Finding Arthur (10 page)

The Norman French who conquered the Anglo-Saxons in the eleventh century saw Arthur as a useful propaganda tool and were pleased to associate themselves with him. This was not because they were pro-British but because they were anti-Anglo-Saxon. This led to the story of Arthur—originally a Celtic story before it was subjected to Germanic, Anglo-Saxon influences—becoming popular on the mainland of Europe and falling under the pens of the Norman-French.

In Norman-French England and on the mainland of Europe the story of Arthur cross-fertilized with French and German influences
and grew exponentially. The Celtic-British origins of the stories were played down even more, and the Celtic material was absorbed and adapted to appeal to English, French, and German audiences. By the twelfth century the story of Arthur had become a staple of the romantic canon of the Troubadours.

In England, when Edward III needed the support of his Welsh subjects to fight the French he “revived” the order of the Round Table to win Welsh favor, although he dropped this idea after his victory at Crécy in 1346. The remains of the 200-foot-diameter hall that Edward started to build in Windsor, but which he did not complete, have only recently been discovered.
⁴²

In the fifteenth century, Henry VII Tudor, a Welshman, coveted the English crown and tried to curry favor with the English by naming his firstborn son Arthur. This Arthur died before he became king, leaving his brother Henry, the abominable Henry VIII, to be king in his place. Henry VIII also jumped on the Arthurian bandwagon. He renovated a round table in Winchester, which he said was
the
Round Table, although it was really a fourteenth-century fake.

Arthur’s story became entangled in the histories of England and Wales, and so we have Edward III, an English king, associating himself with Arthur to ingratiate himself with the Welsh and Henry VII, a Welsh would-be king, associating himself with Arthur to ingratiate himself with the English. In the twentieth century U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his staff preened themselves by promoting their Whitehouse as Camelot, and Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne, has Arthur among his many names to enhance his Welsh connections. The legend of Arthur is evidently a useful and much used legend.

In the film
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
a newspaper man says “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The legend of Arthur contains perhaps the most famous legend of them all: the Holy Grail. The idea of the Grail as a vessel was perhaps inspired by the magic cauldron stories of Celtic mythology, although Wolfram von Eschenbach of Germany in his poem
Parzival
, written in the early thirteenth century, said the Grail was a magic stone. Robert de Boron, about the turn of the twelfth century, inserted the Holy Grail into the
legend of Arthur and provided them both with a communal Christian spin. Robert’s Arthur was a Christian and his Holy Grail was the bowl Jesus used at his last supper, a bowl later used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of Jesus while he hung on his cross. This Holy Grail was said to have been brought to Glastonbury Abbey by Joseph of Arimathea, although William of Malmesbury, who wrote about the abbey in the twelfth century, appears to have known nothing of this. Joseph of Arimathea only appears in the second edition of his book, after William was dead. From the twelfth century on, the search for the Holy Grail is a common staple of Arthurian tales. These Grail expeditions tend to be called quests.

In the early fourth century, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. In the early fifth century the western empire collapsed and the Christian Church moved in to fill the vacuum. Until then, the people of the Old Way, all over the empire but especially in Gaul (France) and Britain, had been free to believe whatever they wanted, provided their beliefs did not impact the welfare of the community as a whole. This was the Roman way. Early Christianity was not like that. Early Church leaders told people what they should believe and so started a “Dark Age” that lasted until the fifteenth century, at which point the Renaissance allowed in a little light. The middle of this Dark Age saw the highpoint in the worship of relics, of which the Holy Grail was the epitome.

The idea of the Grail was first conceived at a time when fake relics provided a major source of income for the Church. Think of the vast number of people even today who expend energy and cash getting themselves to places like Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, hoping to see pieces of the corpse of St. James and pay for the privilege, on the understanding that they will be rewarded while they are alive or in some afterlife. The advantage the Grail had over other relics (usually human body parts) was that it did not exist, and so people could continue looking for it forever. The Grail became the acceptable face of relic worship, the quintessential user-friendly relic, the myth that kept on giving.

According to the conventional wisdom, as everyone knows from innumerable stories, Arthur’s “knights” were “noble” men who spent
much of their time righting wrongs. It is extremely unlikely that this happened in reality. The historical Arthur was not a social reformer. It is more likely that the stories that came to be attached to Arthur were echoes of the spirit of the Old Way of the druids that remained alive in the oral tradition, despite all the efforts of churchmen to eradicate every trace of the Old Way and its works.

The Old Way allowed for alternative ways of living to be discussed. The very fact that new ideas, such as Christianity were allowed space to grow is proof of this. There was almost no persecution of Christians by people of the Old Way. Columba-Crimthann of Iona was allowed to visit Inverness, an Old Way stronghold, and to challenge the druids he met there. It is almost impossible to imagine this scene reversed at almost any time in the next thousand years, when Christianity was in power: a druid seeking to challenge Christians on Christian ground would have been lucky to escape with his life (and many did not).

One of the few records in which the druids
are
mentioned is Pliny the Elder’s
Naturalis Historia
, in which they are described not just as magicians but as natural scientists and doctors of medicine.
⁴³
They were, in effect, a professional class.

Given their various specialties, there was no one person in authority and so no one authorized right way to do things. By the tenets of the Old Way, knowledge was valued, acceptance of the beliefs of others was the norm, and women and gay men had a proper, respected, natural place in the community. No Galileo of the Old Way would ever have been sacrificed to preserve some dogma. On the contrary the Old Way engendered individuality, and so disputation, both of which are good for humanity and bad for those in charge.

It was difficult to control people who wondered how to sort out their own problems because, being individuals, they tended to come up with individual answers. It was much better in the view of those in authority to have
one
answer and a people who were bound to accept that answer. The freedom of the Old Way contrasted strongly with the authoritarianism of the Church. The Old Way was the antithesis of Christendom.

After Christianity came to power people, through the oral tradition,
remembered the time when the Old Way held sway. Even if they did not, being human they would have been inclined to reason, question, and argue anyway, because that is the human “default” position. It was only natural that people would associate their vague memories of the Old Way with the time of their greatest hero, Arthur, a man of the Old Way. He was, after all, the last hero standing when the twilight of the druids gave way to an age of darkness.

In time the philosophy of the Old Way and the legend that came to be attached to the historical Arthur became confused, until stories arose of Arthur’s Camelot as a place where righteous “knights” vied with each other to see who could do the noblest deed. In effect, the ideas of the Old Way became conflated with and personalized by the celebrity status of the by-then-legendary Arthur and his men.

Inherent in the concept of “doing good deeds” is the question, What is good? As everyone knows, once you start asking that kind of question you are on the slippery slope to philosophy, and philosophy always leads to disagreement. Such a thing was unacceptable to a prescriptive and authoritarian Christianity. The Church told people what was good and what was bad and that was that. Unwilling to allow freedom of thought even in story form, the Church decided to keep the quests but have the “knights” search not for opportunities to stand up for the weak against the powerful but for a physical object. The idea of simply doing good protecting women, the weak, and the poor soon took second place to the idea of “knights” looking for the Grail.

It did not matter what the Grail was because the search was the whole point of the exercise. The fact that no one knew what the Grail was did not stop some deluded people from actually looking for it—some are still looking. And so it was that just as Lancelot replaced Arthur as the main hero in the stories, the MacGuffin in the stories changed too: from righting wrongs to questing for the Holy Grail. Questing for this Holy Grail, as opposed to doing good, enabled the Church to avoid the tricky question, What is good?

As the power of the Church grew, the fighting-the-strong-in-defense-of-the-weak elements in the stories were diluted and the searching-for-religious-relics elements became predominant. The fact
that it was unclear what the Grail was had the advantage of preventing anyone from “finding” it and spoiling everything.

Given that there is no evidence that the Grail, whatever it was, ever existed, it is likely that the Grail is a fiction invented, like the anvil in the story of the sword and the stone, to distract attention from the real story of Arthur—a story that was steeped in the Old Way of the druids.

There is an answer to Chrétien’s Grail question, “What is the Grail for?” The Grail was invented to stop people asking the “wrong” questions: that is, just about any questions but especially what is right and what is wrong. The Grail was and is a distraction: that is what the Grail was and is for.

3

Why Arthur Is Lost to History

W
HEN THE
C
HURCH CONTROLLED THE WRITTEN WORD PEOPLE GOT
the
Lives of Saints
whether they wanted them or not. When they were free to choose for themselves people went for stories of Arthur, just as they would today. Modern action movies are the equivalent of late-first-millennium tales of Arthur. The
Lives of Saints
have no such contemporary resonance: once the Church lost its media monopoly, the boring lives of saints proved to be too boring to survive, even when liberally larded with special effects (miracles).

The Christian Church was determined to promote its own interests no matter what, and, as not every historical fact suited its book, the Church destroyed a lot of historical material. Gerald of Wales, who was present when the monks of Glastonbury pretended to find Arthur’s grave, said that Gildas destroyed several “outstanding books” that spoke well of Arthur. Jocelyn ignored the evidence he had found about Merlin-Lailoken, and Mungo Kentigern and produced the book his Bishop wanted him to produce. Non-churchmen too—men like Malory with his authorized books and unauthorized books—followed the party line to keep themselves safe.

Many inactive men today (it is usually men) like fantasy heroes.
It was the same in the past: Christian clerics liked fantasy heroes too. Today we have mild-mannered Clark Kent who becomes Superman, and the unremarkable Peter Parker who is Spiderman. In the past they had mild-mannered, unremarkable men like Cadoc and Padarn, who could turn cattle into ferns and open up the earth.

Unfortunately for the early clerics, people still preferred stories of warriors (especially when they involved attractive women) to hagiographies of saints, which were bereft of sex and action. No matter what the clerics did Arthur remained popular among the people, and, as a hero of the Old Way, he distracted people from the propaganda of their church. The Church could not compete with romantic tales, because they had only saintly heroes and so no scope for romance. Lifric of Llancarfan did his best with his story about Cadoc’s parents, but no one—not then, not now—wants to hear a story about the love life of the main character’s mum and dad. The Church had to find other tactics and it did. Stories in which the hero was a composite of a cleric and an action hero were written, and so we have vapid heroes like Galahad and Perceval.

In the early 590s, Pope Gregory I the Great told his churchmen not to destroy places that were held to be special by people of the Old Way but to commandeer them and use them for their own ends. This policy was applied not just to places of worship but also to stories of Arthur and Merlin.

In Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, Lord Marchmain was contemptuous of the Christian Church but was said to have accepted Christianity just before he died, despite being too far gone by then to have had a meaningful say in the matter. When Arthur was dead and the oral tradition too weak to allow meaningful opposition, Arthur too was claimed as a Christian. He was, in effect,
marchmained
.

When it was recognized that the stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken were not going to go away, a different tack was taken. Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken were absorbed into the body of acceptable Christian writings. Arthur was a man of war and not primarily associated with a particular way of thinking and so it was relatively easy to pretend that he was a Christian. Merlin-Lailoken was a man of ideas and so more of a problem. Too closely associated with the Old Way for anyone
to believe in a Christian Merlin (despite some rather half-hearted efforts to portray him as just that), the best that could be done was to make him a tame, sexless, avuncular figure—a sort of in-house wizard. This did not work either. Merlin-Lailoken was just not a believable Christian. The best that could be done was to ensure that he was always portrayed as operating under the aegis of the Church.