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Now, before we attempt to decide anything about Arthur himself, it may be a good idea to look at something we can be rather surer of: the evidence of archaeology. Several places which are connected with Arthur (such as Tintagel, in Cornwall) have been excavated in this century and we know that they were inhabited at about the right time, although we don't know very much about them.
There is a more interesting instance in the county of Somerset: the ancient hillfort called Cadbury Castle. When I speak of a hillfort, I mean an earthwork dating from the Iron Age, which was the ancient British period, before the Roman Conquest. Then, people lived on top of hills and fortified them with great lines of banks and ditches (ramparts) all around them. Even though it's called a "castle," that doesn't mean that there was ever a castle there, in the medieval sense, with great towers and battlements; it means that the hill itself was the castle.
Now, there are many of these hillforts, but Cadbury Castle is rather special because about the year 1542, a travelling antiquary named John Leland said that this hillfort was Camelot, Arthur's fort or headquarters. He doesn't say that "it may have been" or that "this is a guess," he just refers to this as an understood thing and says "Arthur much resorted to Camelot." Leland doesn't tell us anymore, but clearly, at that time, there was some idea that this hill was connected with Arthur. Now, we have to be careful about this. Camelot, at least in the medieval sense, the way you see it depicted in films, certainly never existed. There would never have been a time when you could go up that hill and see a great stone fortress with Vanessa Redgrave strolling on the battlements, but it could be Camelot if we define very carefully what we mean when we use that term. Camelot, you see, is never claimed to be the capital of Britain. It's Arthur's special place, and it could be that, behind the idea of Camelot, is the fact that an original Arthur, an original King, did occupy that hill and make it his headquarters, sometime back in the 5th century.
The modern Cadbury story began almost 50 years ago. On top of the hill is a great, grassy enclosure inside the ramparts (about 18 acres all together) and, at that time, the owner of the hill ploughed up the summit area for crops. The soil there is very shallow so the plough turned over the soil almost down to the bedrock. A local amateur archaeologist, a Mrs. Harfield, used to go up that hill to walk her dog. The dog's name was Caesar and while Caesar trotted around, Mrs. Harfield walked up and down the plough furrows poking around in the ploughed soil with the ferrule of her umbrella. This is the most elementary form of archaeology and she found little fragments of pottery, and showed them to Dr. Raleigh Radford, one of the great experts on the Arthurian period. Radford had worked at Tintagel some years before and recognised, in the Cadbury pottery, a certain similarity to the kind he had found at Tintagel. The pottery wasn't made in Britain and was a rather fancy sort of imported stuff from the Eastern Mediterranean, a very long way off and very expensive to import. It was used for luxury goods (wine and expensive oils) and what was most important of all, it could be dated pretty close to the time Arthur was supposed to have flourished.
This sort of earthenware has been found in other places in Britain, but finding it implies something about the place where you find it. It suggests that somewhere close by there must have been a wealthy household, the household of a prince or king who had the power, wealth and influence to import this expensive stuff and these kinds of luxury goods. Now, a finding like this puts Cadbury in quite a new light.
It was a long time before any further work was done. In the 1960s, the Camelot Research Committee was formed, of which I was Secretary and Leslie Alcock (now Professor Alcock [since deceased]) was the Director of Excavations. Between 1966 and 1970, Cadbury Castle was partially excavated and we found some very interesting things. The most important thing was that the hill had been vacant during the Roman period because the Romans, evidently, moved the people out so that they couldn't use it in a rebellion. After the Romans left Britain, it had been reoccupied at about the time of Arthur, the late 5th century, and had been refortified on an enormous scale. When we cut down through the top rampart, we found a stone wall 16 feet thick running all the way around the top of the hill for something like three quarters of a mile. The wall had been bound with timber beams. They had been rotted away but you could see where they were. There had been some sort of breast-work platform, possibly watch towers and there was a gatehouse.
The whole hillfort had been refortified about Arthur's time, evidently by a leader of importance and high authority, as it would have required a great deal of wealth and very great resources of manpower to accomplish that refortification. Since that time, it has become even more interesting because many more of these hillforts have been excavated, but there is no other case in England or Wales of such an elaborate fortification.
What we have at Cadbury is hard evidence for a great leader with great resources, at just about the right time, in the very part of the country that is traditionally associated with King Arthur. Can we do any better? Can we home in on a man actually called Arthur, or are we merely left with a pile of inconclusive evidence for some nameless, great leader?
Click here for an Introduction to Geoffrey Ashe. David Nash Ford was formerly history editor for the now defunct online British history magazine, britannia.com.
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A Quest for Arthur: