713. King Arthur: The Once & Future King (Part 1)

What is the historical truth behind the tales of King Arthur, Britain’s greatest myth? When did these stories begin, and with whom? And, is Arthur’s apocalyptic last battle based on an English historical reality from the 15th century? Join Tom and Dominic as they launch into one of the greatest historical mysteries of all time, and discover the truth behind the legends of King Arthur. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at http://Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory. And keep thinking.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesus into another place. And men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the Holy Cross. Yet I will not say that it shall be so, but rather I would say, here in this world, he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon the tomb this, hic jacet arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus. Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  The most stirring, the most haunting epitaph in all of English literature and arguably all of English history. So that comes at the end of The Mort Arthur, the great prose epic that was written by Sir Thomas Mallory during the Wars of the Roses. So in 15th century, England was being torn apart by fighting for the crown. And Mallory's great work is talking about a mystery that has haunted the British imagination, not necessarily just the English imagination, but the imagination of all the people in these islands for a millennium or more. And Mallory's epic, Tom, was called The Death of Arthur,

• 4:03Speaker 01

  The Mort Arthur, for a very good reason. It was mourning a golden age that had already passed into legend, wasn't it?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Yes, the golden age of the Round Table, a time when knights were at their boldest and ladies were at their fairest. And yet, throughout Mallory's account of it, the knowledge that the Round Table is going to end up broken and its knights piled up as corpses shadows the entire story. And it's the death of Arthur, or is it a death? After he's received a mortal wound from his son, Mordred, in the last battle that he will ever fight, this is what sets the seal on the tragedy.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  But to repeat, is Arthur actually dead? This is the great mystery. And Mallory's account of his fate, which you just read out, you know, it's, it's rich in tantalising ambiguities. Because on what basis are men saying that he shall come again? And why on his tomb does it have that kind of enigmatic phrase, rex futurus, a future king? And what does Mallory mean when he says that he personally believes that in this world, Arthur changed his life? I mean, does that mean that he thinks that he died?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Or is he talking about Arthur's translation to some other mysterious dimension, some mysterious realm? And I think it is an incredible passage, because Mallory isn't endorsing this really quite widespread hope that Arthur will come again, but nor is he rejecting it. And it's, it's very eerie and very tantalising. And I think a huge part about why the mystique of Arthur endures to this day, I don't know whether you agree.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  I completely agree. I fell in love with the stories of King Arthur when I was very, very young, because I had a really sort of basic children's version when I was probably five or six or something. King Arthur was my gateway drug into history. My love of King Arthur and the stories of King Arthur predated any historical interest that I had. And of course, one of the things that people always love about King Arthur is this, precisely this idea that he's the once and future king, that he's sleeping and will come again to save the people of Britain in their hour of danger, in their darkest hour. But that's not unique to Arthur, is it? Lots of different cultures have stories like this.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  So for example, Barbarossa, Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor. Now, he was, we know he was real, which we don't necessarily know of Arthur. And Frederick Barbarossa, Third Crusade, right?

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, he drowns, I think in northern Syria, swept away on a river. And he is said to lie asleep with his knights in this kind of mountain chain in Turingia. And brilliant details about this legend, that he sat at this stone table for so long that his red beard, so hence Barbarossa, has sprouted and grown and the tendrils of it have woven their way through the stone of the table. And there are ravens flying around the mountaintop in which he is sitting. And when these ravens stop flying, so the story goes, he will emerge

• 7:33Speaker 00

  and he will save Germany and restore her to her ancient greatness. And of course, we know who loved that story. It was the Nazis, because that's why they gave Operation Barbarossa the name that they did, this idea of reclaiming ancient greatness.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Indeed. But then there's the last Roman emperor, the last true emperor of Rome. So Constantine XI, so he falls in the siege of Constantinople, doesn't he? But he's also not dead. Am I wrong?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  His body is never found, so it's, you know, there's a bit of a mystery there. And so the story is, is that an angel appeared and turned him into marble and hid him in a cave under the Golden Gate, one of the great gates that leads into Constantinople. And it is said that in due course, he will awake and recapture Constantinople for Christ. So that's something that is in the offing. And then, Dominic, one that you absolutely loved, because I remember you talking about it in the series that we did in Portugal, is King Sebastian of Portugal, isn't that?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dom Sebastião. Yeah, so he was fighting in Morocco in the 16th century, 1578. And he was very young and dashing. I think he was in his early twenties, wasn't he, 24 or something? And he disappeared. So that's a thrill. And again, the story in Portugal is, one day Dom Sebastião would return, you know, sort of riding through the fog to rescue Portugal.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, the early morning mist, isn't it, I think. And he will save Portugal. So obviously, the idea of a kind of sleeping king hiding in a cave or something, waiting to be summoned to rescue his country is quite a common one. But that's just by way of saying that none of these guys can compare for celebrity, international celebrity with Arthur. And this celebrity is just mad and huge and dates back to the Middle Ages. So there was a guy around 1200 who was writing an introduction to a book of Merlin's Prophecies. And we'll be coming to them in due course in this series. And he said something along the lines of, Arthur is famous everywhere. He's almost as famous in Asia as he is in Britain.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  And I assume he's probably talking there about the Crusader kingdoms. But I mean, the celebrity that Arthur has in the Middle Ages is absolutely massive. And you see, you know, in medieval times, romances, folktales, the medieval equivalent of fan conventions across the whole of Christendom. Everybody is obsessed by it. And it's fascinating that the oldest surviving sculptural portrait of Arthur and his knights isn't British. It appears on the the north portal of the cathedral in Modena in northern Italy, dated to, I think, around 1130. And at almost the same time, you have a kind of mad story that is situating Arthur's sleeping place, kind of not in Somerset

• 10:27Speaker 00

  or Scotland or anywhere in Britain, but in Mount Etna. And this is revealed by groom, who had been chasing a bishop's runaway horse up the slopes of the volcano. And he'd gone into the volcano where he'd found Arthur reclining on a couch. And the king tells this groom that he'd been there a long time, suffering from wounds he had received during his last battle against Mordred. I mean, no explanations about how he had ended up in Sicily.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  You mentioned fan conventions. So people might have thought that was just a sort of random throwaway remark, but there really are fan conventions. Are there effectively tournaments? So there's one in Beirut, Crusaders 1223?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Cyprus. It's the Lord of Beirut. I mean, such a great title. So it's in 1223. And he stages this very trend setting tournament in Cyprus to mark the knighting of his eldest son. And the jousters dress up as knights from the Round Table. And this establishes a kind of European wide craze for Arthurian cosplay. And so you have these round table tournaments where everyone dresses up as Lancelot or Gawain or Arthur or whatever. And I guess it's a kind of mixture of fighting and fancy dress. So very like the Rested History Festival that we staged at Hampton Court this summer. I guess you'd say it's

• 11:53Speaker 00

  the kind of the original pan-European kind of sporting institution, kind of the medieval Champions League. It's that kind of sense of a shared sport that people from across Christendom can can share in.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  But unlike sport, the Arthurian romance, or what becomes the Arthurian romance, has a kind of political and moral dimension, does it not? A spiritual one even?

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Yes. So very famously, in 1312, there was this French poet called Jacques de Longion. And he drew up a list of the nine exemplars of chivalry. And he chose three pagans to illustrate, you know, the nobility of the classical world. Three Jews, so these are biblical heroes, and three Christians. And together, these constitute the nine worthies. And Arthur is the single British entry, and he is named as the first of the three Christian men. So he is the greatest of the Christian worthies. As you say, it's a measure not just of his fame, but of his kind of moral stature. And so I think it's it's unsurprising

• 12:58Speaker 00

  that when the first printing press is introduced in England in 1476. So again, that's against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses. The merchant responsible for it very rapidly is looking around for something to publish about King Arthur. And this publisher is a guy called William Caxton. And he is a top entrepreneur. I mean, publishing is just one of the many irons that he has in the fire. And he has a very keen sense of what the public wants. And so he comes across this manuscript called The Mort Arthur, a posthumous manuscript left by a knight called Thomas Mallory, who's who's since died. And he reads it and he says, oh, this is brilliant. We've got to, we've got to publish this. And so because Mallory is already dead, Caxton can essentially do what he like with

• 13:43Speaker 00

  it. He can trim it, edit it, mark it as he as he wants. And he does a tremendous job. And the result is a massive bestseller. And I think The Mort Arthur is the book more than anything else that fixes for the English speaking world, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as a kind of single sweeping narrative from the birth of Arthur, in fact, maybe even before the birth of Arthur, right the way up to the mystery of his end. And I'm guessing that the book that you read as a child is derived from it. Certainly, the books that I read were.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  So I had multiple ones. I'll tell you one that I had. It was by Antonia Fraser. It was by the, it was the first book, I think, that she ever wrote. She was a, was a, as a very young woman. It was brilliant. I actually ended up corresponding with her about it a few years ago.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Oh, I read the Roger Lancelin Green one, which had kind of wonderful woodcut.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Oh, that was very good.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  So that was basically Mallory, but it had bits from other romances as well. They were all great. Anyway, Mallory is tremendous.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Mallory is at the back of all of this. You can't tell this story without Mallory.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, if you, if you think of all the novels that are written about Arthur, all the kind of the TV series, the films, Excalibur, all that kind of stuff. Basically, it is Mallory that is lying behind them all.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just things ostensibly about King Arthur. But I mean, Arthur is at the heart of Harry Potter and his wand, Luke Skywalker and his lightsaber, all of those kinds of things. I mean, the writers of these things themselves often say King Arthur is at the root of them. Aragorn with the sword that was broken.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  There's this wonderful comment by Tom Shippey, that the Arthurian legends are the most enduring legacy of the Middle Ages. You know, Tom Shippey, the great writer about Tolkien. I mean, I think that's not untrue, because I would say that people who don't have a specialized interest in medieval history say, will be more familiar with the sword in the stone, or Camelot, or the Holy Grail, than they're likely to be with the names of kings who actually ruled in the Middle Ages.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Of course. And there are two reasons why it's so interesting to us doing a history show. I guess now, number one, I mean, Caxton himself mentioned this in the preface, didn't he? He said, basically, why I want to publish a history of the said noble king and conqueror King Arthur is to show that he existed. And there are people out there, there are haters, losers, who say that King Arthur did not exist, and that all such books as to be made of him be but feigned and fables. And of course, this is the issue that fascinates so many people to this day, right? In the 2020s, was there a King Arthur? Who was he? Was he Ambrosius or Aurelianus or whatever? Was he some warlord? I mean, that is, I mean,

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I've, everybody is fascinated by that, even surely even the most desiccated academic working on Anglo Saxon England, or the the fall of the Roman Empire or something.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  I mean, it is amazing when you look at books written by academics in that period for the general market, they all have the, you know, the world of Arthur, the age of Arthur, whatever. And then they'll say, we don't know anything about him. But they put Arthur on the cover.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Which I think is the measure of that. And we will be trying to answer the question of whether Arthur existed, you know, who was he? Who might he have been? In due course, in the last episode of the series. But I think before we come to the question of who the historical Arthur might have been, it is reasonable to concentrate on the legends. Because I think it is these, much more than what, you know, some historical Arthur might have been getting up to in the sixth century or whatever, which actually makes him such a significant topic of historical inquiry. Because without the legends, to be honest, I mean, who would care? Who would care about this otherwise obscure figure who might not even have existed? And again, just to emphasize how madly popular the stories of Arthur

• 17:32Speaker 00

  were across Christendom. So around 1200, there's this, again, there's this French poet, French poets are obsessed by Arthur. And this guy's called Jean Baudel. And he referred to these stories as the matter of Britain. There was also the matter of France, which were the stories of Charlemagne. There was the matters of Rome, which is kind of classical stories. But the matter of Britain was the real obsession of people in medieval Christendom. And it's a Europe wide addiction. And so this is the second reason in his introduction that Caxton gives for saying why he wants to publish The Mort Arthur. Namely, that Arthur, and I quote, is more spoken of beyond the sea, more books made of his noble acts than there be in England, as well in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek as in French.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  And he might have added, in Latin, in Welsh, Cornish, German, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, Norse, Swedish, Icelandic, Hebrew, and Rhenian.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Rhenian?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  The only Slavic language into which the stories of Arthur were translated. But apparently they were massive in Rhenian.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  It's great to get the Rhenians on the show.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  And essentially, in medieval literature, there is no other theme that can compare for popularity with it. And so I think before we come to the, you know, the historical Arthur, the Arthur of early medieval Britain.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Let's have a look at the Arthur of legend. And so our next two episodes, we'll be looking at so Lancelot first and Guinevere and then Merlin. And people may be wondering, what about the Holy Grail? We have actually already covered that. And if you want to listen to that, it is episode 346. But today, Dominic, we are looking at the last battle, the wounding of Arthur, the mystery of what happened to him. Did he die? Was he translated to a mysterious realm? Will he come again?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Okay. And these of course draw on lots of different traditions and well springs. And so we'll be exploring all of these, won't we? But as we already said, Mallory is the centre of this. Mallory is the heart of it, the Mort Arthur. It's his account that has informed so many of the Hollywood films in the 20th and 21st century retelling. So it's Mallory that actually, even if people haven't read Mallory, he's there in your head, whether you know it or not. So let's start with Mallory and what he tells us about Arthur, the Arthur in his, in his great tale. So if you've seen the Sword in the Stone, even if you've seen the Disney cartoon of the Sword in the Stone,

• 20:06Speaker 01

  you will know that Arthur grew up in obscurity, but he was in fact the true born King of Britain. And he grew up under the tutelage rather like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, all of these characters.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Luke Skywalker with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi is the absolutely, is absolutely the one, you know, in fact, Obi-Wan Kenobi is referred to in the first film as a wizard, as an old wizard. Anyway, he grows up under Merlin, doesn't he? And Merlin becomes his advisor after he has pulled the sword from the stone and therefore demonstrated that he is the rightful King of Britain.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  And it is Merlin who helps him to defeat those who doubt his legitimacy. And it is Merlin who famously helps him to source a magical sword. So to quote Mallory, "They rode till they came to a lake that was a fair water and broad. And in the midst, Arthur was where of an arm clothed in white samite that held a fair sword in that hand. And he also sees a damsel," again quote Mallory, "going upon the lake," which basically means walking. So very mysterious. And Merlin reveals to Arthur who this woman is. She is the lady of the lake who dwells in a rock beneath the lake

• 21:16Speaker 00

  in as fair a palace as any on earth. And the lady of the lake gives Arthur a sword, and this sword is of course Excalibur. And this is the episode that prompts the famous comment in Monty Python, the Holy Grail about what is it? Women in ponds handing out swords, there's no basis for government. I disagree. I mean, I think looking at the absolute shower we've had over the past few years, I think this would be an excellent way of getting a good leader. And Arthur is gonna be an absolutely tremendous king. And it's not just Excalibur that the lady of the lake gives to Arthur as a marker of this. She also gives him a scabbard, which Merlin tells Arthur is worth much more than

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Excalibur, because whoever wears it shall lose no blood, be he never so wounded. The whole episode is incredibly eerie. The lady of the lake is a very mysterious figure in the Mort Arthur. So at one point, she's actually killed by a knight of the Round Table. But before you know it, she's back on the scene. And, you know, has she been resurrected? Are there multiple ladies of the lake? Do they kind of share the title? Unclear. And she keeps shimmering in and out of view throughout the Mort Arthur. And this sense in the Mort Arthur, that women are a very mysterious presence on the margins of what the men at the court of Arthur are doing is an absolute constant.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  And alongside the lady of the lake, you have another very powerful and uncanny woman to whom we're introduced very early on by Mallory. And this is Arthur's half sister, Morgan le Fay, another kind of very famous name in Arthurian myth. So she's Arthur's half sister. She'd been sent to a nunnery as a child, where she'd learnt necromancy. It's not entirely clear how. She is as fair a lady as any might be. And she is consumed by an abiding hatred for Arthur, which is never explained. But she's the kind of, I suppose, the ultimate nightmare elder sister, maybe about the whole of English literature. Right the way through the Mort Arthur, she's constantly scheming

• 23:25Speaker 00

  to have Arthur killed. And this is introduced very early on in the book. And her, her initial plot is that she's going to steal Excalibur and the scabbard, which she does. And she then gives them to her lover, who is a knight called Acolon. And Morgan then magics up exact replicas of Excalibur and the scabbard, which she kind of plants in Arthur's chambers, so that he doesn't know that the real ones have been stolen. And then Acolon and Arthur have a battle. Arthur is startled to find that even though he seems to be wearing this magical scabbard, he's losing loads of blood. The wounds are proving serious to him. But fortunately, the lady of the lake is on the scene. And she comes to his rescue by alerting him to what Morgan has done, the trick

• 24:10Speaker 00

  that Morgan has pulled. And so Arthur then grapples with Acolon, wrestles the real Excalibur out of Acolon's hands, kills him, and gets back not just Excalibur, but also the magical scabbard as well, which is the real prize. But Morgan, you know, she's, she's not a girl to give up. Let's put it like that. So she promptly steals the scabbard a second time. And she goes out and she just chucks it in the lake. And that's it. It's just kind of imperious malevolence and spite of an absolutely transcendent order. And so from this point on, Excalibur is in the hand of Arthur, but he doesn't have the scabbard. And so he, he can bleed. And so the kind of intimation of his

• 24:53Speaker 00

  mortality is set up right from the very beginning.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And there are other sisters, aren't there? Quite a lot of versions, actually, of Arthur, especially for children. The sisters were all conflated into one. So they're basically all conflated into Morgan le Fay, who is the best known. But actually, in the original, there is another sister called Morgoth, and she's a nightmare.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  So she's married to Lot, who is the King of Orkney. And they've had four sons. And the eldest of these is Gawain, who will go on to become with Lancelot, the greatest of Arthur's knights. And then you have Geherris, Aggravaine, and the baby of the family is Gareth, who has beautiful hands. And shortly after Arthur has come to power, Lot, not realising who Arthur is and what the relationship is between Arthur and Morgoth, sends Morgoth to go and spy on him at Arthur's court. And to quote Mallory, "All this time, King Arthur knew not King Lot's wife was his sister." And basically, if you read that in a medieval folk tale, you know, you know what's coming. And

• 25:59Speaker 00

  so inevitably, this being the kind of story it is, Arthur ends up sleeping with Morgoth. And just as inevitably, she ends up pregnant. And again, I'm not sure that this is the kind of detail that tended to feature in the children's accounts of the Arthurian legends that I read.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  No, I don't remember this at all.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  And Merlin, far from being sympathetic when this is revealed, what Arthur has done, is very blunt about what, you know, this involuntary act of incest portends. "Ye have done a thing that God is displeased with you, for ye have lain by your sister, and on her ye have begotten a child that shall destroy you and all the knights of your realm. And the name of this child, once he is born on May Day, is Mordred."

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Right. The great villain of the story is, and Arthur's kind of arch enemy.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  I mean, talking villainy, it has to be said that Arthur does not behave well towards this little baby, who is after all, his son. So when he's told that baby Mordred has been born, he has all the children begotten of lords and born of ladies on May Day, rounded up, put on a boat, and set adrift on the sea. So basically, it's a kind of marine take on King Herod killing the innocents of Bethlehem. And the ship is wrecked, and all the babies are killed. They're all drowned, except for Mordred, who is somehow, somehow survives and is restored to his mother Morgoth, and then raised by her with his four elder brothers. So he is now the fifth of Morgoth's

• 27:30Speaker 00

  five sons. And Mallory typically doesn't explain how this happens. It's just kind of obedient to the internal logic of the story. And you just have to kind of roll with it. And equally puzzling is that when in due course, Mordred has grown up, and, you know, he's attained manhood, he's become a knight, he goes to Arthur's court with his four brothers, and Arthur

• 27:54Speaker 00

  You know, acknowledges him as his son and doesn't seem to have any issue whatsoever. It's like he's completely forgotten Merlin's prophecy. And Mordred is, you know, this guy who Merlin has said, oh, he's absolute trouble. He's going to destroy you. He becomes the knight of the round table. He's not, he's not a famous knight. He's not a star. He, he doesn't kind of win any famous quests. But he is clearly a ticking time bomb because basically he's a very malicious, vengeful man. And it's plain that, you know, he is trouble. And in due course, this is exactly what turns out to be the case. Because in the final book of the Mort Arthur, after we've had all these kind of glorious stories of the adventures, the quests and so on, Mordred's moment finally comes.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Um, and what gives him his opportunity is that his father, King Arthur, has left Britain across the channel and is campaigning on the continent. And madly, bearing in mind the prophecy that Merlin had given him, Arthur had made Mordred regent in his absence. And while Arthur is away in France, Mordred starts spreading fake news. He says, Arthur is dead. Um, and then to quote Mallory, he made a parliament and called the lords together. And there he made them to choose him king. And so he was crowned Canterbury. And the news is brought to Arthur. He returns, he forces a landing. Um, Mordred tries to oppose him. There's a great battle at Dover. Mordred loses and retreats.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Then there's a second battle again. Arthur wins, and this is fought at Barham Down, just south of Canterbury. But Mordred, um, has, he's kept his army together. He's retreated towards Wiltshire and the Salisbury area.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Oh, brilliant. To have the Salisbury area back on the show.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And so it was assigned betwixt King Arthur and Sir Mordred that they should meet upon a down beside Salisbury, so Salisbury Plain. And these negotiations are held between the father and the son, and they seem to be going very well. The rightful king, the would be usurper, it seems that they're going to arrive at terms. And wine was fetched and they drank together. But then there is disaster. And this I always remember incredibly vividly from the children's accounts that I read. So the knights on the two sides are drawn up on opposite sides of this plain. And they're waiting as Arthur and Mordred kind of bury the hatchet. And while they're waiting, an adder emerges from a heath bush. And it stings one of the knights on his heel.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  And the knight draws his sword to slay the adder. And when the knights on both sides, so the two armies drawn up facing each other, when they see this glinting of the sword in the sunlight, they all draw their swords in turn. And then the two armies, Arthur's army, Mordred's army descend on one another. And Mallory writes, never was there seen a more doleful a battle in no Christian land.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Crikey, well, the stage is set for that final showdown between Arthur and Mordred. So after the break, we will turn to the last battle. We'll find out what happens to Excalibur. And we will find out the truth behind Arthur's final journey to Avalon.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that, Tom, at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery. And it is of course the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Anthropic asked 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot, capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity. And American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. And that leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So all day long, the noise of battle rolled among the mountains by the winter sea. And that of course is Alfred Lord Tennyson. So that's his first adaptation of the Mort Arthur. And the Victorians adored Arthur. They loved everything to do with knights and chivalry in the Middle Ages and Mallory. Tennyson, however, he would disappoint you, Tom. He describes this battle as having taken place among the mountains by the winter sea. Now, I've been to Wiltshire and the Salisbury area, and I don't recall any mountains or any, or is there any sea?

• 34:41Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's very poor from Tennyson. Very sad. He's erasing Salisbury from the, from the narrative. Um, but I mean, generally there is a good deal of confusion about where this last battle was fought. As we will see, there are a kind of a number of various candidates. Um, but Mallory said, Mallory's saying it's on Salisbury Plain. So let's go with that. Um, and he also tells us that it lasted all day and never stinted till the noble knights were laid to the cold earth. And by nightfall, 100,000 men are dead and only two knights of the round table are left. Um, and one of these is Sir Lucan, who is described by Mallory as being Arthur's butler,

• 35:24Speaker 00

  which might conjure up a kind of slight Downton Abbey sense. I mean, it basically, he's the guy in charge of, of the king's table. And the other guy who's, who's survived is Lucan's brother, Sir Bedivere. So these are the only guys from the whole of the round table who have survived. And Arthur is distraught and he's mourning the slaughter. And then looking around, he sees Sir Mordred leaning upon his sword among a great heap of dead men. And he picks up his spear. And this is a tremendous detail, which again, I don't think featured in the children's books. This spear is called Ron.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  It's called Ron.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  It's called Ron.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So some people who haven't heard previous episodes will think you just had a stroke at that point. I should explain that what Tom is doing, so it's retrolicating.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Arthur is holding Ron.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Former governor of California and United States President, Mr. Reagan.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Mordred, Mordred charges Ron and Arthur skewers him with Ron. So. And to quote Mallory, when Sir Mordred felt that he had his death's wound, he thrust himself with the might that he had up to the burr of King Arthur's spear. And right so he smote his father, King Arthur. And Dominic, there's a famous illustration by Arthur Rackham, which he did in 1917. So amid the carnage of the, um, of the First World War. And it shows exactly this scene. And you have crows wheeling overhead and the.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, very famous.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  The battle scene is like the Battle of the Somme or something. Or actually, it's, it's the climax of John Borman's brilliant film, Excalibur. Only in that it's the other way around. It's Mordred who's holding the spear, I think, in that. And it's Arthur who works his way down the length of the spear. Anyway, kind of terrible moment. So Mordred falls down dead and Arthur is left mortally wounded by this last fight. Um, and Lucan, the butler, as a butler does, tries to help Arthur, pick him up and move him. But unfortunately he dies after part of his guts fell out of his body. So that's the end of Lucan. I mean, not a good way to go. And so of all Arthur's knights, now the only one left to Arthur is Sir Bedivere. And so Arthur.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  Orders him to take Excalibur and go with it to a nearby lake and to throw the sword out into the water. And Bedivere takes the sword as he's been ordered and he goes down to where the lake is. But then he looks at the sword and he thinks this is Excalibur. I mean, it's so beautiful. It's so rich. It's so glorious. Surely its time will come again. And so rather than throw it away, he hides it. And he then rides back to Arthur and he says, well, I got rid of the sword. And Arthur says, okay, if you did, what did you see? And Bedivere answers, nothing but waves and winds. And Arthur is furious and tells him that he is lying and then orders him to, again, to go and throw the sword into

• 38:19Speaker 00

  the lake. But again, Bedivere can't bear to dispose of it. And again, he lies to Arthur. And again, Arthur, who is now, you know, absolutely furious, orders him to go and throw the sword out into the lake. And this time, Bedivere does obey. And he throws the sword out as far into the water as he can. And a famous, famous moment, perhaps one of the most famous moments in the whole of Arthurian myth, there came an arm and a hand above the water and took it and clutched it and shook it thrice and brandished and then vanished with the sword into the water.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Stuff of so many kind of 19th century paintings and stuff, isn't it? I mean,

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. In Excalibur, it looks ludicrous because the special effects aren't up to it. But it is still such a tremendous moment. I actually watched it before starting this episode to get myself into the mood. I feel so stirred by it.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we can tell.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Bedivere returns to Arthur and says, yeah, okay. So I've seen this, you know, this hand rise up and everything. So Arthur knows now that he's telling the truth. And then Arthur says, you know, we've, we've delayed too long here. Help me down to the side of the lake. So Bedivere does and leads him down to the lake. And there waiting for Arthur, they find a barge with many fair ladies in it, all wearing black hoods. And among them are Morgan le Fay and the lady of the lake. And Arthur is placed in the barge and he lays his head on his sister's lap. And then the queen said, Ah, my brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? And it's completely typical of Mallory that he

• 40:00Speaker 00

  gives no explanation as to why Morgan le Fay, who spent the whole of the Mord Arthur, trying to kill Arthur, is now kind of mourning him, caring for him. And I think Mallory's refusal to explain things that in a novel you would expect to be explained is a massive part of what, of the kind of the aura of mystery that surrounds the whole thing. And I think you get the feeling with this that Morgan has kind of, she's reverted to a kind of older, stranger, weirder register, as though actually she is now in her true dimension because her true dimension are those margins that lie between life and death. And that is why she's come for him.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  But it's one small point about that, though. I remember that very vividly from the children's books. I also remember all the stuff about Mordred and him welcoming Mordred to his cause, even though Mordred's going to kill him. And I have to say, in all that time, it never struck me as weird because, you know, young readers just completely take that, they're like, well, fine, if that's the story, that's the story. And I wonder whether Mallory's listeners were the same. It's kind of a bit weird, but that's the story.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I think they were because, and Mallory himself, he, there is this internal logic. You know, he's, they're in the sources, that's what he's going to do with it.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  And that's the power of it. It's incredibly haunting. And what is also haunting is the fact that the barge now starts to pull away and Bedivere is left alone on the, you know, on the shore. And he calls after his lord and Arthur answers him by revealing his destination. And it's not a cave. It's not Mount Etna. It is the Vale of Avilion. And he is going to Avilion there to be healed of his wound. And Avilion, of course, is Avalon. And away he sails, accompanied by the weeping of Morgan, the weeping of the lady in the lake, all

• 41:55Speaker 00

  the other ladies. And here is how Tennyson, in his unbelievably powerful and beautiful poem on the topic, how he concludes this, this scene, long stood Sir Bedivere revolving many memories till the hull looked one black dot against the verge of dawn. And on the mere, the wailing died away. God, I feel tears, manly tears rise into the eye.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  So lots to unpick here. Is there historical basis for this idea of this last battle, the Vale of Avilion or Avalon? And of course, the question about whether Arthur will come again, where that comes from. So let's start with the last battle, this idea of a Titanic showdown. Now, this is actually one of the oldest facts about Arthur, isn't it? And has clearly a very, well, potentially some kind of factual basis. I mean, I know we'll come to all this. Where does it come from, the idea of a last battle?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Well, it comes from Wales. And just to say, the rest of this series, there is going to be so much Welsh history.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Too much, perhaps?

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Fans of Welsh feminism is going to be a lot of Welsh women.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  This is peak Restus history.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Basically, Welsh history, we have got it. So the mention of the last battle, it's originally mentioned in a collection of annals. So details of what happens, you know, year on, year out. And these, these are called the Annales Cambriai, the Annals of Wales. And it's possibly, in fact, I think probably the second oldest source we have for Arthur. And it dates to the mid 10th century. And it's a chronological record of events beginning in AD 447. And the entry for 537 reads, "The Battle of Camlyn, in which Arthur and Medrout," so that's Mordred, "fell, and there was a great dying in Britain

• 43:50Speaker 00

  and Ireland." And it is predictably enigmatic because nothing about the early history, the early sources for Arthur are self evident. So it gives us no clue as to where Camlyn might have been. The literal meaning of it is crooked bank. So presumably it's by a river. I mean, that would seem a kind of a reasonable supposition, I think. And people will note that it doesn't indicate actually who Medrout was, or indeed who Arthur was, whether he was Arthur's ally or enemy, and who, if anyone, won the battle. It just says that they both died in this battle.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  But no doubt, Tom, this is Welsh history. It's certainly a Welsh source.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  It's a Welsh tradition. Whether it's Welsh history, I mean, we will see. But it's a Welsh tradition. And it definitely, it's in Welsh poetry, dating probably a century after this, so kind of mid 11th century, that we get the first allusions to a rivalry between Arthur and Medrout. But the really decisive contribution is made by a writer who we will be referring to a lot over the course of this series. And he is also a kind of very Welsh figure because he takes his name from a Welsh town. And this is a 12th century cleric called Geoffrey of Monmouth. And Geoffrey of Monmouth writes the, the

• 45:15Speaker 00

  book that kind of lights the touchpaper of Arthur mania. And it's a history of the kings of Britain that ranges from Brutus, who is a Trojan who arrives in Britain and kills all the giants, and it goes all the way up to Athelstan. So, you know, the Anglo Saxon king in the 10th century. And the star turn in this history is the first full length account of the reign of King Arthur. And it is impossible to overemphasize what a massive bestseller this book was. And within a generation of its appearance, it had swept the whole of Christendom. And it is this book that basically inspires the, the Europe wide obsession with

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Arthur. And over 200 copies of the manuscript survive, which for a, for a book that is not theological, not a translation of a Latin classic, is mad. There's no kind of secular text that, that features in so many manuscripts. And Geoffrey called his book a history, but I think it's fairer to describe it as a fantasy. And he's basically the Tolkien, the J K Rowling of his day. He's an author from Britain who creates this entire world of wonder and adventure that is so addictive, so readable, that it makes him an international literary superstar.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  And it's Geoffrey in this book, this history of the kings of Britain, who makes two crucial contributions to what would become the canonical version of the last battle and Arthur's ultimate fate.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Well, when you say, when you say he makes these contributions, if you were being skeptical, you would say he's making stuff, he's making loads of stuff up.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Now, is, yeah, well. Obviously, the whole course of this series will be exploring whether Geoffrey of Monmouth is basically inventing out of nowhere.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Spoiler alert, he is making it up. I mean, let's be upfront about that. He is making up loads and loads of stuff. Not everything, but he is making up a lot.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  So for example, it's Geoffrey Monmouth who creates the idea, doesn't he, that Mordred and Arthur are related? He's trying to explain the relationship between them. But in this case, in Geoffrey, Mordred is Arthur's nephew, right? Not his son.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but there's still a kind of blood relation there. It's Geoffrey who introduces Mordred as the regent that Arthur leaves behind when he goes to the continent. It's Geoffrey who first develops the theme of Mordred trying to steal Arthur's throne, Arthur returning to reclaim it, and then this great last battle. So this is the Battle of Camlyn, as mentioned in the Annals of Wales. And Geoffrey is much more specific about the location of this battle than the Annals of Wales had been. He says that it was fought beside the river Camblam, so just kind of riff on Camblam. And this is the river Camel in Cornwall, and specifically at a place called Slaughter Bridge, which I visited it. And

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I have to say, it's an absolutely lovely spot for a battle. You know, if you've got to have your court wiped out, that's a great place to have it wiped out. And it features a sixth-century memorial stone. So again, the kind of right period, although it has absolutely nothing to do with Arthur. So that's a shame. But it is the right period. So there are other places that have been identified with Camblam. It's the kind of detail that Arthurian scholars love to kind of explore. So one very popular location is Cadbury Castle in Somerset, which stands beside the river Cam.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  That's not really a castle so much as a hill, right? It's like an Iron Age hill fort.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  It's an Iron Age hill fort. And we will be coming to this in part four. So Cadbury Castle fans, tune into that. There is a place called Camblam in Gwynedd. Maybe that's possible. I mean, it's called Camblam. And then there is a place called Cambaglana, which is Castlesteads on Hadrian's Wall. And the idea that Arthur fought battles in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall is very popular, again, as we will be seeing in our fourth episode. But it is reasonable, I think, to say at this point, the search for the historical Arthur is basically like

• 49:38Speaker 00

  searching for a needle that may not exist in a haystack. So that is a problem with the sources. So we don't really know where Camblam was, is the honest truth, I think. And I don't think we ever will.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Although I want to tempt the listeners, we will of course be revealing all in the final episode. So we will. For the purposes of this episode, we don't know. But maybe we can persuade Tom to pronounce a definitive verdict in episode four. What about the other thing that Geoffrey contributes, or indeed makes up? The Isle of Avalon. So we're a billion.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Geoffrey's definitely the guy who introduces Avalon into the mix. Whether he makes it up from scratch, we will see. So Geoffrey writes in his history that Arthur, our renowned king, was mortally wounded and carried off to the Isle of Avalon so that his wounds might be attended to. And of course, it is, as so often, very cryptic. He doesn't say whether Arthur was healed of his mortal wounds, doesn't say where the Isle of Avalon was. So these are kind of twin mysteries that he's very happy to leave hanging. And the fact that Geoffrey doesn't say where the Isle of Avalon is, means that, over the course of the 12th century, you know, this book has come out, it's going great guns,

• 50:52Speaker 00

  everyone's absolutely obsessed by it. And so obviously, people do start to puzzle over where Avalon might be. And this, for, well, for some people, starts to present an irresistible opportunity. So let's move forward from the publication of Geoffrey's history in the late 1130s to 1184, so half a century on. And in this year, a devastating fire breaks out at a 400-year-old abbey at a place in Somerset called Glastonbury.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  I wondered if we'd be into Glastonbury.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  This abbey stands on elevated land above the Somerset levels. So one of the reasons why it's always so muddy at Glastonbury at the festival is because the whole area is naturally very wet. And back in the 12th century, the Somerset levels are a kind of stretch of fens and marshes that for much of the year turns Glastonbury into a kind of island. And so it's this kind of setting that Glastonbury has amid these misty wetlands,

• 51:58Speaker 00

  which gives it a very haunting and otherworldly air. And wherever you have a haunting and otherworldly air, you tend to have pilgrims arriving, because it gives you a sense of the, well, the sacral, I guess. The monks at Glastonbury Abbey, they've got this very ancient church made of wood. It's been a venerable centre of pilgrimage. And so the fact that it then burns down is an absolute disaster, because it's the oldest, the most sacred part of the abbey complex that has gone up in flames. And basically, it removes their entire source of income. So the monks desperately need to rebuild their abbey. And if they're going to rebuild it, then they need the money to do so. And so they turn to the King of England, who at the time is Henry II, the first Plantagenet king,

• 52:44Speaker 00

  ruler of an empire that covers not just much of Britain, but also half of France. And so he should have lots of money. And sure enough, Henry says, yeah, sure, I'll give you some money. But then unfortunately, in 1189, Henry II dies and is succeeded by his son, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart. And Richard the Lionheart, he's not really into building abbeys, but what he's really into is crusades. And so all this money that was going to go on repairing this burnt abbey is now being spent on raising an army to go on the Third Crusade. And so the monks are left out of pocket. They need a new source of income. And then miraculously, Dominic, miraculously, in 1191, they find

• 53:26Speaker 00

  an alternative source of income. And to be precise, they find the bones of an enormous man in a coffin that had been hollowed out from an oak tree. There is a stone slab, and beneath this slab, there is a cross made of lead. And on the cross, written in Latin, are these fateful words. Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the island of Avalon.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  God, it's great that the coffin has that written out to eradicate any possible doubt. And what a moment for it to, at the point that they needed money. Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Incredible stroke of luck.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  This is huge for them, right? I mean, they can basically turn themselves into, well, one of the great tourist attractions in northwestern Europe.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Firstly, they've got the bones of King Arthur, the most famous king in Europe. And they have now successfully identified Glastonbury with the mysterious island of Avalon. So basically, you know, brilliant, open up your cheque books, ka-ching. So they can start using this to make Glastonbury a kind of massive tourist attraction, which is what they do. But if it's massive for the monks of Glastonbury, it is also massive for the English monarchy, because the kings of England can now appropriate Arthur and the stories that are told about him for their own purposes. And the king who really recognizes the potential for this is Edward I, so the hammer of the Scots, but also the guy who

• 55:02Speaker 00

  conquers Wales. And in 1278, on Easter Monday, Edward I and his wife, Eleanor of Castile, they come to Glastonbury, and they preside over the formal reinternment of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, whose bones had been found, you know, inverted commas, by the monks, lying beside the bones of this colossal guy who the monks are saying is Arthur. Arthur and Guinevere are laid to rest in a great black marble tomb that's been constructed before the high altar of the abbey in Glastonbury. And Edward has wrapped Arthur's bones in silk, and Eleanor has wrapped Guinevere's bones in silk. And the propaganda value of

• 55:44Speaker 00

  this to Edward is immeasurable, because it helps him with a problem that has been confronting his dynasty for almost a century. And basically, Edward, you know, he rules by right of descent from William the Conqueror. The problem is, though, that he has lost Normandy. His grandfather, King John, had lost it to the French king. And so this means that Edward and his barons are now cut off from their ancestral homeland. And in this context, tapping into the whole myth of Arthur is an absolute genius move, because it enables Edward to cast himself as the heir of this kind of ancient glorious king who had ruled not just England, but

• 56:27Speaker 00

  a unified Britain. So Wales and Scotland, as well as England. And actually, it's Wales.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  When Edward comes to Glastonbury to rebury Arthur and Guinevere, that is uppermost in his mind. Because the previous year, so that's 1277, Edward had led a massive expedition against Helwelyn of Griffith, who, as events will turn out, is going to be the last independent prince of Wales. And this invasion of Wales, the conquest of Wales, will culminate in 1282 with the death of Helwelyn in an ambush, and then two years later, in 1284, with Edward's official annexation of Wales. He is going to rule as Wales' king from this point on.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  And so in this context, it's, you know, you can see absolutely how, you know, his appropriation of these supposed bones of Arthur is a masterstroke, because it helps him by the fact that Arthur's been found, he's not going to come again, he's not, you know, waiting to draw his sword and come to the rescue of the Welsh. He can be put in a tomb in Glastonbury, and it scotches this deeply held belief that the Welsh and the Cornish and the Bretons have all had, that Arthur isn't dead and that he's going to come again. And just to say that this particular tradition, like the tradition about the last battle being fought at Camlyn, is an authentically

• 57:58Speaker 00

  ancient one. And we know this because back in 1113, a group of French clergymen from Lyon had come to England to try and raise money for a church, and they'd gone to Cornwall. And while they were there, they got into a massive punch-up with a load of Cornish people, who were very offended by one of these French clergymen laughing at the idea that Arthur was, you know, might come again. They, the French found this ridiculous, Cornish very offended, there's a big fight about it. And we know from a poem written in the 10th century in Wales, that Arthur's grave was described as a wonder, and it's a wonder because it can't be found. And if it can't be found, then again, there's the hint of the suggestion

• 58:41Speaker 00

  that maybe Arthur isn't in his grave. And again, you have the sense, I think, reaching back centuries before Edward burying Arthur's supposed bones, of Arthur as this kind of hero who is unbound by the limits of death.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  But Edward's reburying has multiple political functions, doesn't it? Because on the one hand, it's, as you say, dispelling once and for all the idea that there's a kind of Welsh hero who's going to return. But at the same time, he's appropriating Arthur for an English monarchy, like Ptolemy making off with the body, you know, the corpse of Alexander the Great. Edward I is saying, I have Arthur, he is here, he is mine. And actually, Arthur's ambition to rule, Arthur's supposed ambition, you know, Arthur ruled all Britain. Well, that's what Edward I wants to do.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he's conquered Wales, and then he goes off to hammer the Scots. And he's consciously framing himself as the heir of Arthur. And so the corollary of that is that the English king starts to appropriate Arthur as an English hero. And so you, Edward is staging round table tournaments in Wales, then maybe Edward I, maybe his grandson Edward III physically constructs a round table.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  This is the round table in Winchester.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think it gets repainted by Henry VIII, doesn't it? But it's definitely kind of dates from, from the 13th century. Listeners to the series that we did on the Hundred Years' War may remember how important orders of chivalry are to Edward III, and to all the kind of English knights who were fighting in the Hundred Years' War. This notion of themselves as, you know, the knights of a new Arthur, crossing the sea as Arthur and his knights had done, is incredibly important in animating notions of English chivalry, notions that England has a kind of romantic history that its kings can draw on in wars

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  with, you know, even the King of France, that the, the King of England can go toe-to-toe with the King of France.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And so by the time we get to Mallory, Mallory, I mean, there's precious little Welshness in Mallory's Mordartha, is there?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's all England. So the sword in the stone, the most famous story in Mallory, it's framed, you know, the, the lettering on the stone reads, "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England." So not Britain, England.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  So they've found Arthur, they know that he won't return, he's buried at Glastonbury, and he's become an enormously important sort of propaganda tool for the English monarchy. And yet, the idea of his return, the idea of the once-in-a-future king does not go away, because it's still there in, in Mallory. So why doesn't it go away if they know that he's dead?

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think, I think a possible clue to that is given actually in the very last sentence of the Mordartha. And that tells us that, a quote, "This book was ended the ninth year of the reign of King Edward IV by Sir Thomas Mallory Knight." And this equates to 1469, or possibly the early months of 1470, which is a period of immense and escalating political instability in England, because it's the build-up to a fresh spasm of violence that will culminate in open war. And this is part of the, the English Civil War that is known as the Wars of the Roses. So it's Lancaster against York, the emblem

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  of Lancaster is the red rose, the emblem of, of York is the white rose. And it's, the Lancastrian king is Henry VI. He has been deposed, locked up in the Tower of London by the Yorkist king, Edward IV, who has usurped Henry VI's throne and is now claiming, you know, claiming to rule England, and has done so basically for a decade. But fresh instability, Edward IV is going to be cast into exile for a few months, and then he'll come back, reclaim the throne, and end up murdering Henry VI. And so Mallory is finishing his book in the build-up to this kind of great, you know, convulsive moment in the history of 15th century England. And Mallory, in some sense that is not entirely clear, seems

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  to be implicated in the violence of this period. Unfortunately, the details are quite murky, but we know from the evidence of the Mordartha itself, that the author was writing it in prison, because periodically throughout the Mordartha, he is saying as much. There has been, over the past century, quite a lot of scholarly disagreement as to which of the various Thomas Mallorries who were kind of kicking around in mid 15th century England, the Thomas Mallory who wrote the Mordartha was. But I think nowadays, the overwhelming consensus is that our Thomas Mallory was a knight from Warwickshire, from New Bold

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  Revel. And this is a guy who fro, who from the court records clearly did have a certain taste for trouble. And all of this is laid out in the landmark study of The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Mallory, the title of the book. And it's by P J C Field, and it was, came out, I think, about three decades ago, but it's still basically pretty unchallenged in its conclusions, that it is this guy, it's the knight from New Bold Revel. And in the 1450s, this particular Mallory was being kept in a range of prisons in London. So the Marshalsea, the Tower of London, Newgate Prison. And he's been kept there by the government,

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  which at this point is Lancastrian, Henry VI is on the throne. But then Edward IV comes to the throne, and between 1468 and 1470, he is issuing four general pardons in succession. But in all of these four general pardons, Thomas Mallory Knight is specifically excluded. And the measure of what a big deal this is, other people who are excluded in this pardon include Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou, his wife, and Edward, the Prince of Wales, who is his son. So Mallory is being ranked among the, basically, you know, the, the royal, the Lancastrian royal family.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  So it's presumably on Edward IV's orders that Mallory was being kept in prison while he was writing the Mort Arthur. So the mystery is that in the first decade, he seems to be, you know, he's in prison on the orders of Henry VI, the Lancastrian. And then in the second decade, he's been kept in prison on the orders of Edward IV, the Yorkist. And so there's a puzzle as to why this would be. And the explanation that Field gives in his book is that Mallory as author is a notably uncensorious person. And he proposes that Mallory's sympathies were aroused less by causes than by individuals behaving chivalously in difficult circumstances. So in other words, he perhaps, he was anti Lancastrian, and then he feels sorry for Henry VI, so he switches sides.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  So he always favors the underdog in such a way as to get himself arrested and incarcerated.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Well, you're sounding cynical, but I think that there is, you know, there is a certain degree of evidence to back this up in the Mort Arthur itself. So Mordred obviously stages this coup against the rightful king in the Mort Arthur. And I don't think you need to, you know, identify this coup against Arthur as somehow a kind of allegory for the wars of the races, the behaviour of Edward IV against Henry VI. To recognise that Mallory's account of the civil war in the Mort Arthur is, I think, clearly informed by the experience of civil war that England is going through in the 15th century, the wars of the roses and so on.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes total sense. I find that very plausible.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  The details that we cited at the beginning of this episode of Mordred laying claim to the throne, he holds a parliament, you know, he summons the commons, all this kind of stuff. It's very 15th century. It bears no relationship to what was going on in the 6th century. And Mordred laying siege to the Tower of London, and Mallory describes him making many assaults and throwing engines under them and shooting great guns. So, you know, that's amazing, the kind of artillery in the same time as the Round Table. And Mallory writes that the people of England swing this way and that in their loyalties, so to Arthur, to Mordred, to Arthur, to Mordred. And Mallory complains the people of England were so newfangled, and newfangled in the Middle Ages means fond of novelty.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, changeable and fetish.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  They're very changeable. They no sooner have one leader than they want to get rid of him.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like now, frankly.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's a very, you know, haunting descriptions of the last battle that, I mean, has the faint hint of lived experience. So after the last battle, the knights are lying in great tangles across the battlefield. Looters steal out onto the field by moonlight to strip the dead of their belongings. And Mallory writes, who that were not dead all out there, they slew them for their harness and their riches. And I think the point he's making is that the collapse of Arthur's realm into ruin, you know, it's not just Mordred's fault. Mordred has taken advantage of a fickleness that he sees as

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  being endemic to the English. He kind of laments, it was the old custom and usages of this land. And men say that we of this land have not yet lost that custom. Alas, this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may nothing please us, no term.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Well, you can see why he would be writing this in this context, right? In the late 15th century, when, I mean, it's extraordinarily turbulent, I mean, it's fun to read about, but presumably not tremendous fun to have lived through, this period of chaotic leadership, Lancastrian and then Yorkist kings rising and falling, coups, plots, betrayals, battles. So effectively, the Mort Arthur in that sense is not a, neither a fiction nor a historical record, so much as a kind of a work of political commentary, almost, a kind of mirror to the woes of 15th century England.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the kind of the collapse of England from the glory days of Henry V to the bloodletting of Tauton and Tewksbury, I think, I mean, is it possible to think that it isn't there in the back of Mallory's mind? And I think that for that reason, you can understand that the notion that Arthur might come again and redeem his country is something that would have had a peculiar resonance, and not just for Mallory, but for everyone in England at the time.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  I think today, people think that. It's how people, people who present the Rest is Politics think about David Miliband.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Oh, God. He's not dead. He's only, he's not dead. I mean, he may seem dead because he's so uninteresting. Holding his banana like Excalibur.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  One day you will return.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  I mean, I kind of feel, you know, if Arthur's going to come back now is as good a time as any.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's the Mort Arthur as a kind of 15th century mirror. These are the origins in Mallory's own lifetime, the politics of Mallory's lifetime. But there's so much more to explore, isn't there? So we haven't yet really got into the Round, the Round Table and its knights. And specifically, the most, well, the most celebrated, but also perhaps the most controversial, perhaps some would say the most overrated of all his knights, and that's Sir Lancelot.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Sir Lancelot is not overrated, Dominic. Sir Lancelot is absolutely banging.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  He's a show pony. Anyway, right, well, that's, this is, this is setting up nicely the tension that will be simmering in the next episode, as we explore the origins of Sir Lancelot, whether he was quite as heroic as he's cracked up to be, and what on earth is going on with Lancelot and Guinevere, and why is Arthur not doing anything about it? So if you want to find out about Sir Lancelot, if you want the truth about Merlin, and if you want us, if you want us to spectacle of Tom Holland throwing caution to the winds, identifying the historical Arthur, explaining exactly where Camilla was, all of this, solving a mystery that has perplexed great minds for hundreds of years, that's going to come

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  in the fourth episode. If you're a member of the Rest is History Club, so that is our very own Round Table, of the best and the brightest, some of the great people of the modern world, they can hear those episodes right now. You can join them. And the way to do that is to go to therestishistory.com, to stare the sword and the stone in the face, to draw the sword, or alternatively to sign up to the club and give us your details. And then you will get the, you will get those three episodes. You'll get your membership on the Round Table, and you'll get supplementary benefits in the form of the right to join the quest for the Holy Grail. Of all the metaphors with which we've tried to shroud

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  this commercial offer, I think this is probably the, the most ill-conceived and shambolic. Anyway, that's all to come. Loads to look forward to. We will see you next time. Thank you very much, Tom, and goodbye.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Bye bye.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  At Zocdoc, we know you care about your health. You wouldn't do that early morning cardio if you didn't. So the fact that your annual physical is overdue just shows how hard it can be to get seen by a doctor. Sorry, that doctor's not in network.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Press one for more options. You've reached us outside normal business hours.

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  The next availability is in three months.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  But Zocdoc makes finding the right doctor easy. Download the app and search by specialty, insurance and availability. Read real patient reviews, then book instantly. Zocdoc. Ready to be seen?

• 1:12:58Speaker 05

  Stonefire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  I put out Stonefire Naan with dips at every dinner party.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over.

• 1:13:10Speaker 07

  I use Stonefire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 1:13:14Speaker 08

  Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me or? Dance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together we Naan.

• 1:13:29Speaker 09

  Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived? Today, people are fighting back. With support from the Gates Foundation, American scientists and partners around the world have developed a new generation of bed nets that can kill up to 90% of mosquitoes exposed to them, helping cut malaria rates in half. The result? A safer, healthier future for everyone. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.