At Easter 1278, King Edward I took his court to
Somerset, and the abbey at Glastonbury, to visit the tomb of King Arthur.
The tomb of King Arthur at
Glastonbury, regrettably destroyed in the seventeenth century, was obviously a
fake. ‘Obviously’ because, as all sane historians will nowadays readily attest
(whatever the assertions of lamentable Hollywood films to the contrary), Arthur
himself never existed. Beyond any reasonable doubt, the legendary ‘king’ began
life as an elemental figure or demi-god – a sort of low-grade Thor or Wodin.
What is also unquestionably clear, however, is that his otherworldly origins
were in no way apparent to Edward I and his contemporaries. To them, Arthur was
a historical personage as real as Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror
or Edward the Confessor.
Diligent and painstaking modern scholarship reveals to us what
thirteenth-century folk could not possibly know: that Arthur was not historic,
but had been ‘historicized’. That is to say, a number of earlier medieval
writers, at different times and for different reasons, had taken the legendary
or god-like figure and written about him as if he had been a real person. In
the early ninth century, for example, an author known to posterity as ‘Nennius’
wrote Arthur into his account of the struggle between Britain’s original
inhabitants, the Ancient Britons, and the Anglo-Saxon invaders who eventually
displaced them. The deity was thereby demoted into a warrior who successfully
battled for the Britons around the year 500AD.
This Arthur was shadowy and obscure, brief and boring; had his
development ended there and then he would have undoubtedly remained a
little-known and seldom-mentioned curiosity. But Arthur underwent a subsequent
re-imagining, one which transformed him out of all proportion. In the 1130s, a
mischievous Oxford scholar called Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down and perpetrated
what stands to be regarded as the most brilliant and audacious literary hoax of
the Middle Ages, if not of all time.
The
History of the Kings of Britain, as his book has come to be known, was in
reality nothing of the sort. It was a work of fiction, laced with just enough
snippets from more sober and bona-fide chronicles to convince the credulous.
And into his long, tall tale of imaginary kings in a distant imaginary past,
Geoffrey inserted Arthur – King Arthur, as he now became – the greatest of all
Britons, onetime ruler of the whole world.
Not everyone was taken in by such
nonsense. ‘It is quite clear’, wrote the infinitely more responsible William of
Newburgh, some fifty years later and with palpable irritation, ‘that everything
this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors…was
made up!’. By this stage, however, it was far too late: Geoffrey’s book had
become a runaway success, a medieval best-seller. Even today, some 215
manuscript copies of the
History
still survive, putting it way ahead of its nearest rivals, and second only to
the Bible. And as for Arthur – the part of the book that everyone liked best –
he rapidly spawned an entire industry. Tales of his exploits were taken up by
other writers and poets, especially Continental ones, and made taller still.
Soon Arthur acquired a castle called Camelot, a host of knightly companions,
and a Round Table.
It was only a matter of time before
he acquired a tomb. When the church at Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184,
it quickly dawned on the monks there that a sure-fire way to increase the
number of paying visitors was a spot of creative marketing involving everyone’s
favourite king. Accordingly, they dug around in the churchyard and unearthed a
pair of skeletons which, they claimed, were those of Arthur and his queen,
Guinevere. To the monks’ credit, their forgery was first-rate: the excavations
were carried out in secret, and the bones were discovered under an inscribed
lead cross that confirmed, with convenient explicitness, the identities of
their former owners. As with other famous hoaxes (Piltdown Man, the Hitler
Diaries, Geoffrey of Monmouth) even the very clever and sceptical were taken
in. Gerald of Wales, a man who considered himself nothing less than a genius,
saw both the bones and the cross and was convinced of their authenticity. Other
writers followed suit, and Glastonbury’s claim to be Arthur’s final resting
place was rapidly accepted as a matter of fact. By the early thirteenth
century, it was proof positive that the fabulous king about whom Geoffrey of
Monmouth had written had once really existed.
Thus, by Edward’s day, Arthur-mania
knew no bounds, and evidence of enthusiasm for the king was abundantly
apparent. Richard of Cornwall, for instance, soon after gaining his earldom,
spent considerable sums building the remote castle at Tintagel, a place which
offered neither strategic nor domestic benefits but which was, according to
Geoffrey of Monmouth, the location where Arthur had been conceived. Eleanor of
Provence, it is touching to note, was taken to Glastonbury soon after her
arrival in England, by a new husband evidently anxious to please a
twelve-year-old queen who (as other evidence shows) loved all things Arthurian.
By this time, moreover, one did not even have to be a great reader like Eleanor
to join in the fun. Even those knights who were insufficiently in touch with
their feminine sides to endure interminably long tales of courtly love were
still able to fill their leisure time with Arthur-themed entertainment. It is
in the middle decades of the thirteenth century that we first begin to hear of
special tournaments called ‘Round Tables’, where the emphasis was on jousting,
pageantry and prizes. Edward’s good friend Roger Mortimer would organize just
such a tournament at Kenilworth Castle in 1279 in order to celebrate the end of
his military career.
In Gascony and Germany, Italy and
Sicily, France, Scotland and even in the Holy Land: everyone everywhere loved
Arthur and told tales about him. In England, however, the famous king,
fantastic though he was, did present something of a problem. Geoffrey of
Monmouth, sticking to his earlier sources (like Nennius) had located his
superhero at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Arthur was not merely a
British king, but a British king who had fought against the Anglo-Saxons – that
is, the founding fathers of the kingdom of England. The English, in other
words, were the bad guys in the Arthur story; the invaders who had ultimately
defeated the Britons and driven them into the northern and western extremities
of their island. Arthur, the most excellent king that had ever been, might be
admired by the English, but he did not belong to them in any meaningful sense.
On the contrary, he belonged to the descendants of the Britons – the Welsh.
The fact that Arthur was Welsh,
though galling, was not his biggest problem as far as English audiences were
concerned. A more disturbing difficulty was that he was apparently due for a
come-back. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the king was merely wounded in
his last battle with the Saxons; nothing was said about his death. Arthur,
Geoffrey maintained, had been taken to the mysterious island of Avalon, in
order that he might recover from his injuries. And when he did, so the story
went, he would return and lead the Britons to victory once more. For fairly
obvious reasons, the Welsh were very fond of this idea.
The English, for reasons that are
equally obvious, preferred the version of the story that ended in Glastonbury.
Not only did the tomb there prove that Arthur had really lived, and was
therefore apt to be emulated; it also proved that he was really dead, and would
not be coming back to cause any trouble. One of the few people who seems to
have been in on the original fraud at Glastonbury was Edward’s
great-grandfather, Henry II, who had problems of his own with the Welsh. It was
reportedly his suggestion – and one imagines him tapping his nose and winking
as he made it – that had set the monks digging in the first place. If, however,
it was indeed Henry’s aim to discomfort his Celtic neighbours by this discovery,
his propaganda missed its mark. The English might have been predisposed to
accept that Arthur was dead and buried, but the Welsh simple refused to believe
it. ‘In
their stupidity’, scoffed Gerald of Wales, ‘[they] maintain that he is
still alive’.
It was, therefore, more than just
idle curiosity or exaggerated devotion that brought Edward I to Glastonbury in
the spring of 1278. The king, like his mother and his wife, owned Arthurian
romances and appears to have been well versed in their contents; but, as has
been rightly observed, there is nothing to show that his enthusiasm in this
regard was anything other than ordinary. So far as we can tell, Edward’s trip to Glastonbury in 1278 was his first and
only visit, and it was not a secular pilgrimage of the kind that had drawn his
parents there forty years earlier. Edward came not to praise Arthur, but to
bury him. Again.
Two days after Easter, which the court celebrated at the abbey, the king
ordered Arthur’s tomb to be opened. ‘There, in two caskets’, said a local
chronicler, ‘were found the bones of the said king, of wondrous size, and those
of Guinevere, of marvellous beauty’. The next day, Edward had these remains
removed to the abbey’s treasury, there to be kept while a new and better tomb
was constructed. From a description in the sixteenth-century, the eventual
outcome was a box of black marble with a lion at each end, and an effigy of
Arthur at its foot.
What took place at Glastonbury was a
piece of political theatre every bit as pointed and significant as Llywelyn’s
homage the previous Christmas, or the prince’s marriage the following October.
As on these occasions, every effort was taken to ensure that the event was
momentous and memorable. The disinterment of the bodies, we are told, took
place at twilight, no doubt deliberately to heighten its dramatic effect. The
following morning, the court was treated to an equally arresting spectacle when
Edward personally wrapped Arthur’s bones in silk, while Eleanor of Castile
similarly prepared the remains of Guinevere for reburial. There may even have
been, in addition to these macabre solemnities, some kind of celebratory
jamboree. Immediately prior to its arrival at Glastonbury, the court had gone
out of its way to stop at Eleanor’s manor of Queen Camel, which stands close by
the giant Iron Age hill-fort at South Cadbury. Since Cadbury had already been
identified by this date as Camelot (presumably because of its proximity to
Camel, as well as to Glastonbury), it seems very likely that the two visits
were connected, and that there might have been a chivalric prelude to the
exhumation.
Such efforts, coming as they did
within a few months of Edward’s humbling of Llywelyn, and at a time when the
king was engaged in a general drive to redefine the relationship between
England and Wales, can hardly be interpreted as anything other than a exercise
in propaganda directed squarely at the Welsh. The attempt to deal decisively
with Arthur shows in the attention to detail: having wrapped the skeletons and
returned them to their caskets, Edward and Eleanor affixed their seals, so as
to certify that the contents were indeed authentic. More telling still is the
intention to ensure that the evidence was left on permanent display: the skulls
of ‘Arthur’ and ‘Guinevere’ were not reinterred, but placed outside the tomb,
‘on account of popular devotion’. Edward, it would seem, was determined to prove to his turbulent neighbours,
once and for all, that Arthur would not be coming back to save them.
A Great and Terrible King, pp. 162-6
