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One of the most interesting bits of evidence for Arthur is his name. Arthur is the Welsh form of the Roman name, Artorius, and we know that the British people were still giving their children Roman names in the 5th century, even after they had broken away from the Empire. So, a man named Artorius would seem to belong to that period. Somewhat later in the 6th century, we suddenly find records of about half a dozen men, all called Arthur, who presumably had been named after a great hero of that name.
There is one other rather interesting piece of evidence for a real Arthur. This is the story of his not being dead, but only asleep in a cave. He is said to be asleep underneath the hill at Cadbury and in quite a number of other places, as well. Of course, this sounds like a pure piece of folklore or a myth, but a very eminent folklorist, Jennifer Westwood, has pointed out that there is something rather special and significant about this story of a hero, asleep in a cave. She says that the same story is told of other people besides Arthur. There is a German Emperor, a Spanish hero, a Polish hero and various others "asleep in caves" all over the Continent. Westwood points out that the story is always told of a real person, and never of a fairy-tale or a mythical character. Since that story is told of Arthur, it suggests that he may have been a real person, but it is much more difficult to get anything like a historical statement about him.
There are traditions, poems and other materials handed down in Wales by the descendants of the Britons which were known to Geoffrey of Monmouth and were used by him. There is a work called the "Historia Brittonum" (History of the Britons), compiled somewhere about the year AD 800, ascribed to a Welsh monk called Nennius. Nennius gives us stories about what was going on in Britain in the 5th century and Geoffrey certainly used some of them. There is a chapter telling of Arthur, a war leader in Britain sometime in the late 5th century, who won twelve battles, culminating in the famous Battle of Mount Badon. The list is interesting list and very tantalising, but it doesn't tell us anything really about who Arthur was: whether he was some kind of high-king or a local king, organising a resistance, or simply a commander-in-chief.
My own view is that he was something like what the Irish called a high-king, a man who held an honourary position at the head of all the other kings of Britain. Nennius tells us where these twelve battles were fought. Sometimes we can identify the place, more usually we cannot. Some of them seem to have been in Lincolnshire, in the East of England, one is in Scotland, one is Chester, which is near the west side of the country. These locations would suggest that Arthur was fighting the Saxons during that time of anarchy and widespread raiding mentioned before, but there is a difficulty about accepting it as real history. Nennius' list, written in Latin, is supposed to be based on an older Welsh poem about the exploits of Arthur, which unfortunately we have lost.
Up to a point, it looks quite convincing but when he comes to the Battle of Mount Badon, it says that, in that battle, Arthur slew 960 of the enemy single-handedly. Now, obviously, anybody of whom that is said has already become a legend. We can't really be sure how much history there is in this, and I think there is some, but the man who slays 960 men single-handedly is obviously larger than life.
There are other references to Arthur in numerous local legends and in references to the Battle of Camlann, where he was supposed to have fallen in his quarrel with Mordred, originally called Medraut, a number of scholars have tried to piece together a believable Arthur figure out of this matter. Professor Alcock tried in his book, 'Arthur's Britain', suggesting that what we have here is a tradition of a great military leader who made Cadbury his principal fortification and that most of the rest of what is said about Arthur is, more or less, fantasy.
This was a popular view for some years, and I certainly followed it myself in my own early books, but it has to be admitted that we can't be very sure about this. These references in Welsh chronicles, poems and so forth are all quite a lot later than the events they are telling about, and in 1977, the very eminent Celtic scholar, David Dumville, more or less ripped the whole thing to pieces in an article that had a great influence on studies in this field. He argued that the Welsh evidence isn't really historical evidence at all, that it's all a kind of void.
Certainly, the Welsh materials are not early enough. They always have elements of legend in them (like the killing of 960 men), they spread Arthur out too far in time (something like 90 years) and they never give a real date for him, what I would call a chronological fix. They never say that Arthur was king when so and so was Emperor, and it all hangs in a kind of void.
Now, I believe, we can get further, and I think I've succeeded in doing this. In 1980, BBC Television ran a series of archaeological programmes about the Dark Ages which were presented by Michael Wood. In successive programmes, they took different time periods and tried to relate them to a particular famous person who lived in that period. When he discussed the 6th century and Cadbury Castle, he naturally related it to Arthur. He tried to sew up the whole question of Arthur in about 10 minutes flat, which I thought was less than convincing, but I realised that he had made some important points about what the evidence was like. I went back to some old ideas of my own and started re-thinking them. It seems to me that, if we approach it from a rather different angle, we can get to an original Arthur figure. The findings of my study of the sources for Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of the Kings of Britain', were originally published in 'Speculum', the quarterly journal of the Medieval Academy of America, in April 1981. It is really a question of lateral thinking. Historians, before, had always taken it for granted when they looked at Geoffrey's account of King Arthur, that the only part that could have any sort of historical basis was the part that took place in Britain. They believed that the whole idea of Arthur's going over to Gaul and fighting on the Continent was something Geoffrey had simply invented and this meant, of course, that it was of no use looking for evidence outside Britain (which meant chiefly Wales and as I've already said, this was inconclusive).
But this is not Geoffrey's way. He doesn't invent whole episodes out of nothing at all. Half of his story of Arthur is taken up with the campaign in Gaul and yet, where did he get it from? Interestingly, he gives us the only real dating for Arthur that Arthur ever gets. He tells us three times that Arthur's Continental campaign took place when the Emperor (of the eastern part of the Roman Empire) was named Leo. Leo I was quite real and reigned from AD 457 to 474. There are other names that I think narrow it down further. If we look at the Continental records at that time, we find that between AD 468a nd 470, exactly at the time Geoffrey indicates, a man described as the king of the Britons did lead an army into Gaul, and did get involved in the various troubles and wars that were going on at the time. We even have a letter to him that puts us, incidentally, in the same position as with Shakespeare. We have a letter to Shakespeare, but unfortunately, we have no letter by Shakespeare. Likewise, we have a letter to this king of the Britons who appears in Gaul but, unfortunately, no letter written by him. But the letter written to him is good enough evidence of his being a real person. The reason why nobody really followed up on this man is that the two best pieces of evidence for him don't call him Arthur, they call him Riothamus.
It has been supposed that Riothamus was his name which, of course, would probably rule out Arthur. But, some years ago, I discovered and, simultaneously, a very eminent French historian, Fleuriot, discovered that Riothamus is not a name at all, but a title. It's the Latin form of what would have been a British title, Rigotamus, meaning the supreme or high-king.
That left the question of his given name open and, in fact, there is a Breton account of this war which apparently refers to the same man and does call him Arthur. If we look at Riothamus' career, he does a lot of things that Geoffrey seems to build on. He takes his army over to Gaul at the right time (during the reign of Leo), he advances to the neighbourhood of Burgundy and vanishes from history, apparently without dying, which is similar to what Geoffrey tells us about Arthur.
Riothamus was actually betrayed by a deputy ruler, a Roman official, who intrigued with the barbarians and this is exactly the theme that Geoffrey takes up and imagines Mordred doing. Arthur-Riothamus, or whatever we call him, disappears from history with no recorded death, just as Arthur does, and when we last see him and follow his progress on the map, he is actually moving in the direction of a real town in Burgundy, called Avallon, which seems almost too good to be true.
Let me say right away that this cannot be the whole explanation of Arthur. We don't know what Riothamus was doing in Britain before he went overseas, but we can say that he is the only real candidate for the refortifier of Cadbury. There is nobody else on record who could have done it. He could certainly have fought some of the battles that Arthur is supposed to have fought. Unless more is found about him, we cannot be very sure how much of the story of Arthur he accounts for. Nobody could account for the whole of it because it spreads out too far in time and there are other difficulties.
I believe, though, that Arthur-Riothamus, who is a documented person, is the starting point of the story in the AD 460s and there is some evidence from medieval chronicles that this was known to some historians in the Middle Ages. Now, the King Arthur of legend may very well have absorbed the exploits of other men, perhaps other men called Arthur, and here we can only conjecture. The figure of Arthur, in any case, grows and spreads in literature. He becomes much more than any original could have ever been, and he becomes a great patriotic symbol.
The real question is not "did Arthur exist?" Riothamus, certainly did exist. There is no question about that, at all, and we have good contemporary evidence for it. The question really becomes, "is Riothamus the original figure around which the legend of King Arthur was constructed?" I believe he is. There are so many coincidences and Riothamus does so many 'Arthurian' things, that I think we have finally got down to the bedrock.
If we do regard this man, Riothamus, as the original Arthur, we are putting Arthur a generation or two earlier than many historians have tended to do (the 460s rather than the early 500s). This would place him closer to Roman civilization. It would make him probably a man with a more or less Roman education: bilingual, using Latin as well as the British language, a real king and not just a general, somebody who was important enough to be involved in Continental affairs and in the affairs of the Empire as it struggled to maintain itself in the West.
I think this raises new issues about who the original Arthur might have been and what he might have been like, and if, by doing that, I've opened up any fresh potentialities of interpretation, of imagination, of fiction, poetry or drama, I'll be just as pleased and gratified as anyone else.
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: