In Defence of King Arthur

Part 3 - Was there a King Arthur?

In Defence of King Arthur,

by a Canadian Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Part 3 - Was there a King Arthur?

Historia Regum Brittaniae

Part 3 - Was there a King Arthur?

Some historians claim that Arthur was an actual historical king, while others claim that he was a fictitious person. But without a doubt, all of these claims are, in some way, based on a book called the ‘History of the Kings of Britain’ written during the first half of the 11^th century by a Welsh teacher and cleric, named Geoffrey of Monmouth.

John Milton, a few years after writing ‘Paradise Lost’, wrote his own ‘History of Britain’, and in the middle of Book III, he suddenly stops and then spends the next four pages debating the existence of Arthur, since some ancient authors had said nothing of Arthur, except for one – Geoffrey of Monmouth. Milton writes:

“But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such person reigned in Britain, hath been doubted heretofore, and may again with good reason.”

“… out of a British book, the same which he of Monmouth set-forth, utterly unknown to the world, till more than six hundred years after the days of Arthur, of whom … all other histories were silent, both foreign and domestic, except only that fabulous book.”

As to how Geoffrey got a hold of this ‘fabulous’ story of the kings of Briton, he writes in his ‘Dedication’ of his ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, that first, he used traditional oral stories; and secondly, that he used a book that he was given by Walter, the archdeacon of Oxford, to translate into Latin from its original Briton:

“What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on.

At a time when I was giving a good deal of attention to such matters, Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, a man skilled in the art of public speaking and well-informed about the history of foreign countries, presented me with a certain very ancient book written in the British language. This book, attractively composed to form a consecutive and orderly narrative, set out all the deeds of these men, from Brutus, the first King of the Britons, down to Cadwallader, the son of Cadwallo. At Walter’s request I have taken the trouble to translate the book into Latin …”

[taken from ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, translated by Lewis Thorpe]

Most likely this ‘ancient book’ was the ‘Chronicles’ that was written by Saint Tysilio, a 7^th century Welsh prince and abbot. It would seem to me that the ‘Chronicles’ started with Brutus – the first king of Briton, but ended with Cadwallader – the last Briton king, because Tysilio died about the same time as the end of the reign of Cadwallader in the 7th century.

Geoffrey tells a wonderful story of Aeneas’s great-grandson, Brutus, who sailed to Briton (that was named after Brutus) and founded New Troy (now called London) –

“at that time the island of Briton was called Albion. It was uninhabited except for a few giants”.

Then he tells the story of the legendary kings of the Britons (including Lear and Cymbeline) that followed Brutus, until the Roman invasion and occupation, and after that, he tells of the invasion and occupation by the Saxons, up until the last king of Briton – Cadwallader. And during this period of the battles against the Saxons, Geoffrey tells the story of King Arthur, who unified the Britons against the many invaders, and against a return to being underlings of the dreaded Roman Empire!!!

But Geoffrey’s story of Arthur should not be confused with the later invented and fabricated tales of Arthur, when during the age of the Crusades, this story of Arthur and his knights was changed, by people like Robert Wace and Chretien de Troyes, into a chivalric romance.

Geoffrey wrote his ‘History’ around the year 1136 AD, during the reign of the Norman kings, who had invaded and occupied Britain under William of Normandy in 1066, and just before the start of the civil war among these Norman rulers of Briton, known as the ‘Anarchy’ – that would bring the Plantagenets to the throne of Briton.

Geoffrey of Monmouth died around 1155, a few years before Henry II Plantagenet became the king of Briton; and Henry had also become king of the western half of France – with his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152.

Eleanor had been married to King Louis VII Capet of France, but when their marriage was annulled, she was re-married to Henry II – less than 2 months after her marriage annulment to Louis VII!!!

Eleanor would sponsor a Norman cleric, Robert Wace, and around 1155, at the time of the death of Geoffrey, Wace wrote his ‘Roman de Brut’, a romance of the ‘Chronicles’, that tries to imitate Geoffrey’s ‘History’, but that begins to bring in a ‘romantic’ version of Arthur and the Round Table. Wace later wrote a ‘Roman de Rou’, a romance about the history of the Norman kings, from the first Viking king Rollo, and of William the Conqueror and the ‘glorious’ Norman conquest of Briton.

Eleanor’s daughter, Marie, became the sponsor of Chretien de Troyes, who a little later began to writing his romances of the round table, to further the Norman feudal take-over of Briton.

Perhaps Geoffrey saw the coming civil war among the Normans, and so he told this story of the great King Arthur, so that one day perhaps the civil war and ‘Anarchy’ would end, and perhaps the Norman occupation would end, and maybe this story could be used to return the independence of Briton.

But, why did Geoffrey write his ‘History’? For that, we can read the reason that he wrote in his ‘Dedication’ – that the deeds of these early kings – these kings from before the subjugation by the Roman Empire, until the kings before the subjugation by the Saxons, and their battles for independence from both – deserved to be told and to be praised ‘for all time’! Geoffrey writes:

“Whenever I have chanced to think about the history of the kings of Britain, on those occasions when I have been turning over a great many such matters in my mind, it has seemed a remarkable thing to me that, apart from such mention of them as Gildas and Bede had each made in a brilliant book on the subject, I have not been able to discover anything at all on the kings who lived here before the incarnation of Christ, or indeed about Arthur and all the others who followed on after the Incarnation. Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time.”

“At Walter’s request I have taken the trouble to translate the book into Latin, although, indeed, I have been content with my own expressions and my own homely style and I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other men’s gardens. If I had adorned my page with high-flown rhetorical figures, I should have bored my readers, for they would have been forced to spend more time in discovering the meaning of my words than in following the story.”

Geoffrey translated Tysilio’s ‘Chronicles’ without ‘gaudy flowers of speech in other men’s gardens’, and did it in his own original straight-forward style, and he wrote it as a history story, and not as a chivalric romance story. Geoffrey was trying to write this s tory, as if he was an ‘escaped prisoner’, not as a ‘perpetual prisoner’ (like Gibbon).

But before we read his story about King Arthur, perhaps first we should read his story about Merlin.

[quotes are from the ‘History of the Kings of Briton’, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by Lewis Thorpe]

[next week - part 4 - the story of Merlin]