Gone Medieval - King Arthur

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

How have tales of King Arthur evolved over centuries and why have they exerted such an enduring cultural appeal on countless generations?Matt Lewis delves into the legend of King Arthur, guided by Dr. Mary Bateman. Together they explore the evolution of Arthur's myth from ancient folklore to the romanticised figure and a robust literary tradition, engaging the imagination across successive eras.More:Legend of William TellLegends of Robin HoodGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. This episode might invoke windswept crags, misty forests, definitely nights, tournaments and of course, quests. Every good story needs a good quest. In a distant time, a man. lived, maybe, about whom stories are still told today. Whether he was ever real is perhaps less important than why those tales persist and how they grew. Who was King Arthur? It's a question as old as time, well, at least medieval time. In the last episode with Eleanor, you'll have heard all about the prophecies of Merlin, and today we're going to explore the story of Arthur, or rather the story

of Arthur because there isn't just one. From his earliest appearance to the explosion of Arthurian romance and myth, he's meant many things to many people at different times. He's often known as the once and future king, and maybe he is, because today's guest is here to tell us just how stories of Arthur evolved and persisted. Dr Mary Bateman is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bristol and the author of local places and the Arthurian tradition in England and Wales, 1400 to 1700. So are you ready to delve into the world of Arthur and his knights? Mary, welcome to Gone Medieval. It's fantastic to have you with us to guide us through King Arthur. Can you guide us through a person? Kind of, although it's especially complicated with Arthur, but we'll get on to that, I expect. But it's lovely to be here, thanks, Matt.

I'm really excited for this. It's going to be really interesting, I think. I wonder if we could start off by talking about kind of when and where is the first reference that we currently know of to someone who might be King Arthur. How far can we go back in the record to identify this person? The difficulty with answering this question arises with the fact that some of our sources are written down a lot later than they were potentially composed, particularly the early Welsh sources, which are some of the more exciting ones and the ones that maybe people aren't so familiar with.

In terms of the earliest, I suppose, datable source to give any kind of detail about Arthur, you'd be looking at a text called the History of the Britons or the Historia Britonum. And that was written, we think now, in sort of 829, 830. The author tells us that it was written in the fourth year of the reign of King Mervyn, who was a king of Gwinn. And we think that he might have even commissioned this work to be written. So that, as it sounds really on the tin, it is a history of the Britons that begins with the founding of Britain by Brutus, who comes over from Troy, all the way through to the later British kings, including King Arthur. Funnily enough, though, in this one, he's actually not a king, Arthur. He's a great war leader or a Duke's Valorum, so a leader of battles.

And the text essentially describes 12 battles that Arthur takes place in, in different places, and doesn't give huge amounts of detail other than that. But it does provide a really important blueprint for some of the more detailed early accounts that comes slightly later than the history of Rotonum. So that is, I think, our earliest sort of datable text. But if you like, I can also talk a little more about the early Welsh texts as well, which are potentially quite a bit earlier than the history of Protonum. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you're a big fan of the Welsh sources, some fantastic stories in amongst all of those. And there's always this big debate, isn't there about it? Is Arthur Welsh, English?

Is he Breton? Is he Scottish? Where is Arthur? So are we getting some really early sources from Wales sort of claiming Arthur as theirs first? Well, that's again, a complicated question, right? Because if you think about it, all of these early sources date Arthur to somewhere between 450 and 550. And at that point, like Wales or England or whatever,

as we imagine it, the map looked very different, okay? So really what you're looking at is Arthur is a sort of early British king and that's why he gets claimed I think disparately by different people. A lot of the really early Welsh sources actually talk about Arthur or connect Arthur in some way with Ehenoglev or the Old North. That would have been part of the kingdom of the province of Britain. So Welsh speaking, right, kind of like British speaking, that was at one point connected with Wales on the map.

but by the time that, for example, the Historia Britonum and some of these other texts come along, the connection has been severed through Anglo-Saxon conquest. So Arthur is connected with the Old North in a lot of these old texts, and that kingdom we think of, it would have been called the Godothin. There's actually a famous poem called a Godalthan about the men from this kingdom and their battles. But that would have been in essentially sort of the south of Scotland north of England. We're talking sort of the area from sort of around to Edinburgh, but then also down into Northumbria. And that is the place where a lot of this early Welsh poetry places Arthur's activities, essentially,

which might explain why there are so many popular theories that maybe Arthur was a leader, a military leader, a ruler, active in the north somewhere, possibly around Hadrian's wall. Yeah, if they're placing him in this kind of 450 to 550 period, that's very much a time when Rome has, just left Britain and it is a fractured place that is kind of doesn't have the identity of, as you said, England, Wales, Scotland and those kinds of things. And it will distill into several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms down to the heptarchy and then eventually down to England. And I guess that feeds into this idea that we often have of Arthur as a kind of warlord in a fractured place, rather than being a king of England as we might recognise it. He's leading a group somewhere in the British Isles

during this period, but he's quite hard to pinpoint by the sound of it. Absolutely. And I think people now are very comfortable with that. We've kind of shrugged off this myth of Arthur as the great emperor of all of Britain and its appended places, territories abroad. And so actually, when you look at modern media about King Arthur, you're getting a lot more films that are really tapping into that idea of Arthur as kind of a Romano-British leaf. in a more localized way. And thinking here of the Guy Ritchie film that was very much, I think a lot of that was actually filmed in Scotland.

And you get kind of all of the modern popular ideas about Arthur wrapped up in one film there. You've got Arthur as a Romano-British fighter leader, if you like. And also the Arthur around the kind of northern, more into kind of like the territories up in Scotland and the north of England. So, yeah, I think it's interesting anyway that that's kind of what we've come back around to. And I guess it speaks to just people being a lot more literate in the idea that Arthur as the Grand King of Britain was a fabrication or a kind of myth, you know, and looking for kernels of truth behind that myth in a more like localized way, which is quite nice. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we might come back to this later, I guess, but it's also, I wonder how much that story of Arthur is, as you say, this kind of emperor of the British Isles plays into this notion of the fact that Britain was always meant to be, you know, it's probably a much later idea of the.

inevitability of England and Britain and the rise to what will eventually become empire in the 18th, 19th centuries, that idea that Britain was always meant to happen and that Arthur was some kind of coalescing force really, really early on in the story must have had its appeal at a certain time, which perhaps we don't need anymore. That's an interesting thought. I suppose so much of the original story, as we know it, kind of inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth, was founded upon this idea of prophecy, right? Arthur being a prophesied leader to unite the Kingdom of Britain. That's partly why, right, the story has maintained its appeal over time

because there have been periods in English and then later British history where people have just been desperate to find icons to support that image, right? That idea of a single United Britain and Arthur very much ticks the boxes in that sense, I suppose. Just before we get away from those really early medieval sources, and I'm deliberately avoiding saying dark ages here. Before we get away from the really early medieval sources, is there a sense amongst those writings that the people are writing about someone they believe

was a single real person who existed? Or are we already getting a sense that he is representing something? That's a really good question. Certainly the earliest, earliest sources connect Arthur with particular battles, really, and fighting. In fact, one of the earliest mentions in the poem of Godovin is talking about a completely different warrior fighting in this battle that we know took place.

It would have been around Catrice in Yorkshire between the Britons and Saxons. And it describes a fighter and how he's an incredible fighter, but he's no Arthur. And so there's that sense there of him maybe being remembered at some point as an excellent,

but very much a real man of war, you know, of battles and things. And then in some text you get a weird sense of both, actually. So to go back to the Historia, which we were speaking about earlier, this 9th century Latin text. On the one hand, you have quite a dry list there of Arthur and his 12 battles that feels very chronicle, you know, like very specific and historical. On the other hand, you have this text that is circulating alongside the history of the Britons called the Mirabilia, or that kind of the miracles of

Britain. And that is very much in the realm of myth. So there's a grave belonging to Arthur's sun that keeps changing size. And there's a rock in Wilf in Wales with the pawprint of Arthur's gigantic dog, cabal, that has been hunting the pig troynt across the landscape. And we know that that is referring to a mythical image of Arthur because it exists elsewhere in literature. It's referring to the hunt for the boar, to truth in this Welsh text, this Welsh prose text called Kulachanon. So some texts seem to have a little bit of both. And then that's not even to say, about the saint's lives, some of the early saint's lives that feature Arthur as a kind of not very nice king actually, kind of more of an opportunity to show a saint in, you know,

doing their thing and essentially teaching Arthur a lesson in practice a lot of the time his bad behaviour. Yeah, it's interesting for someone that we universally think of as a positive figure that he's there as a foil to a saint's life sometimes. Very much so. And I think especially given that you would assume, or a lot of people would assume, that the early well, Welsh texts must buy into this idea of Arthur's messianic return, which we call the Breton hope, and a lot of medieval texts that mention it, refer to it as something that those Welsh, or those Bretons, or those Cornish, believe in, when actually the earliest literature about King Arthur from Wales is very varied in terms of how he's represented, the earliest, I should

say literature in Welsh rather than from Wales, because as I say, it's complicated. But yeah, so the earliest literature in Welsh about Arthur and these early Saints' lives, it paints a very mixed picture actually of him as a king. And some of it is really not very flattering at all. Figures him as a bit of a tyrant. So whether or not that's more realistic, I don't know. And that mention in Igidofin is interesting because it's kind of, you know, this guy's great, but he's no Arthur. It's almost a throwaway thing. But it speaks to so much about what people already must have known about Arthur at that point, that he is a point of comparison. and that he is someone, everyone is aware of.

It's like saying, you know, this guy's okay at football, but he's no messy. There must be a reference there for everybody to know what Arthur is already by this point. Absolutely. And that's what I find most exciting, actually, about these earliest mentions of Arthur. And so frustrating is they're very enigmatic and fragmentary. And we can only assume that it's because he was already a very well-known figure in oral tradition. And that example from a good other than is far from the only example. There are other examples of pro-land poetry from various important.

early Welsh books that talk about Arthur in passing as something that people might just recognise or know about. So there's definitely a sense that there is a strong oral tradition there early on, even if we can only see the kind of traces and shadows of it rather than being able to pin it down exactly. We're kind of relying on those later manuscripts, you know, where these texts are written down in order to, you know, to see the traces of them, which is kind of exciting. Yeah, fascinating. And I guess, you know, The next major leap forward in Arthur's story probably comes with Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century. So he writes what is perhaps the first occurrence of what we might recognize today as the Arthurian myth, the big stories of Arthur.

Why do you think Geoffrey is writing this down? What is it about Arthur's story that attracts him in the work that he's writing? So Jeffrey obviously talks about himself as being of Monmouth. And there's a lot of theories as to what that exactly might mean. One of the theories that I think is the most interesting is that Geoffrey might himself have been someone essentially of mixed heritage with a Norman father and a Welsh mother. And if you think about it, women as the ones raising children are often the ones passing down stories, myth and kind of oral storytelling and things. So there's the sense that possibly Jeffrey might have actually had some personal knowledge of and interest in being of Monmouth, these stories himself. Of course, there are other people who rightly pointed out that as somebody, you know, a sort of a trained man of letters in the society that he was living in, I believe it was in Oxford University at the time when he wrote down this history of the Kings of Britain, apparently translated from an early British book that was given to him.

But there is also this sense that at that point in the 1130s, Arthur is actually becoming increasingly valuable as a a kind of figure of history and myth that can support Norman intervention in the island of Britain. Partly because firstly he offers this vision of a leader who can unite the whole of Britain, which is essentially the Normans, what they want to be doing is to be spreading out and kind of building territories across the whole of the island. And secondly, because he is a key historical figure who has put down the Anglo-Saxons, right? So to the Normans, that's kind of. quite valuable. It's quite a valuable means of, particularly where they're integrating in Wales and the marches, the sort of places where Geoffrey of Monmouth came from, the figure of Arthur

is such a valuable tool because he allows a point of connection between the incoming Normans and the Welsh who are already there in the form of someone who has a shared enemy in the form of the Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons. So I think that's probably why we see that emerging at that particular period and from that particular writer. And it's interesting, I guess, that Geoffrey positions Arthur as not just a uniter of Britain, but kind of an imperial conquest-seeking king. You know, he's outward-looking as well and takes territories on the continent. So they're talking to the interconnectivity of Britain and overseas territories,

which suits the Anglo-Normans, as you say, around about this time, because it's exactly what they're doing. And I guess, again, plays into that story of Brutus, and that idea that conquerors are the people who have made Britain what it is so far. Brutus conquered it as a Greek. Arthur conquers it as a native Britain, but brings everybody together, and now the Normans are conquering. This is just another one step in that progress of Britain, I guess.

That's such a great point. And interestingly, this is the period where you get those stories of what Britain might have been like before Brutus came, beginning to emerge. So the stories of Albina and her sisters, the women and their giant offspring, who Routis has to come and rid Britain of. But to return to Geoffrey of Momavut there, you've actually reminded me of another important point that always gets overlooked with Geoffrey

that relates to this. And that's that, of course, some of Arthur's men, like Bedavir and others, actually go on to be founders of places on the continent. So Bedivir, for example, founds a particular place and then obviously produces offspring there in Norman territories. And that is something that we always forget about today, but that myth about Arthur's Knights essentially spawning new generations in Europe

is a piece of a supposed fiction that continues to hold right up until the 1500s. Gerald McArthur's World Map from 1569, I think, talks about places in the north of Europe that were founded by Arthur's Knights. So again, something that not many people will know about maybe or recognise, but another, isn't that useful for an incoming, you know, conquering northern. Norman force to say, well, hang on, we're, we already have connections to this whole world, this whole kind of. Yeah.

It's so interesting. I guess it's another part of the story that might have been set aside because it's no longer relevant. But in the context in which it's written, you know, the Normans are kind of everywhere in Europe. They're getting down to Italy and they're, you know, they're heading out east and they've been to the Holy Land and they've settled lots of areas in the Crusader States in the Holy Land.

So it's a way of talking about the fact that these people bring with them, progress internally, but also connectivity externally that is of value to the kingdom. You know, you're now part of something much bigger because the Normans have come, isn't that a great thing? Absolutely. And I love the way that you can trace that through the Arthurian artefacts of the Middle Ages. That's another kind of interesting, I guess, side avenue to think about, you know, Richard the Lionheart, when he is picking a gift to offer to King Tancred of Sicily as a sort of symbol.

of their new kind of allied state, he gives him, apparently, the sword of excalibur, which is really interesting, and that also is indicative of how these Arthurian myths had already moved around in Europe quite a long time before even Geoffrey of Monmouth. So 1136, I think, Jeffrey of Monmouth's great history of the Kings of Britain, which details all of the kind of finer points of detail about Arthel's life for the first time. It's such an important text. and yet there are examples from a cathedral in Modena, different places that actually have Arthurian stories there in the built architector of the cathedral.

Seemingly from the Welsh tradition, I think it's in Atranto. You've got Arthur fighting this cat, this giant cat, Kathpulag, that is there in later French texts as well. And then the story of Gwynabir's abduction is in the cathedral down in Medina. So all of that is to say that,

you can sort of trace the international influences of these Arthurian stories from quite an early date, but then that continues to be politically useful. So the internationalism is kind of, it's there in all different areas, including, I guess, like, material history as well, which is quite cool. Yeah, and some of those kind of artefacts are really fascinating. So the whole Excalibur thing is, I mean, how could Richard I first underline his lack of Englishness any better than giving away Excalibur. But it's also, you know, his dad had kind of found the grave at Glastonbury.

And Edward I will later go back and kind of reinforce the connection of Arthur to Glastonbury around the time that he's completing his conquest of Wales. So this is very much then claiming Arthur as an English saint, you know, and Glastonbury falls on the kind of pilgrimage route out of Wales down to Canterbury or anywhere like that. So you're forcing every Welsh pilgrim who goes through to almost. you're sticking a big signpost in their face saying Arthur is English and you can't have him back. Yeah, and Glastonbury is so convenient for that because it's already a site that has lots of connections with saints from the Celtic world, Bridget, Patrick and so on. And so, yeah, Arthur just kind of becomes part and parcel of that.

But of course, the other valuable thing there is that if you can point to Arthur's grave, which was apparently found at Glastonbury in 1191 and say, look, here lies Arthur. And here we have an artefact as well, an inscribed across. Here lies Arthur buried in the Isle of Avalon and this is where Avalon is and so on. You are essentially kind of put into bed that story of Arthur's return, the Breton Pope, which, you know, there's some debate about whether that might have been overplayed by people who want to be critical of the Welsh or the Bretons or whoever. But if you genuinely think that that is a morale booster for your opponents, how useful is. it to be able to say not only that Arthur is buried here in England, but also that he is dead and buried and a figure of history and not coming back to save anybody.

Yeah, because that idea of him as a sort of the wants of future king, people often trace back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, but Geoffrey doesn't kind of really say that, does he? He sort of says Arthur goes to Avalon, injured, end of story, and kind of leaves it open, and people have read into that the fact that Arthur never really died and may come back one day. And like you say, it's convenient then Anglo-Norman and later English propaganda to say he's not coming back to save the Welsh, which is almost acknowledging that he's more connected to the Welsh. They're sort of saying he's not coming back to save the Welsh because he's dead and he's buried here in England. Yeah, I've always thought that Geoffrey kind of says a lot with what he doesn't say there

because he sort of says Arthur goes off the healing to Avalon and then the crown is handed to Constantine. But that Geoffrey of Monmouth's great text, the history of the kings of Britain, It never actually says that Arthur dies. And that doesn't seem like much in and of itself. But when you look at the other kings in Geoffrey's history, he's quite specific a lot of the time about where they're buried. So I think I can see why that gap has becomes filled. I personally think that probably some of these myths,

this myth that Arthur wasn't really dead, I suspect that it is probably got early roots. And maybe Geoffrey's aware of it, but isn't quite sure what to do with it. I guess, again, it speaks to that, that intertwining of these almost chronical histories that involve Arthur, but also the deeply mystical stories that also include Arthur, that you can then weave in this idea that he might be coming back one day. It's sort of the blending together of history and folklore and myth, really.

Yeah, exactly that. And then, of course, you have the Holy Grail myth, which is a whole other sort of strand of mysticism that works its way in slightly later on when Arthur sort of becomes subsumed into the romance tradition, really. and yeah, that's because I think there's some interesting theories that the first writers to really set down the legend of the grail quest in writing

might have had some kind of connection to Cistercian orders. There was a theory originally that it actually might have been a Cistercian monk that I think that's been not debunked but we don't have enough evidence anymore but certainly there is a lot in there to suggest some kind of connection

with Cistercian theology you know kind of thinking Yeah, which is, again, an interesting point of people claiming Arthur to deliver a message or a purpose, because then it would be to claim Arthur as a Christian figure who is willing to go on a religious mission and giving him a Christian purpose kind of repackages Arthur yet again, doesn't it? Yeah, and it definitely speaks to kind of developments anyway in terms of thinking about the position of knights as well. I'm thinking, obviously it's quite a few years later, but the Crusades that kind of kick off a couple of centuries before that, and then this need to kind of repackage the figure of a knight as actually a holy figure, sort of a holy knight, that becomes very, very important as part of Bernard de Clevo's efforts

to kind of really question what it actually is to be a good night, in the best night. And you see all of those questions and all of those reinventions filtering down then into the literature, which was with the Grail quest and the Shephast and the Shepard. sharp distinction from kind of just the martial figures that you have of the Arthur of the chronicles and things that comes before. Although of course he does carry Mary on the shield in your home on. So there's that. Of course. And just before we leave Geoffrey, outside of the political context in which Geoffrey is writing, do you think it contributes to the persistence of Arthurian stories that Geoffrey is kind of writing in the 1130s? He's really hitting a sweet spot around

the emergence of ideas of chivalry, of courtly love, of romance literature. And Arthur seems like an ideal subject for all of that kind of thing. So is it someone at this point that other writers begin to latch on to and tell that story away from Geoffrey? That's a really good question. I think the thing is, for the romance authors that do pick up on Arthurian material and thinking he of kind of like the Vulgate cycle but also Cretian of Troy, and he's the first to really put the Lance Lott-Gwinnevere relationship down in detail into textual form. Arthur is almost not that important.

It's more about his knights and the things that they do. And I do wonder whether that might be, because it's literature in French and for the kind of elite of Northern Europe beyond Britain, part of me wonders whether there isn't such a need then to be telling the story of Arthur as a national figure and you can have kind of more fun then with the stories of the people that surround him.

Certainly that's the impression you get in those early romances. It's as Britain as a kind of distant place where sort of magical things happen. It feels kind of almost exoticised in a way. So it's almost the idea of it as being kind of somewhere else. It feels a bit as well like, you know,

we've got the Wizard of Oz and then we have to have wicked and the sequels and a kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe built around it. There's a little bit of that going on. that Arthur's story has been told, but here's another name. We can bolt on and we'll tell that story and that'll take us off in, you know, different directions all over the place and suddenly this is a multiverse of stories about,

Arthur might be at the centre of it somewhere, but he doesn't need to be in it anymore. I couldn't agree more. Whenever I teach these texts and sort of I'm trying to explain to my students, particularly the post-Vulgate prose text and France, that it just becomes so, it is like the unfolding and the unfolding and the unfolding of both individual stories, but also this huge universe of characters. It is a bit like the Marvel multiverse that's sort of taking over our cinemas a bit. Of course, the other thing to say there as well is that we think that Krettián and some of the

other sort of francophone romances may have also been taking material from oral tales that were being told in Brittany that were then kind of mixing in with the more kind of like francophone literary oral cultures as well. So there's a really interesting question mark there about whether they are sort of like there are tales that have gone from Wales to Brittany and are then being translated into French or whether there is a more complicated kind of admixture of these stories between kind of like Breton and Welsh versions at an earlier date. Yeah, that always makes me wonder again about the Welsh marches and sort of like how that

dynamic of French and retellings of potentially Breton but then also like Welsh traditional Welsh tales worked in the Welsh marches. that might well be the reason why Geoffrey has such a rich body of material to kind of work with, as it were, at an early date. But it strikes me as, I think it's really great that you have scholars at the moment about Helen Fulton that are looking a lot more closely into the Welsh marches and the sort of figures who were patronising literature there, but also the types of literature that were circulating in manuscripts. I'm right through the Middle Ages, because I suspect that was a very, very rich area for the creation of new Arthurian stories, whether or textually. not sure. Yeah. And I think for audiences today, there are so many aspects of Arthur's story and the rest of

his cinematic universe that feel really, really familiar. We think we know the stories, whether that comes from early books that we might have read as children or whether that comes from films that we've watched. But there are names and there are items and there are ideas that I think we think are really original. You know, they're ingrained in the story going as far back as we possibly can. And I wonder whether we could just explore some of those and think about when they actually appear in the story.

So, for example, Merlin, when does Merlin arrive in Arthur's story and who is he? Well, Merlin is mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth. I think he's the first to kind of really bring Arthur and Merlin together into the same, yeah, the same kind of grand story. For Geoffrey, Merlin kind of has more to do with actually with Arthur's forebears. So he brings Stonehenge over, apparently from Ireland. where it is in use as a sort of bathhouse, a magical healing bathhouse by giants in Ireland,

who have themselves taken it from Africa. It's a really strange and interesting story. And Geoffrey, with sort of his own sort of machinations, devices, manages to transport that over to Salisbury Plain as a monument to British soldiers who can fall in there. This is before, you know, kind of before the reign of Arthur. And really, the key involvement for Geoffrey in the life of Arthur is in bringing about Arthur's life full stop

because there's this sort of a slightly unpleasant, I suppose, to modernise conception story for Arthur, whereby his mother, Iguerna, is the wife of a Duke called Duke Gouloglois, and they live together in their castle at Tintagel, which, if you've been to Tintagraimat, I'm not sure a lot of people have obviously been there today as kind of a sort of modern Arthurian pilgrimage,

if you like, of the touristic type. But it's this old medieval castle that really, kind of juts out into the sea. And it's very much described like that by Jeffrey and called by name Tindadol. So we know that that is where he's talking about. And essentially Merlin manages to polyjuice potion style transform himself and Uther, who has fallen in love with Duke Gawlois's wife, Egerna, so that they are looking instead like Duke Gawlois and his servant. And together they travel over, basically trick Egerna who thinks that Uther disguised is indeed her husband. And then that's how Arthur is conceived. And then later her husband, the Duke,

dies in battle and she ends up marrying Uther anyway. It's all very strange. And then they forget a sister for Arthur and so on. So that is essentially what you have in Geoffrey. And of course, it's very important for me to mention here that for Geoffrey, Merlin's key role really is as a prophet. So he has a whole book in his history of the Kings of Britain that is the prophecies of Merlin, which can be kind of flexibly interpreted as prophesying the kind of the great Norman intervention, like, you know, in Geoffrey's own present. But then after the history of the Kings of Britain sort of becomes a bestseller, Geoffrey of Romer also then decides to write the life and the prophecies of Merlin as well, a couple of decades later, which go into

more detail. That's where you have this story of the Red and the White Dragon fighting, if you can across that one, Matt. Yeah, yeah, I love that story because it's something, so, you know, I'm probably more at home in the 15th century, but it's something that Henry the 7th, when he's coming back to England, will very much latch onto, and he'll use the Red Dragon of Cadwallader, and that's really playing on that Merlin prophecy

that the Red Dragon will eventually drive out the White Dragon of the Saxons. Yeah, this is the thing. These Merlinic prophecies become so important for all of the kings of England that want to use them later on to kind of justify their own political maneuverings. So that's kind of where Merlin emerges,

There is a mirth in there as well in Welsh tradition earlier on as sort of wild man of the forest. But his story really is fleshed out in those French romances, the sort of bulgate and post-Bulgate that come a little bit later. It's the kind of emergence of romance. And so we've talked a bit about Excalibur as well. I wondered when Excalibur and the lady in the lake who is intimately associated with Escalibur in our minds now, at least. When did they enter the story? Do they arrive together? No, not quite.

So Jeffrey of Monmouth describes Arthur as having a sword called Caliburn that is forged on the island of Avalon. And you can kind of tell from the name that that's going to be the origins of the story of Excalibur. Arthur actually has two swords, which I guess is where you mentioned the Lady of the Lake, right? So there's one sword that he pulls from stone. And then there's another sword, Excalibur, that he's given by the Lady of the Lake and that he then has returned to her at the end of his life. and both of those swords emerge from the romance tradition in French so the sword on the stone I think is Robert de Boron

is the first appearance of that story who is sort of like early 13th century romancer writing French Arthurian romances that we talk of as being part of the Vulgate cycle of romances and then the Lady of the Lake I think is post-Volgate off the top of my head so she comes around

slightly later as well she's not there and Geoffrey at all. And that whole idea of Gapar casting his sword back when he has his final battle is one of those kind of epic romantic details that gets added by romances. It's definitely not there in Geoffrey. I love this because it's something that we kind of assume at our distance was a settled story from the very beginning and that all of these people and things were there. And it's what we instantly recognise as Arthurian. And it's interesting to see them all being slowly fed in and building up this body of stories around Arthur. I guess the other big thing that people will associate with Arthur is the round table and

the knights who sit around the round table. So just to start with the round table, when does that first make an appearance in Arthur's story? So the round table is a fairly early addition to the story. It's not there in Geoffrey of Mumworth. As I said earlier, he's kind of not that interested really in Arthur's knights. He's more interested in Arthur and his story. The round table nights are there, however, in the...

first kind of translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth into a vernacular. And that's a text that we call the Brut that was written by an author called Wes, who was writing in the Channel Islands, again in French, presumably for a Norman elite audience as well. And he describes Arthur as having this round table made up, essentially, that has seats for up to 12 or 13, 13 including Arthur, knights to sit around. So there aren't squabbles over the precedence of the knights. A really funny detail about the roundtable is that it's extremely flexible into its dimensions. So the first English translation of Geoffrey's history, so this is slightly later than Wes. It's by a figure called Ahamon or Lawman. We think he might have maybe had a role that related to recording laws or something like that.

And I think his round table can seat something like, I can't remember off the talk. my head and figure, but it's something like one and a half thousand knights or something, which is more of a stadium dimensions than a table. And yet, it really, the figure changes a lot in terms of how many sort of roundtable nights there are. So those names, there are definitely knights in Arthur's retinue that are there in the earlier texts and in Geoffrey of Monmouth as well. So people like Gawain, who's called Gualfmei in the Welsh, early Welsh texts. And Kay, actually, who we might think of was, you know, kind of thanks to T.H. White and Disney as Arthur's slightly petulant steward, but actually Kay is one of Arthur's closest right-hand men in the early

Welsh tradition, and Kay is there in Geoffrey of Monmouth as well. Other knights, like Lance a lot, who is probably the most famous Arthur's nights now, I would say. He only comes about with the French romance tradition later on. He's not there in Geoffrey of Monmouth at all. And in fact, those who were writing romances in English, so kind of like Middle English for an English-speaking audience, barely mention Lancelot. I think you could probably count on one hand the number of mid-medieval texts sort of like pre-Malory where Lancelot appears at all, let alone an important figure. And the ones where he is important are kind of translations from French texts anyway. So it's interesting that like the knights themselves seem to almost have, they're more popular in some places than others. The English romances love Garwain.

He's their absolute favourite. He's kind of the ultimate. If the English Arthurian romance reader were to have a favourite night, it would be Garwain, I think. So, yeah, it's funny. Get a bit of the green night going, make everybody happy. Yeah, a little bit. Have you got a favourite obscure night?

There must be so many amongst, if it sometimes expands to 1600, there must be so many that we don't really know about. Have you got a famous one who falls by the wayside and nobody really remembers? Gosh, there's so many. What I really like is when figures pop up as kind of anti-heroes or a kind of Arthurian opponents in some texts. And then at the end of those texts, they just get subsumed into Arthur's court and a later later just mentioned in

passing, like in Thomas Mallory or something where you have this list of all his nights. So there's a Sogroma, some major who is a sort of, I guess, like almost like a fairy opponent figure that Arthur and Garwin come across an obscure Middle English romance called the Wedding of Sir Garwin and Dame Ragnall. That's essentially a loathly lady story. in type to the wife of bath, you know, the knight has to marry, seemingly this hideous woman who has helped them overcome a riddle, all solve a problem, and then in the end it works out well, and she sort of becomes transformed into a beautiful wife for them. But in this obscure Middle English romance that we think might have actually been written by Thomas Mallory, which is an interesting

sort of development in scholarship recently. But in this romance, the kind of figure who puts Garwain and Arthur in this sort of pickle. When they encounter him in the forest and encroach on his territories, it's called Sagrimos Somajor. And then he later appears as one of Arthur's knights in later texts. And I like details like that.

It's just kind of... The idea, I suppose, that your enemy can become your friend that's quite nice. So he's an interesting example, I suppose. Yeah, who doesn't? And before we get to kind of Mallory, who I guess, kind of,

if Geoffrey is the bookend at the beginning of a recognisable Arthur story, then Mallory is the bookend at the other side of it, in medieval terms at least. So before we get to him, through the kind of the high and the late medieval periods, what does the preoccupation with Arthur tell us about what people are interested in and how Arthur can fit telling those stories? Because he sort of changes and the focus of Arthurian stories changes throughout the period, doesn't it? Definitely. I mean, there's a few different ways you could think about answering that question.

But I suppose if you look at how. how of that is presented politically as a sort of ideal king in those stories where he is. Obviously, he isn't ideal in all stories. He goes from being a kind of a great conqueror in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who conquers far distant territories and things, to being in some of his translations that are more interested in presenting a king who is good at keeping peace at home, maintaining things at home, managing civil unrest between people at home.

So there's texts where that is the kind of art. author that is more of a focus. So like the Brut, the Chronicles that we refer to as the Brutonauticals that connect these early Geoffrey of Monmouth, Brutus to Cadwalada narratives right up until the immediate kings of the immediate present. Different brutes end in different places. It's almost like a diary of who's currently king, like, you know, an annul or something of a chronicle that's always being rewritten. So in those, it's all about after the administrator, after the peacekeeper at home. And then when Mallory comes along, he is writing in the middle of the Wars of the roses when maintaining peace in the sense of avoiding civil war is extremely important. And you

really get a strong, strong sense of that across Mallory's Arthurian texts, which is essentially, he's bringing existing stories together. So these aren't exactly new stories. They're stories he's taken from the English and the French traditions and sort of interwoven with history. But you can tell that for Mallory, this is a tangible problem in his own present. And in fact, there's this amazing moment in the Mordaitha, which Mallory rarely interjects with his own voice in the same way that, you know, Chaucer likes to do. But there is a moment in the text where he kind of laments the infighting, and specifically the lack of loyalty and the flippancy of people. He's referring to the moment when Arthur has gone to the continent and Mordred is persuading

people round to his side that he would make the better king. And all of the nobles change their minds and decide to support Mordred. And Mallory is saying this is so sad that English men are like this even today. And he kind of makes it sound like a problem, a current problem, an English problem. So that is as much to say that these Arthurian texts kind of get reinvented to mirror what's going on politically in the immediate present. Yeah. I guess that's almost a direct reference from Mallory. You know, if he's writing in the, what, the mid-1470s for the most part, the readeption, you know, Edward VIII being ejected from the kingdom, Henry the 6th coming back for a bit, you've got this whole idea, you know, not dissimilar to the time of Richard

the First and John, where you've got this other king who wants to insert himself and take the place in it. It's kind of, he can lament those things in Arthur's story that are dragging the country down in his view in his time as well. So Arthur is kind of a container to talk about those things. Exactly, exactly that. And like the change that Mallory saw back and forth within his lifetime as a result of the civil wars, you cannot completely understand why you get this sense when you read the Monk, Arthur, that it's deeply tragic and sad because it feels like a tangle that can't really be very easily resolved or untangled, and that Mallory is really writing that from experience, from having been in the middle of it. Because of course, Mallory himself was potentially, you know, a casualty of this. And we know that. But at different times he was in and out of favour with kind of different halves of the sort of dynamic with regards to the War of the Roses. So there's definitely a sense that it feels very immediately relevant as a story for him to be telling. And I think that's probably why he picks it as his project to be working on literally while he's in prison. He's working on it.

I was going to say the other thing about Mallory is we shouldn't present him as some kind of heroic writer who is, you know, gathering all of these stories together. He's probably not the nicest bloke we've come across in this story so far. Oh, absolutely not. And people are always kind of shocked that he was MP five times, Justice for the Peace and a sheriff. And obviously a knight. So he's writing these stories about these amazing knights pursuing the grail, these kind of idealized knights.

And yet he himself was kind of imprisoned throughout his life for a variety of crimes, which reigned from the sort of fairly petty, like cattle rustling, all the way through to rape, to attempted murder, to sacking, I think a nethered. nunnery. It's like some quite serious crimes. I mean, I know that we still have shock stories in the news today about the behaviour of some of our representatives in Parliament, but I think that probably takes things to another level a little bit. So, yeah, and he's not had the same kind of

kind of exoneration that Chaucer has had, because of course there was also a question mark over whether Chaucer was a rapist. And actually it turned out that in that case, it was more to do with somebody else's servant being essentially subsumed into Chaucer's household. But we don't have that for Mallory. So it's really troubling to read his text, I think, with that knowledge in the background, particularly when he's working through some of his kind of big moral questions that are very prominent, I think, and reading Mallory's women as well. Because, of course, unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mallory's text has some really interesting

female characters that have their own time in the limelight. Yeah, because I think it's interesting that he's kind of writing this book about lamenting the chaos of the world of Arthur, but also reflecting the chaos of his world when he's contributed to that chaos. You know, he's not one of the noble Chevalric knights who is there to solve everything. He's actually part of the problem, but he's trying to, almost like he's trying to work through to a solution for the problem that he's part of. But the women thing I think is interesting because, you know, he's living in a time when there are so many powerful women around as well in the wars of the road. is, you know, you think it's Cecily Neville, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort, people like that coming to the fore where women are playing a significant part in the politics, albeit, you know, off the battlefield, but having as much of an impact. And it's interesting that

Mallory then is drawing the women closer to the centre of the story as well. Yeah. And there are definitely powerful women there in Mallory. But I think the thing that really strikes me is interesting about Mallory's women, particularly his magical women, is that they aren't they're powerful and they have a serious impact on the people around them. People like Morgan Maffa and obviously Vivian, who famously in the French tradition, imprisons her slightly, well, her rather lecherous tutor at Merlin inside an invisible tower or a rock or something like that, different in every story. And those women are all there in Mallory.

And it's interesting to me that, like, as with the romances, where you have prominent women, their main intervention often is their magical interventions. and then it just strikes me as like an interesting role that female characters can play in romance narratives. It's often they operate from maybe different rules, maybe kind of not the rules of brotherhood and sort of politics and the realm of the human, but they have to have something else, some other way to operate, that can offer a challenge to that. And that's often sort of the supernatural, which has always struck me as kind of interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I guess, you know, we only really care about the medieval world.

Nothing else matters after the medieval world is gone. But just to briefly talk about the continuation of Arthur's story, it quite often feels to me at least that maybe Henry the 8th desecration of the roundtable that's at Winchester redecorating it and putting his own terrible face on the front of it. It's almost like the last big expression of interest in Arthurian stories from English-British monarchs. But the story never quite goes away, does it sort of fade? Does it fade a little bit? Or am I wrong in thinking that?

Does Arthur's story kind of continue? Well, I'm a little biased here because my kind of key area of specialism really is what happens to Arthur after the Middle Ages. And I think although you have, like, Arthurian skepticism really begins to be something that is openly expressed, right? It's in fact, like a very famous example to speak of Mallory, the preface to William Kackston's edition. Because what people often forget is that Mallory is the first Daltherian medieval text to be printed in 1485. and so reaches a whole new audience. And in the printer's preface, he openly says that there are people

who don't think Arthur ever existed at all. And that was not a completely new thing to express, but to be expressing it that openly and in the preface to the text that you're trying to sell that glorifies Arthur is quite a shocker. And you only really get more of that as humanism begins to really take hold as a way of thinking in the 16th century

and then onwards, obviously, within Britain. the English civil war and the period of kind of, I guess, monarchic questioning that came with that and the protectorate and everything else, that is also not great for the popularity, I suppose, of Arthur. You don't want a hero king when you're wondering if you need a king at all. Yeah, but I think if you're willing to kind of support or kind of tolerate a vision of Arthur that isn't just Arthur the Grand King that we're used to seeing in kind of like Tudor iconography, Plantagenet, you know, role-playing. Actually, I think that that post-medieval Arthur is one of the more interesting and varied. I say that medieval Arthur, but that post-medieval Arthur, but after the Middle Ages, there are so many different versions of Arthur that you get.

And his story just becomes a source for the most wonderful, creative, playful freedoms. And, you know, to speak of kind of the 17th century, Arthur really becomes a figure of satirical potential at that time. And there's just some wonderful little gems that you find when you start digging through the archive in fairly ephemeral texts where Arthur or his knights get used. And again, Merlin and his prophecies. You wouldn't expect this of Merlin, because of course he's a prophet who is in service to kings, right, in Geoffrey of Monmouth. But in and around the period of English Civil War, there are all these texts coming out that describe Merlinic prophecies that both support and oppose the kind of royalist vision. So you even get people like Lily, William Lilly is his name, writing sort of like pro-parliamentarian prophecies and calling them the new Mer, like referring to them as Malinic, like the New Merlin.

And it just becomes so strange. And I really like that. And I think it's very easy to think I won't bother looking for Arta in that time period when actually there's so much variety. And that's not even to talk about things like landscape folklore. you know, if you turn around to a person in the street today and ask what they know about Arthur, some of the most kind of romantic ideas that they might have to do with Arthur could be to do with, you know, places that they know where they live, that are hill forts that has, I think Arthur, it was buried here I heard about Arthur in a cave, this, that and the other.

And all of that kind of landscape, folklore and myth really kicks off big time at the end of the Middle Ages, is when there are antiquarians traveling Britain and recording those stories from people. So I guess I would challenge the idea that it all gets boring after the Middle Ages because there's loads to talk about. Yeah, yeah. Maybe Arthur doesn't,

but the world gets boring after the Middle Ages. I'm going to stick to that. Cinema today kind of remains fascinated with Arthur and various stories of him in lots of different incarnations with lots of different kind of focuses and messages. and there seems to be a little sign of Arthur going away, kind of more than a millennium after he was first being recorded.

Do you have a sense of what Arthur means today and why we're still so captivated by him and his story? Different people find different things in his story to captivate them. And I could talk about a few different examples. So to think about kind of the Guy Ritchie film, the 2017 Guy Ritchie film, part of the thing I think that was appealing to the people who produced it, but also the people that went to watch it,

is this idea of looking for the historical author in narrative and finding a way to kind of tell that story that might be hidden beneath the leaves of fable to quote some old antiquarian. So we still very much are interested in those stories. Part of me wonders whether as we kind of move forward into an age that is increasingly virtual and online and kind of governed by AI and technology and like thinking and living in virtual spaces, that those fixed-in-place landscape places

become more exciting and things. Tintagil is by far and away one of English Heritage's top sites for visitors in terms of footfall. You only need to pick up a particular kind of newspaper every now and then, and there'll be a new theory about a particular earthwork or place connected with Arthur,

so people are still more interested than ever in looking for those stories. But then also there's something about the narrative of Arthur as well, that is very appealing to a particular kind of modern storytelling. I'm thinking here of the film The Kid Who Would Be King. This idea of being kind of like a chosen one in some way, even if you're a bit normal. You can see how, you know, the narrative of Arthur and Sword and the Stone, the Breton Hope of Arthur's return and all of that and prophecy can be reinvented to serve that particular narrative first that we have in kind of contemporary storytelling.

It kind of plays into that Harry Potter idea that you can be normal but find out that actually there's something really special about you. Absolutely. And, you know, we have to, of course, also remember that we grew up on, or I certainly I grew up on, even at that point, you know, which we came out a lot earlier. But the Disney Sword and Stone with art, which is itself based on T.H. White's Arthurian novels for sort of like children slash young people, where you get that story of Arthur the underdog as having kind of been raised in the royal court as an adult. dot tea and all of that. You can see why it took off and became popular and fed into these narratives as well. You can kind of see the traces of it because it was written at the time when those kinds of narratives were becoming more popular. I suppose it's a move towards thinking that greatness can also be something that comes from within you rather than from the way that you're

raised in some ways. But I'm not sure. It's at odds with that too in a weird way, isn't it? Because It's saying that you're baited in some way to be great. Yeah, no, but I think it kind of returns always for me to that idea of the Breton Hope, the Once and Future King, in that Arthur can be anything to anybody at any time in any situation.

His story can kind of mould around the circumstances in which it's being told. So it's almost that Arthur never has gone away. Arthur never has died because he keeps coming back to be the vehicle, the container with which we can tell new stories that are about ourselves as much as they're ever about Arthur. And there's always going to be something

that we think we need saving from. And if Arthur, the Breton hope, the idea of Arthur returning, the Once and Future King, to help people at a time of need, to help the Britons at a time of need, but what even are the Britons anymore because it was written when the Britons

were the Welsh and everything else. And so you can 100% see how having a story about coming back to help people at a time when they're need them could have perennial appeal. There's always going to be problems, but like politically or culturally or whatever else, climate change. Maybe, maybe now the time is right for an Arthurian climate change film or like novel, you know, young adult novel, who knows? But there's always going to be something that people feel like they need saving from. And I think that's probably the appeal

that Arthur has, you know, partly. Yeah, fascinating. This has been an incredible chat, Mary. I probably shouldn't keep it any longer, but I feel like we could talk about this all day. It's absolutely fascinating. So thank you very much for joining us and thank you so much for guiding us through a millennium or more of the story of King Arthur. Oh, it's been a pleasure. And you're right, there's loads to talk about, but it's just been really nice being able to chat about some of it. Yeah, no, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this chat as much as I did. Mary's book, Local Places and the Arthurian tradition in England and Wales, 1400 to 1700.

is available now and you can listen to Eleanor's episode on the prophecies of Merlin from earlier this week if you missed it. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free. Head over to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.