716. King Arthur: The Truth Behind the Legend (Part 4)

Did King Arthur really exist or is he just a legend that has developed over the centuries? Could he have been a Roman general who fought against the Saxons? Or is he a Celtic warlord? What is the truth? Join Tom and Dominic as they solve one of the greatest mysteries in British history and reveal who the real King Arthur was. 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 _______ Sign up to Revolut at revolut.com/trih and get £20 when you spend. 18+, end date 30/06/2027 and promotion T&C's apply. Revpoints T&C's apply._______ Check out Ask the Archives at ask-the-archives.com and get started with Claude at 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

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• 3:00Speaker 00

  Somewhere in the island, a great captain gathered the forces of Roman Britain and fought the barbarian invaders to the death. Around him, around his name and his deeds, shine all that romance and poetry can bestow. 12 battles, all located in scenes untraceable with foes unknown, except that they were heathen, are punctiliously set forth in the Latin of Nennius. The latest and best informed writers are ready to believe that there was a great British warrior who kept the light of civilization burning against all the storms that beat,

• 3:43Speaker 00

  and that behind his sword there sheltered a faithful following of which the memory did not fail. It is all true, or it ought to be, and more and better besides.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  So that was Sir Winston Churchill. And he was writing in The Birth of Britain, which was the first volume of his mighty history of the English-speaking peoples. And he wrote those words in the summer of 1938, so just before the appeasement episode at Munich. And I hate to say it, but I'm going to say it. The storm clouds of war were gathering over Europe. And so this idea of a great captain who fought the barbarian invaders to the death,

• 4:38Speaker 00

  who gathered around him a faithful following and kept the light of civilization burning against all the storms that beat, and made sure that the memory of a land of freedom and honour did not fail, you can absolutely see why that would have appealed to Churchill as he sat there at his desk in the wilderness, waiting for his country to call him back to the front. So the Arthur that we get in Churchill's history is effectively Winston Churchill.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  He is a man of great courage and indomitable spirit, who is rallying the British people to war against an invading horde of Germans. He is defending freedom, law and honour against barbarism, tyranny and massacre. But of course Churchill wasn't the first British figure, was he Tom, to associate himself with King Arthur? And we'll be meeting a couple more in today's episode.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  We certainly will. And just to say that phrase.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  It is all true, or it ought to be.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I mean, people have been feeling that about Arthur for a thousand years, possibly more. And we've met some of them over the course of this series. So there were the Cornishmen in 1113, who ran into some French clerics who'd come over to raise money for their church building projects. And the Frenchman poo-pooed the idea that Arthur was real and would come again. And they got into a massive punch-up. And then all the knights of medieval Europe, who lived and loved and fought in emulation of the knights of the Round Table, and then William Caxton, who published The Mort Arthur

• 6:35Speaker 01

  in 1485, with the stated aim of refuting those who claim that, and I quote him, "All such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables." But one of the reasons why Caxton feels the need to say that in the end of the 15th century is that by that point, scepticism about Arthur was starting to become very difficult to keep at bay. And this is a development which upset a lot of people. So to take someone from the same period as an exemplar, Henry Tudor, a Welshman, absolutely obsessed by King Arthur. And when he defeated Richard III in 1485 and seized the English throne, we mentioned

• 7:19Speaker 01

  this in our last episode, he claimed to be doing this in fulfilment of a prophecy of Merlin. And that prophecy, Dominic, was the one that featured in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Fortagern and the Red Dragon and the White Dragon. And the prophecy in that is that in due course, the Red Dragon would triumph over the White Dragon. And Henry's banner at Bosworth was a Red Dragon, and it became a part of his coat of arms and was very, very important to kind of Tudor myth. And like you, Henry named his eldest son Arthur.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And so had he not died, there might well have been a new Arthurian age.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  There might as well, yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  But the tragedy for Henry, who dreamed obviously that the Tudors were restoring the Age of Arthur, was that the chill winds of scepticism were blowing ever, ever harder, and they were blowing from Italy. So when Henry Tudor, Henry VII, employed a top Italian historian by the name of Polidora Virgil to write a history of England, in the expectation that Polidora would big Arthur up for him, there was an absolute disaster because Polidora had been trained in all these kind of historical methods that were being honed by the Renaissance back in his homeland. And he thought King Arthur was absolute rubbish, absolute tosh.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And he dismissed all the stories told about Arthur in very withering terms, "as good only for the common people, who always more regard novelties than truth."

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what did he know? He was Italian. I mean, actually, a lot, because the Italians, of course, at this point were sort of...

• 9:05Speaker 01

  They were leagues ahead.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They were world leaders in humanism. So, yeah, if you were a patriotic Englishman, or indeed a Welshman in the 16th century, you know, you might want to cling on to your legends of King Arthur. But over time, scholarly opinion, I mean, this is certainly the case if you stand back and you look at the last 500 years, scholarly opinion was to become more and more sceptical about the existence. Of a historical Arthur, wasn't it? And probably never more sceptical than today. There is, but the tide has really been running in one direction, I'm sorry to say.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Actually, no, I think it was probably more sceptical in the 17th and 18th centuries.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Really?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it completely melts away. And actually, kind of an interest in the Arthurian stories melts away as well. It definitely fades, but not completely. And I think that there is a kind of Camelot shaped hole left. And there still is, because as you say, even, you know, today as well, there is this kind of scepticism towards the existence of Arthur. And that Camelot shaped hole reflects the fact that despite all this, people still want Arthur to be true, I think. I think there is a kind of yearning to believe that some of the stories might, you know, have foundations. And so people in the hope that there might be a kernel of truth have gone back and have looked through all the very earliest sources. And essentially, to the degree that there is a kernel, it's very identifiable what that kernel is.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And we mentioned it in our previous episode. It's this tiny acorn from which the great oak has sprouted. And it is this obscure and little regarded text, the Historia Brittonum, the History of the Britons, which was written in 829 in Gwynedd in North Wales, purportedly by this Welsh monk called Nennius. And I say purportedly because we are dependent for his name on a preface that many scholars claim is dodgy. And I'm afraid to say that this is going to be a feature of today's episode, that every time you think you've pinned a detail down, very learned scholars will pop up and say, actually, no, probably not.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  It's an interpolation or it's late or whatever. And so we can't be sure it's Nennius, but we will call him Nennius.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Let's call him Nennius. So this, I mean, we discussed this last time. This is unquestionably the oldest surviving document that names Arthur. It is not, unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, this is not a sort of a fantasy blockbuster. Nennius is writing this as a chronicle, I guess, as a history. And it's treating this Arthur as a figure of history. He is a military leader who fights and wins battles. And this is the foundation stone. So if you look at all the later stuff that was then added on, Merlin, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, Mordred, whatever, Lancelot, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  All of this would have been impossible without this text from Nennius. This is the very beginning of the whole thing.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  The great building block for the whole massive edifice. And so that being so, let's take a very close look at what Nennius has to say, because really everything depends on this paragraph. So it's just, it's just a single paragraph, mentioned in the last episode, it's just 14 short sentences long. And Arthur's appearance in the text, it's placed by Nennius against a very ominous backdrop. So Nennius writes, a period, Arthur appears, a period when the Saxons were increasing in numbers and growing in Britain. Then in those days, Arthur fought against them alongside the kings of the Britons. But Arthur himself was the dux belorum, the leader of wars.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And this is one of the most debated sentences ever written about Arthur. And so let's try and parse it. So there are a number of ambivalences in this very short sentence. Is Arthur supposed to be subordinate to the kings of Britain or their superior? It's unclear.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Who are the kings that Nennius is mentioning? Is this a stable coalition? Is it a floating array of allies? Again, it's just not clear. And what is the significance of this Latin phrase dux belorum? So there are two schools of thought on this, basically. Does it deliberately echo a Roman title? So the commander of the northern reaches of the province of Britannia in late antiquity, so the final decades before the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, he was called the dux Britanniarum. Is Arthur being cast as a Roman style commander? Someone reminiscent of that figure?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Or does the phrase carry no kind of, you know, technical freight at all? Is it simply a descriptive that Nennius has coined to describe the fact that Arthur is, you know, in charge of fighting the war?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, is he the supreme commander, the chief warrior, the, you know, what is he? Well, the key question, I guess, is, is he one of the kings and the high king, as it were? Is that what this means? Or is he actually underneath the kings, simply as their commander in chief of their armies?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  We don't know.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  So ambivalences. And then I think there is a slight ambivalence around the question of who Arthur is fighting. So we assume the Saxons, because these are the people who've been mentioned in the previous sentence. But again, Nennius isn't specifying it. So the precise word he uses is those people, illus.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And so it could be the Saxons, or it could be a kind of much messier array of enemies. Again, there are ambiguities there. And then there is this phrase, in those days, which has a deliberate biblical echo, I think. And wherever there are biblical echoes, you kind of potentially have to worry about the authenticity.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Is that not the nature of all of these texts there that are biblical echoes in all of them and literary formula in all of them? So that's not, that's not unique to this passage, right? This is the nature of any source from this period.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Certainly in this period, I just flag it up as an issue to bear in mind. So a lot of questions there. That's basically the first sentence that mentions Arthur. And then we plunge into an enigmatic list of 12 battles that Arthur, as the dux belorum, is supposed to have fought and won. Seven of these are fought beside rivers and four of them, I think rather improbably, beside a single river, and to quote Nennius, which is called Dubglas and is in the region of Llinwys. And Llinwys is thought by most scholars to be somewhere in northern Lincolnshire. But if that's the case, then the Dubglas is a complete mystery. Because there is no such river in north Lincolnshire.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And so other scholars have suggested that Llinwys might actually be in Scotland. And the Dubglas is a river called the Douglas or something like that.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  But to be fair, if Nennius is Welsh, he's a long way away from all this. So he, you know, he might get meddled.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  He might indeed, or he might have alternative sources, as we'll see. The notion that a lot of these battles are fought in the region of Hadrian's Wall, or perhaps further north, is very strong. It's a very kind of popular scholarly theory. And definitely the seventh battle is fought in Scotland because it's, it's described as the Wood of Caledonia. So Caledonia, the Roman word for Scotland. The eighth battle, again, the possibility that it's, it's fought in the region of Hadrian's Wall. It's fought in a fort called Gwynion. And Hadrian's Wall is the area of Britain with the largest concentration of forts. So that's a possibility. There's a bit of a descriptor here. We get more detail about this battle than any other. And Nennius says that at this eighth battle at Gwynion,

• 16:54Speaker 01

  this was a battle in which Arthur carried the image of Mary, the perpetual virgin, on his shoulders. And on that day, the pagans were put to flight and a great slaughter was upon them through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and of Mary, his holy virgin mother. So what's going on here? There is a very popular theory that it is a mistranslation of the Welsh word for shield, which I gather is very similar to the Welsh for shoulders. So it's, I think, Welsh, Welsh listeners, tell me if I'm getting this hopelessly wrong. I believe that the Welsh word for shield is osgwydd. And the Welsh for, for shoulders is osgwyth. And there's an extra D on the end of the word. So that's one theory.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  No, our Welsh listeners, we're getting detailed analysis of Old Welsh. Or is it, Dominic, you'll know as a great admirer of Byzantine practice in late antiquity, that the Romans were very keen on carrying icons of the virgin into battle?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Really?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So maybe is, is, is that a possibility? But they weren't doing that at the period when Nennius is writing. They're doing that in an earlier period, kind of sixth, seventh century. So maybe, is that a clue that this might be a reference from an earlier source? I mean, I don't know, slightly clutching at straws there, but let's clutch at straws because we don't really have much else to clutch at. Then we have the ninth battle. This was fought in the city of the Legion. So it could be Caerleon, it could be Chester, it could be York, anywhere where there was a legionary base. And then the 11th battle occurred on the, the mountain which is called Agned. I mean, God knows where that is. Geoffrey of Monmouth identifies it with Edinburgh, for what it's worth.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  We've established that Geoffrey of Monmouth just makes mad stuff up, so.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I know. But, you know, if you're keen on the kind of idea that Arthur is fighting in, in the border region or in southern Scotland, there's something else there for you.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  So is that Arthur's seat, basically in Edinburgh?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yes. But Arthur's seat doesn't get to be called Arthur's seat until the 15th century. So there's not a kind of, there's no continuity there. Then the 12th battle that Arthur fights, this is the big one. To quote Nennius, the 12th battle was on the mountain of Badon. And this is, you know, this is a resonant phrase because of all the 12 battles that Nennius lists, this is the only one to have featured in another much earlier source. And we touched on it in our last episode. It's the one that's mentioned by Gildas, the highly educated Daily Mail style columnist, who was born some three centuries before Nennius, almost certainly in southern Britain, and in the same year as the Battle of Baden Hill or the Siege of Baden Hill.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And Gildas, although he wasn't a first hand witness to Baden Hill, he is as close to being a witness as we get. It's a battle, but it's also a siege, he tells us. So maybe, you know, is it fought at Hillfort or something like that? We don't know. And also, Gildas specified that it ranked as not the least victory won by the Britons over the Saxons. Baden is often portrayed as a victory so great that it stems the Anglo-Saxon advance, that it wins the Britons a breathing space. This is a theme of many of the novels that are written about a supposed historical Arthur, that Baden is the battle that wins it. That's not actually what Gildas said. I mean, he literally says it's not the least victory, which is slightly damning with

• 20:24Speaker 01

  faint praise, I think. And I think it's clear that Gildas actually only mentions Baden Hill because it's the year in which he was born. But, you know, to repeat, it is resonant. It appears in Gildas and now it's appearing in Nennius. So what does all this mean for the historicity or otherwise of Arthur? I mean, let's give two perspectives, both of which are drawn from the work of very distinguished scholars. You could argue that it offers us a clear substantiated evidence for the existence of someone called Arthur. This is an Arthur with a military background that seems to have kind of very strong Roman vibes. He's got this title, Dux Belorum, which has echoes of late antique command structures in the Roman

• 21:07Speaker 01

  army. You've got a range of military activities extending from north of Hadrian's Wall, maybe to Lincolnshire, maybe to the south of Britain. The south of Britain is where Gildas strongly implies that Baden Hill was to be found. You have regional kings who seem prepared to accept Arthur's pan-British authority, if you're looking at it a certain way. And Arthur is described as being victorious in a battle which we know to be historically authentic. So that's the evidence for Arthur as existing. Or you could argue that the entire paragraph is a literary fiction and a very palpable literary fiction. So on the question of whether

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Arthur has a late antique military command, the obvious question is how would a monk in 9th century North Wales have had even the remotest knowledge of what Roman officers in late antiquity were called?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  There's a counter argument to that, though. How would he have known to make it up?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Well, it could just be the phrase, Dux Belorum. I mean, it could just be, you know, he's the guy who's in charge of fighting battles.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I suppose. But I think if you're pointing fingers at people and saying, well, how on earth can such a person know about things that happened hundreds of years before he was born? The presenters of a history podcast are probably not in a brilliant place to do that, right? I mean,

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Well, except we are because we have ready access to enormous amounts of information, which Nennius probably didn't. It's unlikely that he had an extensive library.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  He must have had something in order to write this at all. Surely. I mean, he's read books.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  He must indeed, and we will be coming to this. But just to continue the skeptical perspective on it. You can also, I think, and I think this is clearly the case, that the list of Arthur's victories has basically been scavenged from a range of sources. One of these is Gildas. You know, these places, a lot of them rhyme in the Latin.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And that implies, I think, that they come from poetry.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And they may come from various poems, and poems in the early medieval Welsh literature don't tend to be absolutely focused on strict historical fact, I think it's fair to say.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a fair point.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  The other kind of key thing to bear in mind is that Arthur is actually just one of a multitude of British heroes mentioned by Nennius in the Historia Bretonum. And these other ones are patently fictional. So the first one is a guy called Brito, who's a grandson of Aeneas, and he supposedly gives Britain its name. And this is the guy who in Geoffrey Monmouth will become Brutus, the guy who fights the giants and stuff like that. There's also a guy called Dolabella, who supposedly fights Caesar. And Dolabella, where's he come from? He's Cicero's son-in-law. I've no idea how Nennius came up with this. Dolabella clearly didn't exist. Brito didn't exist. Does this imply that Arthur didn't

• 24:05Speaker 01

  exist? And then on top of that, going back to the kind of the biblical echoes, there is something possibly suspicious, if you're in a very skeptical frame of mind, about there being 12 battles. I mean, 12, you know, it's kind of maybe an echo of the disciples or whatever. I think basically, the degree of support that Arthur provides for a historical Arthur in that paragraph is a matter of perspective. And it always reminds me of that thing where you either see a duck or a rabbit, and it's very hard to see them both at the same time. Well, basically impossible. And so I think this passage doesn't really give a decisive answer.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  In and of its own terms. So that being the case, are there other sources that might help to clarify matters? And there are. There are a few other pre 11th century texts that do mention Arthur, say, before the year 1000. But the emphasis is, I'm afraid, very much on the few. So firstly, the Historia Bretonum, the passage that we've just read, that paragraph, is not the only mention in the manuscript of the Historia Bretonum that has Arthur. So attached to it like a kind of appendix, there's a group of what are called the Mirabilia Britanniae, the marvels of Britain. And these marvels include two mentions of Arthur. So

• 25:25Speaker 01

  one of them is a stone imprinted with the paw print of a dog called Cabal. And Cabal was the dog of Arthur the warrior, we're told in the Historia Bretonum. And then there is a grave of a guy called Amor, who was the son of the warrior Arthur, and Arthur killed him there and buried him. And the thing that's miraculous about this grave is that its length varies every time it's measured, so that it's impossible to get an accurate reading. So that's, that's very miraculous.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is miraculous.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Now, what's the significance of these two marvels, both of which are obviously mythological? I mean, they're clearly not historical. If the authorship of these marvels can be dated to the same time as the Historia Bretonum, the kind of the mass of the material, 829, we know that that's the date very precisely, because we get the date of the king who's ruling at the time when it's written. Then that does suggest something intriguing, because it suggests that Arthur by 829 was already so celebrated a warrior that he's well on the way to becoming a figure of folklore. And you become a figure of folklore, you know,

• 26:38Speaker 01

  after several generations have kind of bigged you up. However, there is inevitably a problem because most, though by no means all scholars, date the Mirabilia to the 10th century.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  As much later and added together with the other manuscripts.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  To repeat, there are scholars who think that it is ceterminous with the mass of the Historia Bretonum. So in other words, it might be evidence for the fact that Arthur is already a figure of folklore by the early 9th century. But again, the problem is, there is something there for the believers and there is something there for the skeptics. It's hard to be certain which way to go. The same is also true of another, possibly very much earlier piece of evidence, which is a couple of lines in a Welsh Betonic poem, but it's written in the north. So at a time when the Welsh-speaking kings are, that they're occupying Edinburgh, they're occupying Alclut by the Clyde. And this poem is called Ogudorthin.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  It's dated to the early 7th century, and it tells how a warband of 300 Britons left Edinburgh on a kind of doomed expedition to the south into what is now Yorkshire. And one of the fallen warriors on this expedition, a guy called Gorthir, is mourned thus, "He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress, though he was no Arthur." So in other words, he is killing lots of people, he's feeding the ravens, but he's still not as good as Arthur is. And if this is genuinely from around 600, then this is the earliest mention of Arthur that we have. And it implies, again, that he's already a household name. But Dominic,

• 28:21Speaker 01

  it will not surprise you, it will not surprise the listeners, to know that there is a complicating problem here. So Ogudorthin survived in a 13th century manuscript. That's the earliest written version of it that we have. And it is clearly written by at least two scribal hands. And one of these seems to have written the core poem, and the other one to have added additional later material. And I am simplifying things massively here. So if you're a professor of Old Welsh, please don't, don't get cross with me for this.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Right. Do we have such people listen to the show? Surely not.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Who knows? We'll find out. And those two lines which feature Arthur disappointingly seem to have been written by the later scribal hand. However, it's not conclusive. There are definitely scholars who do think the Arthur lines are early. But I think to come to an informed opinion on this, you basically need to be a scholar of Middle Welsh, which I'm not.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  There's only about 10 such people, surely, in the country.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Again, you know, you pay your money, you take the choice on this.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  So unclear from the marvels, unclear from the Ogudorthin poem, and then there's a couple of entries in one more source. So this is a source that you mentioned right back in the first episode of this series, called the Anales Cambriai, the Anles of Wales. And that was compiled in the middle of the 10th century. So what does that source tell us?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so one of these entries, and this is for the year 516, again, describes the Battle of Baden. And it says that this was a battle in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders, and the Britons were victors. And I think that this clearly derives from and garbles the Historia Bretonum.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  The thing about the shoulders and the shield.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he was carrying the Virgin Mary in the earlier one, and now he's carrying Jesus. But the second entry from the year 537, this doesn't draw on the Historia Bretonnem. It clearly comes from another source and I think, you know, it is much more tantalising. So this again, we have, we've read this out in, in the first episode, but I'll give it again. The Battle of Camlyn, in which Arthur and Medrock fell, and there was a great dying in Britain and Ireland. And in episode one, we talked about how Medrock would become Mordred and Camlyn is the last battle that ends up featuring in the Mord Arthur. But where does the Annalise Cambray, I get this from? We don't know, but there is an intriguing detail and that is that this detail about the great dying.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  It has been kind of discovered by volcanologists, I guess, climatologists, that there was in the year 535, a massive volcanic eruption, which was so immense that it seems to have precipitated famine across much of the world. So there are records of this famine in, in Roman sources, in Chinese sources. And it's possible therefore that this is describing a famine that afflicted Britain and Ireland in that year. So a suggestion perhaps that this entry might be kind of authentic-ish.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  But again, I mean, it's not a kind of game changer, I think. It doesn't kind of seal the deal. And so that is it. Those are the sources from the first millennium that mention Arthur and there are no others.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  To be fair, I think that last source is, is pretty good. It mentions Arthur and Mordred in the same entry and it's written from what? 537?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Well, it's written in the, in the mid 10th century.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yes, it is actually. It's looking back to 537. So maybe the myths of Arthur and Mordred are already current.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  But it's that detail about the, you know, the, the great dying. Cause if it's the terrible famine, then that's a detail that has only recently been shown to be true.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  So the bloke writing this would have drawn on sources that were no longer exist to find out about the great dying. Otherwise, how would he know?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's the one that is the most convincing of all the pieces of evidence that we've been discussing. Just before we come to the break, two authors who don't mention Arthur, but are very significant. And so therefore the fact they don't mention him might be considered to be significant in its own right. First of these is Bede, you know, the first great English historian, Northumbrian monk, writing around 730. And Gildas, who we've already mentioned, and he is writing a couple of centuries before Bede. So maybe around 520, 530.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And it's not surprising, we said this in the last episode, that Bede would omit Arthur because Arthur is a great British hero. Bede is very contemptuous of the Britons because he blames them for not having converted the English to Christianity and thinks that this is why God is punishing them by depriving them of Britain. So you could see why Bede might not wish to mention Arthur. But Gildas is a different, different matter. Remember, this is the guy who's born in the same year as the great victory at Baden Hill. And Gildas, not only does he not mention Arthur, but he seems to attribute that victory at Baden Hill to Ambrosius Aurelianus. And Ambrosius Aurelianus is described by Gildas as a Roman whose parents had worn the purple

• 33:35Speaker 01

  and that under him, the Britons had rallied and taken the fight to the Saxons. So it's possibly Ambrosius Aurelianus is a, a kind of shadowy Arthur figure, possibly.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  I mean, you're not the first person to have suggested that, are you? There's lots of historians who flirt with that thesis.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yes, but I suppose as regards Arthur, the question is, in this case, is absence of evidence, maybe evidence of absence or maybe not.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  So after the break, we will be sifting this rather paltry evidence and looking at the various theories as to where and when and how the stories told of Arthur might first have emerged. And Dominic, you and I together will be giving our solutions to the whole mystery.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Finally, the solution awaits. I mean, if you've been listening this far, I bet you are absolutely beside yourself with excitement as we are about to solve the mystery of King Arthur. Come back after the break for this earth shattering moment.

• 34:45Speaker 01

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• 37:09Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the Rest is History. He who can accept of legends for good story may quickly swell a volume with trash. So that rather disobliging verdict was from John Milton in 1648. And Milton's view was that King Arthur was not a serious subject for study. So yeah, disappointing from, from Milton. And as you were saying before the break, in the first half, for two centuries or so, almost everybody, every serious scholar, every vaguely reputable writer who investigated what we would call the Dark Ages, agreed with Milton. They said the stories of King Arthur, they're, they're not just made up, they're embarrassing. They're so clearly fabricated.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  But historians then began to change, didn't they? And I suppose you can date that to what? The middle of the 19th century, when Victorian writers and artists become infatuated with Arthurian legends.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you've got Tennyson, the Lady of Shalott, the Itals of the King, all that kind of thing. You've got the Pre-Raphaelites who, who kind of love a moody looking damsel or a solemn faced knight errant. Lots and lots of, of paintings by them drawn from Arthurian myth. And there's the whole kind of Victorian obsession with chivalry, the cult of the gentleman, becomes a kind of great global marker of, of Englishness. We, in the episode we did on the samurai, we talked about how the kind of chivalric ideal derives from the British idea of the gentleman. So all of this kind of fuels enthusiasm for, for Arthurian legend.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  But I think it also reflects something else, which is in the late 19th century, a kind of escalating obsession with mythology and for identifying legendary heroes with sun gods or nature gods or fertility gods or whatever. So in the 19th century, Arthur comes to be cast as a personification of the sun. Excalibur is seen as being, you know, the rays of the sun, the knights of the round table, the seasons, or the signs of the zodiac, or the planets, or whatever. And then in the 1920s, it's all about vegetation gods who die and rise again. So drawing on The Golden Bower by Fraser, and the most

• 39:37Speaker 01

  celebrated explication of this is Jesse Weston, who wrote a book called From Ritual to Romance, which cast the quest for the Holy Grail as a story that encodes deeply buried memories of ancient fertility cults. And T S Eliot loved it.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  He loved this.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  So The Wasteland is, it's all about this, the Fisher King and things like that. But I think today that these kinds of universalizing theories don't have much traction. I think essentially scholars today would see them as a kind of intellectual period pieces. And there isn't really anyone today who thinks that Arthur was a sun god or a fertility god or whatever. And there are two principal reasons for this. The first is essentially what we've been talking about in our first two episodes, the degree to which the stories and themes in Arthurian romance, so the sword and the stone, the round table, the Holy Grail, whatever, clearly originated in medieval times in response to medieval obsessions,

• 40:40Speaker 01

  medieval cultural needs, whatever. So you think of the, you know, the figure of Lancelot, the cult of chivalry, all that kind of stuff. This is clearly not an embodiment of some solar cult, you know, some kind of global solar cult. It's bred of the cultural specifics of the 12th and 13th centuries. Now that said, there clearly are mythological trace elements in the stories told of Arthur, but these are deriving from one specific mythology, and that's the Celtic mythology, the mythology of whales and cornwall and whatever. And we've mentioned some of them already in this series. So the plot which structures Cretias' Lancelot, you know, he goes on this quest to rescue Guinevere from this knight who's

• 41:24Speaker 01

  abducted her to a strange eerie kingdom. And you can see how that story is drawing on Welsh tales about figures from mythology who ruled strange lands, lands of supernatural, lands of fairy, whatever. And also in, I think that what derives from Welsh mythology is the hero who passes from our world into a condition of, if not death, then a kind of suspended, a suspended life. And I think this is clearly one of the most venerable themes in Arthurian legend. And those Cornishmen in 1113 who were getting upset because the

• 42:05Speaker 01

  French were laughing at them, you know, that, that is testimony to how far back that story goes. But the notion that Arthur himself was a god at one point and slowly got adapted into a historical figure, it seems to me really implausible. So if you look at the Historia Bretonum, you've got an Arthur whose dog is leaving his paw print on a stone, and who's killed his son, whose grave can't adequately be measured. And then you've got an Arthur who's a Dux Bretonum and fighting at the city of the legion or whatever. It seems improbable to me that the first one would have evolved to become the second one.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Totally. Could work the other way around. You could have a real Arthur, who is a great warrior or commander, of whom fabulous stories are later told. It's very unlikely that you have a deity who then over time-

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that becomes a figure of history.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a sort of left hand colonel in somebody's army. I mean, that just seems highly unlikely.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's no question that Arthur does come to be associated with a huge number of, of kind of weird prehistoric monuments or hills or whatever. You mentioned Arthur's seat. But this is an ongoing process. I mean, it lasts throughout the Middle Ages. It continues into the early modern period. And you can think of parallels in more recent history. So all the inns where Elizabeth I is supposed to have stayed, all the oak trees where Charles II is supposed to have hidden. I think that if those stories about the paw print of Arthur's dog in a rock are being written down at the same time as the stuff about Arthur as the Dux Bretonum, that suggests that Arthur is already a figure of myth when Nenius is writing his book, and that it reflects the fact that this is

• 43:47Speaker 01

  a mythologization of a historical figure, and therefore Arthur must have lived several centuries before Nenius.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, as you say, you can absolutely, I mean, history is littered with figures about whom tall stories are later told, you know, indeed sometimes supernatural stories. So that's, that's perfectly possible.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Drake's drum.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Let's get to actually a key thing, which we haven't really talked about at all. The word Arthur, so Arthur's name. It's not, if he's, he's the Dux, whatever he is, Dux Belorum, but it's not obviously a Latin name, is it? So what does the name tell us about him?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  It's thought to be a Bretonic word, so the Celtic name, derived from the word for bear, arth. But I gather from specialists in the field, philologists and such like, that the consensus now is that it derives from a Roman name, namely Artorius. And obviously, if that's the case, then there's a real problem in assuming that Arthur might originally have been a Celtic god. I mean, it basically blows it out of the water, because as Nicholas Hyam, in his recent book, King Arthur, The Making of the Legend, Whitley puts it, Celtic gods uniformly bore Celtic names. In other words, not Roman names. There are no Celtic gods that have Roman names.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  So let's assume that it is a Roman name. It's Artorius. And he is, of course, the Dux Belorum. So is he therefore, I mean, this is a very standard view now, isn't it? That Arthur is some kind of Roman, you know, Romano-British military officer, the sun is setting on the Roman Empire, but you know, like Churchill in that opening reading, he draws his sword and rallies the last Romans to him to keep the flame of freedom flying against the invaders.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And I think it is no coincidence that this take on the origins of the Arthurian legend should first have emerged in the 1930s, just as Britain is kind of bracing herself for a war impossible invasion by Germans. I mean, I think it's, it's, you can absolutely see what's going on there. And the scholar who blazed the trail for this theory was, he was a philosopher as well as an archaeologist and a historian, so a very interesting man, called Archie Collingwood. And he wrote The Oxford History of Roman Britain. It was published in 1936. And in it, it's almost kind of throwaway lines, but it has a massive

• 46:20Speaker 01

  impact. Collingwood suggested how, through the mist of legend, as he puts it, the contours might be glimpsed of a kind of sub-Roman campaign led by a commander of rare genius. And Collingwood suggests that this commander had stood at the head of a mobile field army, so heavily armored cavalry, catafracts, that were typical of Roman armies in the late antique period. And that this commander was heir to the Roman province of the Count of the Provinces of Britain, and he had ranged from beyond Hadrian's Wall, down to Dorset,

• 47:01Speaker 01

  down to Kent, and that this is reflected in the geographical spread of the 12 victories that you get in the Historia Bretonum. And this commander was, of course, Arthur, and he's described by Collingwood as the last of the Romans, the last to understand Roman ideas and use them for the good of the British people. And this is the theory that Churchill picks up in that passage that you read, the latest and best informed writers. He's thinking of Collingwood when he writes that.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  As you say, it's beautiful. It's a, it's a theory that you instinctively feels right, you want to believe it. And it's a huge inspiration to the general public, to novelists, and to serious scholars for several decades after the Second War.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  That's the sort of Bernard Cornwell- Well, The Winter King.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Rosemary Sutcliffe's great book Sword at Sunset.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so many, exactly. The Rosemary Sutcliffe, all so many sort of 1950s, 60s onwards fictional versions of Arthur have Arthur as a sort of Roman commander amid the ruin, the crumbling ruins of Roman Britain. Any archaeological evidence for this? Because we haven't talked about archaeology at all.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Right. So in the 1960s, this theory helps encourage a dig, a very famous dig, which is conducted by an archaeologist called Leslie Alcock. And this goes on for four consecutive summers and it's covered in considerable detail by the BBC. So it has unusual fame for an archaeological dig. And it was held at Cadbury Castle in Somerset, which we mentioned in episode one as being one of the possible sites for the Battle of Camlyn. And this was an Iron Age hillfort, which at least since the Tudor period had been identified with Camelot. And in fact, there was a Welsh historian who was so offended by Polidora Virgil that he said, look at Cadbury Castle.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Everyone there says that this was Camelot. So that proves that Arthur existed. So it's, it goes back at least as far as that. And Alcock's excavations revealed that the hillfort had been reoccupied in the wake of the Roman withdrawal from Britain. And he distinguished really very solid fortifications built of timber and dry stone and earth. And there was a great hall which had clearly been occupied by a very considerable warlord. And there were luxury goods, pottery imported from the Mediterranean and the like, very similar also to what you find in Tintagel, intriguingly.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  So it's not surprising then that when Alcock, in I think 1973, published an overview of his excavation, he gave it a title which left no one in any doubt as the whom he thought had been occupying that great hall and enjoying the luxury goods that had been brought there from the Mediterranean, because he calls his book Arthur's Britain.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Well, to be fair, if not Arthur, then who? I mean, he's one of the few characters from this period who is named and, you know, he was obviously important enough to leave a kind of mythological legacy. So why not Arthur?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  And Alcock gives a kind of brilliant description of Arthur as he strides around Cadbury Castle in his Roman military uniform. So he's, he's going in very hard. And this in turn encouraged some scholars, some kind of not so scholarly over the course of the seventies to, to go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth and say, oh, well, you know, if Geoffrey of Monmouth got this kind of link between Arthur and the world of the Roman Empire, right, what else might he have got right? And so we could look at a couple of these theories. One of them is that Arthur had ruled as, and I quote, "The last Roman emperor in Britain, heir to the island emperors who had been enthroned there since the withdrawal of the legions."

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And this was proposed by a scholar called John Morris, who was a historian at UCL. He wrote an entire book called The Age of Arthur, which I adored.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, brilliant book.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And it was full of diagrams with, you know, maps and kind of arrows showing Arthur's campaigns and things like that. And he then wrote a posthumously published history of Roman London. And that's where that description of Arthur as the last Roman emperor in Britain appeared. It has to be said, there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, everyone now thinks that this bloke Morris made all this up, doesn't he?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Well, he was maybe over enthusiastic in his interpretation of the source material. Another theory was developed by Geoffrey Ash, who was the guy who wrote a number of books about King Arthur inspired by Alcock. He kind of wrote the, the book of the dig. His theory was that, that when Geoffrey said that Arthur had led an army across the channel to attack the Romans in Gaul, that, that maybe this reflected distorted memories of an army of Britons crossing the channel to attack the Goths led by a British king. And this theory derived from the undoubted fact that there was a king called Riothamus

• 52:14Speaker 01

  who had led an army of Britons against the Goths around 470. But there are considerable problems with this theory as well. Firstly, it ignores the fact that Riothamus, rather than triumphing gloriously, as Arthur was said to have done in Geoffrey of Monmouth, had actually been defeated. It also required Riothamus to be not a proper name, but a title and a word for a king, which it definitely wasn't. And it also required the Britons to have crossed the channel. And all the evidence points to these Britons actually having come from Brittany rather than from Britain. So basically, I think that's dead in the water, that theory.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  There are other Roman theories, right? So what about this one? There was a Roman officer, I mean, with a very, very telling name. Is it, what is it? Lucius Artorius Castus? Is he the real Arthur?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Well, the evidence for this is it's a kind of funerary inscription found in what today is Croatia. And it includes not just Artorius's name, but the fact that he had served in Britain. So this might, you know, this is, might seem a kind of clinching detail. Except for the fact that the date of this funerary inscription is the second century AD.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Oh no, that's far too early.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  300 years before the collapse of Roman Britain.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Now, what about another idea? I'm going to throw another idea at you. So this, there's a film, I think, with Clive Owen in it. Isn't he Arthur?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Kieran Knightley.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  So in this film, if I remember right, Arthur has the cavalry, has this heavy cavalry. Then these are Sarmatian warriors from what is now the Hungarian plain. So is there any truth in this?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So this theory derives from the undoubted fact that in 175, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius did send Sarmatian warriors, specifically Iasagans, from the plains beyond the Roman frontier to Britain. And the theory is that it's the descendants of these Iasagan warriors, the Sarmatians, who led the fight against the invading Saxons. And also that they adapted stories that they had brought from Sarmatia to Britain. And that these would go on to provide the basis for many of the stories that were told of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  So the Sarmatians, I mean, are they still going to be Sarmatians hundreds of years later? I mean, that just seems absolutely ludicrous. The Knights of the Round Table, I mean, you have demonstrated surely beyond any possible doubt that the Knights of the Round Table are inventions.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Are knights?

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, of the Middle Ages.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  They're not, they're not catafracts. They're not Sarmatian heavy cavalry. I mean, it's mad to think that.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  They're reflecting the age of chivalry. I mean, they are inventions of the age of chivalry. They are not folk memories of these kind of barbarian warriors or whatever.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  You know, the, the other thing is that it's not even evident that the, these guys were heavy cavalry. Because there are all kinds of Sarmatians who weren't heavy cavalry. We have no way of knowing for sure. So I, I think that that's, that's improbable. And again, I will quote Nicholas Hyam in his tremendous recent book on King Arthur. "We can be as certain as the nature of the evidence permits that elements of the Arthurian stories were not carried to the West by Iasagan warriors posted to Britain by Marcus Aurelius in 175, which is a scholar's way of saying that it is absolute tosh."

• 55:42Speaker 00

  But he goes further, doesn't he? In his book, King Arthur, the Make of the Legend, he basically says, "The whole thing is made up. There is no historical Arthur at all." I mean, that's disappointing. So why does he come to such a sweeping and definitive verdict?

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Essentially, he's, he's dumping on the whole idea, which I think is very popular, that you can't have smoke without fire. And he says this is simply not true. So to quote him, "When all is said and done, all we have are swirling shapes in a fantastical cloud. There is neither flame nor fire beneath. Half-imagined wraiths forming in hillmist are no foundation for our history." And his thesis is that Neneus literally made it up, that he's responsible for the whole Farago, that he invented Arthur from scratch to serve the propaganda needs of Gwynedd, the Welsh kingdom in the north, that was being menaced at the time by Mercian expansionism.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And he points out that the themes, not just of the paragraph about Arthur, but the whole Historia Bretonnae, in which that paragraph appears are kind of twofold. So firstly, the Britons, aka the Welsh, are the original and rightful people of Britain. They should own it. It's theirs. They're the indigenous people. But over the course of their history, there have been repeated invasions, there have been repeated waves of immigrants and conquerors, so the Romans, the Picts, the Irish. And Arthur is just one of a long line of British war leaders that Neneus has invented from scratch to demonstrate that in the long run,

• 57:26Speaker 01

  the Britons are always bound to emerge triumphant. That just as the Romans were seen off, the Picts were seen off, the Irish were seen off, so in the long run, the Saxons are going to be seen off. And so Hyam, he's basically saying that Neneus is as bad as Geoffrey of Monmouth. He writes, "Let us face facts. The Historia Bretonnae is in large part a work of historical fiction. Neneus too is Dan Brown."

• 57:54Speaker 00

  So we could end the episode right there, but we're not going to because I believe, am I, am I right, that you don't quite agree with Nicholas Hyam's verdict?

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Having read his book, you've got your doubts.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  It's a wonderful book. It covers every theory that you could want to have covered and does it. I mean, Hyam is a brilliant scholar, you know, and a really good writer, as you could tell from, you know, that wonderful stuff about wraiths.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  And when I began it, I thought that Arthur was a complete myth. But weirdly, by the time I finished it, I was starting to have second thoughts about that. There's no question what Hyam's book does with completely devastating clarity is to spell out how insubstantial our evidence for historical Arthur is. But what it also does is demonstrate how contested it is. So contested, in fact, that I think it is actually really difficult to be certain one way or the other. Hyam, you know, he says, I'm not, not at home to agnosticism. He definitely didn't exist. I think his book is a very convincing demonstration of why agnosticism ultimately is the only

• 59:05Speaker 01

  response to the kind of the insubstantial nature of the evidence. Because the sources, such as they exist, such as we have been describing them, it's almost like they've been designed to preclude certainty either way. To say that Arthur's a total miss, you've got to side with saying that all the sources are late. If you're saying that they're all early, then perhaps you can say that they are, that they're authentic. And, you know, great scholars on either side are arguing both those things. So it's really, really difficult if you're not, not a specialist, I think, to arrive at certainty either way. So just to reiterate, to argue that Nennius invented Arthur requires all that stuff about the Arthur's dog and the stone and stuff to date from the 10th century.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  But if they're written, you know, in the early 9th century, then, and lots of scholars argue that, then I think that that suggests that Arthur has a kind of much earlier origin. And that would imply that Nennius couldn't have invented Arthur from absolutely nothing, because Arthur's already famous enough as a great warrior by 829 to have given his name to all these kind of various features in the landscape.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Then you've got that line in All Got Thotlin. He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress, though he was no Arthur. I mean, he was no Arthur suggests that there is a universally accepted standard that is associated with somebody called Arthur that everybody thinks existed, right? As in, he was no Muhammad Ali, he was no, she's no Margaret Thatcher, he was no Winston Churchill. I mean, you just know you don't say that unless everyone knows that person means something and existed.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Right, but that's the problem. It might be late, which lots of scholars think, but equally, it might be early and lots of great scholars think that too. So what do you do? And what if, and Hyam, this is Hyam's argument, that the Arthur is another Arthur, it's not the King Arthur, it's some Arthur, other Arthur. But I think that this is just kicking the problem down the road, because Nennius definitely wasn't making the name Arthur up. For a brief while, it does actually seem to have been very popular among British and indeed Irish princes and kind of royal families. And here's the thing, the popularity of Arthur as a name in early medieval Britain is confined to a very precise period of time, and it's basically the 6th and 7th centuries.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  So that's much earlier than Nennius. And there's another recent book that's come out by Ken Dark.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Ken Dark, who's writing about the Dark Ages.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  He would say he's writing about early medieval Britain, Dominic. Ken, early medieval Britain. And he's, he's published, Kings and Tyrants, it's called, it came out just actually just a couple of months ago. And he points out that before the 6th century, there's no mention of Arturius from Britain. I mean, there's the guy in Croatia or whatever, but from Britain, you've got thousands of inscriptions, there's no mention of anyone called Arturius on them. And then to quote Dark, after at latest, the late 7th century, there are no more Arthurs in Britain prior to the early 9th century, when Historia Bretonnem was written. So in other words, this short period covering the darkest of what you might want to call

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  the Dark Ages, this is when the, the name Arthur suddenly starts appearing. And this prompts the obvious question, what or who could possibly have prompted its emergence as a popular name among the royal families of Britain in the early 6th century?

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  That's tantalizing. Surely the most definitive piece of evidence. I mean, this has been, I've been thinking about this ever since we mentioned it in the episode, and I wondered if we'd come back to it, and finally we have. This is that entry in the sort of the Welsh annals, the Annales Cambriai. So the Battle of Camland, in which Arthur and Medrout fell, and there was a great dying in Britain and Ireland. Now, this is not fiction or fantasy, you know, scholars don't think this is made up.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's this thing about the volcano and the famine, if, if we're to assume that that's the great dying. And the other thing is that, you know, we have Arthur there, so Arturius, he's got a Roman name, but we also have Medrout. And Dark points out that this too seems to have derived from another Latin name, Moderatus. And the use of Latin names like that is fading out by the kind of 8th century.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  To me, that is, that Arthur and Mordred basically in the same source, within a tested historical fact, the, the famine that comes up from the eruption.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  We don't know who they are. We, you know, we said in the first episode, we don't know from this, whether they're on the same side, whether they're fighting one another, you know, who wins the battle, whatever, we don't know that. But what we do know is that these are two figures whose name derive from Roman names. So if we're talking about an Arturius and a Moderatus, that implies that these might well belong in the 6th century to a date which there is kind of external evidence might indeed have been in 536 or 537. I think that is the degree of evidence we have. It's, it's a pretty tiny flickering candle to set against the, you know, the icy winds of skepticism, but I think it is a candle all the same.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  And we began this series with the mystery alluded to by Mallory, did Arthur die of his wounds or did he, was he taken to another place and is he destined to come again and win the Holy Cross? And we end it, I think, with something very similar, that question of did Arthur exist or must he be banished from the history books as an outright fabrication? And so I am going to sign off this series by echoing Mallory and saying, I will not say that it shall be so.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Oh, that's very nicely done. So I think he did exist, by the way, just going to pin my colours to the mask, you know, I, and I, I want him to have existed because I want him to have existed. Simple as that, really.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  I, I think that's entirely, you know, you're not a professor of early Welsh, so I think you're entirely entitled to your opinion.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  No, and I never will be, I'm happy to say.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  You can believe what you like.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Surely everybody, all our Welshers who's listened to this, definitely want him to have existed.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Everyone wants Arthur to have existed, basically.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Of course they do, of course they do, unless you're utterly joyless. Right, Tom, what have we got coming up next week?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  We've got you, haven't we, talking about a much more recent period of history, the great events of 1956. So that's the Suez Crisis, in which Britain doesn't show herself to best advantage, and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Yes, indeed. Those episodes will be out on Monday, the 1956 series, Suez first, then Hungary, for our club members. If you want to get all of the episodes on Monday, as the club members will, then you know what to do, you need to sign up to the club at therestishistory.com. You'll get all sorts of supplementary benefits, which, let me just put this on the record, they absolutely do exist. The existence of these benefits is, there is absolutely no scholarly doubts about this whatsoever. And that to finish it for Michelle. Tom, thank you very much for that, that was absolutely masterful, and we will see you next week in 1956. Bye bye.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  Hello, Goalhanger History listeners. This is Marina Hyde and Richard Osman from The Rest is Entertainment.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Hello, everybody. Every Thursday and Friday, we are reacting to the pop culture phenomenon that is The Celebrity Traitors, will be on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And Marina and I are digging into all the castle's twists and turns, giving our expert opinion on what should happen next.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor?

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  It's tempting to think of an actual traitor.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  A Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby, but then all of those are traitors who got caught.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Philby had a great run, though.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  He did have a great run.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Yes, maybe, and probably sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  So maybe there's, there's some sort of equivalence. So if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday and Friday night at 10pm.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  We are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  The Great Game, Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  We assess a Prime Minister.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  With high confidence, it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago. A frago that says to kill the President of Russia. Yes.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  New from Goalhanger.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

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