Read Your Indulgence

Destinations: Arthurian Britain // Remember There Was A Camelot

November 8, 2016

Here is what we know for sure:
      516 AD – The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors.
      537 AD – The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was a plague in Britain and Ireland.
Two lines from the Annales Cambriae, written 400 years after Arthur’s fall. That’s it. No Camelot, no Round Table, no Merlin, no Morgan, no Excalibur, no Guinevere. We don’t even know if Medraut, AKA Mordred, was the bad guy, much less Arthur’s son. Practically everything you know about King Arthur, including that he was a king, was added to the story centuries after his death by Britons, Bretons, Welsh, Saxons, Normans, and — eep! — Hollywood. But what a story it became!
Careers have been made and broken sifting for Arthurian truth after centuries of embellishments and flat-out fiction. But some aspects ring true, and it means a grand tour of what is called Sub-Roman Britain. The Romans had pulled out, the Anglo-Saxons were coming in, and the fractured Britons were fleeing west and would eventually become the Welsh. Nobody was writing anything down and a lot was lost. But not all.
The Battle of Badon happened around the late 5th or early 6th century; we know because Anglo-Saxons were suddenly leaving Britain in droves then. But it is anyone’s guess where Badon actually is. Camlann’s location is equally mysterious, but Camlann must have been devastating; Anglo-Saxons were invading in full force by the late 6th century.
But Camelot, Avalon, and several other locations have basis in historical facts, if not Arthurian ones. Tintagel, where Arthur was born, was a thriving port in the Dark Ages, and remains of the community are easily seen. Welsh myths put Camelot, first attested in the 12th century, at Caerleon, a modern town that was a Roman fortress, but modern Colchester in England was once the suspiciously-named Camulodunum, and was the capital of Roman Britain.
Arthur’s grave is supposedly the mystical island of Avalon (in Romano-Celtic, the name means “Island of Apples”), which many researchers surmise is the hill of Glastonbury Tor, which in the day was indeed an island surrounded by swampland. In 1190, monks at a monastery there claimed to have found the grave. Even better, they said, Arthur had been interred along with Guinevere, who on a lead cross found in the tomb was described as Arthur’s “second wife.”
Now there’s the story I wanna know.
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