The Ancients - The Truth About King Arthur

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

The legend of King Arthur has been reworked many times, but is there any historical truth behind the tales? Dr Miles Russell believes there is and in this podcast he highlights how elements of King Arthur’s story derive from five key ancient figures. From British warlords that opposed the arrival of Julius Caesar to Roman emperors of Later Antiquity, Miles explores these individuals in ‘Arthur and the Kings of Britain: The Historical Truth Behind the Myths’.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we are focusing on that famous medieval figure King Arthur, but we're looking at King Arthur from the ancient perspective. We're looking at five key figures from ancient Britain who contributed

to the creation of the mythical figure Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Arthur. Now to talk through these five figures I was delighted to get on the show my good old friend Dr Miles Russell from the University of Bournemouth. Miles is an encyclopedia when it comes to Roman Britain and when it comes to the creation of King Arthur. So without further ado, here's Miles. Miles, it's fantastic to have you on the podcast. Thank you, good to be here. Now, yeah, this is an absolutely incredible topic. We're looking at King Arthur, but also his

ancient links, shall we say, because Miles, the question of who was the real King Arthur, it's kind of like what happened to the 9th Legion. It's one of those great mystery questions of history. It is. I mean, Arthur is such an incredible character. He's a world character, really. You know, he's famous everywhere. And I think his story is one that just keeps getting reinvented for every generation. You know, he's one of those characters from the past

where it's now very difficult to disentangle the historical truth from the sort of mythology and the fantasy that's built on it but because the story's been enlarged and enlarged and enlarged over time you know every generation makes the arthur that they want so we'll see in the last few decades it's been tv series has been films there's been computer. It's just building on that mythology. So probably of all characters in the past, King Arthur is probably one of the most famous, really. He's world renowned. Absolutely world renowned. And you are an archaeologist of ancient history.

And although we sometimes think of Arthur as this medieval figure, he has these incredible links, shall we say, when you look at the research to ancient Britain. Absolutely. Yes, yes. shall we say when you look at the research to ancient britain absolutely yes yes i mean it's i guess you know king arthur is one of those characters who's always fascinated historians and archaeologists alike trying to get back to the actual physical truth of him you know did he the argument is always going there are those who believe he was a real character operating at the end of roman britain and those who believe his complete fantasy and within that they're trying to find some middle ground of trying to actually place him because it's such an emotive time you know when you're talking about the end of Roman Britain we're talking about the beginning of the kingdoms of what becomes England what becomes the

principality of Wales the kingdom of Scotland It's all these formative stories, all these foundation myths all begin at that, all coalesce at that one time. So Arthur's there at the epicentre of all that. So trying to, you know, he's got great resonance today trying to find out who he was, where he existed and what he actually did. Super interesting questions, Arthur, right at the epicentre. So Miles, to really start off this chat, the background, we are talking about the book at the heart of your research on this topic. It's not an ancient book, but this literary source, it's key to our discussion today. What is this book? It's A History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Historia Regum Britanniae, I give it as a Latin title, and it's written in around 1136 AD. So it's written a

very long time after the events that it describes. It divides opinion, I think it's fair to say. In the past, it was viewed as one of the most important texts relating to the history of the Britons, giving them their lost voice. But in the last 200 years, people have tended to be a bit more critical of it and say, well, actually, it appears to just be either complete fantasy, it's made up, or it's some kind of misguided patriotic drivel, which really made sense in the 12th century, but doesn't today. The difficulty really is we don't know anything about the man who wrote it, Geoffrey of Monmouth. We know that he existed, which is good. We know that he was living in Oxford in the 1130s. We know that by his name, Geoffrey of Monmouth, he must have grown up or spent his formative years on the Welsh-English border.

But beyond that, we know very little about him or indeed why he chose to write this book. He says in his foreword that Walter, the Archdeacon of Oxford, his ultimate boss, gave him the task of translating a very ancient book in what he calls the Celtic tongue, translating it into Latin. But people have taken that to think, well, this is some kind of smokescreen, some kind of cover for something he's actually inventing, because there is no original Celtic text that people have found. But all the way through his book, we can see he's making reference to oral history. And other writers of the same time are like Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury. They're talking about the stories of the Britons, which are known by heart. So there is this sort of tradition of all storytelling, of passing myths down from

generation to generation, but not actually writing anything down and it is actually the beginning of the 12th century that we start seeing things like the Mabinogion in Wales a whole series of different texts we see the Welsh triads we see Geoffrey of Monmouth they're starting to write down stories which seem to have been passed around now the difficulty with an oral history is obviously tracing its origins. And of course, it's the possibility that every generation is slightly modifying it or changing it. And therefore, the story becomes distorted. Names become garbled and it becomes increasingly difficult to look back and think, well, what is the actual kernel of truth there? What is the actual origins of this? But Geoffrey is writing this down and he presents a history that he describes of the Britons he's putting this as an attempt to counter the overtly English stories like Bede who writes a ecclesiastical history of the English people

he's got William of Malmesbury Henry of Huntingdon and their stories are very Anglo-Saxon centric you know they're based on the first English migrants setting up kingdoms. He's presenting a story that counters that and said, actually, before they arrived, there is this great heritage going back, all the kings and queens and monarchs. And he claims they are descended ultimately from Trojans who were escaping the Trojan Wars, who were sort of refugees who landed in Britain and established this sort of series of kingdoms and effectively it's a polemic really sort of saying that all these people existed before the Saxons arrived and going through their history and identifying key heroes but the difficulty from our perspective and from a historical point of view is because these names aren't mentioned

anywhere else have they got any kind of historical truth to them is he making them up is he using some kind of oral tradition that hasn't been written down anywhere else what is the basis of this but it's important for us because Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first person to give us an entire life history of King Arthur from his conception to his mortal wounding so all our understanding of Arthur the man or the mythology that's built around him begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are scattered references to an Arthur character before that, but Geoffrey gives us everything. It's a full download of his entire life history. Miles, that is super interesting.

And just before we go on to Arthur, that mentioning of this oral tradition, as it were, should we say pre-Saxon, is it looking at the ancient Celtic history, as it were, in this oral tradition? Because you see so many parallels. I was immediately thinking of perhaps Homer, the Odyssey, the Iliad, that oral tradition. But you could also then look at the Polynesians and their oral tradition before the Europeans and the interactions there. And it seems like it's quite similar here, how he is now writing down hundreds and hundreds of years later, Geoffrey of Monmouth, this tradition that may well have been passed down through many of the Celtic speaking peoples and said for generations.

Absolutely. So remembering sort of heroes from the past. Another good sort of example is the stories that are first being written down or recorded in 19th century Afghanistan about Iskander, you know, Alexander the Great. Here you've got a Macedonian general from the third century BC who's being remembered thousands of years later. And the stories have multiplied, but at its core, there is a historic or verifiable figure. So we can see that oral tradition has a very long history, you know, that tales do survive. But because they're not being recorded, it is very difficult to see when they mutate and when they change and that's the tricky thing with Geoffrey of Monmouth is we can identify some of these characters not all of them but we don't know when these particular tales are mutating and evolving

absolutely don't you worry Miles we'll be going back to Alexander the Great very soon I'm sure but let's focus on Arthur so Arthur in Geoffreyrey's book, how significant a figure is he? In the history of the Kings of Britain, Arthur is coming towards the end. I mean, he occupies about a third of the book. So he's the most significant character. He's given the most amount of space to develop. And in a way, everything is leading up towards Arthur. I mean, there are characters after him in the story, but they're less significant and they're given sort of less time, really. But throughout the story, Geoffrey presents a series of important men and women who are trying to defend their kingdom and trying to establish the laws of the land and all these sort of things. And Arthur occurs at a point when the

kingdom's under its greatest threat, because Geoffrey identifies the Saxons coming in from, you know, migrating across the North Sea as the biggest threat to the kingdom of the Britons. So Arthur's there at that point defending everything that's gone before. But it's interesting because the story that he gives of Arthur is repeating lots of key tropes, lots of key aspects of other people's story. And it's presented without comment. It's some kind of divine plan. Everything that's happened before is coalescing under Arthur and is repeated under Arthur.

And he is the ultimate warrior in the story. And his demise signifies the high point of the Britain story, but also the point which they sort of descend and the kingdom sort of crashes to a halt. The ultimate warrior portrayal. So is he very much portrayed in this book, Miles, as a warlord? He's a horrible character in Geoffrey of Monmouth because he's a psychopath. He is very quick to anger. He slaughters people for no apparent reason. He invades countries just because he wants power. But that is in the post-Roman, indeed pre-Roman period, that is how heroes are remembered. They're not remembered for having a kingdom of peace and

prosperity. They're not remembered for the laws that they pass. They are remembered for being strong individuals who don't take any prisoners. So Arthur, his story is just drenched in blood. any prisoners. So Arthur, his story is just drenched in blood. He is not a very nice character from our point of view, but from the point of view, I guess, of a post-Roman society, he's exactly the kind of individual you want on your side. You've got these descriptions of him in a battle, almost going into berserker mode and slaughtering hundreds of individuals just with his sword. He is there, he's doing all the killing and i think in a way that is important to understand because the arthur that jeffrey presents us is completely unlike the medieval arthur that we get all the later romances built around him from the 14th 15th

16th centuries really make him more human they bring in the the romance cycle of Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere. They bring in the quest for the Holy Grail. They bring in other characters like Bedivere and Percival and Galahad and all these other individuals. So they make Arthur a more human individual. They emphasise his humanity, whereas Geoffrey just presents us with the warlord. And it's interesting to see how little of the original story that Geoffrey gives us actually appears in the later accounts. He almost gets edited out completely and other elements come in. And therefore, there's no sword in the stone.

There's no lady in the lake. There's no Lancelot-Guinnevere romance. There's no Holy Grail. None of those aspects are in Geoffrey's primary account. It's all about conquest and killing and being the strongest man, the last man standing, effectively. Miles, the parallels are so striking. We're going back to Alexander now because of that whole portrayal. With the Alexander historians, first of all, like the original sources,

you mentioned how Arthur is portrayed as this sometimes psychopathic warlord. Well, I think Alexander is portrayed very similarly at times this killing of hundreds of thousands of people particularly in the Indus river valley but it's only later on when you get the romance added with the Alexander romance stories where you see him going to mythical lands almost what they thought mythical lands like in Africa or visiting Jerusalem etc etc And those are added later. So it's so interesting. You see these striking parallels between two of the most well-known warlords of history who have become two of the most well-known warlords

in history have these striking parallels in how their story in the literature develops over time to become, shall we say, more popular among audiences. It is, it is. I mean, it's still going on today. I mean, you can think, when you look back to all the ancient Greek myths, really none of the characters in there are particularly nice. You think of someone like Achilles. I mean, he is a really unpleasant individual. And yet when people are trying to dramatise the Trojan Wars

today, they downplay the death and killing side. And they try to bring in romance and try to make this person likable. Because ultimately, we want to see an element of our heroes that we empathize with, that we like. Otherwise, what's the point? So you can see a lot of more modern interpretations of Achilles. And yeah, he's quite a nice chap. He's got compassion. It doesn't appear in the original sources. Basically, he is a murderous sociopath. And that is the same with Alexander. I mean, there's nothing about his story. He's not going eastwards in a missionary zeal to bring his brand of civilization and to benefit society. He's conquering and killing and destroying another civilization. But later on, the romances are added and they're trying to make him ultimately a more likeable person.

And that is exactly what's happening with Arthur, because he is a deeply unlikable person when you read his accounts in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Now, let's go back to Arthur then. Thank you for that tangent. That was very much appreciated. So, I mean, the stories of King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth, many of these stories that are given to Arthur, Miles, they happen to other individuals before him. Exactly. I mean, the interesting thing looking through Geoffrey of Monmouth, which you do read it from cover to cover, which I've done many times, it's not something I'd ordinarily recommend to people because it's not like reading a novel and it's plagued with names and dates and events. But you see that certain themes do get repeated. And this is one of the reasons I think that Jeffrey's history, his skill is he's weaving together a series of stories and trying to put them in a chronology that makes sense to him. So we often see stories repeated, like the invasion of Julius Caesar in 54 BC in Britain as a documented event.

It appears twice in Jeffrey and Monmouth's account from different perspectives. event it appears twice in Jeffrey and Monmouth's account from different perspectives and it's almost if he doesn't realize it's the same event and therefore he separates it out and we get three invasions of Caesar rather than the two that we know about and the 54 BC is repeated and he does this with individuals we see someone whose story is very similar to somebody else and their name form is slightly different it's Garbo and it's evidently it's person but jeffrey's presented with two rather different accounts and rather than pushing him together he treats them as two separate individuals so when we look at arthur you can disentangle there's at least five individuals which come together really so arthur is a composite in jeffrey of monmouth his story has already happened to other people and these are sort of people who are in some way significant. They've been remembered as heroes in the old psychopathic

Elleside. You know they are prominent warlords of their time but their stories have undoubtedly been remembered and therefore they are coalescing around Arthur and Geoffrey brings them together to create this sort of composite Celtic superhero. Composite Celtic superhero, five key figures from ancient Britain. Miles, let's delve into these five figures now. I want you to go wild with the detail of each of these people. Let's start with the first one. This is someone who I actually think is particularly interesting, particularly because he seems to be very much an influence on Clive Owen for the King Arthur of that in the 2000s. Miles, number one, Ambrosius Aurelianus. Yes, I mean, Ambrosius Aurelianus is one of those figures who in post-Roman Britain we do have

some detail of. It's not much to go on really, but Ambrosius Aurelianus appears in the writings of a man called Gildas. And Gildas is writing at some point in the mid-6th century. Gildas is not the best historian to rely on because he's not a historian. He's the man of the clergy. And his account on the ruin of Britain, it's a polemic. It's a sermon, basically, explaining why the Britons have suffered, because they're all diseased and sinful and corrupt.

And therefore the Saxons are like a scourge from God cleansing them. So it's full of blood and fire and anger. And Gildas hasn't got a good word to say about anybody. Everybody's corrupt and horrible, apart from one person who is Ambrosius Aurelianus. And he says that he's a man of good character. He's descended of sort of noble Roman stock. And he is responsible for this great defeat of this rascally crew, the Saxons. He defeats them at a battle or the siege of Mount Baden. And because Gildas is so complimentary about him

and he mentions this battle, and this battle gets referred to time and time again, it becomes a key battle of King Arthur in the later sort of rewrites but Gildas doesn't give us any information about who is besieging whom at this great affair he doesn't tell us where Baden is but because Gildas is writing somewhere in the west country or possibly sort of southern Wales we assume it's within that sort of general area but it's important to him and it's important to the people he's speaking to. So Ambrosius is this major character. Now he appears a lot in other oral histories, which were later written down,

like the Triads of Wales, like the Mabinogion briefly, Nennius in Historia Ritonum, the history of the Britons, Ambrosius is in there. And he features very heavily in Geoffrey Monmouth's work because he's treated as the immediate sort of predecessor of Arthur. But Ambrosius is somebody in Geoffrey Monmouth's work because he's treated as the immediate sort of predecessor of Arthur but Ambrosius is somebody in Geoffrey Monmouth who yes he fights the battle

of Baden which Geoffrey places at Bath in the west country he is trying to establish his kingdom in the face of Saxon advances defeats them a number of times and Geoffrey has him being having his coronation at Stonehenge and of course this becomes the archaeologists have picked up on this recently going back to Geoffrey this idea that in Geoffrey's account Ambrosius asks his chief advisor Merlin to build a monument to commemorate all those British aristocrats who've been murdered by the Saxons and Merlin goes off to Ireland and brings back this great stone circle which they set up on Salisbury Plain. And that's where Ambrosius has his coronation. And of course, from an archaeological perspective, that seems utterly ludicrous, you know, because we know the history

of Stonehenge and it's not post-Roman in essence. Although it's possible, you know, there's debate whether the blue stones have come from West Wales, which might be sort of remembered. But the key thing in Geoffrey's text is he's talking about the monument being restructured and we know that archaeologically you know i've excavated inside stonehenge entirely legally by the way it was part of a bigger project but a lot of the blue stones that we see in stonehenge today were reshaped and modified in the post-Roman period. So there is some kind of structural modification going on in there at the time that Ambrosius is supposed to have existed. And because you've got Amesbury, the town nearby, Ambrosius's burr, his name is resonant in the landscape. So it's possible

Geoffrey is remembering or writing down an event involving the reshaping of Stonehenge and the coronation of this king whom Gildas has mentioned before but he's there and he's the only post-Roman warlord for whom we've got anything vaguely complementary written about so in that sense he's in the right space at the right time for the Arthur character and when we look at Ambrosius in Geoffrey's text, aspects about his childhood, aspects about his kingship, and of course the Battle of Baden, get absorbed into the Arthur story. So they're repeated without comment later on. So we can see there's about 16% of the King Arthur story,

as it appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth, is taken from Ambrosius' life. Well, you kind of read my mind what the next question would be which would be like what elements of Ambrosius Aurelianus's story does Geoffrey adopt mould into the character of Arthur but is it really the battle narrative? It is yes it's the battle narrative and it's the sort of aspects about his kingship and his position in his power and it is actually interesting that later writers take other aspects of ambrosius because in jeffrey of monmouth although merlin is there he and arthur never meet they occupy different timelines as it were but later writers have merlin becoming arthur's advisor and his wizard so it's interesting but it's ambrosius and merlin in the original text but later when ambrosius is written out, Merlin gets absorbed into the Arthur story.

Well, there you go. I never clicked that link between Ambrosius, Aurelianus and Amesbury. And Miles, if we then move on, it sounds like Ambrosius, he is a significant core of the character of Arthur in Geoffrey's Monmouth. But moving on to the next figure, he also seems very, very significant. Character number two, Magnus Maximus. Yeah, I mean, Magnus Maximus, I guess, is one of those individuals who doesn't resonate so much today. We don't hear a lot about him, but he was a significant character in later fourth century Roman Empire, because we know that there's not a lot about his life story that has been recorded, but it is known that he is of Spanish ethnicity. He's serving in Britain, possibly as a commander of the Northern armies, the Dux Britanniorum. But in 383 AD, his soldiers proclaim him as emperor.

So he is illegally created as leader of the Roman world. And lots of people are doing this around the Roman Empire. Throughout the third and are doing this around the Roman Empire. You know, throughout the third and fourth centuries, the empire is tearing itself apart with multiple leaders and claims and civil wars. So in that respect, Magnus Maximus is not that different. But he seems to have the support of the troops in Britain. There seems to be a lot of disaffection with the government in Britain with Rome, feeling that they're not perhaps being looked after.

They're a distant province. They're not that important. And Magnus Maximus, as we know from the histories, takes troops out of Britain. He gets support in northern Gaul, northern France, Belgium, Germany. He's minting coins with his face on and with images of victory. His army besiege the forces of the legitimate Emperor Gratian, who is killed in the retreat. So the Emperor of the West dies. The Emperor's mother and his younger brother then go over to the east. And Magnus Maximus is sitting there above the Alps,

about to advance down into Italy, when the Eastern Emperor arrives with an army, cuts him off, and he is executed and killed. And the is put down but it's a huge political and social upheaval because it's completely destabilized the west it's involved a loss of life it's an own goal as far as rome's concerned because it's destroying its own army and saw lots of it been fighting but the fact that his story you think well why is magnus maximus remembered what possible relevance has he got to Britain? But he is remembered. If you look in a lot of the early Welsh genealogies, lots of the leaders of Powys and so on, they trace their ancestry back to Magnus Maximus,

who's often cited as the king who killed the king of the Romans. He is remembered. And in the Mabinogion, we get the story of the dream of Maxon, who is Magnus Maximus, who in that version of the story, he's an emperor in Rome who dreams of this distant, faraway, mythical land with a castle and a beautiful princess. And he sends people out to look for her. And they eventually come back and say, we found her. She's in effectively North Wales. And he travels travels over there meets the woman literally of his dreams and they fall in love and he stays there for long enough for arrival to take power in rome and then he has to take troops out of britain to go and reclaim his kingdom so it's sort of a reverse

version of the story but he's remembered in so many different accounts you think well there's something about him okay yes he was a prominent warlord. That's something that, you know, tick, you are remembered for. Undoubtedly, there were praise poems about him. I suspect he restructured Britain significantly. So he devolved authority, perhaps to individual tribes or leaders. And that's why they later treated him as their sort of progenitor,

as the founder of their dynasty. But a lot of the story, certainly the Mabinogion, centres around Carnarvon in North Wales and that's where the later sort of Plantagenet dynasty build Carnarvon castle and it's supposed to be the sort of myth fulfillment that they are building a fortress that resembles the castle that Magnus Maximus had in this dream so sort of the later Norman monarchs are building on this mythology quite literally and representing themselves as the ultimate sort of fulfillment of the Magnus Maximus story.

But when we look at Geoffrey of Monmouth, when we look at the fact that he leaves Britain, he invades Gaul, modern day France. He defeats armies, he kills the emperor and he's just about to go over the Alps to invade Italy when he's suddenly turned away. All this is Magnus Maximus' story that's been repackaged for Arthur. So 39% of the King Arthur story comes from Magnus Maximus in Geoffrey of Monmouth. So he is the most significant person to contribute to the Arthur tale. tribute to the Arthur tale. Miles, it's so interesting how the most significant person for creating this Celtic superhero is this rather infamous Roman general. It is, I guess to our perspective it is, but given that he's portrayed as a strong leader, someone who is successful in battle, someone who galvanises the Britons and the Gauls and

the Germans against Rome, this becomes a significant factor in this story. And of course, bear in mind, he doesn't come back to Britain. One of the later aspects developed with Arthur is he's gone. He's not killed, but he might come back one day. And I guess that is something about Magnus Maximus, is that he's gone abroad. Stories of his death might be treated as a bit of an over-exaggeration. But there's that sense that one day he will return and save us all.

So you can see how that's him. But yeah, from our perspective, from most people's perspective, I guess Magnus Maximus, whose name translates as the great, the greatest. So he's quite a show-off. He's not modest, yeah. He's not modest in that sense. But he doesn't feature much in our history. He's just another name in that list of rebels but

for the sort of beginnings of the great welsh dynasties and the princes of wales he's a key character from their past and therefore he gets built into the story of arthur catastrophic warfare bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles i'm james rogers and over on the warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

Join us on the front line of military history. well from magnus maximus let's move on to another person who is definitely not modest in the slightest figure number three constantine the great yeah i mean again constantine is another character who ultimately hasn't really got anything to do with britain you know he's from the eastern mediterranean from the balkans but he is serving in britain with his father in 306 ad and his father is constantius his father is the emperor and at that stage, there is a system called the Tetrarchy, which is by whoever's emperor chooses their successor. And it's not somebody of their bloodline. They choose the most capable leader to succeed them.

And it's a way of trying to get rid of all these fighting dynasties. Now, in 306, Constantius dies in Britain at York. He's on campaign in Britain. And Constantine, his son, effectively says, well, I'm the son of the emperor. I'm going to be emperor. And his troops proclaim him as such at York. So it's this major uprising, another sort of time when a general has illegally seized power. And Constantine does what Magnus Maximus does later, is he takes troops out of Britain. what Magnus Maximus does later is he takes troops out of Britain he goes into Gaul and then he starts his campaign downwards into Italy down towards Rome and so in effect there are elements

of his story which are repeated in the Arthur story of him invading but Constantine is the first emperor who literally just before he dies he's on his deathbed he converts to Christianity and he allows Christianity to flourish and of course for writers like jeffrey of monmouth who are in that christian tradition he is the most important roman of all and we can see aspects of his story i mean it's very very similar to what happens to magnus maximus and to be fair constantine although he's treated as a great roman when you actually look at his story, he's a deeply unpleasant individual. And he murdered all his rivals and he suffocates people in baths and he poisons. He is horrific. But he fits that profile of a strong leader. And Constantine is successful. Unlike Magnus Maximus, who dies at the last hurdle, Constantine does

become emperor of Rome. And the fact that his rebellion starts in Britain and York features a lot in Geoffrey of Monmouth's texts. So it's that side of it. I mean, Constantine is 8% of his story. So it's not a great deal, but he's there. And when you look at Constantine as he appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth, there are elements of his rebellion and his war in Gaul, which feature in the story of Arthur. It's such a difficult question, but I'm going to ask it quickly because you mentioned how Constantine is such a significant figure when we imagine about the world Geoffrey's living in, the medieval period, when looking back at ancient Rome. Do you think when Geoffrey's writing this, and he knows Constantine's links to Britain and

to York, and how he's such a significant figure, that perhaps he thinks that when I'm creating this Celtic superhero superhero I must get elements of this significant figure's history in the story in the creation of Arthur. I think you're right he does and also bear in mind that a lot of the characters like Constantine although his life story is remembered elsewhere Geoffrey and other writers give him a British mother so we see there is this his mother Helena, who's often actually treated as the patron saint of archaeology because she goes off to the east and she finds evidence

of the true cross and Christ's crucifixion, all this stuff. But in various accounts, she's perhaps confused with a Helena character in North Wales. But it's as if Constantine, he's got British heritage, therefore he becomes a king of Britain. But it's vital to get him in there because he's such a significant player in the story, not just of the Roman Empire, but critically of Christianity and its acceptance. So to have him as one of us. And it's another string to Geoffrey's bow to say the Britons are far more important than the Saxons. You know, yeah, the Saxons have got monasteries and they convert to Christianity and all that sort of stuff. But the Britons, we've got Constantine as one of us.

And therefore, you know, that makes our royal lineage far more significant. You know, you've got Athelstan and Alfred. Yeah, great. But we've got Arthur and Constantine and these people. And they are far more important in world history than any of your lot. Ah, there you go. Always thinking about the Saxons as well in that whole narrative. Very, very interesting indeed. Now, figure number four. We're going further back to late Iron Age Britain. And Miles, the figure of Cassivellaunus. individuals who we do have an independent account of because he features in Julius Caesar's account of his invasion into Britain. And of course, Caesar, as the consummate politician, he writes

everything down. He justifies all these actions as a series of dispatches from the front line. So in his account of the wars in Gaul, he describes in detail his invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 BC. And in 54 BC, he comes up against a preeminent leader. He's called a preeminent war leader of the Britons called Cassivalonus. And of course, Cassivalonus, that name form gets garbled in Geoffrey of Monmouth and becomes Cassivalonus. It appears in other forms as well. But in essence, he is the man who stands up to Caesar. Now, in Caesar's account of the war, he manages to defeat Cassius Valonus. Of course, he does. You know, it's Caesar writing and he gets tribute out of him and he leaves. Now, that particular invasion, the great thing about us, because we've got Caesar's account, we can compare it with what Geoffrey of Monmouth writes.

And Geoffrey doesn't seem to have Caesar's account to hand because there's nothing in Caesar's writings that fit Geoffrey of Monmouth's. So perhaps the Gallic Wars is not something he had in his library or accessed to. But we get the invasion of 54 BC mentioned twice, but it's two different accounts of that same action. In the first account that Geoffrey gives us, Cassivalonus is victorious. He drives Caesar into the sea. He defeats him comprehensively and sends the Roman packing. You know, that's what the Britons want to hear. That's what probably in praise poems after that event,

that's what people were saying. You know, the Romans have gone. The Gauls were defeated by them, but we kicked him back into the sea, back to where he came from. The second version that appears in Geoffrey's, we've got the same invasion, Cassie Ballown fighting Caesar. But there is another character in there. And that is a chap called Androgeus, who is a powerful British leader who's on Caesar's side.

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Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. But helps Caesar. Caesar couldn't defeat Cassivalon without Androgyous' help. So he's presented as a great warlord who is far greater than Caesar and far greater than Cassivalonus. So there are three different versions of the same event one by Caesar or his supporters one by Cassive Alornus and his lot and one by Androgeus now Caesar mentions Androgeus he calls him Mandubracius and he's of the Trinovantes tribe of Essex so you've got this Britain on the Roman side now interestingly in Geoffrey of Monmouth when he's describing this Androgeus is presented as the nephew, the treacherous nephew of Cassive Alornus.

And when we see Caesar landing and the description giving of the Romans arriving is replicated much, much later on when we get the Saxons invading for the same number of ships, the same battle tactics, and Cassive Alornus is betrayed by Androgeus. When Geoffrey Monmouth describes Arthur, Arthur is betrayed by his nephew Mordred. And so you get Mandubracius becomes Mordred and Cassive Alornus, that element of the story, gets morphed into Arthur's tale. So no doubt this is a prominent British Iron Age king who is mentioned by the Romans, but becomes something very different in Geoffrey and Monmouth's account, depending on who's writing the story. So in some versions, in Geoffrey and Monmouth's, Cassivellaunus is the hero. In the other versions, he is an unpleasant character who needs to be defeated. It depends who's giving you that oral tradition. But Geoffrey looks at that completely

unfiltered and doesn't realise it's from two different sources and just tries to blend it into one so we don't understand why in one stage Cassius Valornus is the hero and then 10 pages later he's the villain it's never explained but it's because it's two different accounts sort of knitted into this singular account and the intriguing thing is also when we look at Jeffrey Monmouth he keeps talking about I mean effectively there are two prominent royal houses in Britain there's the House of Cornwall and there's the House of London and it's their story that filters throughout and when we look at Cassivellaunus he is from the House of Cornwall but when we actually sort of identify

these characters and their tribal affiliations it it's not Cornwall and London. It's the Catavoloni tribe of Hertfordshire and it's the Trinovantes of Essex. It's those two tribal accounts that seem to survive as oral traditions. And perhaps when Geoffrey was writing, the name form was garbled. He didn't understand what Catavoloni was. So it becomes C kernow or cornubia becomes cornwall and trinovantes he translates as new troy which for him means london so his geography becomes across the whole of britain but the origins are just these two tribal groups fighting for survival in Hertfordshire and Essex but jeffrey transposes that across the whole of britain that is super interesting because

like tangent does he talk about britt Brittany at all then in these links? Yes, yeah, Brittany features quite a lot, especially in Arthur's story. There's lots of later sort of myths that Magnus Maximus, when he goes to Gaul, he sort of invigorates the sort of aristocracy of Brittany. He places his troops there and they sort of intermingle with the local population. And certainly there's a lot of sort of Breton tradition with Arthur. Now, part of that might be because we know there are channel migrations. You know, Brittany is Little Britain and Britain itself is Great Britain.

So it might be that the stories migrate across the channel in the 6th, 7th centuries AD. Or it might be that Magnus Maximus, just as he was doing in North Wales, was doing something equivalent in Brittany. And that's because the Breton connection becomes attached to Arthur. But some accounts also say that Cassius Valonus, having driven Caesar into the sea, then led raids against him in northern Gaul. So, you know, it's all tied up. There is certainly a great oral tradition of these leaders involving themselves in the most northern parts of France. Absolutely. It's so, so interesting, Myles, right there. So we're going to move on to the last and

final figure, a figure who I'd never even heard of before this. Figure number five. Arviragus. Again, we face that problem that a lot of what occurs, what appears in Geoffrey is garbled name forms. And presumably they've been mistranslated or the oral tradition has in some way, like Alexander becomes Iscander and various other sort of waveforms. But the story of Arviragus is important because we get Arviragus as a great British leader

who is negotiating with the Emperor Claudius, he at some point refuses to pay tribute to the Emperor, which is what Arthur does later. The Romans try and invade and Arviragus fights them and he becomes allied to them. And there's a key moment when Arviragus marries this great British noble called Genvissa, who is described as the great beauty of her time. And this is later, almost word for word, we get Arthur marrying Ganhumara, who later becomes Guinevere in later romances. So the whole key element of Arviragus's story with fighting Rome, then allying with Rome and marrying this great beauty gets added to the key beginning of

Arthur's story now it's difficult to really place Arviragus as a historical character but the name form seems to become a degenerate of Caratarchus who is properly referred to as Caraticus in other sort of anglicized forms and Caraticus Caratarchus is one of those forgotten characters of early Roman Britain Boudicca sort of takes up all the air of most of our sort of stories of that time because Boudicca in AD 60 leads the great revolt of the Icani tribe of Norfolk against Rome and you know Colchester London St Albans were all burnt to the ground but Caratacus is there at the beginning he is opposing Rome from day one in AD 43 when they invade. His capital, his centre at Colchester, is captured by the Romans.

He retreats into Wales. And in 47 AD, so some years later, he re-emerges in what is now South Wales, having galvanised the tribes there to fight the Romans. And then he transfers the centre of operations into North Wales. And then he later goes up, tries to open up another front in what is now Yorkshire with the Brigantes tribe and their queen, Cartimandua. And she eventually hands him in chains over to the Romans. I don't want you. Go away. Where you go, the Romans follow. And so he's handed over and he's taken to Rome in triumph. Claudius has him in a great procession. Caratarchus is supposed to give him this great speech saying,

why do you envy us in our mud huts when you've got all this marble? I would have greeted you as a friend rather than as a rival. And he gives this great speech. And Claudius, according to the Roman writers like Tacitus, is so impressed by this speech that he lets Caratarchus go. He gives him his freedom. He's not allowed to leave Rome, but effectively he's not executed either, which is a plus, you know, and he lives out his life in Rome so here is this great character who appears in lots

of early Welsh literature because he is actually there fighting the Romans on the ground no doubt lots of praise poems around him other elements of his story appear in much later tales so the relationship between Caratacus and Cartimandua gets evolved into sort of Arthur and Guinevere. The betrayal of Guinevere developed from the betrayal of Cartimandua as she hands him over to the Romans. But we see Caradoc and Cradoc and Kurdic, all these name variant forms of Caratarchus, survive in lots of early Welsh literature. So he is remembered. And these key aspects of him. I mean, again, he's another character who leaves britain and never returns so it's that once and future king he's not dead but he will come back and

save us and that gets built into the arthur story as well so arviragus karatakis is another cat it's about 24 of his story becomes absorbed into the arthur tale as presented by Geoffrey of Monmouth. There's one part of that last figure, Arviragus, that I would like to specifically ask about, and that's to do with an island off the north coast of Britain, Orkney. Because we do hear in One Source, I believe, with Claudius accepting the surrenders of British chiefs, that there is one chief who comes from Orkney. Could this all be linked? I mean, what is the story here? Could there be connections between all of this? It is very, very different. Bear in mind, the Roman sense of geography is not quite as accurate as ours. We know that in the 80s AD, so 40 years after Claudius, a Roman fleet does circumnavigate Britain and it is actually an

island. And so now that probably got to the Orkneys and so on there is some Roman material on Orkney and people tried to make a link I mean it seems unlikely if the Romans having invaded Kent and Essex a delegation would come down from Orkney to surrender that but then it might just be that the name has become sort of mistranslated or garbled from another different tribe and we know that in jeffrey of monmouth the icani tribe of norfolk or icenia as they're sometimes referred to are described as scythians and the scythians of course are right you know it's a name later given to the huns you know this is a tribe right the way across from the other side of the black sea

so icani becomes scythians buddhica becomes soderic, king of the Scythians. So it may be that we are looking at this and saying Orcanes, whereas the Romans were actually using a different tribal name and it's not actually that far north. It would seem odd that a tribe from those far distant islands would A, have heard that the Romans had invaded and B, sent a delegation down to say we surrender because they're so far away, it doesn't really make any odds to them. But the conquest of the Orcanes is represented in Geoffrey Monmouth quite a lot Arthur conquers

the Orkneys with Claudius's help Arviragus Caratacus he invades the Orkneys lots of other characters got it almost becomes like a generic name for taking the whole of Britain you've conquered everything including the Orkneys but quite what the origins of that story are sadly we don't know so actually it's kind of similar to saying like a sassanian ruler conquered as far as the caspian gates or the romans conquered as far as the pillars of hercules yeah it becomes a byword for the limits of the known world absolutely gotcha now you've mentioned them in passing as we've chatted these percentages so i've got to go to the maths now, Miles. To sum it all up with these five figures, what's the percentages of each of them in the story, the elements of the Arthur story? If you break it down in a purely mathematical way, looking at what

Geoffrey Monmouth says, Magnus Maximus is 39%, Caratarchus is 24%, Ambrosius Aurelianus is 16%, Ambrosius Aurelianus is 16%. Cassivellaunus is 12%. Constantine is 8%. Hang on. There's one percentage missing. That's 99%. What is this 1%? Well done.

That's good maths. Yeah, there's 1% in there. And basically that just relates. There's an element of Arthur's story where just before he conquers Gaul and fights the Roman emperor, he conquers Norway. He conquers Gaul and fights the Roman emperor, he conquers Norway. You know, he conquers Iceland. And these are aspects that don't actually feature in any other character story in Geoffrey and Monmouth's account. So it's an element that is not repeating something that's gone before.

But there have been a lot of invasions from Norway and there are later in his text as well. So it might be something just slipped in there as a sort of giving it back to the Northmen that they have invaded time and time again, but we were there first. The Britons conquered you before you conquered us. And that might be a sly dig at the Normans. Of course, Geoffrey Monmouth is writing in the 1130s in Norman England. He's quite clear. He's not a fan of the Normans, quite definitely. But the Normans like what he's writing because they like to link themselves to Arthur. You know, they are doing what Arthur does. They are subjugating the Saxons, the English. And so they connect with

Arthur and they like this idea of a grand and glorious heritage in Britain, which they want to connect to. And it might just be Geoffrey having a little sly dig that the hero of his account went and attacked Norway and attacked the land of the Norsemen the Normans you know before they came to Normandy and in fact he was there before you came to us but that's that one percent 99 percent belongs to someone else if you take all these other stories of other characters out of the Arthur tale that Jeffrey gives us there's nothing left for Arthur he becomes a non-person so it's quite clear he cannot have existed effectively as far as Geoffrey's is concerned he is the composite of everyone who's gone before him well he's the five key characters who've gone

before I mean if the Arthur tale is made up of all of these stories from earlier in British history we've been chatting through this and you did mention her name earlier, Boudicca. Is it surprising or do you think it's not that surprising that actually of all the figures, even though Boudicca is perhaps the most well-known figure from ancient Britain today, that he didn't take any of Boudicca's story for the tale of King Arthur?

No, Boudicca, she's important to us. Absolutely. And she has a key figure in the early history of Roman Britain and gives us a lesson about what it means to side with the Romans, you know, because Boudicca and her husband Prasutagus

are on the Roman side to begin with. And it's only after his death is her people betrayed by Rome and we get this huge fiery vengeance raining down upon the key cities. So it's become a major part of our mythology today or british history but bearing in mind that much of what jeffrey's writing relates to the tribes of what is now essex and hertfordshire in that part of the southeast

buddhica isn't part of that story and you know the one character who does appear at about the right time is this character a soderic which arguably is a garblisation of Boudicca. And Geoffrey Monmouth turns her into a man. It's King Soderic of the Scythians rather than Queen Boudicca of the Icani. And she arrives and starts looting stuff or he arrives and starts looting stuff in Geoffrey's account. And it's swiftly dealt with by a British leader with Roman support. So I think she is there, but her name form has been garbled and bearing in mind that it's only really from the time of Queen Elizabeth I does Boudicca take on more resonance in Britain because they're looking

for historical precedence of strong female characters resisting an alien sort of imperialism and at the time of Elizabeth I with the Spanish Armada suddenly Boudicca becomes that model and she's picked up again during the reign of Charles I when he's with Catherine of Braganza she's picked up again with Victoria and you know we get that great big statue that we're familiar with now at the very end of Victoria's reign of Baudicea with her chariot outside the Houses of Parliament. So Boudicca arguably has become a far more important person in the last 500 years than she probably was at the time. And she doesn't really feature much in Geoffrey Monmouth's account

rather than this garbled character at the very beginning. Well, there you go. Now, Miles, this has been an incredible chat talking about what we know about Arthur, particularly from Geoffrey Monmouth, and looking back at ancient Britain, i must ask before we go tristan and isolda are there any ancient links to this tale which could be similar to arthur that you can think of well again i mean tristan and isolda at the court of king mark these are very important aspects of cornish mythology today

and of course it seems to be that it's their story you know I'm trying to argue whether or not they were real people or not but their story is very much linked to the islands of Tintagel and North Cornwall so you've got King Mark as this powerful and he does appear in other sort of sources and there's the Drustanus stone the big memorial stone parts of the 6th century in southernwall, which could be a precedent for Tristan. But the story of King Mark sending Tristan over to Ireland to bring back his older and Tristan and his older fall in love. And they sort of, Mark seeks vengeance and they hide in the island. All these sort of things are very much linked to Tintagel. And I think when Geoffrey of Monmouth is writing his text he's looking for places

that he can anchor his story to and Kelly in South Wales which is near Monmouth becomes the court of King Arthur that's probably a site that Geoffrey knew quite well the old Roman legionary fortress but Tintagel becomes the point bearing in mind that Arthur is supposed to be descended via his father Uther from the house of London but through his mother from the House of Cornwall. He needs a place for Arthur to be conceived. And Tintagel is so resonant with mythology, the story of Tristan and his olden mark, that that is where King Golwar, or Goloris as some people call him, and Egerna, that's where they are. And that's where Egerna and Uther conceive, not to put too fine a point on it,

Arthur is conceived there. But it's such a strong, mythical, important place in Cornish history. It's the ideal place for Geoffrey of Monmouth to place Arthur. He doesn't say he was born there, but certainly his history begins there. And it's later versions of the Tristan and isolda myth they get reworked

into the arthur story and tristan becomes lancelot and isolda becomes guinevere and we get that sort of love triangle between them and mark becomes arthur so much later that story does get absorbed into it but i think it was well known at the time that's why jeffrey places tintagel as arthur's conception point that's why when you go to Tintagel today everything is Arthur connected because it's that side of the story that has been placed there becomes one of those key points upon which the whole mythology of Arthur is grounded absolutely and absolutely incredible sites down in the southwest Miles this has been an incredible chat your book on this topic is called

arthur and the kings of britain published by amberley from all good and probably some bad bookshops fantastic miles it's always great to see you so thanks so much for coming on the podcast thank you thank you for having me I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm Thank you. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.

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