Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor

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СКАЧАТЬ (i.e. historical truth) colours much of his writing, both archaeological and historical. Although he acknowledges that there are many unsolved problems, he belongs to what David Dumville has termed the ‘no smoke without fire’ school of recent Arthurian historians.² Adherents of this school may have doubts about Arthur’s historicity, but they believe that so much was written about him, albeit long after his lifetime, that there has to be a core of truth to it. Alcock has also argued, moreover, that early sources such as the British Easter Annals mentioned St Patrick, St Bridget and St Columba by name, and nobody today doubts their historicity—so why doubt Arthur, who is mentioned in the same sources?³ Unfortunately, historians do not work like that: each person’s claim to veracity must be examined on its own merits, preferably using a number of independent sources. It is not good enough to claim that if A is known to have existed, then B must have lived too.

      I knew Alcock when he was still actively engaged in archaeology, and I know many of the people who worked with him at his excavations on South Cadbury in the late sixties and early seventies. His excavations were of the highest standard, and the subsequent publications were also first-rate.Why did he become so involved with what was ultimately to prove a wild-goose chase? I don’t think anyone knows precisely why, although Nicholas Higham has plausibly suggested that Alcock’s was essentially a post-war reactive response: he was looking for a non-Germanic origin for British culture.⁴ A cynic, however, might suggest that the Camelot/Arthur stuff helped keep Alcock’s much-loved South Cadbury project financially alive. Maybe, but neither he nor the very distinguished people on his Research Committee were particularly worldly or ambitious in that way. It was a bona fide academic research project, and certainly not a mere money-making ploy. So, to return to my original question, why did he become so preoccupied with Arthur?

      I can only suppose that something of the Arthurian magic touched him and fired his imagination. Maybe too he was intellectually predisposed to accept Arthur as a result of the horrors of the Second World War. There is no doubt that, even if at times flawed, Alcock’s writing on the history of Arthur can be remarkably persuasive. For a long time he clearly believed in the importance of what he was doing, even if he did eventually radically rethink his original ideas about Cadbury and its supposed identification with Arthur’s Camelot.⁵ Whatever the truth about Arthur and Camelot at South Cadbury, the excavations were superb, and have given rise (as we will see in Chapter 8) to an important and continuing project of fieldwork.

      What is it about the Arthurian legends that so many people find appealing? Is it just that he has been used as a historical metaphor to explain something as nebulous as the origins of Britain? Or is it more than that? Does Arthur express something deep within ourselves, something we do not fully understand, but which we feel matters? Or are the myths surrounding the Once and Future King just very good stories? My own feeling is that while it may be possible to deconstruct the historiography (i.e. the history of the history) of the Arthur myths, that process will not necessarily explain their enduring appeal, and it certainly will not explain why they are so extraordinarily popular with so many people of different nationalities today. Let me give a single example of the phenomenon.

      Anyone who has been touched by the power of the Arthur myths never forgets the experience. It happened to me back in 1974, in Toronto, when I was an Assistant Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was a time when there was a great upsurge of Arthurian interest, brought about by Leslie Alcock’s claim that a Somerset hillfort at South Cadbury was probably the site of Camelot.⁶ Geoffrey Ashe’s popular analysis of the myths and stories surrounding the Grail legends had appeared in paperback,⁷ and of course there were other publications, some good, some less so.⁸ It was widely assumed that, as an English archaeologist, I would know about the Dark Ages. In fact I was a prehistorian working on the outskirts of prosaic Peterborough, not at glamorous Glastonbury—but like a fool I kept quiet about that. In any case, the museum’s PR people thought it would be a good idea if I gave a public lecture on the subject of ‘Arthur’s Britain’. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.

      My suspicions should have been roused when the BBC contacted me in late summer while I was digging in Peterborough; my lecture in Toronto was scheduled for some time around Christmas. The BBC had received a tip-off from someone in Canada, but as I was still reading the first chapters of Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, I couldn’t answer the questions they asked me. So they left me in peace.

      Back in Toronto, I soon realised that my Arthur talk was going to be very big indeed. The publicity was huge, and was developing swiftly. In the mid-1970s the over-commercialised AM radio stations of North America were being replaced by more laid-back FM stations, playing music by bands like the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd and so forth. King Arthur was meat and drink to this audience, and I had several extended chat sessions with DJs on air.

      On the day of the lecture I arrived at the museum, but the crowd around the main entrance was so big that I had to go down to the basement and enter through the goods entrance. I clutched my slides in what was rapidly becoming a very sweaty palm. Upstairs, the main lecture theatre was already packed, and there was still half an hour to go. I handed my slides to the audio-visual technician, who was visibly shaken by the huge crowd. He was Welsh, and the quiet words ‘Good luck, boyo’ came from an uncharacteristically dry mouth. Out on the stage a crew was rapidly rigging up a sound system that would relay my voice to a crowd standing in the huge rotunda just inside the museum’s main entrance. I later learned that additional loudspeakers were positioned outside the building—and remember, this was Canada in the winter.

      I think the lecture was successful, but I was so dazed that I can’t in all honesty remember how it went. Arthur had worked his magic, and had left me an older and a wiser young man. After that experience, I simply will not accept that the appeal of Arthur is just about British origin myths or the romance of chivalry. I do not believe that there is a rational explanation, but I am convinced that there is a power to these stories that cannot be explained away.

      We have seen how two of the British origin myths, the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, owe their current popularity to a series of reinventions in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same can be said of Arthur, but his story has a far longer history of creation, recreation and adaptation. By contrast, whether or not one believes there was ever an ethnic group called the ancient Celts, it cannot be denied that Britain was home to a diverse group of Iron Age cultures with their own highly original style of art. Similarly, even if, as I believe, they did not invade en masse, a few ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (or people like them) probably did come to Britain in the post-Roman period—either that, or perhaps as well as that, influential British people repeatedly travelled to northern Germany, where they were influenced by what they saw.

      But when it comes to Arthur, one fact cannot be sidestepped: there is no mention of a character of that name in any ancient account of Britain written between AD 400 and 820—and Arthur is supposed to have lived in the fifth century.⁹ There are sixth- and seventh-century accounts of battles and other events in the fifth century which have been linked to Arthur by modern authors, with more or less credibility, but none with certainty. There are also later accounts which hark back to earlier times and hypothetical lost authors; but nobody, either at the time or within a few generations of his death, wrote about him by name until some four centuries later—fifteen or twenty generations after the event. To put that in context, it is as if Simon Schama was the first historian ever to mention Oliver Cromwell by name.

      Today Arthur is essentially a literary phenomenon, and there is an enormous subsidiary literature devoted to the legends surrounding СКАЧАТЬ