Forbidden History - King Arthur: Britain's Warrior King

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History, Dominic Selwood explores the origins of King Arthur, tracing the line between legend and reality to uncover whether a true warrior king once stood behind the myth. Cast List: Dominic Selwood: Historian & Journalist Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Thanks for supporting the show. King Arthur is often imagined as a medieval monarch, a ruler of beautiful castles, noble knights, and chivalric ideals. But the earliest references to Arthur tell a very different story. One rooted not in romance, but in brutal violence. Everything was imbued with this super-examined.

natural air of magic. So he was a warrior chieftain. They already knew who Arthur was. Arthur needed no introduction at all. To explore what we can genuinely know about Arthur and how history slowly transformed into myth were joined by historian Dominic Selwood, who will guide us through the earliest sources, the medieval reinvention, and why this story has refused to disappear for over 1500 years. One of the reasons why Arthur is so fascinating is that actually he's three people. Firstly, there's the original historic Arthur, who some people don't think exists, I think did. He's a misty figure from a very long time ago, but there are records that demonstrate that there was someone of that name and of that profile.

Secondly, he's this later medieval, chivalric, fantastical creation, the centre of what became called the Matter of Britain. It was the great story cycle of Britain, Arthur and his world, his knights and his roundtable. And then thirdly, he's this somewhat invented mythical figure that seems to pop up in every generation and in every age, always a little bit different, but somehow still perennially relevant. So understanding these three authors and unpicking them is a really fascinating task. When a figure is old enough and distant enough, they stop being just a person and begin to function as a symbol. King Arthur exists in that space between memory and meaning. We'll also explore how Arthur is repeatedly reinvented, watching each period of history project its own values onto him, until the line between who Arthur may have been and what he came to represent almost disappears.

Situating the historic Arthur is a really important thing to do because everyone who grew up on the medieval Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable assumes that he was from the high Middle Ages, the age of chivalry and armour and jousting. The real historic Arthur comes from a much, much, much earlier period. The Romans had ruled Britain from 43 AD until around 410 AD, when Rome was beginning to crumble, and they found that defending Britain was just too costly in resources from all the attacks that were coming, from Scotland and from across the North Sea. And so when the Romans left, local Celtic people needed to take on the defence of England.

By the early 5th century, Rome itself was under immense pressure. The empire was overstretched, struggling to defend its borders on multiple fronts at the same time. In the West, Rome faced repeated invasions from Gothic and Germanic groups, while internal power struggles, civil wars, and economic strain weakened central authority. Britain, seen as too distant and expensive to maintain, became increasingly. increasingly difficult to justify. Roman legions were recalled to defend the heart of the empire.

This meant that taxes and supplies dried up, causing the local Roman administration to collapse. By around 4.10 AD, Britain was effectively told to look after itself. The result was a sudden power vacuum. Roman law, infrastructure, and military protection vanished almost overnight, leaving the native Celtic population exposed to raids and migration from Picts in the north and Anglo-Saxon groups arriving from across the North Sea. Arthur is seen as an early defender of England against the Anglo-Saxons,

who'd been coming since about 250 AD, but by the early 400s were coming really in more significant numbers. So Arthur is a leader in this Celtic twilight period of Britain. And there is not much documentary record from this period. For the people living through it, this would have felt like the end of the world that they knew. The Roman order retreated, and in its place emerged something older and primordial. A Britain defined by ancestral law and the constant threat of violence. Nature reclaimed the cities. Fields became forests.

and power shifted from imperial officials to war leaders who could protect their people. It was in a chaotic, almost post-apocalyptic landscape that formed the backdrop to the real author. But what we do have is a fascinating poem. It's called the Godotzin. It's written in Welsh because the language of Britons in those days was Welsh. That was the language of the country. And the Godotzin was written about 575 to 600 by a Welsh poet called Anirin. And Anirin had been at a battle. And that battle was probably at Katrick in Yorkshire.

And Anirin was the only person who came off the battlefield alive. All his fellow Celts were dead and the Anglo-Saxons had won. But what he says at the end of the poem is that there was this phenomenal Celtic warrior who he'd fought alongside. And this person was a real one-man war machine and his name was Guawadur. And he had fought off so many Anglo-Saxons, bravely, boldly.

And then he says, but he was no Arthur. And what that tells us is that for an audience in 575 to 600 AD, they already knew who Arthur was. Arthur needed no introduction at all. And that's really, really important. Arthur was already a well-known cult figure as a battle leader, that early in history. There are many historical figures we only know about from maybe one document,

or a translation of a document, or a mention in a later document. Think about Arthur is we actually have three documents about him. So even though people like to think perhaps that there's not very much about him at all, in the context of the period, there's really quite a lot. It's often said that there isn't enough evidence for King Arthur to have existed. But by the standards of early British history, that argument doesn't really hold. Figures like Budica are universally accepted as real, despite relying almost entirely on a handful of Roman writers,

recorded decades after the events and filtered through hostile propaganda. Arthur, by contrast, appears in multiple early sources from different regions of Britain, written closer to the period in which he's said to have lived. In other words, measured by the same historical standards, Arthur is no less plausible than some of the most famous names in Britain's ancient past. In addition to Anirin's poem, there's a book that was written by the Welsh monk Nenius. At least that's what was thought for a long time. Now people aren't really quite so sure.

but in 829 and it's called the History of the Britons and in that he has three different stories about Arthur again this is very early this is 829 and the first one is the battle lists of Arthur this is a list of 12 battles where Arthur fought the Anglo-Saxons and it doesn't call him a king it calls him the Latin is dux bellorum which means leader of the battles. So he was a warrior chieftain.

And it explains where these 12 battles took place. It names them or gives descriptions of them. And it ends with the most famous of Arthur's battle, the battle at Mount Baden. And for a long time, people thought that many of the place names were fictitious and we didn't really know where they were. But actually, historians have now uncovered pretty much all of them and are confident where they were,

and that these were battles. that the Celts defended Britain against the Anglo-Saxons in. Then there are two more stories. One of them concerns Arthur's dog. And it says that there's a place where there's a pile of stones. And at the top of this pile of stones is a stone which has the pawprint of Arthur's dog, whose name was cabal.

And if ever you take that stone and go and hide it in the bushes somewhere or carried away for several days and bury it, when you go back to that pile of stones, that one with the poor print is back there. again. And the third story is about Arthur's son. And it says that his son, Anna, has a magic grave. And if you visit the grave, whenever you go and you measure it, the measurements of its sides and length will be different. And it never has the same measurement twice. Now the story of the dog and the grave

sound a little bit odd. But what's happening here is that this is very typical medieval miracle type stories. It's the kind of things, exactly the type of stories they used to tell about medieval saints and their miracles and what they did and the wonderful and magical things that happened in the world around them.

Everything was imbued with this supernatural air of magic where things quite weren't what they seemed. So what they're saying is they're putting Arthur into this same tradition like a saint of being a wonder worker and a miracle worker. So if Arthur was a real figure existing in a Britain on the edge of collapse, what does that mean for the deeds later attributed to him?

And if his name survived, while so many others vanished, is it possible that behind the legend lies a series of real battles and a reputation powerful enough to survive across 15 centuries? So alongside a Niren's poem, we now have Nenius's story as well, which tells us he's this great battle leader, and also that he's somebody with quasi-magical powers. But even that's not quite the end of it. Because in Wales, in Duffeth, they write a book called the Annals of Wales, the Annalis Cambrii. And those come out a little bit after the history of Britain in about 9.50. And it's a list of dates and famous things that happened. And it says

that Arthur fought two very important battles. One was the Battle of Baden in 516, and one was the Battle of Camlan, where it says Arthur and Medrout both died, and Medrout comes back in the later medieval stories as Mordred. So there we have three completely separate texts from very different places, from very early, long before the literary traditions of Arthur,

attesting to someone called Arthur that needed no introduction. And for anyone who's a specialist in early medieval history, that's a huge amount of information about one person. And I think therefore absolutely certain that there was somebody of that name. The place names in Arthur's battle list are a little bit difficult for a modern audience because they use names like Camlan or the City of the Legion or the Lake Beside the River. but many of these have been now unpacked and explored. So Mount Baden, for example, a number of places have been suggested,

but almost certainly in the West Country. The city of the Legion, again, that can be traced with the geographical references to Roman emplacements. These are Roman legions that we're talking about. So using some historical investigation, many of these places are now becoming clear where they are. Identifying Arthur's battle sites hasn't come from a single discovery, but from decades of historical detective work. For Mount Baden, scholars cross-referenced early sources like Gildas, writing in the 6th century,

who describes a decisive British victory around the year 500, even if he never names Arthur directly. Linguists then examined the name Baden, while historians mapped it. against Roman roads, forts, and late Roman defensive positions. Over the 20th century, this narrowed likely locations to the West Country, places like Bath, Bradbury Rings in Dorset, and nearby hill forts tied to Roman infrastructure. None can be proven with certainty, but taken together, the evidence has made Mount Baden, one of the most credible battle sites linked to Arthur's world. These discoveries seem to open a myriad of new questions. If these battle sites cluster around former Roman roads and encampments,

what does that suggest about Arthur's background? The name Arthur has such a sheen and a ring to it now that it's almost impossible to think of it as a normal person's name. But back in Arthur's day, it wasn't a very special name. One interesting thing is it's not a Celtic name. So he wasn't being identified as one of the Celtic defenders of Britain. It's a Roman name, it's a Latin name. So that means that his parents were sufficiently integrated in the Roman world

or aware of the Roman world to choose a Roman Latin name for their son, if it was the name that his parents gave him and not a later name that he was given. But Arturius does exist in places around the Roman Empire. We see it on some steels, some carvings, some votive altars. Arturius is a Roman name, but just not a very popular one. So there's very little we can tell from exploring his name other than concluding that his parents had some kind of a connection to the Roman world. We do have real Roman examples of the name. Artorius appears on Latin inscriptions carved into stone, including a funerary inscription for a Roman military officer named Lucius Artorius Castis.

found near modern-day split in Croatia, once part of the Roman province of Dalmatia. His career is laid out in stone, detailing service across the Roman Empire. Artorius was a genuine Roman name, rare but real, and one associated with military families. One thing we might be able to glean about the name Arthur is something about the world he and his family moved in, Because, as with most military occupations, the Roman settlement of Britain wasn't massive, the number of Romans here was actually not that great. But the indigenous Celtic population either became more Romanized or still stayed fairly Celtic. And this often was a factor in a function of where they lived, was it in the towns, was it in the countryside?

So you can map areas that were more Romanized than others. Certainly in the big dwellings and settlements, lots and lots and lots of evidence that Celtic people learnt Latin, dressed the Roman way, really integrated in order to do business and in order to get on, but that in the less populous areas and out in the countryside, there was much less assimilation of Roman ways. So if it was his parents who gave him the name Arthur, that's the suggestion they might have come from a more Romanized part of Britain. Britain at the end of Roman rule was a deeply uneven landscape. In some places Roman life had taken hold. Towns like Londinium, now modern-day London, were built on Roman foundations.

These cities had stone buildings, baths, roads, and a population used to Roman law. They would speak Latin, wear togas, and have imperial administration. These were places where Roman identity lingered longest, even after the legions withdrew. So if this Arthur, or or Artorius, belongs to a post-Roman Britain of brutal frontier warfare, how do we end up with the Arthur of plate armour, courtly love, mystical quests and damsels in distress? How does a war leader forged in a world of spears and survival transform into a chivalric king?

By the time of the high Middle Ages, Arthur has become the defining British story. It's called the matter of, Britain in the same way the matter of France was all the stories about Charlemagne and his knights and the matter of Rome was all the classical mythology. Arthur becomes the archetypal quintessential British story and probably starting at the end is easiest. I mean the most comprehensive Arthur tale and collection is the compendium put together by Thomas Mallory and that was published in 1470 and he called it the whole book of King Arthur and his noble knights of the roundtable.

So all the elements are already in there. Interestingly, when Kaxton started printing in Britain, it was one of the first books that Kaxton did. But he made an error when setting it, and he gave it the title, The Mort Arthur, the Death of Arthur, which actually is the last chapter of Mallory's story. So we now know the book by the name of its last chapter.

But that's the most important, really, source for the medieval legends of Arthur. it covers everything, how he found out that he was this chosen person, how his brotherhood of knights came together, how they came to sit around a round table, how their quests like the Holy Grail came into the story, how Lance Lott and Gwynavir and their romance became so disastrous for the story of Arthur, and of course his relationship with Merlin.

So by this time, by the time of Mallory, He's pulling together all these strands which have been growing for two or three hundred years into the quintessential Arthur romance. The literary imagined Arthur that Mallory was drawing on doesn't go back to Nenius and the Annals of Wales and the history of the Britons. It goes back to a Welshman called Geoffrey of Monmouth. He was a priest, he was living in Oxford, and in around 1139, he published a book called The History of the Kings of Britain. And he said that it contains stories that he'd read in an old book in the Britonic language. Now, that book has never been found.

It's assumed that Geoffrey just invented all of his stories, like King Lear and his three daughters, which of course Shakespeare then took up. But one of the stories he tells is about Arthur. So this is the first real invention of Arthur. as a literary character. It's sometimes suggested that there's a much older background to the artist stories that it might go back to Greek or Roman times. And one of the features of medieval storytelling is that it's not really historical in the sense we think of it today, as in a chronology, something gave rise to another thing. It's often conflated with lots of

different elements. So for example, quite typically some of these early stories about the history of Britain that we're talking about at the time of Arthur and the Arthur stories, trace the origins of Britain back to Brutus, and that's where the name Britain comes from, from Brutus of Rome. Brutus, of course, has this Roman heritage, but Rome, of course, has this Greek heritage. So all these things are conflated into one big story, and the aim is to give legitimation to kingship, because if you can trace Britain's rulers back to rulers was from the past, from Greece and Rome and the intervening period, you have unassailable authority for the power that these rulers wield. So there are lots of strands that drive the Arthur story back

into the classical world, and the elements that Geoffrey has is that Arthur was born through the magical help of this wild wizard man Merlin, who tricked Igrain of Tintagel, into sleeping with Uther Pen Dragon, and the result was Arthur. And at that stage, Merlin then disappears from the story. But that's the original story of Arthur, and that comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth. And that's then picked up not that long after by another Welshman, Gerard of Wales, because he writes that Henry II had been told by an old bard that Arthur was buried in Glastonbury.

And so there is a huge event at Glastonbury Abbey where they try and dig up Arthur. And lo and behold, they do find him. They find two skeletons, bigger one and a smaller one, and the smaller one has some tresses of blonde hair still on it, and there's a big lead cross, and it says here in the Isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur and Wenevereh, his wife. More cynical people have pointed to the fact that the Abbey of Glastonbury had a very bad fire some years earlier and needed to get some revenue in order to rebuild the monastery. So having dug up Arthur and Guinevere, they obviously got lots and lots of tourists and this helped them bring more money back into the abbey. But nevertheless, Gerald recalls that story.

So this is the basis that other writers in France, in Germany, in England, in Brittany, then take up and they spin and weave into this incredible tapestry of tales. which is how we arrive at Mallory's synthesis of all of those in 1470. To find out more, head back to episode 42, uncovering the real King Arthur, where we investigated the archaeological site at Glastonbury Abbey, alleged burial place of Arthur and his wife, Gwynnevere. As the Arthur story is retold, it gathers an expanding cast of fantastical characters and quests.

each shaped by the age that tells them. Knights are sent on journeys that test honour rather than simple strength. Figures, like Morgan Le Fay, blur the line between magic and politics, while tales such as the Green Knight introduce supernatural trials where moral courage matters more than victory. In many ways in these stories, Arthur is a classic hero, quite predictable in lots of senses. But the one person who is really extraordinary is Merlin.

He first got introduced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who said that when Vortigian, who was a Celtic leader, was escaping the Anglo-Saxons, he fled into Wales. But he found that a tower that he had wasn't stable. And he spoke to his wise people, and they said, you should find a young person and sacrifice them and spread the blood at the base of the tower, and this will help stabilise. it. So they found a young person whose mother was a nun and whose father was a demon, and that was Merlin. But when Merlin was brought, Merlin said, you don't want to kill me, I can tell you what's going on. There are two dragons underneath this tower. There's a red

dragon and there's a white dragon. And the red dragon represents the Celtic people of Britain, and the white dragon represents the Anglo-Saxons. And they're fighting out this battle that's going on all around us. And so Vortig and Julie drains the water around. the tower, finds the dragon's problem solved. The red dragon is still a lasting emblem of the Welsh people, still emblazoned on the Welsh flag today, a direct echo of that ancient story. It marks a cultural divide between England, shaped and conquered by Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and Wales, where Celtic and pagan culture endured more strongly. Merlin is then taken up by Vortigin and others as a great prophet.

He's sent to Ireland where he gets Stonehenge and brings it back to England. And he then becomes the chief counsellor to Uther, Uther Pendragon, which is how Uther and Merlin are then together in order for the story of Arthur's birth to come about. But Geoffrey didn't invent Merlin. Merlin was a much more ancient character. He's been around actually since about the 400s. He's a character from Welsh folklore, and he's a mixture of two people. He's one, a poet called Mervyn, but he's also a wild man of the forests who had fled into the forests after Battle of Carlisle in 573 AD.

And they were both called Mervyn, so they got conflated into one person. So, in many senses, Merlin is just as old as Arthur, but they've come from very different roots into this fantastical chivalric world. However, not all the stories associated with King Arthur come from Britain. Some come from a well-known collection of stories from the other side of the Roman Empire, like the Middle East, and contain much more Christian iconography. Among the most iconic elements of the high literary Arthur story is the Holy Grail. But that doesn't come in to the original story by Geoffrey of Monmouth. That doesn't get introduced until the 11,8.

80s and 90s, when a writer in France called Christian of Troy writes a book called Percival or the tale of Arthur. And in it, he's building on that original Anglo-Welish story of Arthur, but he tells a story of how Percival, who is going to be this great knight, is off scouring the country and he goes into a castle. And in that castle, he witnesses a grail procession. A group walks through the room. One is carrying a spear which has on it a drop of blood. Others are carrying two great gold candelabra. And then it says at the back of the procession is a grail

covered in precious stones. It's pretty enigmatic as to what that grail is. It's a dish by looking linguistic here what the word is. But the story is unfinished. The next one who picks it up is Robert of Boron, who's writing about a decade later, and he attaches all of this to Joseph of Arimathea. So we know in the Bible that Joseph of Arimathea

is the man who gets permission to bury Jesus' body in his own tomb. Well, in Robert of Boron's story, Joseph takes the cup from the Last Supper, and he takes it to the crucifixion site, and he catches Jesus' blood in it from the cross. Later, Joseph is imprisoned, but Jesus appears to him and gives him this cup and it sustains Joseph in prison for decades. Joseph then later gives it to his family

and one of his brother-in-law's great descendants brings it to Avalon in Britain which starts the whole Glastonbury Joseph of Arimathea myth. But what's happening at this stage is that the original Grail that Christian of Troy spoke about which was quite pagan it was just a dish, there was nothing Christian about it, has now been Christianised. Robert of Boron, has put it in the context of the Last Supper, in the context of the crucifixion. And this is really, really important, and it helps to explain why the story had such relevance and resonance in the period, because this is exactly the time when the church is beginning to talk about transubstantiation, that the blood and the wafer at the Holy Communion Holy

Eucharist, that Mass are in fact the real body and blood of Christ. So the Grail becomes an allegory, a symbol of that other cup with the blood and blood of Christ at mass. The two become conflated. So one is almost a literary version. The other is the church version. But the two go hand in hand. And so writers and thinkers of the time use them as illustrious, well, use the Arthur story as illustrations of the Christianization of this old pagan tradition. So in that sense, the Holy Grail is very, very much of its time and very time.

in with evolutions in church liturgy. Other writers, of course, then take it even further. So in Germany there's a writer called Wolfram of Eschenbach and he creates the grail as a stone and it's guarded by knights who he calls Templaisen, who of course people say are the Templars. He also describes them as all dressed in white with red crosses, but this is a stone. The word he uses, he calls it the Lapsit Exilis, which actually doesn't mean anything in Latin. but it could be Lapis X Chalis, the stone that came from the sky. And so once you have now these very, very rich versions of what the Grail is, it starts being used in the subsequent Arthur stories.

The Vulgate cycle, for example, connects all of this to Thomas Mallory, another great tradition of it, as this magical object. The Vulgate cycle was a collection of medieval French romances written in the early 13th century, that for the first time stitched separate Arthurian stories into a single unified narrative. This tradition heavily influenced later writers, including Thomas Mallory, shaping how Arthur's world was understood as a continuous legend rather than a series of disconnected tales.

So the journey of the Grail is actually a really important one that mirrors the journey of the Catholic Church's theology of the period. Grail dominates the Arthur story, but it isn't the object most people picture when they think of Arthur. Another artifact sits closer to the heart of the legend, and the tradition suggests he may have possessed more than one. The medieval literary Arthur, of course, is a king and a battle leader, and the sign of kingship in the medieval world is a sword, and Arthur, of course, has not one sword, but two swords. The first one comes at the beginning of his story. Arthur is revealed to everybody as their rightful king because he is the one who can pull the sword from the stone. So a sword has

been stuck in a rock for a long period of time and the legend is that whoever can remove it is the rightful king of Britain. And albeit all of the knights try and they fail, Arthur, who is just squire to his brother pulls it out one day because he's out trying to find his brother's sword and can't quite run back to where it actually is so sees it sticking out the rock and thinks, well, I'll just see if I can grab that one and does, and lo and behold, he has been identified as the future king. So that is the sword by which Arthur's power is revealed. The other sword, of course, is Excalibur, and that's the more famous one that he comes to through Merlin and the hand coming out of the lake and the lady on the other side of the lake saying this is your sword

this will make you invincible this is the scabbard for as long as you wear this you will not be able to spill a drop of blood so there are two very important swords in arthur's life the sword in the stone comes at the beginning excalibur is this powerful symbol throughout his story and then of course is so important and symbolic at the end but that raises another question of all the medieval legends that survive, what makes Arthur different? Why does this figure born over a thousand and a half years ago still hold our attention? The journey from Geoffrey of Monmouth's first incarnation of Arthur in about 1139 to Mallory's Mort Arthur in 1470 and subsequently is one of people being really fascinated by this character. And it's really interesting to explore why that might

might be. And at the end of the 1800s, a writer identified something called the hero's journey. And we all know that from every Hollywood film. Someone from obscure origins has some kind of defining event that pulls them into a bigger, wider world, where they receive training and instruction, and then they undertake some sort of massive challenge that solves the problem that the world is facing and after that everything is different and they are different as a person as well. It's the story of the Wizard of Oz, it's the story of Star Wars, it's the story of Harry Potter, it's the underlying framework of our modern sense of story. The Arthur story has all of those elements. He's plucked from obscurity. He's chosen by the sword in the stone. He has to learn

how to deal with being a king and running a kingdom. He has to cope with the challenges that are blighting the kingdom. And of course, his reign changes everything and he is a very different person by the end of it. So Arthur is an archetypal story. And that's one of the very strong subconscious emotional reasons why he just appeals to everyone and every generation. And similarly, Merlin, although he's not part of the hero's journey, as in he's not the hero, he is and has become the archetypal wizard.

He is Obi-1 Canobi. He is Dumbledore. He is this mentor wizard who helps the hero by bringing him into this supernatural world. And so the combination of Arthur and Merlin is just a magical mixture that seems to appeal emotionally to people in every century of every time. And the fact that we've had Arthur from the 1100s through now into the 21st century, with barely a period when he wasn't being reinvented in some way or another, is absolute proof of the solidity and appeal of that fundamental dynamic. In the end, King Arthur sits at the point where history gives way to story. A possible war leader in a collapsing post-Roman Britain becomes over centuries a king of ideal,

skills, quests, and moral tests. Each age reshapes him, adding new layers, until the real man is almost impossible to separate from the legend built on his name. This leaves us with our final question. If Arthur lives on only in story, where does that leave the truth? And is it possible that the legend matters more than the man ever did? exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below,

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