Dan Snow's History Hit - The Real King Arthur

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

If King Arthur never existed, why does he loom so large in England's history? Dan traces the real-life figures who could have been the legendary King Arthur- the medieval king who pulled the sword from the stone and led the English against the Anglo-Saxons who arrived in England in the 5th century with peace on their tongues and conquest in their hearts. He explores the origins of the Arthur myth in medieval literature, the state of disarray in Britain after the Romans left and the real-life bravery of Ambrosius Aurelianus against the Saxon invaders.Written and produced by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal PatmoreDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

They came from the north, the west and the east. A later chronicler tells us they were like hungry and ravening wolves, rushing with greedy jaws upon the fold which is left without a shepherd, and wafted both by the strength of oarsmen and the blowing wind, break through the boundaries and spread slaughter on every side. And like mowers cutting down the ripe corn, they cut up, tread underfoot, and overrun the whole country. tread underfoot and overrun the whole country.

They were raiding parties, war bands, armies of settlers, men of violence who'd come to pick the carcass of Roman Britain clean. You'll listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, and I'm going to be talking about a time that leading historians have asserted was probably the most catastrophic, regressive period in the last 2,000 years of British history. A time of plague, unending warfare, violence, dissolution, death, slavery and horror. It was the 5th century AD. In the first decade of that century, Britain effectively left the Roman Empire.

It was catapulted out, it was prized out, it was torn out, it fell out. There are various interpretations. That empire had taken blow after blow along its frontiers, and its enemies were now striking deep within its vitals. It was an empire that could no longer control or support its most far-flung province, one beyond storm-whipped seas, a province with its own nightmarish, indefensible frontiers. Although it's obviously not fashionable anymore, it's unacceptable to do so. Describing this period as a dark age is at least an understandable nickname.

Events are obscure, opaque. It's almost like they've been blacked out. There are no British written sources, not one single one one that survive from that period. There's a few offhand remarks from continental scribes and there's the archaeological record. And that's all that we have that's contemporary. And it does seem to me that the people who lived at that time, who attempt to survive through that upheaval, well, they might reasonably have described the times they've lived through as pretty dark, and not just for reasons of literary scarcity.

But dark times have often furnished us with our brightest myths. And from out of this cauldron of violence and savagery, a figure has emerged. A story, really. And it's a mixture between a kind of mythical founding figure and our most recognisable folk hero. Here's Arthur. A man who, we're told, briefly stabilised the land., drove the enemy away at the tip of a spear by the edge of his sword Excalibur, by one telling of it. A man who fostered a window of peace and prosperity behind the protection of his shield. His story has been retold countless times, and it's an essentially British story. It's the story of a battle, ultimately hopeless, to defend this little island of ours against an invading foreign foe

who have all the resources of a mighty continent at their backs. The story of Arthur has inspired its fascinated every generation since its inception. inspired, it's fascinated every generation since its inception. Henry VII called his son Arthur a very political name, a name for a boy that he wanted to see grow up to be a truly British king. Arthur died, but his little brother who became Henry VIII picked up the baton. He had a round table carved. On it, he had the names of Arthurian knights painted. He and his mates would dress up as them and feast, Henry always taking the place, naturally, of the once and future king. And I'm convinced that if you meet someone who insists that when they were a kid, they never harboured dreams that they were Arthur. They

were never deeply moved by Arthurian legend and saw themselves in that context. Friends, that person's a liar. Every child thinks themselves Arthur reborn. Surely. The Arthur myth is so powerful, it dwells within all of us. And it may be that Arthur is no more than that. It may be that he's simply a myth. And I do need to be honest here. We have absolutely no reliable, well-attested evidence for anybody called Arthur, let alone an Arthur who held back the tide of Saxon conquest of these English newcomers for a generation. The Arthur that you know and love, the Arthur Excalibur, Lancelot, Camelot, the Grail, and Merlin is entirely the product of romantic medieval authors with fertile imaginations. He is as artificial as Indiana Jones.

But as with Dr. Jones, there are influences. There is a context for this story. There are whispers. There are traditions that Arthur is built out of. There are kernels of reality among the fantasy here, folks. And that's what I'm going to try and do in this podcast. I'm going to talk about those kernels. I'm going to talk about what happened in Britain and what happened to its people

in those harrowing decades and centuries after the fall of Roman Britain. And I'm going to tell you everything we know about the history on which Arthur is based. Enjoy. t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima god save the king no black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower britannia was a province of the roman empire but it was a province that grew and shrunk. Its borders fluctuated and it could get a little fuzzy at the edges. For most of the period we're talking about, the province covered most of what is today England and Wales.

That's from the middle of the first century AD for about two and a half centuries after that. At times, though, it extended much further north. It spread up into the highlands of Scotland. Roman ships sailed up the Moray Firth. Roman banners flew on ramparts in what is now Aberdeenshire. But at other times, more generally, the northern border of Britannia was the mighty wall built on the orders of Hadrian from sea to sea in the second century. And within that province, south of that wall, there was the most sophisticated society in terms of engineering, in terms of administration, in terms of urban living, food production, that had ever existed to that point in history. I've crawled through Roman sewers in York,

part of a system of waste management that would not be replicated or improved upon until the 19th century. I've walked along the Foss Dike, probably the oldest canal in Britain, and it linked the mighty River Trent to the vital legionary base at Lincoln. It was an astonishing bit of civil engineering. And there were bridges, there were aqueducts, there were roads, there were infrastructure projects for which Britons would have to wait until the coming of the early modern period to see their like again. The Roman province of Britain was integrated into a trading network that again would not really be reconstructed until the second millennium AD. Ships docked in London with cargoes from right across the Mediterranean basin.

By one obvious measure, population, humans thrived in Roman Britain. There were plenty of humans about. One low estimate is that there were about 2 million people living in the province, and that headcount would not be surpassed until the Norman conquest hundreds of years later. Now, don't get me wrong, folks, I'm just fanboying about the Romans here. It was an empire that for much of the time

gloried in watching enslaved captains fight to the death in arenas. It laid waste of vast swathes of opposition territory. It murdered entire peoples. As Tastus, one of its greatest historians and authors so memorably put it, the Roman way was to make a desert and call it peace. So I'm not particularly misty-eyed for Rome. And that's particularly because the Pax Romana that we hear, this long period of peace and plenty, it was not patchier than you might think. Britannia, for most of its existence, was a contested province.

For long spells, even at the so-called peak of Roman power, I think it would have felt like frontier territory. The wheels were constantly in danger of falling off well before its final collapse. Let's take Hadrian's Wall, for example, a wonderful piece of civil engineering that we still go and visit and marvel at today, but that was not built as a work of civic splendor. That was built in response to what was clearly a very lively threat environment. There's a castle, a strong point every mile. The wall itself is four metres tall. It's an astonishingly expensive, vast piece of defensive infrastructure. And it was built because Britannia was a nightmare to defend. The Romans had

successfully conquered the southern and eastern parts of this Atlantic archipelago, but there were plenty of other bits of it, bits that we now largely call Scotland and Ireland. And they were incredibly difficult to conquer, to subdue, but also to contain. They had trying climates, let's just say. They had wild landscape. And they were probably not worth the effort of conquering and occupying and subjugating. Some emperors did campaign in Scotland, for example, but the appetite to spend years fighting a wild, ungovernable, warlike people in driving rain on the absolute, total, utter extremity of your empire and indeed the known world, spending years being ambushed in mountainous, boggy terrain, terrain completely unsuitable for agriculture or large

scale settlement, well that appetite turned out to be limited. So conquering the rest of the archipelago, effectively subduing all of its people, well that wasn't really an option for Rome. But by leaving them unconquered, your province Britannia has the messiest frontier you can imagine. We think of Hadrian's Wall, but look at a map, folks. Look at a map. Hadrian's Wall is just a tiny part of that frontier. The Irish Sea is a bridge, not a barrier. Raiders can pop across on a calm night. Go and look at that map. Look at the Isle of Man. Look at Dumfries and Galloway stretching around the flank of Hadrian's Wall. This is an age where people moved by water. The west coast of Britain was a giant, porous

frontier with a range of enemies waiting for any administrative or military breakdown in Britain, any opportunity to launch their raids. And that's why the wall bit of Hadrian's Wall is just one small component of a huge defensive plan that comprised of forts and positions stretching all the way up the coast of what is now Cumbria. Britannia was terribly vulnerable. And we haven't even talked about the neighbours to the east yet, but we will. So to protect this blasted province of the empire, the Romans ended up deploying a surprisingly large chunk of their army here, perhaps 50,000 men garrisoning it just for one province. That's possibly the most concentrated deployment in any province of the empire. And it's not a particularly valuable one at that.

We're not talking Syria, not talking North Africa. Britain was only really conquered by the slightly insecure Emperor Claudius to show off. And having planted the eagle on these shores, having convinced settlers to come across and build communities, well, it's beneath the dignity of Rome. It's too embarrassing just to sack it all off and retreat. But the price of maintaining this province was huge. For example, as well as all those legionaries, they have to maintain an entire fleet, the so-called Classis Britannica, to dominate the channel. Rome has its own separate naval establishment in the English Channel. So Roman Britain was always a project. Well before the collapse of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th century AD, there were obviously problems. Look at the Roman Wall of London. That wall springs up

around 200 AD. 80 years later, a wall to protect the city of London from the foreshore of the Thames was built. Now, I'd say that means somebody has lost control of the maritime environment. There is danger to Rome's leading settlement in Britain, its most glittering prize. London is being walled off. It's even being protected from the water. There is trouble. The Thames is bringing not only Roman trade administrators, soldiers, and money, it's bringing raiders as well. And after that, throughout the

third century and the fourth, the wall goes through periods of refurbishment. It's an ongoing project. And in that third century, it wasn't just London that was being defended. Ports right along the length of eastern England were militarily upgraded. They were turned into coastal protection forts. There's a fragment of text surviving from the late fourth century. And it shows us that these forts were part of a big defensive scheme. It was known as the Littus Saxonicum, the Saxon shore. It's not absolutely clear why it bore this name, although I'm probably drawn to historians who say they were built to defend this coast and the coast of Gaul opposite from pirates, raiders, men from the mouth of the Ems, the Oder and the Weser rivers from what is now northwest Germany, Holland,

men known as the Saxons. It is possible the Romans used the word Saxon the way that we wrongly use the word Viking. It was simply a title that they gave to seagoing Germanic marauders, and it may have referred to anybody who sailed across the North Sea. Anyway, the point is that there was threat at every quarter for the Roman Empire. There were the Irish, there were the Picts in what is now Scotland to the north, and there are the Saxons to the east. And that's frankly when the going is good for the Roman Empire. When the going is good, they're building these massive defences. And by the end of the 4th century, the beginning of the 5th century, these massive defences. And by the end of the 4th century, the beginning of the 5th century,

things were not going well for the Roman Empire. We know this from accounts written on the continent, but pleasingly, we also can work this out from the archaeology. There's a great example of this in a wonderful book by Mark Morris, which I urge you all to read. It's on the Anglo-Saxons. He brought the podcast talking about it. And he starts the book with a man called Peter Watling. It was late 1992. He was whacking something with his hammer on his farm near the village of Hoxton in Suffolk, when unfortunately, as often happens with hammers, he lost it. It disappeared into the long grass. Perhaps he whacked something too hard and it bounced out of his hand. Aha, he thought, he called his mate over, Eric Laws, who'd been given quite the retirement gift. He'd been given a metal detector.

Laws started scanning the field, looking for the hammer, and his readings went off the chart. He dug down and hit the mother load. Not the hammer, but something that he realised immediately needed to be taken to the authorities. Archaeologists turned up in their special Batmobile and they carried out an extensive dig. They recovered what was one of the most spectacular hordes of Roman treasure ever found in Britain. 30 pieces of gold jewellery, lots of silver tableware, the family silver, 100 spoons, ladles, things like that, and a load of coins. 584 gold coins and 14,000 silver ones. The archaeologists also found Peter's

hammer. Now that coin hoard, at a stroke, doubled the number of coins that have come down to us through archaeology from late Roman Britain. And the best thing about those coins, they allow us to date the hoard. The last coins minted in that hoard date to 407 and 408. And that's important because it's in that decade that we're pretty sure the last Roman troops left the shores of Britain. And as Mark Morris says, hordes are a barometer of unrest. I do not wish to share publicly on this podcast how close I came to burying a hoard of my valuable possessions during the early days of the pandemic, but let's just say I came close enough for it to be embarrassing. And I'm not alone. Samuel Pepys buried coins in 1667 when he heard about the Dutch raid on Medway. Alan Turing buried

treasure at the outbreak of the Second World War. Amusingly, he never found it again, so Turing's buried treasure is out there somewhere. And like Alan Turing, the Roman who buried his worldly possessions in this field in Suffolk never came back for them. And here's the really interesting thing. That coin hoard is not an outlier. No, far from it. The opposite, in fact.

The vast majority of Roman coin hoards ever found in Britain are from the 4th century AD. And the rate at which Romans buried their treasure increases enormously as the centuries go on. So by 400 AD, at the end of that century, people all over Britain are burying valuables in enormous numbers. And bear in mind, that's just the ones we've found and properly recorded. Who knows what else is down there or who knows what else was discovered and treated as a lucky lottery win by toiling peasants over the intervening centuries. Why was that happening? Well, at various points in the 4th century, there were moments of grave crisis for the Roman Empire. Central authority was fragmenting, there was elite competition, civil wars,

so-called barbarians, outsiders were pushing at the frontiers. In 367, we think there was a big mutiny in Britain. The Roman garrison in Britain was not being paid properly. And if you weren't being paid and you were still having to go and wrestle Picts on Northumbrian hillsides, you might down tools as well. So the Romans actually had to invade to restore order. It's a sign of imperial breakdown. By 375, the archaeology showed us that the occupancy of these big villas, these big palatial Roman villas, which actually had industrial food production sites, huge estates producing plenty of food, much of which could be exported to the cities. Occupancy of those villas had fallen by something like a third.

Roman towns were being depopulated as well. Perhaps some Roman towns think the population halved. Things were feeling precarious in Britannia. But what really seemed to have sealed Britain's fate were not the barbarians pushing across Britain's frontiers, but attacks right on the other side of the empire. In the second half of the fourth century, a steppe people moved west. They crashed into Europe. They were the Huns. And the people they crashed into, so groups living beyond the Roman frontiers,

found themselves between a rock and a hard place. They found themselves between the hammer of the Huns and the anvil of the Roman Empire. And at this point in history, the Roman anvil gave way first. Groups of outsiders crossed into the empire. And in 378, an idiotic emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Valens, hurled his small force against a great mass of German and Eastern European so-called barbarians by the city of Adrianople. He was far too hasty in his attack. The barbarians had circled their carts, their wagons, the top of a hill, and the Romans marched up the slopes through flames lit by the barbarians. They staggered, coughing through the smoke, to the makeshift fort, only at that very moment to find themselves surrounded by a returning force of barbarian cavalry which had been out scouring the countryside.

The Romans were caught between the jaws of infantry and cavalry and massacred. It was a catastrophic defeat. Roman defences across the Balkans into Italy were torn to shreds. With an existential crisis in its heartland, the Roman Empire was starting to see defence of Britain as a luxury belief. Roman power seemed to shrink in on itself in this period. The capital of the Western Empire went from the city of Trier on the Rhine to Milan in Northern Italy. The empire was going into a kind of defensive huddle. We think in 383, the British garrison revolted again. Perhaps payment from the imperial treasury had been suspended. A leader of these

mutinous British forces emerged. He had the rather magnificent name of Magnus Maximus. And sadly for the province, Britain was not enough for him. He established his rule in Britain, but then invaded Europe, hoping to get himself crowned emperor. But he was killed. 20 years after that, by the early years of the 5th century AD, archaeologists don't really find that many coins minted in Europe, in the Roman Empire, in Britain anymore. It seems very likely that Rome stopped paying its garrison in Britain. Instead, the British authorities try and mint their own version of these coins. In doing so, debased them, clipped them, made the coins less and less valuable. Nearly all the coins in the Hoxton hoard I was talking about are clipped

and struck in Britain. All of the signature moves for a collapsing, desperate, chaotic central authority. In 406, it seems that the army revolted again. There was a quick succession of leaders. They rose and were assassinated. Now that same year, France, Gaul as it was, was invaded by Germanic peoples, possibly walking across the frozen Rhine that winter. The Roman Empire in the West was, well, collapsing according to a previous generation of scholars, or certainly as historians like to say now, transitioning to something different from what it had been. Another leader of those Roman forces emerged in Britain, Constantine. He did what Magnus Maximus had done a generation before. He also invaded Gaul, trying somehow to reconstruct, to preserve

the Western Roman Empire, to dominate it. But unlike another illustrious Constantine, a forebear a century before, history did not repeat. This Constantine was murdered before he could seize the imperial crown. It seems likely that Britain's final Roman garrison, such as it was, was sacrificed on the altar of this Constantine's imperial ambition. Britain was now devoid of troops, and this time there'd be no replacements coming from Rome. We hear accounts from the continent that there were Saxon raids in 408, and those accounts say that the British at that point armed themselves and ran risks to ensure

their own safety, and freed their cities from attacking barbarians, which was great for them, I suppose. But in this process, they didn't just drive out the barbarians. They also seemed to have irrevocably broken with Rome because they didn't just throw out the Saxons. They clearly decided that Rome could no longer guarantee their lives and property, and they would have to look to themselves to do so. So the end of Roman Britain is a strange mixture of the Romans sort of leaving, the Romans abandoning it, but also the British moving into that vacuum and actively casting aside the remnant of Roman rule

and attempting to forge a new security solution. This chronicle writes that they expelled the Roman magistrates and established a government they wanted. This might have been a short-term win, but long-term it was a catastrophe. Britain was torn out from under the imperial umbrella, which even if it had been a bit threadbare by that point, it had still fostered links of trade and government and exchange. Now the Britons were alone.

And although some archaeology in recent years has provided a more nuanced pictures, it's still the mainstream interpretation that Britain probably undergoes at this point the most dramatic collapse and reversion in terms of economy and infrastructure of any time in the last 2,000 years of history. The Roman villa network is completely abandoned at that point. Good quality pottery seems to vanish. Good quality ironmongery also seems to disappear. I saw this once when I went to visit the fort of Vindolanda, part of the Hadrian's Wall defensive scheme. It sits just to the south of the wall itself.

And it was a Roman fort. There was a garrison there. And I was shown where the town outside the walls of the fort used to be and how it suddenly disappears in the late 300s, the early 400s. At that point, the fort is dramatically re-fortified. But by using methods that appear quite primitive, it's not like there are engineers from the imperial centre, not like lots of new building materials around. They seem to have dried up. Instead,

there's makeshift improvements to the fences of the fort. And eventually, as the decades go by, you can see it chillingly in the archaeology. The gravestones outside the fort in the Roman Cemetery, they're torn up to shore up the walls, to block up the gate so that wagons and carts can no longer come in and out. There's just a crawl space through which people can enter and leave the fort. The needs of the dead regarded as far less important than those of the barely living. So as you can see at Vindlanda and other places a reasonably rich land now lay terribly vulnerable it's people desperate large-scale agriculture as i mentioned through this system of villas collapses there's not enough food towns and cities simply empty as people have to head to

the countryside they head to the food as the production and distribution networks break down and ensure that no food is heading into the cities. Scavengers now pick the corpse of a once glittering society. I think it's very difficult for us as modern audience to think about this and understand it. We're not used to dramatic reversal, to collapse in our world. Most of the graphs have been going up and to the right for 50 years. Life expectancy, literacy, maternal mortality, population growth, carbon emissions. All of those measures have increased. But there are some places in the world where I think you do get a sense of that.

I once travelled around the Congo and I was so struck because there you can see collapse. You can get a sense of what it feels like on the ground. Now, let's be quite clear, like the Roman Empire, the Belgian Empire in the Congo is nothing to shed tears over. Blood-soaked, genocidal recent past in the case of the Belgians. There were gross inequalities. Nearly everyone in the Congo, black African people living in the Congo, were denied access to political economic power, so don't get me wrong. But one thing empires do is they build big, obvious things. And their successor states, which are often at war with one another, often struggle to replicate the big

transnational networks of empire, they are less good at maintaining those obvious legacies of empire. And in Kinshasa, I saw that played out. I saw wharves crumbling into the Congo River. I saw mid-century, 20th century cranes leading at grotesque angles, where once Belgian freighters would have sailed up the Congo and loaded vast amounts of rubber and other raw materials into their hulls before setting off to sell them on the global market. Now clearly that trade didn't benefit the vast majority of people living in the Congo

but I thought it was a fascinating parallel that made me think about the end of the Roman Empire in Britain and on the banks of the Thames. Elsewhere in the Congo I saw how the roads between the major cities just didn't really exist anymore, where once you were able to drive from one to another, you can no longer. Those wealthy enough fly between the cities. Some travel on extraordinary, packed boats on the

mighty river Congo, but most people stay where they are and attempt to eke out a living. So in the Congo, I saw a country of subsistence farmers. Large-scale agriculture and distribution had disappeared. And that echoes the end of Roman Britain. And there was one other place that made me think about the more spectacular palatial aspects of Roman rule in Britain. I went to a former palace. I went to the ruins of a palace. It was built by Mobutu Sese Seko, the strong man who'd seized control in a military coup, ruled over Congo during the Cold War with Western backing. He'd built the most absurd palace in the middle of the bush. And I walked through it. I could see

the marble falling in chunks off the structure. There was a snake, I remember, in the drained swimming pool outside. And there were people living in lean-to shacks in the entrance hall where gigantic floor-to-ceiling glass doors had been smashed and the weather blew through what had once been his grand reception area. I imagine that in Roman Britain. I imagine people living in the ruins of giant bathhouses, villas, palaces. And in the Congo, I also met armed groups. I met men and women and children who were being trained to fight for a share of this disintegrating polity, this country, a mineral-rich land with covetous neighbours

and innumerable local lords of war. And 1,600 years ago, I don't think Britain would have been wholly different to that. An attractive landscape, decent climate, rich farmland, tin and copper mines, densely populated with desperate souls who could be rounded up and crowded onto slave ships. This was now the playground for the hard men of violence. And perhaps because of that, this is the point at which we really lose touch with what's going on. We don't know anything about it. We have a single source, Gildas. We know pretty much nothing about him. There is a very, very lively debate indeed about him and when he wrote but we don't have to worry

too much about that here right he did but right he did and it's quite the book de excidio et conquistu Britanniae on the ruin and conquest of Britain it's known for short as the ruin of Britain I have a copy here with me I've just been leafing through it for this podcast, which has been a real treat. It was almost certainly written in the first half of the 6th century, but please don't hold me to that. And it's literally our only near-contemporary source for British history in this period. The only one. Probably written about 100 years after the events that I'm describing. And friends, it is a hell of a read. It's partly a sermon. It's partly a letter of rage, a peon of rage, an opinion piece directed at the rulers of his own time. It's the original grumpy newspaper column saying how awful everything in the world is. And perhaps unlike some grumpy

newspaper columnist, Gildas was almost certainly right. The world that he's describing was pretty awful. And the book starts right here at the beginning, thank goodness, with a history lesson. How we got here. Here we go. The subject of my complaint is the general destruction of everything that is good and the general growth of evil throughout the land i must say it should be said in this book he does blame a lot of the woes of britain on degeneracy moral degeneracy that old chestnut and he really absolutely hates fornication i'll cut that bit out, but he does go on and on about it. He talks here about the darkness of this our age. He believes it's marked by an innate, an indelible, an irredeemable load of folly and inconstancy.

You think it's bad today, folks? Gildas has got news for you. He tells a story, he uses the word subjection, dreadful slavery. He refers to, I'm quoting, multiple devastations of famine, of her famous pestilence, of her last enemy far more cruel than the first, of the subversion of her cities, and of the remnant that escaped. Interestingly, he does say here how hard it is to be a historian in the 6th century. I shall not follow the writings and records of my own country,

which, if there were ever any of them, have been consumed in the fires of the enemy, or have accompanied my exiled countrymen to distant lands. But instead, he says, he'll be guided by the relations of foreign writers, which, being broken and interrupted in many places, are therefore by no means clear. And I love this passage because it really reinforces to me that if Gildas is struggling to work out exactly what happened in Britain in the hundred years before he was born, then how on earth are we going to get to the bottom of it? This period is going to be forever obscure and we will be speculative at best. Gildas tells us they came from the north and they came from the west. And he says that like hungry and ravening wolves,

I quoted in the introduction, rushing with greedy jaws upon the fold which left with our shepherd, wafted both by the strength of the oarsmen and the blowing wind. They break through the boundaries and spread slaughter on every side, and like mowers cutting down the right corn, they cut up and tread underfoot and overrun the whole country. He's talking here about the Picts and the Irish. He says that they differed from one another in manners, but they were inspired by the same avidity for blood. And Gildas tells us, no fan of beards either, they were all the more eager to shroud their villainous faces in bushy hair than to cover with decent clothing those parts of their body which required it. So keener on beards than underpants. Truly a terrifying spectre.

Gildas describes the fight as the Picts move down the island from up north. Gildas writes that these north men heard about the departure of the Romans. Gildas says they heard about the departure of our friends and their resolution never to return and And they were seized with greater boldness than before. They marched from the north. Gildas suggests that there were some sort of garrison on that northern frontier, perhaps garrisons in places like Vindolanda that we've seen from the archaeology. But they were cut down, says Gildas. But in fact, they were the lucky ones, because such premature death, painful as it was saved them from seeing the miserable sufferings of their brothers and children as these men moved down through

Britain the enemy acted Gilda says with more unrelenting cruelty than before and butchered our countrymen like sheep so their habitations like those of savage beasts for they turned their arms on each other and for the sake of a little sustenance imbrued their hands in like those of savage beasts, for they turned their arms on each other, and for the sake of a little sustenance, imbrued their hands in the blood of their fellow countrymen. Thus, foreign calamities were augmented by domestic feuds, so the whole country was entirely destitute of provisions, save such as could be procured by hunting. Everything's broken down, foreign invaders are on the rampage, and the Britons have turned on each other in the desperate struggle to survive.

Now, Gildas also mentions a pestilence, a plague which killed so many people that the living couldn't bury the dead. Now, we think we know there was one savage outbreak of plague, of what we later call the Black Death, the bacteria Yersinia pestis. We think that was in 540 according to sources around the rest of the Roman Empire that suffered terribly from it. But it's possible Gildas is also referring to an earlier pestilence as well. Certainly it was a time of violence and disease. So these attackers, we think they were the Irish. Now the Romans confusingly called the Irish the Scots for reasons that I will not go into in this podcast. That's another part.

But also the Picts pushing across both of these two groups coming from what is now Ireland and Scotland, pushing through Britain's extended frontiers. And if the mighty Roman Empire had struggled with these two groups to contain these groups in the past, then what hope did the isolated rump of Roman Britain have? So Gilder says, the Picts and the Irish were bad enough, but he's in no doubt who really posed the most existential threat, who really promised to stamp out the very idea of viable post-Roman Christian Britain. And those were the men who came from the

East. They came in their boats across the grey seas, waiting for a gentle easterly breeze to help them paddle or perhaps sail across the hundred miles from what is now the Dutch coast to East Anglia, landing on the plentiful, wide-open beaches of Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, penetrating up the river estuaries of the East. And they came from the part of the world described by the Romans as Germania. They came from modern Denmark, Holland, Germany. I mentioned them before, but yes, it's time for the Saxons. Although, as I said before, there is absolutely no contemporary description coming from anyone in Britain these Saxon raiders are mentioned by writers in

5th century Gaul. There's one man called Sidonius Apollinarius who wrote in 455 he made a passing reference to the Saxon pirate who deems it sport to furrow in British waters, cleaving the blue sea in a stitched boat. Later he wrote, the Saxon is the most ferocious of all foes. He comes upon you without warning. When you expect his attack, he slips away. Resistance only moves him to contempt. A rash opponent is soon down. Shipwrecks to him are no terror, but only so much training. His is no mere acquaintance with the perils of the sea. He knows them as he knows himself.

When the Saxons are setting sail from Britain, going back to the continent, he explained, it is their practice, thus homeward bound, to abandon every tenth captive to a watery end. These men are bound by vows which have to be paid in victims. They conceive it as a religious act to perpetrate this horrible slaughter and to take anguish from the prisoner in place of ransom. So in these dark years years Britannia did certainly not rule the waves and Britons very much shall be slaves. Gildas is in no doubt that the true cause of the ruin of Britain is the Saxon and the worst thing about the Saxons the most heartbreaking part of the story is that Gildas tells us that it was the Britons who invited them in. Gildas describes

the fateful British Council, one which took a far-reaching national strategic decision, well, that makes the loss of the American colonies look like an act of genius. It was decided to invite the Saxons over to shore up the regime, to import a little bit of muscle, to take on the Irish and the Picts. Gildas says, then all the counsellors, together with that proud tyrant who he calls Girthrygern, but who most subsequent sources identify as Vortigern, were so blinded as a protection to their country they sealed its doom by inviting in among them like wolves into the sheepfold the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful to both God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations. It's a solution as old as time.

Invite one group of thugs in to take on another group of thugs. What could possibly go wrong? Like the Irish king who invited the Normans over to help him out, or the Totonacs of Mexico who thought Cortes might help them get rid of their Aztec neighbours. You might think the warlike predator is doing your bidding, but he probably won't for long. Nothing was ever so pernicious to our country, wrote Gildas. Nothing was ever so unlucky. What palpable darkness must have enveloped their minds. Darkness desperate and cruel. up their minds, darkness desperate and cruel. Those very people whom they dreaded more than death itself were invited over to reside, as one may say, under the self-same roof. The Saxons came, the Saxons saw, the Saxons called their mates and conquered.

You listened to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Gildas tells us what happens next. They first landed on the eastern side of the island by the invitation of the unlucky king, and there fixed their sharp talons, apparently to fight in favour of the island by the invitation of the unlucky king and there fix their sharp talons apparently to fight in favor of the island but alas more truly against it their motherland finding her first brood thus successful sends forth a larger company of her wolfish offspring which sailing over join themselves to their bastard-born comrades. Gildas describes these Saxons as the fire of vengeance.

He says it did not cease until the neighbouring towns and lands were destroyed. It reached the other side of the island and dipped its red and savage tongue in the western ocean. As a powerful and poetic description of invasion, destruction and collapse, I don't think Gildas is matched over the next 1500 years of British history. It's still quite shocking, quite scary to read today. The chroniclers that followed Gildas added touches of colour and embellishments. There's a 9th century story, it's probably unreliable, but it says the Saxon leader was called Hengist. After campaigning across the island, so says this 9th century account,

he sent peace feelers out to Vortigern. He promised perpetual friendship with the monarch. Taking advice from his elders, decided to meet. Hengist organised a big feast to mark the occasion, the signing of a new treaty. 300 senior Britons arrived, each one sat next to a Saxon. Very nice, what could possibly go wrong? The Saxons had peace on their tongues but treachery in their hearts. And on Hengist's signal, importantly, once the Britons had all got very drunk, each Saxon drew a secret knife out and murdered their neighbour. Only the king was

spared Vortigern if he handed over most of his kingdom as a ransom. Now, like any plan that relies on the drunkenness of Brits, this worked. It's a story, though. Who knows if it's true? Either way, the Saxons ended up conquering great swathes of the country. Britons were killed, they were enslaved. I always think it's a mark of the desperation of the age that we see in the archaeology, that Iron Age hill forts around England were re-fortified. Just imagine that. After centuries of treating these forts like heritage sites, suddenly they once again become urgent defensive structures. There's excavations at the magnificent so-called Cadbury Castle, which is a lesser castle. In fact, it's

just a massive series of Iron Age ramparts on the summit of a lovely big limestone hill just south of Bath, just inside the border with Somerset. And it's revealed a substantial sort of great hall, a big building, 20 meters by 10 meters, built in the late 400s. Alongside that, you can tell the innermost Iron Age fortifications have been kind of bolstered. They've been re-fortified. And there are shards of pottery there, which have been found from the Eastern Mediterranean, fascinatingly. So it could indicate that this was a little stubborn outpost, a holdover, a survivor of an international Roman world that was under relentless assault. It was a candle in the dark. Many Britons went overseas.

They fled. They went into exile. They hid in the forests. London, Lincoln, York, the great cities of Roman Britain, abandoned, left to rot. The 9th century account I mentioned says that Vortigern ended up wandering, lonely and broken hearted, to die ignominiously, anonymously, unmourned. Well, it says that or he was swallowed up by the earth one night. You can judge which you think is more likely. Coming back to Gildas, he describes the people of Britain,

the swords gleamed, the flames crackled around them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies He talks about those that were left behind, some therefore of the miserable remnant being taken in the mountains were murdered in great numbers. Others constrained by famine came and yielded themselves to be slaves forever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offered them. Some others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations instead of the voice of exhortation.

The way he tells it, death was a release for the people of Britain. The ones that did remain in Britain took to mountains, precipices, thickly wooded forests, he said, the rocks of the sea. They still had trembling hearts and they lived in continual jeopardy. In 450, we have a continental author who comments that the Saxons had taken Britannia and that had been accompanied by disasters and vicissitudes for the locals. Yeah, I think that's an understatement. Gildas writes that at some stage the Britons wrote to Rome and said, the barbarians drive us into the sea and the sea throws us back on the barbarians. Thus two modes of death await us.

We are either slain or drowned. We don't really know if the Romans replied or if there was anyone really to reply to, but if they did, it might have gone something like this. Sorry to hear that, but we've got trouble a little close to home. Attila the Hun is watering his horses in the River Po in northern Italy, levelling cities so thoroughly that it's hard to tell where they once stood. What we don't have here in Italy is 30,000 spare men to launch a massive amphibious assault into distant Britain.

So there was no help coming from their erstwhile imperial masters. By 430 AD, we have archaeological evidence of Saxon burials in Britain, very different, as you can imagine, to the Christian Romano-British burials. Britons, for example, weren't in the habit of cremating their dead, but now at this point we suddenly get cremation cemeteries. We also see people buried with possessions, which is more of a pagan practice. And there's a band of territory really from Norfolk stretching right up the East Coast, right the way from the Wash, if you like, right the way up to the Humber, that shows clear evidence of Saxon burial practices. Now, interestingly, to the South in what is Kent and Sussex and bits of Hampshire, we see a bit more of a fusion of

burials, part Saxon, part Imperial Roman. So clearly written bits of Hampshire, we see a bit more of a fusion of burials, part Saxon, part Imperial Roman. So clearly Britain at this point, it's a very diverse picture. It was fragmented. There were different kingdoms and polities rising and falling. Differently, there's even different cultures, some more Saxon, some more Romano-British, others perhaps a kind of uneasy blend. There does seem to be a pretty clear east-west divide in the archaeology. Some sites in the west of Britain show Christian Romanised life enduring. I mentioned Cadbury Castle in Somerset, we've got Tintagel Castle too, a magnificent building right down in the southwest of England. Now recent research shows that there was a hall built there, a fine building, there seemed to be goods imported from Spain, lots of pieces of amphora, so sort of Roman-style storage jars, and it seems that island fortress off the coast of Cornwall was able to hold out

as well. But then again, thinking about it, if Roman life couldn't hold out in that superb defensive site, accessible only by a narrow causeway at low tide, at the diametrically opposite point of the island to where the Saxons were landing, well then Romanitas was not going to hold out anywhere. Now this is the exciting bit, folks. The evidence from the archaeology that through the west of Britain there were places that were able to hold back the Saxon tide. That corroborates what Gildas tells us. Because in this litany of catastrophe and disasters, in this most pessimistic of British history books, there is one bright spot. Gildas talks about a leader who emerged from the brutalised ruins of Roman Britain. He tells us about a man who for a time held the line,

who even pushed the Saxons back. A man who won a period of peace, as Gildas says, by the will of God. This is the key passage in Gildas. The poor remnants of our nation, to whom flocked from diverse places round about our miserable countrymen as fast as bees to their hives for fear of an ensuing storm, being strengthened by God that they might not be brought to utter destruction, took arms under the conduct of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a modest man, who of all the Roman nation was then by chance left alive, alone in the confusion of this troubled period. Ambrosius Aurelianus. Aurelianus, here is our glimpse of Arthur in the historical record. He has to be the slender foundation on which the myth, the Arthur industry, has been erected. But Gildas, tragically, only gives us these few crumbs. Gildas writes that Ambrosius Aurelianus's parents wore

the purple. That meant they were at very least part of the ruling elite, perhaps even the imperial family. Only the very richest people in the Roman world were able to afford purple dye. The emperor himself wore robes entirely of purple, magnificent robes. Lesser officials like high priests or consuls wore purple lined garments. Now Gildas also tells us that his parents had been killed in the upheavals of the period, perhaps spurred on by this personal tragedy. He rallied his fellow Christian Britons and he forged a weapon with which he could take on the Saxons. Gildas tells us that he provoked the cruel conquerors to battle and, by the goodness of our Lord, obtained the victory. After reams and reams of nothing but pessimism, barbarism and defeat,

here is a victory. But, says Gildas, one victory did not win the war. Instead, there seemed to be a just an attritional grinding conflict. Sometimes our countrymen, sometimes the enemy won the field, Gildas says. But then something important did happen. Then Ambrosius Aurelianus won a more lasting victory. Gildas says he defeated our cruel foes. It was at a place called Mons Baden, possibly Bath Hill. Gildas says it was almost the last great slaughter inflicted upon the rascally crew. Gildas says it was a siege, but that's it. That's all we know. Gildas says it was a siege, but that's it. That's all we know.

Were the embattled Britons stuck on top of a hill surrounded by a Saxon horde? Did Ambrosius lead a last desperate sally as food and water ran low? Was this a final shriek of defiance by the British resistance, traumatised by the loss of their loved ones, their farms, cities and churches? Did they catch the besieging forces unprepared, drunk, distracted? Perhaps Ambrosius rallied the troops with exhortations to live up the reputation of their forebears, to show that Roman arms were still a force in the world. Did they even see themselves as Roman? Or was there a new, post-Roman, British identity? Then again, it could have been the Saxons that were trapped.

Besieged. Crushed. Perhaps they'd been overconfident. Perhaps a swaggering force of Saxons had raided deep into the West, become isolated, weighed down by booty, slowed down by a miserable, shackled train of British boys and girls torn from their lives and destined for the slave markets of the East. Did Ambrosius surprise them, pounce on them? Did he come out of the rising sun, the light flashing off their burnished armour like the sun on broken ice?

Did this isolated Saxon force suddenly feel very alone, deep inside hostile territory, far from their lifelines across the North Sea, the valley floor packed with Britain's baying for their blood. Every one of their British enemy with a thousand reasons to want to slaughter every last raiding Saxon. Was it the Saxon supplies that ran out? Saxon supplies that ran out? Did they man ramparts and shower down a hail of arrows and rocks and axes and stones on British spearmen as they staggered uphill in ragged lines? Did the Saxons try and hold out desperately on the summit, surrounding their warlord or his corpse,

as their holy men spat curses and called upon Woden to release his war wolves on their Christian foes. Well, we have no idea. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder,

rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. But it does seem that after that victory, there was a time of comparative peace. Gildas calls it an unexpected recovery. He even uses the word orderly to describe how society worked afterwards. But weirdly, this is the thing about Gildas.

This is the point at which he's particularly excoriating in his work. The main target of his ire are the leaders who followed Ambrosius and who threw away his legacy. And he does identify one key source of weakness for the people that came after Ambrosius, and that is fornicating. He absolutely hates people having sex, folks. As soon as there was peace, apparently everyone got down to it. To which I say, give these people a break. But on a more serious note, he also talks about how the politics shifted. And this, by the way, sent chills through me. This is fascinating. Gildas says, our foreign wars ceased, but the desolation of our island remained in the minds of those who were eyewitnesses. And then he says that those memories, the rawness of that memory,

encouraged leaders to act wisely, to act in the public interest. But, Gildas says, when these had departed out of this world and a new race succeeded, who were ignorant of this troublesome time, and had only experienced the present prosperity, all the laws of truth and justice were so shaken and subverted that not so much as a vestige or remembrance of these virtues remained. And that passage, written by a very angry monk 1500 years ago, I'm terrified could equally describe today. While the generations that remembered the Second World

War governed, they were far from perfect, but they absolutely realise what the consequences of some of their more extreme behaviour and rhetoric could be. And now, in the words of Gildas, that we have a race that only experienced the present prosperity. I worry like him that laws of truth and justice are being shaken and subverted. And that, friends, is why we all love history. A voice from a distant past which is so utterly unlike ours. And yet that voice can tell us something very, very profound about our politics today. And with that, that is the end of Gildas. It's been a rollercoaster. That's all we get from him on the subject of Arthur, or rather Ambrosius

Aurelianus, because you'll notice that one thing that Gildas does not mention is anyone called Arthur. And that's a bit disappointing for us Arthur fans. The arrival of Arthur would have to wait for this book here, which I've got next to me, and that is a book from the 9th century. It is even more crazy than Gildas. It's the earliest surviving text specifically mentioning Arthur in connection with fighting Saxons. It's the Historia Brittonum, the History of the Britons, and it's attributed to the Welsh monk Nennius. And it is pretty wild too. It's a mixture of myth and praise poetry and oral histories and

well, fever dreams. He gives a lot more Ambrosius content, who he calls a king of kings. And Nennius starts to build out this myth, flesh out the myth that we know and love. He talks about the red dragon still on the flag of Wales to this day. He gives us that dragon. Young Ambrosius had a vision in which a red dragon representing the British fights off a white dragon representing the Saxons. The red dragon wins obviously and this is the beginning of the red dragon in that Welsh tradition. So when you're watching Wales play rugby with the dragon motifs draped around the stadium, you can thank Nennius and the history of the Britons for that. But Nennius also suddenly introduces a new character. He calls him a soldier, he calls him a dux bellorum, a duke of war, a warlord. He says he was less noble than many others, yet he was chosen to leave the Britons

on 12 occasions and, says Nennius, was often conqueror. His name was Arthur. Nennius gives us a list of battles, place names of castles and rivers that are now lost to us tragically. At one battle, Nennius says that Arthur bore the image of the Holy Mother of Jesus, and he put the Saxons to flight and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter. In the final battle, Nennius says, which identifies as Mons Baden, so very like Gildas, he says it was a most severe contest. Arthur penetrated the hill, climbed the hill. He killed 940 men by his own hand, no one but the Lord offering him assistance. In all these mighty engagements, the British were successful, for no strength can avail

against the will of the Almighty. Then, just as he's telling us all about Arthur, sadly, Nennius goes into a lengthy description of St. Patrick. So that's all we get. That's all we hear about Ambrosius or Arthur from anyone writing within 300 years of the events being described. Now remember, for context, the United States of America is not yet 300 years old, so it is a very long time before anyone else writes about Arthur. So why is Arthur the most famous mythical figure in Britain? Well, the answer to that is very simple, and I'm going to finish off this podcast just by talking about it, the answer to that is very simple. And I'm going to finish off this podcast just by talking about it. The answer to that is because one author

turned Arthur into a phenomenon. He is the reason we're still watching movies about him to this day. He is the reason you are listening to this podcast about Arthur now. And that man was Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey was a Welsh priest, cleric from Monmouth. Well, he may not actually have been Welsh by ancestry, but he seems to have been born there around 1090, just after the Norman conquest, just at a time when the Normans were pushing into South Wales, Gwent. And he wrote an account of British history. I've got it here. We think it was around 1136. And it's pretty wild, as you'd expect. It starts off by saying how Britain was settled by survivors from the city of Troy after the Trojan War. Then he talks about

how the Romans arrived, and he talks about Arthur, and he goes beyond Arthur. And what he's trying to do, it seems, politically, is he's trying to counter the overtly English stories of people like Bede. Bede, famously big Anglo-Saxon historian, he wrote in the 8th century, I haven't really mentioned him in this because he doesn't add anything to our understanding of Ambrosius and he basically just copies out what Gildas says. So anyway, Geoffrey wants to say, hold on a second, there are competing narratives on this island. There is the Anglo-Saxon English history, but actually there's a richer, deeper history here, which goes back long before these English arrived on the shores, that takes us back to a British tradition, stretching all the way back to classical antiquity.

And so Geoffrey seems to be reporting on the oral traditions which he would have grown up around in Wales. And let's not forget, Wales was a rump of Britishness where the language, the religion, and some of the customs of Romano-British had endured. This is a place where the stories of Arthur, of Ambrose Aurelius had survived because the Saxons had never fully conquered and occupied that part of Wales.

This is Britain unconquered. Now in this book, there are some giants, there are some dragons, there is a very healthy hatred of Saxons running all the way through it, and there's a sense of longing for the lost lands in the East, the lands of what is now England, lost to those Britons. And there's also a fair dollop of magic in it as well. It is, as you can tell, unreliable history, folks. It's unreliable history, but it's the end of the podcast and we're going to humour it

because it's fun, it's a cracking yarn and it's given us Arthur. You're going to recognise this. But it's Arthur as a warlord. There's not much romance here. There's no sword in the stone. There's no governmental appointment by lake-dwelling women.

There's no Holy Grail. There's no Lancelot. There is just a lot of fighting. Now, here's the first mention of the big man in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Here we go. Where is it? That night, she conceived Arthur, the most famous of men, who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery. who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery. Now he's describing here how Uther Pendragon, so Arthur's father, Ambrosius Aurelianus's little brother, so Uther Pendragon snuck into Tintagel Castle to ravish the wife of Duke Galois of Cornwall, who he'd fallen madly in love with.

He smuggled himself in because Merlin, who Geoffrey Monmouth invents, we got Merlin for the first time, Merlin slipped him some potion. Now, Harry Potter fans might recognise this as polyjuice potion. Merlin's potion made Uther Pendragon look like Galois. So he sneaks in, he has sex with Galois' wife, and Arthur is conceived. Uther's big brother and brother, as I mentioned, is poisoned by the Saxons, so little bro Uther Pendragon inherits, and then Uther is taken ill quite quickly. The Saxons return.

Geoffrey tells us he had to delegate command to others. The result was kind of attritional warfare. Between the two sides, the outcome of each battle was always in doubt, it being hard to tell which of them was victorious. Their own arrogance was a handicap to the Britons, for they were unwilling to obey the orders of their leaders. This undermined their strength, and they were unable to beat the enemy in the field. Almost all of the island was laid waste. Dutha decides to take matters into his own hands. He wins a big victory at St Albans, but then the Saxons poison him, like his brother brother and he's buried next to Ambrosius his big brother in the middle of Stonehenge which excitingly Merlin has apparently stolen from

Ireland and re-erected on Salisbury plain. Now Geoffrey does interestingly suggest that the main base of the Saxons is in the northeast so north around the Humber and that does tally to a certain extent with the archaeology so there are sort of flashes in Geoffrey of Monmouth of material that we can corroborate. He says Arthur is 15 when he inherits, in a quite traditional way, because his dad had died. He was the crown prince. There were no swords involved. Well, not immediately, because he does decide to pick up a sword and go on the offensive straight away. He besieges York. He crushes the Saxon army in Lincolnshire. He then fights a gigantic battle against crushes the Saxon army in Lincolnshire, he then fights a gigantic battle against Saxon raiders in Somerset, and he gave a quite arousing

pre-battle speech, which Geoffrey makes up, and he promises that anyone who falls will die doing God's work and they shall receive absolution for their sins. You get a sense here that Geoffrey might have been a little bit influenced by the crusading zeitgeist that was abroad at the time. At that battle, Geoffrey says, Arthur strapped on his armour. He put on a leather jerkin worthy of so great a knight. On his head he placed a golden helmet with a crest carved in the shape of a dragon and across his shoulders a circular shield called Prindwen on which there was painted a circular shield called Pridwen, on which there was painted a likeness of the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, which forced him to be thinking

perpetually of her. He girded on his peerless sword called Caliburn, which was forged in the Isle of Avalon. A spear called Ron graced his right hand. long brought in the blade, and thirsty for slaughter. Ron? Hmm, I think Excalibur was definitely a literary upgrade there by a subsequent author. Geoffrey says they marched up a hill on which the Saxons were encamped, and the Saxons launched charge after charge down upon them. And when the greater part of the day had passed in this way, Arthur went berserk, says Geoffrey of Monmouth, for he realised that things were still going well for the enemy and that victory for his own side was not yet in sight. He drew his sword Caliburn, called upon

the name of the Blessed Virgin, rushed forward at full speed into the thickest ranks of the enemy. Every man whom he struck, calling upon God as he did so, he killed at a single blow. He did not slacken his onslaught until he dispatched 470 men with his sword Caliburn. When the Britons saw this they poured after him in close formation dealing death on every side. Perhaps this is Mount Baton. Perhaps Geoffrey has access to Welsh sources now lost that give us more detail about Ambrosius Aurelianus' or Arthur's greatest victory. It's tempting to wish that was true. Arthur then marches north to crush the Picts,

he diverts to smash an invading Irish army on the way, then it's time to rebuild, he restores churches, and finally, when he'd restored the whole country to its earlier dignity, he himself married a woman called Guinevere. She was descended from a noble Roman family and had been brought up in the household of Duke Cador. She was the most beautiful woman in the entire island. Then things get pretty wild. Arthur apparently then conquers Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, and Norway, having given the Kingdom of Britain a lasting peace for the next 12 years. Then he conquers all of what is now France. Now, this could have been a kind of weird shot across the bowels, a flex

by Geoffrey to annoy his new Norman overlords. Arthur then holds a kind of Camelot-like celebration in Caerleon, the ancient Roman legionary fortress. It was very magnificent, and it was feasting, and everyone was in attendance. And Geoffrey says, indeed, by this time, Britain had reached such a standard of sophistication that it excelled all other kingdoms in its general affluence,

the richness of its decorations and the courteous behaviour of its inhabitants. And then it goes even more crazy. Arthur invades the Roman Empire. He kills monsters and kings of Babylonia and things like that. But whilst he's doing so, Mordred, Arthur's nephew, betrays him, grabs Guinevere, invites hordes of Saxons over,

Arthur lands at Richborough, there's a kind of D-Day-like fight on the beach, Gwaine is killed, Arthur's sidekick, Arthur pushes inland, defeats Mordred at Winchester, hunts him down to Cornwall, and there one last battle takes place. Dreadful was the slaughter. Men packed in tight formations hacked each other to death. The Flower of Britain was killed there. Mordred was hacked down. Arthur was mortally wounded and carried to the Isle of Avalon. And that was the end of Arthur. Geoffrey finishes by saying this was in the year 542 AD. After that, Geoffrey says the Saxons returned never greater numbers until they'd conquered the land, the British clinging on only in Wales and Cornwall. Geoffrey got that bit pretty much right.

He says, of their church along with them, those left alive, shattered by these dreadful disasters. But wherever they went, no havens of safety remained open to them in their flight. Whatever we think about Geoffrey of Monmouth in this book and its flights of fancy, the fact remains that the Saxons did win in what is now England and even up into parts of southern Scotland. As they all agree, Nennius, Geoffrey, they all agree, whenever the Saxons lost, they just summoned new supplies of men from Germany. And what's interesting about this Saxon conquest is it was a departure from what had come before. In other parts of the former Roman Empire, barbarians were absorbed. They learned Latin,

they Christianised, which is why people talk about kind of transition and change rather than collapse. In French, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi are days of the week. They're named after Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. You can see the more ancient Latin tradition enduring there. But in England, those have become Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, after the Saxon gods, Teu, Woden, Thanor, and Frigg. The Saxons found a ruined Britain and levelled what was left.

They started again. London was a ghost town enclosed by its wall. The Saxons called it Lundenber, London Fort. They just avoided it and settled a mile to the west. Lundenwich, a new settlement They just avoided it and settled a mile to the west. Lundenwich, a new settlement, sometimes translated as London Port, where the river fleet joined the Thames. Today, the ghost of that name survives, by the way. The area is known as Aldwych. So linguistically, it was a pretty clean slate. Only 30 words of ancient British make it into Old English. English place names. Anything ending

in ham or ing means the settlement of the people. So Wokingham is the settlement of Wokers people. Tun means manor. Hampton, Tunbridge, a place like that. Greenwich, which as I said with London, also denotes a settlement, perhaps a port. Greenwich, a place of green fields. Woolwich, which, as I said, with London, which also denotes a settlement, perhaps a port. Greenwich, a place of green fields. Woolwich, the place where wool comes from. Lee is a clearing. Henley, Webley, Headley. Lowe is a hill. Harlow, Ludlow. Stead is a place, or perhaps an enclosed pasture. Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamstead, Hampstead. exposed pasture, Hamel Hempstead, Berkhamstead, Hampstead. And I've seen that takeover. I've seen that imposition of a new culture, of a new idea of England on the landscape. I spent some time in

Wendover a few years ago, where they were digging a massive cutting, a massive trench through the landscape for the unlucky infrastructure projects, the high speed line here in the UK, and it's high speed too. And while they were digging, they found a vast cemetery from the fifth and sixth century. So right at this period, fascinating stuff. The site contained 138 graves. There were 141 burials in there, and also five cremation burials as well. So it's the largest Anglo-Saxon burial ground ever found in Britain. There were more than 2,000 beads, and there were nearly 100 brooches. There were knives, there were spearheads, there were shield bosses. There was one individual, she was a woman, and she was covered with this

extraordinary array of goods. She must have been very high status, very rich, covered in jewellery. And she was also buried, I'll never forget this, she was buried with a complete ornate glass bowl made of pale green glass, made right at the beginning perhaps of the 5th century and the 4th century. So it could have been one of the last fancy ornate luxury items produced under the Roman Empire. And it was obviously treasured as an heirloom for decades afterwards. The human remains that I saw at that dig, these were the men and women who Ambrosius, who Arthur, all their historically accurate equivalent whose names we've now lost, who they were fighting. And these were the men and women who won. These were the men and women buried in this gravesite who founded England. But strangely, Arthur became a hero of

the English. That British figure who'd fought so hard to stop England from happening at all became almost our secular patron saint. I wonder if that's because his story has transcended Englishness or Britishness. While I was preparing for this podcast, I think I had a bit of a revelation as to why the Arthur story means so much to us. I think it's to do with our place in the world. I think it's to a certain extent our geography has determined our mythology. The Polynesians have their own unique geography.

They tell stories of wayfarers. The Andeans talk about mountains and the spirits, the gods in the mountains. While Britain's position and our fate, our historical journey, means that we always come back to the story of Arthur. It's a recurring national trope. A great force arises on the continent of Europe. We sit on our little island off the coast of this vast landmass. The mighty foreign host arrives on our shores. They invade. A leader emerges to fight a seemingly hopeless battle against this force. Sometimes they win, often they lose. And that's actually just the basic rhythm of our island story. It's our national repeating myth. So in some ways, Arthur is Caraticus who tried to

halt that Claudian invasion, the invasion of the first century AD. Boudicca is Arthur. She rose up against an occupation, fought a hopeless battle against it. Arthur is Ambrosius. Arthur is Alfred the Great. Arthur is King Harold. Arthur is Elizabeth. He's Drake. He's Churchill. Arthur is an idea. And no doubt Arthur is similar to tales of freedom fighters in other cultures. I'm sure he is. And no doubt Arthur is similar to tales of freedom fighters in other cultures, I'm sure he is. But there are characteristics that seem particular to us on this island, and our place in the world, and our journey through history. And many versions of the myth say that Arthur is not dead.

He's asleep. He's waiting. Arthur will come again. And I now realise that metaphorically that's true. Someone called Arthur with his spear, Ron, and his sword, Caliban, is not literally going to awake and come and save us. But history hasn't finished with us. The world remains chaotic. And we may one day have need of another person to rally us, to help save the country from an invading force. And in a sense, that future leader will also be Arthur. Thanks for listening to the podcast, folks. See you next time. you