:59Dana Schwartz?

  Historia Brittonum contains a section including a battle list, 12 battles in which someone named Arthur led troops. This Arthur isn't actually called a king, but rather a dux belorum, or military leader, a general. The battle list ends with the Battle of Baden, where Neneus claims that Arthur killed 960 men, a resounding and impressive victory. If you're interested in proof that that battle actually happened, there's some pretty good evidence you can cite. There's some archaeological evidence that Anglo-Saxon migration reversed around that

• 8:42Dana Schwartz?

  time, which is consistent with a massive victory of the British. After all, who wouldn't turn around when faced with a general who could kill nearly 100 other soldiers himself?

• 8:55Dana Schwartz?

  There's also another extremely early source, a text written in the 6th century, called "On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain" by Gildes, which mentions Badin. And that's huge. That battle would have been within living memory of when Gildes was writing his book. Except, Gildes doesn't actually mention Arthur. It's possible, maybe, that Arthur figure was just too obvious to need to be mentioned? Or maybe Neneus, in the 9th century, got his battles mixed up, and that heroic general Arthur fought

• 9:35Dana Schwartz?

  in a different later battle? But there's also no Arthur mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which would have covered the period he was alive. Nor is there an Arthur in the 731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which also mentions the battle at Badin. Gildes does mention someone named Ambrosius Arlenius, which excites some people, because I suppose it starts with the letter A, but that seems like the type of thing that only matters if you're already determined to find evidence for a real King Arthur.

• 10:16Dana Schwartz?

  Even Neneus's book, which does mention Arthur, the source that's most helpful if you're someone clinging to the idea that someone named Arthur exists, gets a little, let's say, less than factual. There's another section of Neneus's Historia Britnum that claims that Arthur had a dog, named Cabal, who was chasing a boar, and while the dog was running, his paw print became permanently embedded in stone. "And people would try to steal the stone," Neneus says, "but then the very next day, it would be right back where it was." Neneus also tells us that Arthur's son was buried in a tomb that's never the

• 10:59Dana Schwartz?

  same length if you measure it more than once. Quote, "And men come to measure the grave and find it sometimes six feet in length, sometimes nine, sometimes 12, sometimes 15. And whatever length you might measure in at one time, a second time, you will not find it to have the same length. And I myself have put this to the test." End quote. And so, even back then, the oldest source we have mentioning a candidate who could ostensibly be our King Arthur, he's not a king, first of all, and second of all, he's already a figure of popular mythology. There's another source people often bring up,

• 11:44Dana Schwartz?

  the Annalists Cambria, or Welsh Annals, originated in the 10th century, but which survives as a copy from two centuries after that. The Welsh Annals also mention Arthur and the Battle of Badon, but the text went through so many revisions over the centuries, it's impossible to know what the original text was, or whether it was ever a corroboration of the Historia Bretonna, or whether it was just using the Historia Bretonna as a source. And so, the King Arthur of our popular imagination exists really only in the margins of historical sources,

• 12:28Dana Schwartz?

  and it requires plenty of squinting. Certainly, a very, very long time ago, people had an idea of "someone called Arthur", whether he was real or not. There's a Welsh poem called Egid Odin from between the 7th and 11th centuries, and it mentions some random warrior, and then adds, "he was no Arthur", the way someone today might say, "he was no George Clooney", or whatever. Of course, once again, we're faced with the question of whether it's possible the author of that poem had just read the Historia Bretonna and took note of this guy who allegedly killed 900 men.

• 13:13Dana Schwartz?

  He might be referring to Arthur as a "man who was understood to be a figure of myth already, and not of history." That's really kind of all we have. Countless books and articles have been written about the "real" King Arthur. And the idea that there might be some hidden clues we've overlooked sends historians and amateurs alike into Da Vinci Code-esque tizzies every few decades, only for nothing really worthwhile to come up. The archaeologist Noel Miles once riley made the declaration that "no figure on the borderline

• 13:57Dana Schwartz?

  of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time." On the evidence, it does seem astonishing that an occasionally-referenced general somehow became one of the most celebrated figures in all of British mythology. So how did Arthur, Dux Bolorum, become a king? We have a Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth to thank for the King Arthur who has captivated our imagination for centuries. Three hundred years after Nennius wrote his battle list that included a battle leader

• 14:39Dana Schwartz?

  named Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth decided on a slight rebrand. In his 1136 Historia Regnum Britanniae, he wrote about King Arthur, the monarch who defeated the Saxons. This is the first version of Arthur that has elements of the story that remain in our mythology today. Sort of the biggest hits of Arthurian legend: Guinevere, Excalibur, Merlin. In Geoffrey's version of the story, King Arthur's father was Uther Pendragon, and Arthur was conceived at Tintagel Castle and then ultimately died while battling Mordred, and he was laid

• 15:23Dana Schwartz?

  to rest in Avalon. The larger cast of side-characters aren't there, but the general shape should be familiar to anyone who went through a "King Arthur" phase. But Geoffrey didn't even really purport to historical accuracy, or at least not all that convincingly. Remember, he's writing in the 12th century about something that allegedly was taking place in the 6th century. Geoffrey claimed he was basing the Arthur story on a "very ancient book", but inconveniently for us, he doesn't actually mention what that book might be.

• 16:04Dana Schwartz?

  Even at that time, Geoffrey's contemporaries were aware that he was writing a work of, if not entirely fiction, then almost entirely fiction. William of Newburgh, a 12th-century historian, wrote of Geoffrey, "It is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur was made up, partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons." The legend of Arthur was forming in real time, a folk story that was giving Britain its own identity. Geoffrey's book did please the Britons.

• 16:49Dana Schwartz?

  It was a sensation, the most popular text in the Middle Ages after the Bible. The idea of Arthur was exciting, a matter of national pride. In 1233, the Earl of Cornwall made what objectively seems like a terrible trade: three prime estates in exchange for Tintagel. Tintagel was remote and served no real defensive or strategic function, but it did have one thing going for it: it was romantic, in the sense that it was already associated with the man who was swiftly becoming a mascot for Britannia herself.

• 17:32Dana Schwartz?

  The next big leap in the story of King Arthur as he became a legend was a leap across the English Channel. The 12th-century French poet, Chretien de Troyes, added his own spin on the Arthur lore, and like a game of improv, adding in new elements. He came up with Lancelot, the Holy Grail, and Camelot. And from this point in the Arthur legend, it becomes interwoven with Welsh mythology and romantic traditions. And so, our version of King Arthur is born not from 6th-century history, but from 12th-century literature.

• 18:16Dana Schwartz?

  But there were a lot of stories circling around 900 years ago, and the vast majority of them aren't household names. Why has this legend of Arthur stood the test of time? The answer is something that every good female pop star understands when it comes to longevity: You've got to rebrand yourself. Arthur stories are incredibly malleable. They can fit like liquid into containers of any shape. Over the centuries, Arthur evolved into whatever the current moment needed. According to historian Nicholas Hyam, back when Nennius was writing about the great

• 19:00Dana Schwartz?

  general who killed 900 Saxons in battle, Britain needed "a God-beloved warrior" to rally behind. One important detail of Nennius's historia is that Arthur went into battle with an image of the Virgin Mary on his shield. According to Hyam, "Arthur was winning battles with the support of Jesus Christ and Mary against the Saxons. The Saxons were presented as barbaric, dishonest, and latecomers to Christianity."

• 19:36Dana Schwartz?

  By the time Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing his version, he was doing some PR for the Welsh, who were seen by some as Celtic-speaking savages. Geoffrey's Arthur had his roots in the western craggy castle of Tintagel, and elements of his story are derived fairly linearly from Welsh and Irish folklore. Hard to think of the Welsh as savages when British history is oriented around a noble, valiant Celtic king. But Arthur wouldn't belong to the Welsh forever. In 1191, monks at Glastonbury made a shocking announcement.

• 20:21Dana Schwartz?

  They had found skeletons, which they claimed were the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. What a lucky happenstance. Of course, it's just a happy byproduct that that discovery would mean plenty of visitors and pilgrims coming to the abbey. One of those pilgrims was King Edward I. He visited the Glastonbury graves in 1278 and actually disinterred the remains. One observer wrote at the time, "There in two caskets were found the bones of the said king of wondrous size and those of Guinevere of marvelous beauty."

• 21:04Dana Schwartz?

  I personally would love to know how beautiful a skeleton can be, but I'll take their word for it. Edward reinterred those skeletons after wrapping them in silk and giving them the royal seal. But his little pilgrimage wasn't just to honor a fellow monarch. His loudly and publicly proclaiming that he saw the remains of King Arthur served an important political purpose. Edward was saying, "King Arthur is definitely dead." So any Welsh enemies King Edward had, who had any great notion that this heroic king might be immortal

• 21:47Dana Schwartz?

  or would ever return from the grave to challenge Edward for the throne? Well, they were sadly misguided.

• 21:55Dana Schwartz?

  A few centuries later, other English monarchs would also use Arthur for their own PR purposes. As I've probably alluded to on this show before, the Tudor claim to the throne of England was fairly tenuous. King Henry VII was really doing everything he could after the Wars of the Roses to try to establish himself as legitimate. And one way he did that was by claiming that on his Welsh side, he was a direct descendant of King Arthur. Henry VII further bolstered that connection by naming his first son Prince Arthur,

• 22:39Dana Schwartz?

  although tragically Arthur died young and cleared the way for his younger brother Henry to become King Henry VIII. And even later, in the Victorian era, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "Idols of the King", repopularizing Arthur and framing Arthur's story not as one of a Welsh battle saga, but as a romance and a love triangle. It's no accident that Arthur reemerged during a period when the Industrial Revolution was adding a sense of uncertainty and chaos to the country. Arthur became a comforting figure of power and stability,

• 23:23Dana Schwartz?

  and new elements of the Arthur story, notably of Guinevere as an adulterer, were introduced to reinforce notions of Victorian morality. Even today, the myth of King Arthur is pretty profitable, despite the fact that Arthur isn't real. And even if he was, never actually lived at Tintagel Castle, the place receives 3,000 visitors a day in the summer, most of whom probably imagine they're seeing the real Camelot.

• 23:57Dana Schwartz?

  A fantasy not dispelled by the fact that English heritage, which controls the site, plays into that lore with Arthurian decor and carvings. Tintagel does have an incredible archaeological history. During the Arthurian period, the settlement was home to Celtic people who were writing on slabs, forging metal, and organizing relatively sophisticated systems of agriculture. It's easy to imagine, plausible even, that at some point, that group of people had a leader, and that leader was a valiant warrior.

• 24:39Dana Schwartz?

  And when the Saxon horde tried to cross the narrow rocky strait to the castle, that leader might have been able to defend his people. Maybe that man was named Arthur, or something like it. And the story of his noble victory embedded itself in Welsh folklore, eventually becoming embroidered until he was a king with noble pious knights who carried a sword called Excalibur. When you tell a story like that, it almost sounds plausible.

• 25:18Dana Schwartz?

  That's the history of King Arthur as we know it today. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about how another aspect of Arthur's story came into the popular imagination.

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• 28:19Dana Schwartz?

  If you're familiar with the myth of King Arthur, you probably know that he became king because he was able to pull a sword from the stone. "Who so pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England?" You know the drill. All of these nobles fail and then lowly Arthur is able to do it. That part of the story, and in fact, lots of the most popular elements of the Arthur legend today, come from a 15th century text called Le Mort d'Arthur by Thomas Mallory. But the identity of who Thomas Mallory actually was

• 29:01Dana Schwartz?

  is a question that has been the subject of speculation and debate among historians. Not as much debate as who King Arthur was, but you know, debate. The most prominent answer is that he was Thomas Mallory of Nubald Revel in Warwickshire. That's the case. He was sort of an anti-Arthur. That Thomas Mallory was a thief and a criminal, and actually would have published Le Mort d'Arthur while he was in prison for robbery and rape. That is a very downer of an epilogue, and so I'll leave you with something a little happier.

• 29:41Dana Schwartz?

  We had an addition to the Noble Blood family last November on Thanksgiving Day: A little boy named Arthur. And as his chubby cheeks and giggle and the fact that I can't stop taking pictures of him can attest, he is entirely and definitely real.

• 30:09Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Maloney.

• 30:26Dana Schwartz?

  The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer Reema Ilkayali and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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• 31:21Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.