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

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СКАЧАТЬ absolute agreement as to the date of Badon, except, as we have seen, that it probably happened in the decades on either side of 500, and probably not after 516. The Welsh Annals add further confusion to an already confused picture by mentioning ‘Bellum baronies secundo’ (the second Battle of Badon), which Alcock believed was fought in the year 667. The actual sites of the two battles are also unknown.

      The most distinguished writer and scholar of the eighth century was the Venerable Bede. This remarkable man was born near Monkwearmouth, County Durham, some time around 673, and died about 735. He is widely associated with the then new monastery at Jarrow, near Newcastle in Northumberland, where he was ordained priest in 703, but he probably lived most of his life at the monastery that was twinned with Jarrow, at Monkwearmouth. His major work, which tradition has it was written at Jarrow, is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which he finished in 731.²¹ Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is a highly important source of early English history. It is both well written and well researched, but like the man, Bede’s intentions in writing it were complex.

      Bede’s primary motive was the salvation of his people, and he saw the Church as the means of achieving it. Although not an ethnic Anglo-Saxon himself, he wrote from their perspective, and his history is essentially about the anarchy and power vacuum that followed the end of Roman rule. He describes a period when southern Britain was subject to marauding bands from the Continent. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by St Augustine in 597 was for Bede the great turning point. As he saw it, the Church imposed order in a world where structure was lacking. He was hostile to the British, whom he saw as chaotic, and he used the writings of their own historian, Gildas, against them—in the process he edited and greatly improved the overelaborate language of the De excidio. Bede fails to mention Arthur, and follows Gildas, his source, in attributing the victory at Mount Badon to Ambrosius Aurelianus.

      The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the last of the major pre-Norman histories of Britain, was established by King Alfred some time in the 890s. In form it was an annal, written in Old English, and was maintained and updated at major ecclesiastical centres. It begins with the Roman invasion and was still being updated in the mid-twelfth century. Surviving manuscripts are associated with Canterbury,Worcester, York and Abingdon. The Chronicle can be patchy as a source on early events, but it is much better in its later coverage, of the reigns of Alfred (871—99), Aethelred (865—71), Edward the Confessor (1042—66) and the Norman kings. It is also an important document for the study of the development of Old English; but while it is not particularly relevant to the Arthur myths, it does provide a useful account of the early Anglo-Saxon histories of south-eastern England, especially Sussex and Kent.

      The first major source of full-blown Arthur stories is the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s.²² It would be fair to call Geoffrey (c.1100—55) the father of the mythical King Arthur, who was largely his invention. He did, however, use the principal earlier authors Gildas, Bede and Nennius, together with current oral sources, which as we will see could have had very much older roots. His History was also based on an unnamed earlier British or Welsh work which he had seen and which is often assumed to have been the ‘source’ for his own considerable inventions. This famous ‘lost source’ has itself become a Holy Grail of modern Arthurian enthusiasts and theorists.²³ Geoffrey’s book was to prove enormously popular and influential, particularly as an inspiration for the later Arthurian literature in the medieval courtly tradition.

      In the previous chapter we saw how Geoffrey produced the Brutus legend to account for the origins of Britain; Arthur was by no means his only invention. Later in his life he wrote a less successful Latin epic poem about the life of the prophet Merlin, the Vita Merlini. Geoffrey was undoubtedly a very capable author, but like everyone else concerned with Arthur, he had his own motives for writing. He lived in very troubled times. England was in the throes of a civil war between the followers of King Stephen and those of Matilda, daughter of Henry I; the war started when Stephen seized the throne in December 1135, and ended when he died in 1154 and Henry II ascended the throne. During this period, generally known as the Anarchy, the country grew weary of warfare and strife. There was a widespread desire for peace, which may help to explain why Geoffrey’s largely fictional history met with such success both in Britain and on the Continent, where it provided the source for a rich tradition of medieval Arthurian romances.

      Geoffrey wrote his history in order to provide an honourable pedigree for the kingship of England that was then being fought over so keenly. He was writing for the benefit of the Anglo-Norman aristocratic élite, and he set out to show how their predecessor, King Arthur, had performed mighty deeds. Arthur had, according to Geoffrey, defeated the Roman Emperor and conquered all of Europe except Spain. That went down well with an audience of Norman knights whose families, friends and relations controlled not just England and Normandy, but large parts of Europe too.

      But Geoffrey’s work went further. Significantly, he made use of earlier sources to give the appearance of authenticity for those who possessed some historical knowledge. As Nicholas Higham puts it:

      It provided the new Anglo-Norman kings with a predecessor of heroic size, a great pan-British king in a long line of monarchs capable of countering pressures for decentralisation, as had occurred in France, and reinforcing claims of political superiority over the Celtic lands. Existing claims that the Normans were descended from the Trojans gelled easily with the descent of the Britons from the same stock…At the same time Arthur offered an Anglo-Norman counterbalance to…Charlemagne as an historical icon.²⁴

      Geoffrey’s account of Arthur and his exploits is both remarkably full and detailed, and hard to put down. These, however, are more than mere tales of adventure; there is something transcendent about them. It seems to me beyond doubt that Geoffrey intended to create this sense of ‘otherness’, of the stories being somehow close to the supernatural.

Most reviews of Arthurian history talk in terms of pre- and post-Galfridic sources.* Pre-Galfridic sources are seen as having more historical value than Geoffrey’s own work and those that followed him. All, however, are chronologically separated from the events in question by several centuries. All their authors, too, have their own motives for writing. Nicholas Higham was the first to point out that pre-Galfridic sources such as the Historia Brittonum or the Annales Cambriae should not ‘be treated very differently from, for example, Geoffrey’s Historia, or other later texts. All are highly imaginative works, none of whose authors saw their prime task as the reconstruction of what actually happened in the distant past. Rather, in all cases, then as now, the past was pressed into the service of the present and was subject to the immediate, and highly variable, purposes of political theology.’²⁵

      The story of Arthur’s conception at Tintagel Castle, which involves magical changes of identity, harks back to Biblical tradition and the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary. As Pearsall and others have noted, there is more than a little of the British Christ to King Arthur. Even given the extraordinary power of Geoffrey’s writing, it is still remarkable just how rapidly the Arthurian tradition took off not in Britain alone, but in Europe too. This is largely down to two gifted translators of the original, and to a French writer whose literary skills were the equal of Geoffrey’s.

Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae was translated into French by Robert Wace, a churchman who was originally from Jersey, but who lived at Caen in Normandy. He called his translation the Geste des Bretons (History of the Britons), but it was renamed the Roman de Brut (a topical reference to Romance and Britain/Brutus) by the scribes who copied it out for a wider readership. The new title stuck. Wace’s was a very free translation, СКАЧАТЬ