HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2024-08-20T11:51:50.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00How The Winter King brings Arthurian Britain to lifehttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/how-the-winter-king-brings-arthurian-britain-to-life/2023-12-21T09:10:14.000ZThe car park adjacent to The Mall Cribbs Causeway shopping centre in north Bristol is not a location you would immediately associate with Arthurian Britain.

On the day of our visit, it is grey and drab. However, behind the walls of a nearby warehouse lies the unexpected: a recreated world of Arthurian Britain – constructed for The Winter King. This series is a new adaptation of The Warlord Chronicles trilogy, novels written by Bernard Cornwell of The Last Kingdom fame, which are themselves an adaptation of the story of King Arthur.

Here, in a space you might expect to see forklift trucks or light manufacturing, and which is noticeably colder than the mizzling day outside, the production crew have been busy building ‘rock’ walls from polyurethane, as well as cave interiors and vast menhirs. It’s fantastical and incongruous, but then who can say with any confidence what’s authentically Arthurian?

After all, according to the show’s historical advisor, Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, interviewed in the significantly warmer environs of his office, we know little about the years between the Romans leaving Britain, in AD 410, and St Augustine arriving, in AD 597.

“It is a major event and the records don’t start to go darker and darker – the plug is pulled,” he says of the early fifth century after Rome’s legions withdrew.

“Instantaneously, the lights go out and it changes Britain completely. You have Saxons and post-Roman Britons roaming around this post-nuclear landscape of gigantic ruins. Technology crashes, people actually lose the art of making pottery for a while.”

To understand why there was such turmoil, it helps to consider the Romano-British economy.

Cash arriving to pay the army created “an immensely rich society”, Hutton says. This in turn attracted settlers from elsewhere in the empire, who built houses, and farmed and consolidated estates. When the Romans withdrew because the empire faced multiple attacks from barbarian tribes, the economy imploded.

“There’s no modern comparison, mercifully,” says Hutton when HistoryExtra offers the idea of a precursor to a modern-day failed state – although he’s amused by the analogy of a zombie apocalypse, with “the invading Anglo-Saxons standing in for the zombies, maybe, and the Irish and people from the north, Picts and Scots”.

All of which begs a question, what precisely is the role of a historical advisor if there’s so little actual history to advise on?

Consistency, says Hutton, is key. Not only is it the advisor’s job to help head off any “obvious anachronisms” but also to ensure that characters are “operating with a common set of cultural references”.

The alternative, even when viewers can’t quite put a finger on exactly what’s wrong, can be jarring. “What you don’t want to do is to have somebody using a 14th-century sword, a fifth-century ornamentation and speaking a 19th-century script,” says Hutton.

The end of Roman Britain

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Who is the Winter King?

These kinds of anachronisms often bedevil period adaptations. The problem is particularly acute in Arthurian tales where the King Arthur – or the ‘King That Never Was’ as The Winter King’s promotional material has it – is a mishmash based on different stories.

The earliest of these dates from around 300 years after Arthur might have been around, and reach down the years to the present day via, among others, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, the Romantic poets and TH White.

It hardly helps matters here that we don’t know if Arthur ever lived. “There’s a spectrum of possibilities, from a great national leader of the British resistance to non-existent,” says Hutton.

In this context, it’s fascinating to see how Bernard Cornwell’s novels made Arthurian Britain so believable, and avoided being hemmed in by competing stories.

“He was suggesting something that might actually have happened [in The Warlord Chronicles],” says Hutton, “but taking back people with later medieval names into that earlier period. That’s entirely legitimate. This is, after all, a work of fiction.” In Hutton’s estimation, Cornwell is “a superb storyteller”.

Cornwell’s source material thus offers the creators of The Winter King TV series a solid base from which to create a believable world. But what about the real era? Why would anyone want to come to Britain if it was so grim?

How The Winter King depicts Arthurian Britain

As well as push factors – population pressures in Ireland and in Anglo-Saxon lands on the continent, including in the latter case lowlands adjacent to the North Sea where sea level rise was a problem – there were definite temptations.

“The great thing about the Roman province of Britain is that it’s still very rich,” Hutton explains. “It has great farmland, but also it has the amount of wealth that Roman Britain had accumulated, which can be looted in precious metals, valuable objects and plunder. The option of crossing the sea to Britain and laying your hands on this stuff is very attractive.”

DNA evidence, says Hutton, “suggests a lot of people coming from what’s now Germany” while the historical record, in so far as it exists, suggests a local population suffering violence and trauma. “That’s the Saxons coming in bulk, slaughtering people, driving them off and taking the land. That’s the Bernard Cornwell scenario.”

Another view, sometimes expressed by archaeologists is that there is “no material evidence for massacres or a drop in [the existing] population”. But Hutton highlights that it seems likely Roman villas and towns would already have been deserted. “Anybody who reads accounts of early medieval battles knows that you don’t have war graves. When you slaughter an army you leave it for the crows or the bones just disintegrate.”

For Hutton, compelling evidence for mass Anglo-Saxon immigration lies in linguistic changes and “the complete loss of Celtic languages”. The incomers are numerous enough to “bring a language with them and keep it”. In contrast, the invaders who arrived in the Norman Conquest 1066 spoke French, but two centuries later English was the country’s main language.

It’s fascinating that early accounts of Arthur associate him not with the south, as Cornwell does, but with the north of England and with military prowess.

“Archaeologically, interesting things are happening,” Hutton says. “For example, the Hadrian’s Wall forts were repaired sometime around AD 500 as a coherent military system, and seemingly linked again to the old Roman city of York. The title of the Roman governor of that area, the military leader, was the dux Britanniarum, the ‘British leader’. The title given to Arthur in The History of The Britons [cAD 828] is the dux bellorum, the ‘leader of the battles’.” Not, it’s worth emphasising, that Hutton is here identifying the ‘real’ Arthur.

Whatever the truth, the world of the fifth-century remains elusive. It is Hutton’s estimation that historians, archaeologists, DNA specialists and linguistics experts need to reconcile evidence “that is pulling them in different directions”.

It’s a place that only really begins to come back into focus when Augustine, sent on a mission to Christianise the Kingdom of Kent, became the first archbishop of Canterbury. “It’s a religion dependent on books,” says Hutton, “and so the more Christians you have, especially the more monasteries, which are the places that do the writing, the more records you have.”

Back at Cribbs Causeway, we’ve been invited to watch filming, a scene involving a rescue from the Isle of the Dead. Once again, you find yourself reflecting on how this is a fantastical take on the story of Arthur and his cohorts. Crucially, it’s also one created with a huge attention to detail and its own internal consistency.

The Winter King, starring Iain De Caestecker as Arthur Pendragon, begins streaming via ITVX on Thursday 21 December. Bad Wolf, the production house behind His Dark Materials and Russell T Davies’ second Doctor Who reboot, is making the show

]]>Was King Arthur real? Discover the legend of the 'once and future king'https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/king-arthur-facts-real-round-table-holy-grail-death-buried-lancelot-guinevere/2023-08-18T08:50:12.000ZWho was King Arthur?

Arthur, sometimes known as ‘the king that was and the king that shall be’, is recognised all over the world as one of the most famous characters of myth and legend. Yet, if he existed at all (which few scholars agree upon), he would not have been a king, but the commander of an elite force of fighting men. Furthermore, he would have lived more than 500 years before medieval legends suggest.

All that is known, with even the least degree of certainty, is that a man named Arthur, or Arturus, led a band of heroic warriors who spearheaded the resistance of Britons against the invading Saxons, Jutes, and others from the north of Europe, sometime in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

Another theory claims that Arthur was a Roman centurion named Lucius Artorius Castus, who fought against the Picts [northern tribes that constituted the largest kingdom in Dark Age Scotland] on Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD, some 300 years earlier than the time at which Arthur’s dates are normally set.

Even Arthur’s birthplace and base of operations are questionable. Camelot – the castled city associated with King Arthur – was likely invented by the 12th-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes. Arthur’s association with Cornwall and parts of Wales is an idea fostered by 18th-century antiquarians such as William Stukeley, who carried out one of the first archaeological investigations at Cadbury Castle in Somerset, long believed in local folklore to be the original site of Camelot.

Whatever the truth – and we may never know for sure – the adventures of the legendary King Arthur, with his Round Table Fellowship of Knights based in the mythical city of Camelot, were told and retold between the 11th and 15th centuries in hundreds of manuscripts in at least a dozen languages.

“What place is there within the bounds of the Empire of Christendom to which the winged praise of Arthur the Briton has not extended?” wrote the 12th-century chronicler Alanus ab Insulis (or Alain de Lille). Today Arthurian stories are told in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Icelandic, Dutch, Russian, and even Hebrew.

John Matthews is a historian who has produced more than 100 books on myth, the Arthurian legends, and the history of the Grail, including The Complete King Arthur: Many Faces, One Hero (Inner Traditions, 2017)

Was King Arthur Real?

From marrying 'Guinevere' to his invasion of Gaul, many of the landmark events in the story of King Arthur may have happened – but to other people. These are the five key characters whose lives have been absorbed into the Arthurian story

 

Ambrosius Aurelianus

The character of King Arthur, the heroic leader, gradually evolved in oral tradition as people celebrated and commemorated the very real fifth-century warlord Ambrosius Aurelianus.

Aurelianus was “a gentleman”, the sixth-century writer Gildas assures us, being “one of the last of the Romans” whose parents had undoubtedly “worn the purple”. Wearing the purple was a euphemism for being emperor, the clothing dye being so expensive that it was reserved for the leader of state.

The fact that Gildas describes Aurelianus’s parents in this way suggests that they possessed significant authority, probably as fourth-century usurpers or rebel emperors holding power in Britain. G

ildas notes that Aurelianus was a successful general, defeating Saxon armies on many occasions, the greatest victory being the siege of Mount Badon. Unfortunately, we don’t know who was besieging whom, nor indeed where ‘Mount Badon’ was (although Geoffrey of Monmouth later claims it was at Bath), but it was clearly a major engagement and was much celebrated, later becoming a key moment in Arthur’s career.

By the ninth century, it is clear that the historical Aurelianus and the legendary Arthur were already starting to take different paths. In the Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) compiled by Nennius, ‘Arthur’ has acquired a number of battles, chief among which was Aurelianus’s victory at Mount Badon.

Nennius also tells us that Aurelianus was fighting British enemies, worst of which was King Guorthigirnus (Vortigern), the man who first invited the Saxons to Britain.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (who calls his hero Aurelius Ambrosius), says that Vortigern tried to hide in “the castle of Genoriu” but was besieged there, dying as his fortress burnt around him. Having defeated the tyrant, Ambrosius Aurelianus established himself as master of Britain, rebuilding London in the process. In a grand ceremony, staged within Stonehenge, Aurelianus was crowned king.

Interestingly, archaeological evidence suggests that the internal bluestone setting at Stonehenge was modified in the post-Roman period. By the time Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote down the coronation story, it was the great sarsens of Stonehenge that were transported to Salisbury Plain from Ireland (with help from the wizard Merlin).

 

Arvirargus

Arvirargus, or Togodumnus, was a British king from the first century AD who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, joined forces with the Roman emperor Claudius to subjugate the Orkneys. Returning home, Arvirargus married the Roman lady Gewissa, a ‘great beauty’. In the Historia, Arthur joined forces with Hoel to subjugate Ireland before returning home to marry Ganhumara, a ‘great beauty’.

 

Constantine

Constantine (later ‘Constantine the Great’) was proclaimed emperor by his men at York in AD 306. Taking troops from Britain and Gaul, he marched on Rome, killing the western emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312, before defeating the eastern emperor Licinius 12 years later. Much of his campaign, from York to Rome, is later mirrored in that of Arthur.

 

Magnus Maximus

In AD 383, Magnus Maximus, a Roman officer in Britain, was illegally proclaimed emperor. Determined to capture Rome, Maximus took an army to Gaul where he fought and killed the emperor Gratian. Later, in the Historia Regum Britanniae, Arthur, determined to capture Rome, takes an army to Gaul where he fights and kills the emperor Lucius Hiberius.

 

Cassivellaunus

A warrior king from the first century BC, Cassivellaunus refused to pay tribute to Rome, only to see his kingdom attacked. On the verge of defeating the Roman army, Cassivellaunus was betrayed by his treacherous nephew, Mandubracius. Later, in the Historia, we hear that Arthur, refusing to pay tribute to Rome, sees his kingdom attacked. On the verge of defeating the Roman army, he is betrayed by his treacherous nephew Mordred.

Dr Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University and author of Arthur and the Kings of Britain: the Historical Truth Behind the Myths (Amberley Publishing, 2017)

The legend of King Arthur: who's who

Archaeologist and historian Miles Russells gives us a quick-fire glimpse into some of the most famous people, places and objects in the stories of King Arthur

Guinevere

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur married Ganhumara; ‘Guinevere’ is a romanticised French version of the name created in the late 12th century.

Mordred

The character of Mordred, the treacherous nephew, is based upon the first-century-BC king Mandubracius of the Trinovantes (in Essex), a prince who betrayed his uncle to Julius Caesar.

Lancelot

There is no equivalent of Lancelot in the earliest accounts of Arthur, his queen Ganhumara instead committing adultery with Mordred.

Merlin

In the earliest accounts, Merlin and Arthur never meet, the wizard being the chief advisor to Arthur’s father Uther and his uncle, Ambrosius Aurelianus.

The Round Table

Added to the story of Arthur in the 12th and 13th centuries, the concept of the ‘brotherhood of knights’ appealed to the medieval concept of chivalry.

Tintagel

Cited as the place of Arthur’s conception, Tintagel was indeed a significant fortress and port throughout the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

The Holy Grail

Added in the late 12th century, the quest for the Holy Grail adds a greater sense of both chivalry and religious destiny to the story of Arthur.

The Sword in the Stone

There is no mention of a sword in the stone prophesy for Arthur in the earliest accounts of his life; Arthur simply inherits the kingdom from his father, Uther.

Excalibur

Although named swords play an important part in Celtic folklore, Arthur’s sword was called ‘Caliburn’.

Dr Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University and author of Arthur and the Kings of Britain: the Historical Truth Behind the Myths (Amberley Publishing, 2017)

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This article is curated from content first published on HistoryExtra and in BBC History Revealed in 2016 and 2017

]]>Caer Cadarn and Camelot: where was King Arthur's castle?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/where-is-camelot-where-arthurs-court-camelot-castle/2023-08-18T08:10:09.000ZCamelot first appears in Chrétien de Troyes’ late 12th-century French romance Lancelot or The Knight in the Cart.

Given that this story was very much his creation, the name is likely to have been made up, presumably based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Camblan’ or Wace’s ‘Camble’, with ‘-lot’ added to fit the rhyme (meaning ‘share’, ‘fate’).

There have however been numerous attempts to identify King Arthur's Camelot. Winchester was a candidate in the later Middle Ages, then South Cadbury Hillfort in the reign of Henry VIII, based presumably on nearby names such as the river Cam.

Colchester in Essex and the Roman fort at Slack near Huddersfield have also been put forward as possible Camelots, because they were called Camulodunum (literally ‘fortress of the god Camul’) in Roman Britain.

Before taking any of these too seriously, we surely have to show that there is a good chance that Chrétien had drawn the name from a reliable and near-contemporary source. That seems highly unlikely.

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Nick Higham is emeritus professor in early medieval and landscape history at the University of Manchester. His books include King Arthur (Stroud, 2015)

This content first appeared in the May 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Who killed King Arthur?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/who-killed-king-arthur/2023-08-18T07:01:18.000ZHow does King Arthur die?

The battle of Camlann is said to have been King Arthur's final battle.  Weakened by the losses incurred during the quest for the grail, and then by the scandal of Lancelot and Guinevere, Arthur’s kingdom began to break apart.

War broke out after Lancelot staged an armed rescue of Guinevere, condemned to death for her treasonous love for the great knight. In the heat of battle Lancelot killed two of Arthur’s best men, Gareth and Gaheris, who had defended the queen.

Their brother, the famous knight Sir Gawain, thus became Lancelot’s most bitter foe, and as Arthur was forced to respond to Lancelot’s rescue of the queen, he reluctantly led an army to France to attack him.

While Arthur and Gawain were away attacking Lancelot, King Arthur’s son, Mordred, raised an army and declared himself king. With the hasty return of the true king to Britain, a final battle took place at Camlann.

Who killed King Arthur?

Arthur killed Mordred, but suffered a wound that seemed likely to kill him – though in the end he was taken to Avalon to be healed.

There follows one of the most famous scenes in the entire series of Arthurian stories: Arthur’s faithful follower, Sir Bedivere, throws the king’s mighty sword back into the lake from which it had come at the beginning of his reign (given to him by the Lady of the Lake). A mysterious hand rises from the water and seizes the sword, drawing it under.

A ship then appears, carrying three queens, who take the wounded Arthur away, across the sea to the fabled Isle of Avalon, where it is said he would be healed of his wounds and live on, awaiting recall by his country in time of need – the ‘once and future king’ indeed.

Where is King Arthur buried?

Belief in Arthur’s expected return to his country was kept alive in stories for many years by the people of Britain.

Arthur’s bones were supposedly found at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191, though this was nothing more than a fabrication designed to quell the belief that Arthur would return to expel the invading Normans.

Nevertheless, some bones were indeed interred in a black marble tomb in 1278 at the expense of Edward I.

]]>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: what’s the story?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight-story-summary-what-about-who-wrote-bertilak/2021-09-24T07:10:00.000ZSir Gawain and the Green Knight is one the great Arthurian romances, an epic poem in which the noble Sir Gawain plays the ‘beheading game’ with a mystery knight – setting him on course for a grand quest in which his virtues are sorely tested.

We don’t know precisely who first told the story. What we do know, says Ad Putter, professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bristol, is that it is “an English story from about 1380, written by a poet from Cheshire”.

The tale begins with King Arthur, who is holding court in Camelot at Christmas.

“As he waits for an adventure to arrive, a green knight comes riding in,” says Putter, who was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “This is not just a green knight because he’s got green armour on; this man’s green all over. And he is of a huge size.

“The Green Knight offers a challenge to King Arthur’s court of a very unusual kind. He says that anyone of them could chop his head off, on condition that in a year’s time that person comes to his place and then I’ll chop his head off.”

In the tale, it is Sir Gawain, one of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, who takes on the challenge. He swings his blade and cleaves the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders – only to witness his verdant foe stride forward to pick up his own severed head, and for said head to talk, reiterating the terms of their agreement.

Almost a year later, Gawain departs Camelot to seek out the knight in his ‘green chapel’ – even though he has no idea where it is.

“A eulogy to the cult of chivalry”: what can Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tell us about Edward III and the Hundred Years’ War?

The chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great Arthurian stories. But it’s also one that reflects the ideals of Edward III’s England during the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War, writes historian Helen Carr...

The Green Knight shows his severed – and still talking – head to King Arthur in this illustration of the beginning of the 14th century legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Gawain's trials and tribulations

A directionless Gawain ends up seeking refuge from the chill of winter in an unnamed castle, where his host offers him another contest: the host goes hunting three times, on each occasion promising to give Gawain whatever he wins in the woods; Gawain in turn must spend three days in the company of the host’s wife, and likewise must give the host whatever he gains.

For Gawain, what follows are three days of trials and temptation, as he resists the wife’s increasingly explicit advances while adhering to the tenets of both chivalry and courtly love.

On the first two days, Gawain earns a kiss, which he gamely confers on the lord each night. The third day, his prize is more substantive: the wife’s green girdle, which she presciently mentions will protect the wearer from being struck. Gawain, under the impression he is otherwise facing certain death, keeps this token for himself, imparting on the host three kisses in its stead.

When Gawain arrives at the green chapel, the Green Knight is revealed to be none other than the lord of the castle. The knight, who later names himself Sir Bertilak, swings his axe three times. Two are disguised as feints, acknowledging the days where Gawain upheld his side of the pact. With the third, the Green Knight nicks Gawain’s neck on account of his keeping of the girdle, leaving a scar that will forever remind him of when his virtue had faltered.

Why is the tale significant?

“One of the fascinating things about the beheading challenge is that it’s very different from challenges of other sorts,” says Putter.

“It’s not a challenge of brute strength, but of submitting to something passively – you have to sit there and be brave and wait for someone else to have to have a go at your head.

“It’s a contest of a very different sort from the usual chivalric, martial challenges.”

Though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a beloved tale now, this wasn’t always the case.

“It’s a hugely popular story with modern audiences, but it wasn’t popular at the time,” says Putter. “I’m very pleased to see that we will soon have a new film called The Green Knight on this subject. I hope it follows the story very faithfully, but I doubt it. The story will always be better than any modern film based on it.”

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: five quick questions answered

 

Who is Sir Gawain and is he related to King Arthur?

A Knight of the Round Table famed for his virtue and, according to Arthurian legend, King Arthur’s nephew.

 

Who is the Green Knight?

The green giant isn’t a monster at all, but a man. He is Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert, the lord of a castle in which Gawain seeks refuge before reaching the green chapel.

 

Why is the Green Knight green?

Magic. Sir Bertilak was transformed into the Green Knight by the sorceress Morgan le Fay in order to scare Guinevere to death.

 

Who is the old woman in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

The crone who accompanies the host’s wife in the tale is the sorceress Morgan le Fay. She often serves as an antagonist to Arthur and his court in Arthurian legend, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is said to have learned magic from Merlin.

 

What role does King Arthur play in the tale?

Very little: he only appears at the start of the poem, taking up the Green Knight’s challenge before Gawain steps up to claim the honour for himself, and at the end, when Gawain returns.

Professor Ad Putter was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about Arthurian legends, alongside Professor Ronald Hutton, as part of our 'Everything You Wanted To Know' podcast series. 

]]>The real King Arthur and his Lancelot? Henry the Young King's remarkable friendship with William Marshalhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/william-marshal-knight-henry-young-king-friendship/2021-02-26T18:00:18.000ZThe legends of King Arthur, his leading warrior the mighty Lancelot and the tragic love triangle they formed with Queen Guinevere, retain their allure, though more than eight centuries have passed since they were first popularised. These tales remain touchstones of the Middle Ages, evoking romanticised images of a distant era, replete with knightly daring and courtly gallantry. Yet, for all our fascination with Arthurian myths, one probable inspiration for these stories has been all but forgotten.

In the late 12th century – just as medieval Europe was falling under the spell of early Arthurian ‘Romance’ literature – a real king was feted as the ultimate paragon of chivalry. He too was served by a faithful retainer, one renowned as the greatest knight of his generation. And, like Arthur and Lancelot, their story ended in tragedy amid accusations of adultery and betrayal.

Though history seldom remembers him now, Henry the Young King seemed assured of a glittering future when he was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170. Just 15 years old, Henry was already tall and incredibly handsome – the golden child of his generation. As the eldest surviving son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he stood to inherit medieval Europe’s most powerful realm, the Angevin empire, with lands stretching from the borders of Scotland in the north to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.

But though Young Henry had undergone the sacred and transformative ritual of coronation – becoming a king in name – he was denied real power for the remainder of his career. Crowned during the lifetime of his virile and overbearing father (in the vain hope of securing a peaceful succession), the Young King was expected to wait patiently in the wings, serving as an associate monarch.

Vexed king

As it was, Henry II (or the ‘Old King’, as he came to be known) lived for another 19 years, stubbornly refusing to apportion any region of the Angevin realm to his primary heir and, not surprisingly, Young Henry soon became vexed by this state of affairs.

The situation would have unsettled any ruling dynasty, but because Young Henry happened to belong to the most dysfunctional royal family in English history, it proved to be utterly ruinous. Thwarted by an imperious father on the one hand, yet encouraged to assert his rights by a scheming mother on the other, the Young King also had to contest with a viper’s brood of power-hungry siblings, including Richard the Lionheart and the future King John. In many respects Young Henry’s career proved to be a tragic waste. He led two failed rebellions against his father and ultimately suffered a squalid and agonising death in 1183, having contracted dysentery.

Historians have traditionally offered a withering assessment of his career, typically portraying him as a feckless dandy – the young, extravagant playboy who, once denied the chance to rule in his own right, frittered away his time in pursuit of vacuous chivalric glory. Dismissed as “shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, improvident and irresponsible”, the Young King remains a misunderstood and often overlooked figure.

Timeline: The life of Henry the Young King

1155: Born to King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. As eldest surviving son he is heir-apparent to the Angevin empire. His younger brother is Richard the Lionheart. 1160: Though barely five, Henry is married to the French king’s two-year-old daughter, Marguerite; both were rumoured to have bawled throughout the ceremony. 1170: Crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey during his father’s lifetime, but expected to serve as an associate monarch. 1173–74: Leads first rebellion against Henry II, in alliance with Louis VII of France and Philip of Flanders, but is thwarted by his father. 1176: Starts to frequent the northern French tournament circuit alongside William Marshal, quickly earning a reputation for lavish largesse. 1179: Attends Philip II of France’s coronation and the grand tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne. 1183: Second rebellion against Henry II’s regime leads to war in Aquitaine. Henry the Young King contracts dysentery and dies in agony at Martel, west central France.

A closer and more impartial study of Henry’s life reveals that this view is overly simplistic, at times even misrepresentative, and deeply shaded by hindsight. In fact, the best contemporary evidence indicates that the Young King was an able and politically engaged member of the Angevin dynasty, renowned in his own lifetime as a champion of the warrior class. This status brought Henry real political influence and marked him out as a model for contemporary authors of chivalric literature and Arthurian myth.

The course of Young Henry’s career and his connection to the cult of chivalry were heavily influenced by his close association with William Marshal – a man later described by the archbishop of Canterbury as “the greatest knight in all the world”. Born the younger son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, William trained as a warrior and rose through the ranks, serving at the right hand of five English monarchs in the course of his long and eventful career.

Like Henry, Marshal was said to have been a fine figure of a man, but he was built first and foremost for war. Possessed with extraordinary physical endurance and vitality, and imbued with the raw strength to deliver shattering sword blows that resounded like a blacksmith’s hammer, he also became a peerless horseman, able to manoeuvre his mount with deft agility. These gifts, when married to an insatiable appetite for advancement, fuelled William’s meteoric rise. Later in life he would become Earl of Pembroke and regent of the realm. But in 1170 Marshal was still in his early 20s and a household knight serving in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s retinue.

Timeline: The life of William Marshall

1147: Born as the younger son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, John Marshal, and grows up in England’s West Country. 1170: William is appointed as Henry the Young King’s tutor-in-arms. 1179: He is permitted to raise his own banner and attends the great tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne. 1182: Accused of betraying Henry and bedding his wife, William is forced into exile. 1183: Returns to Young Henry’s side shortly before his death. William later sets out for the Holy Land to redeem Henry’s crusading vow. 1186: Comes back to Europe, enters King Henry II’s household and starts to accrue lands and wealth. 1189: Marriage to the heiress Isabel of Clare (arranged by Richard the Lionheart) brings William the lordship of Striguil (Chepstow). The couple have no less than 10 children. 1190–94: Serves as co-justiciar of England during King Richard I’s absence on crusade and period in captivity. 1215: William helps to negotiate the terms of Magna Carta and he appears as the first named nobleman in the document. 1216: After King John’s death, William supports the child Henry III’s claim to the crown and is appointed as ‘guardian of the realm’, thus becoming regent of England. 1217: Despite being 70 years old, William fights in the frontline at the battle of Lincoln and defeats the combined forces of the baronial rebels and the French. 1219: William resigns as regent, dies in peace shortly thereafter and is buried in London’s Temple Church.

After Henry the Young King’s coronation, Marshal was appointed as the boy’s tutor-in-arms – a promotion that was probably engineered by Queen Eleanor so that she could maintain a degree of contact with, and influence over, her eldest son. William soon became Young Henry’s leading retainer and close confidant. The pair developed a warm friendship and together they set out in the 1170s to make their mark on the world.

By this time, western Europe was in the grip of a craze for knightly tournaments. These contests were light years away from the mannered jousts of the later Middle Ages, being riotous, chaotic affairs, tantamount to large-scale war games played out by teams of mounted knights across great swathes of territory, often more than 30 miles wide.

They were not without their risks. There is no evidence that warriors used blunted weaponry – relying instead upon their armour to protect them from severe injury – and the gravest danger came from being unhorsed and trampled under-hoof in the midst of a heated melee. Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey died from wounds sustained in this manner and one of William Marshal’s sons would suffer a similar fate. But the great value of these events was that they offered noblemen the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their knightly qualities to their peers, enabling them to earn renown within a society obsessed with chivalric culture. Tournaments came to feature heavily in Arthurian Romances, with Lancelot depicted as the leading champion.

Feckless youths?

The most persistent accusation levelled by historians against the Young King and his knight William Marshal is that they wastefully immersed themselves in the world of the chivalric tournament. However, while it is true that they became leading devotees of the tourney circuit, this was hardly the all-consuming focus of their careers – their participation being chiefly confined to an intense, four-year period, between 1176 and 1180. Nor is it the case that these years were squandered. In fact, the successes they enjoyed on the tournament field transformed the prospects of both men.

Serving as the captain of Young Henry’s tournament team, William Marshal shot to fame using a combination of martial skill, steely resolve and canny tactics to score a tide of victories. William was rightly revered for his prowess, but there were also important practical and financial gains to be made. Most tournaments revolved around attempts to capture opposing knights, either by battering them into submission or by seizing control of their horses (one of William’s favourite tricks). Prisoners would then have to pay a ransom and perhaps also forfeit their equipment in return for release. Marshal bested some 500 warriors in these years and thus accrued a significant personal fortune. By 1180 he was in position to support a small retinue of knights of his own and had achieved such celebrity that he was on familiar terms with counts, dukes and kings.

Exalted standing

Henry the Young King also stood to gain from his close involvement in the tournament circuit. As the patron of a leading team Henry participated in events but was generally shielded from the worst of the fracas by his retainers. For a man of his exalted social standing, there was less emphasis on individual prowess and more upon the chivalric quality of largesse – and in this regard, Henry was unmatched. At a time when leading nobles were judged on the size and splendour of their retinues, the Young King assembled one of the most impressive military households in all of Europe.

As a result, contemporaries compared Henry to Alexander the Great and Arthur, the great heroes of old, and hailed him as a ‘father of chivalry’ – a cult figure, worthy of reverence. Such ostentation came at a crippling cost but this display of status was not simply an exercise in idle frivolity, as most historians have assumed.

Tourneys were games of prowess, but they were played by many of the most powerful men in Europe – barons and magnates driven by a deepening fixation with knightly ideals. This lent Young Henry’s renown a potent edge because it inevitably brought with it a measure of influence beyond the confines of the tournament field. As a teenager, Henry had sought power through rebellion. In the late 1170s he made his name and affirmed his regal status in a different arena. These achievements could not be ignored by the Old King. Historians have often suggested that Henry II viewed his son’s lavish tournament career as merely wasteful and trivial. But by 1179 his attitude was unquestionably more positive.

On 1 November that year, the frail teenager Philip II was crowned and anointed as the next king of France in the royal city of Rheims. All of western Europe’s leading dynasties and noble houses attended this grand ceremony and to top it all a massive tournament was organised to celebrate Philip’s investiture. That autumn the close correlation between practical power and chivalric spectacle was laid bare.

With the creation of a new French king, the chess board of politics was about to be reordered and naturally all the key players were angling for influence and advantage. Leading figures such as Philip, Count of Flanders and Duke Hugh of Burgundy – both tournament enthusiasts – were present, eager to establish themselves as the young French monarch’s preferred mentor.

Henry II looked to his eldest son to represent the Angevin house, and so Young Henry went to Rheims alongside his illustrious champion, William Marshal.

Young Henry duly played a starring role in the coronation, carrying Philip’s crown in affirmation of his close connection to the new French monarch. After a round of feasting, Henry and William moved on to a large area of open terrain east of Paris, at Lagny-sur-Marne for the greatest tournament of the 12th century. There, as leading knights among some 3,000 participants, Young Henry and William revelled in a glorious festival of pageantry, awash with the colour of hundreds of unfurled banners. That day, according to one chronicler, “the entire field of combat was swarming with [warriors]”, so that “not an inch of ground could be seen”. It was a spectacle the likes of which had “never [been] seen before or since” – and Young Henry and William Marshal were its stars.

The contest at Lagny marked the apogee of William Marshal’s tournament career and the Young King’s dedication to the cult of chivalry. Having resuscitated his reputation, Young Henry sought to make a more direct re-entry into the world of power politics by snatching the duchy of Aquitaine from his brother Richard the Lionheart. But then, a shocking rumour reached his ears. One of his warriors was bedding Queen Marguerite, his wife. The man accused of this heinous crime was none other than William Marshal.

Passionate affair

It is impossible to know whether there was any substance to this allegation. It appears to have been levelled by a disaffected faction in the Young King’s entourage and possibly prompted by jealously of Marshal’s glittering career. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was precisely in this period that the famed author of Arthurian literature, Chrétien de Troyes, composed his first story about Lancelot and his passionate affair with Queen Guinevere.

In all probability Young Henry did not believe William to be guilty or else he would have enacted a more severe punishment than mere exile. As it was, the shame surrounding Marshal was sufficient to require his banishment from court in late 1182. When the Young King began his second rebellion against his father in 1183 he did so without his leading knight and advisor by his side and the subsequent civil war did not go in his favour. Facing the combined might of the Old King and the Lionheart, Young Henry eventually relented and recalled William to his side.

Tragically, William Marshal only arrived in time to witness his lord’s descent into ill health, for the Young King contracted dysentery and died in agony at Martel, near Limoges in France, on 11 June 1183. On his deathbed Henry reportedly turned to “his most intimate friend” and bid William to carry his regal cloak to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in payment of his “debts to God”. It was a charge that William duly fulfilled.

Young King Henry received scourging press from most late 12th-century chroniclers. For these historians, writing during the reigns of the Old King and his successors, Henry was easy game – a wayward princeling who died young and left no great court historians to sing his praises. In their accounts he became little more than a mutinous traitor who “befouled the whole world with his treasons”.

Only a few of Young Henry’s closest contemporaries offered a more immediate impression of his achievements and character. The most heartfelt memorial was offered by the Young King’s own chaplain, who wrote that “it was a blow to all chivalry when he passed away in the very glow of youth” and concluded that “when Henry died heaven was hungry, so all the world went begging”.

Dr Thomas Asbridge is reader in medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London. In 2014, he presented the BBC Two documentary The Greatest Knight: William the Marshal.

This article was first published in the January 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Max Adams on the First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthurhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/video-lecture-max-adams-first-kingdom-britain-age-arthur/2021-02-04T10:24:13.000ZFor 200 years after the fall of the Roman empire in around AD 400, Britain’s history is deeply obscure – and irresistibly interesting. Max pieces together fragments of history and archaeology to paint a picture of a dynamic people living in tumultuous times of hardship and uncertainty.

Born in London in 1961, Max was an archaeologist before taking up careers as a woodsman, traveller, writer and broadcaster. Two biographies (one a Guardian Book of the Week) were followed by critically-acclaimed and best selling works on the Dark Ages (The King in the North, In the Land of Giants and Ælfred's Britain) and on trees and woodlands. Max is also a musician and novelist. For monthly newsletters, events and insights, visit Max's website

View Green Video on the source website]]>How much of the story of King Arthur is true?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/mount-badon-how-much-king-arthur-story-true/2020-11-02T16:47:55.000ZProfessor Ronald Hutton was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, alongside Professor Ad Putter, answering questions about Arthurian legends submitted by our readers and the top online search queries. A selection of his answers have been transcribed and edited for clarity, and are shared below…

Q: What are the first documentary sources to mention Arthur?

A: It really boils down to four pages in a manuscript at the British Library called Harleian 3859, from two different documents.

The earlier and the most important document is the general history of the Welsh people, the Historia Brittonum, which has the first clearly dateable mention of Arthur. It is from AD 830, written in North Wales by a good scholar. The passage is a list of battles in which King Arthur, or maybe the ‘General’ Arthur, was the leader. It provides information about how he killed 960 people, apparently single-handed at [the battle of] Mount Badon and at another battle at Castle Guinnion, he carried the Virgin Mary's image on his shield or his shoulders.

The second of the earliest sources is about 100 years later than the Historia Brittonum. It is the Annales Cambriae, the Cambrian Chronicles, which are from West Wales in the AD 950s. It's the first attempt to set Arthur in an actual chronology. And there are two dates that refer to him: AD 516, the battle of Mount Badon, where it describes Arthur carrying the image of the Virgin Mary at that battle and winning it. And then AD 537, the battle of Camlann where Arthur met Medraut and perished.

This is the first mention of a character who later becomes Mordred, who is called Medraut in this story. We aren’t told, however, if he was Arthur’s enemy, or if they were on the same side, but that is the only mention we have the early sources of that particular battle, the fatal battle of Camlann, or Arthur’s death.

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Geoffrey of Monmouth

Q: Is there any good archaeological evidence for King Arthur?

A: Strictly speaking, there isn't any archaeological evidence for King Arthur at all. There's absolutely nothing that has been dug up that can be firmly linked to Arthur or any kind of text that mentions him, which is one good reason why we can't say for sure that he ever existed.

There is, on the other hand, a vast amount of excellent archaeological evidence for the people and culture in which Arthur would have lived; in other words, for the native British in the period between around AD 450 and AD 550. And we have more of that every decade. But as yet, Arthur himself still escapes us.

 

Q: How is the Arthurian story linked to the end of the Roman period?

A: If there is an Arthurian history at all, then the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain really kicks it off, because until the Romans pull out round about AD 410, we have a history of Britain. In other words, we have coinage; we have rulers of the empire whom we can identify. We occasionally hear of actual events in Britain connected to real people. But as soon as the Romans leave, that's it: there's no more coinage, there's no more contemporary history.

We enter what can still be called the Dark Ages, in which we really don't know politically what is going on. And that is why the contrast is so vivid to this very day between the Roman period and that which a lot of people would like to call the Arthurian. One of them is firmly historical. The other exists almost outside history.

Q: What of the Arthurian story can we be certain of as factual?

A: Just one thing, and that's the battle of Mount Badon, which is recorded in both of our earliest texts as one of Arthur's greatest victories.

We know that this battle actually did happen because of a near-contemporary text, the list of complaints against current kings of the British by a man called Gildas, which mentions the battle and anchors the time at which Gildas himself was born. So this battle is a historic fact.

The real problem is that we're still not certain if there was a historical Arthur actually linked to it and he won it. We haven't yet found a credible contender to win it instead of Arthur. But it is the one point at which history and the early Arthurian story connect.

Ronald Hutton is a professor of history at the University of Bristol and an expert in British folklore, medieval paganism and magic.

He was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about Arthurian legends, alongside Professor Ad Putter, as part of our 'Everything You Wanted To Know' podcast series. They were talking with HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove.

This content was first published on HistoryExtra in 2020

]]>Who were the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian legend, and where does the Holy Grail fit in?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/knights-round-table-arthurian-legend-holy-grail/2020-10-22T17:37:42.000ZProfessor Ad Putter was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, alongside Professor Ronald Hutton, answering questions about Arthurian legends submitted by our readers and the top online search queries. A selection of his answers have been transcribed and edited for clarity, and are shared below…

Q: When did stories about King Arthur become popular?

A: During the 12th century, the two big names that I should mention are Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a schoolmaster in Oxford and wrote a hugely influential history of the kings of Britain [Historia Regum Britanniae], in which he gave a very prominent part to King Arthur.

Then there is Chrétien de Troyes, the inventor of Arthurian romance. These are the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, riding out on adventure. Chrétien was from the Champagne area in France, and his romances, again, were hugely influential. These two writers helped popularise the Arthurian stories, though it might be mentioned that there was a lively oral tradition of stories too.

Q: When does the idea of the Round Table appear?

A: It is not in the chronicle by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but in a French translation by a writer called Wace, who was from Jersey. He says that Arthur founded a Round Table to avoid problems and quarrels about precedence and who could sit at the seat of honour. If you have a round table, everyone is equal.

Later writers elaborate on the idea. There is an English translation of Wace by a writer, Layamon, who tells us that the Round Table was built by a Cornish carpenter and could seat more than 1,600 men. Later traditions then ascribed the invention to Merlin.

Q: What does the Holy Grail have to do with the Knights of the Round Table?

A: It depends on which romance you read. In the first romance that mentions the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes, the Grail is simply a serving platter – which is what the word originally meant. It's a flat dish that he later reveals contains the Eucharistic wafer.

Those religious associations of the Grail were taken up and developed by later writers. In later Arthurian literature, it is usually described as the cup with which Joseph of Arimathea, one of Christ's disciples, collected the blood of Christ after he'd been crucified. And it becomes, in 13th-century Arthurian prose romances, a kind of mystical object that you try and find in a search for perfection.

It's really important in Arthurian romance, because it signals a shift towards a more spiritual drive in which being a knight is not just about being brave and powerful or being courtly: it also becomes a matter of being spiritually pure and sometimes chaste. So you have a new generation of knights who become associated with the Grail and who achieve the quest of the Holy Grail.

Camelot: where was King Arthur’s court and castle?

Camelot is the legendary court and castle of King Arthur, and a peerless seat of chivalry. If it did exist, where might it have been built?

King Arthur and his knights return to Camelot (Photo by: Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Q: When does Sir Lancelot appear in the stories, and what is his role?

A: Lancelot first appears in the romance of The Knight of the Cart written by Chrétien de Troyes in about 1175. He has a very important role there: he is the lover of Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur.

Chrétien de Troyes, as far as we know, is the inventor of this love triangle involving King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and Lancelot. It does appear that there was another tradition of Lancelot where he is just one of King Arthur's knights, because there is a 13th-century romance by a German writer Ulrich von Zatzikhoven. And in this romance, he doesn't have an affair with Guinevere at all.

The reason why this love element is so important is that the essence of romance tries to reconcile an interest in martial prowess with an interest in a kind of romantic element – and how do you combine those two? Well, one way in which you can combine the two is by suggesting that knights become braver if they are inspired by the love of ladies. And that really is how Lancelot takes off, because it is Lancelot's love for the queen that leads him to do the marvellous deeds ascribed to him in the romances.

Q: Who was the ‘best knight’ in the Arthurian stories?

A: What tends to happen as you go through literary history is that once-famous heroes undergo a process that we call epic degeneration; they decline, and this you see throughout Arthurian literature.

For instance, we might think of Sir Gawain as one of the great knights. And he is certainly an exemplar of heroism in the earliest romances by Chrétien de Troyes. He becomes, in the later romances, something of a womaniser and a traitor.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: what’s the story?

An epic poem of temptation, knightly virtue and chivalry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the most famous Arthurian legends – though King Arthur only features at the beginning and the end. We explore the tale – and the history behind it…

The Green Knight shows his severed – and still talking – head to King Arthur in this illustration of the beginning of the 14th century legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

It is the same with Lancelot. I have mentioned Lancelot as being one of the great knights, being driven to greatness by love of Guinevere. But in the quest of the Holy Grail, he is the person who cannot achieve the grail quest. And he is eclipsed by his son, Galahad, who is spiritually pure. Galahad is the only knight in the Arthurian legends who cannot be said to decline in any way, because he is taken up to heaven and that's the end of him.

Epic degeneration applies to King Arthur as well. I think you could well say that in the chronicle tradition, he is the great conquering king. What you see in the later romances is that his role is much more passive and in Chrétien de Troyes’ late and unfinished romance, which is the story of the Grail, Arthur is even shown as nodding off; he falls asleep as he presides over the Round Table.

Professor Ad Putter was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about Arthurian legends, alongside Professor Ronald Hutton, as part of our 'Everything You Wanted To Know' podcast series. They were speaking with HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove. 

This content was first published on HistoryExtra in 2020

]]>The legends of King Arthur: everything you wanted to knowhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/everything-you-wanted-know-about-legends-king-arthur-arthurian-ron-hutton-ad-putter-podcast/2020-09-06T11:15:02.000ZIn the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, experts Ron Hutton and Ad Putter respond to listener queries and popular search enquiries about King Arthur and the legendary tales surrounding him and his court.

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