Finding Arthur (20 page)

This does not mean that all of the original source material is necessarily lost. We can still find in Malory a detail which, although slight, makes sense when looked at with reference to Scotland in the sixth century and, indeed, when looked at with specific reference to Arthur Mac Aedan.

According to Malory, Arthur married Guinevere the daughter of “Leodegrance, of the land of Camelard, the which holdeth in his house the Table Round.” Leodegrance gave the Round Table to Arthur as a wedding present: “I shall send a gift [that] shall please him … for I shall give him the Table Round.”
⁷

Why would Malory say the Round Table was a gift from the family of Arthur’s wife? Why say it was a gift at all? Why not just invent a miraculous origin? Why not just have the table come up out of the waters of a loch like Excalibur, or appear by magic like the sword and the stone? The answer to these questions can be found when we look at the Round Table’s solid base in Scottish history.

The passage in Malory helped me to understand the historical source of the Round Table story. Gabhran, Arthur’s grandfather, married into the royal house of Manau, where Pictish influences were
strong. Rights passed down the female line among the Picts and so it was by right of his mother that Gabhran’s son, Aedan, become king of Manau. When he became king Aedan gained control of the fortress on Stirling Castle Rock and with that came what has come to be called the Round Table. It was not actually the wedding present Malory says it was, but it was part of the package that came with the marriages of Gabhran, Aedan, and Arthur into Pictish royalty. It is easy to see how Malory, the imaginative, ingenious, commercial storyteller, got the idea for his
wedding present
story, because it fits neatly with the customs of the Celts of Scotland and indeed of the wider world.

As early as the third century BCE, the Greek writer Posidonius described Celtic warriors at a feast seated in a circle, a practice that continued for at least the next thousand years,

When a large number [of Celts] feast together they sit around in a circle with the most influential chieftain at the centre … His position is accorded on whether he surpasses the others in warlike skills, or nobility of his family, or his wealth. Beside him sits the person giving the feast and on either side of them sit the others in order of their distinction or merit.
⁸

The Round Table was not round to enable everyone to feel as if they were equals, nor was it akin to any table that might have been used at the Last Supper or indeed to any other table, because the Round Table was not a table. It was a round earthwork, known as Arthur’s Knot or the King’s Knot, the remnants of which lie to this day in the shadow of Stirling Castle rock. There, as Posidonius said of the Celts of the European mainland, Celts of Scotland sat in a circle with the most influential chief at the center.

Gabhran, his son Aedan, and Aedan’s son Arthur all sat there with their fellows. This practice was the foundation upon which the much later fiction of the Round Table was built. (Of course, a raised round earth mound was too close to nature for the Church, and so, just as in the sword-and-stone episode, an anvil was placed between the sword and the stone; a manmade artifact, a table, was substituted for the earth mound.)

Arthur’s Knot or the King’s Knot is similar to
Dhaill
—both were meeting places set in the lees of important forts, the fort on Stirling Castle rock and Dunardry, respectively. (Making meeting places at the foot of hills avoided the need for strangers to take long walks up to the summit of a fort, but also denied strangers the opportunity to see the defenses of the fort on the top of the hill.)

We do not know what, if anything, there was at
Dhaill
. Whatever may be there today will only be seen if someone excavates the site. But at Stirling there was a raised round earthwork. We know this because the Knot at Stirling was examined by archaeologists in 2011. The headline in the Scottish newspaper, the
Herald
, was “Find unearthed in hunt for King Arthur’s round table.”
⁹
In England, the
Telegraph
¹⁰
read, “King Arthur’s round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland: Archaeologists searching for King Arthur’s round table have found a ‘circular feature’ beneath the historic King’s Knot in Stirling.” According to the
Telegraph
, the King’s Knot has been shrouded in mystery for hundreds of years:

Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older … Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets. Their findings show there was indeed a round feature on the site that pre-dates the visible earthworks … a circular ditch and other earth works… The finds show that the present mound was created on an older site and throws new light on a tradition that King Arthur’s Round Table was located in this vicinity … [A]erial photographs taken in 1980 showed three concentric ditches beneath and around the King’s Knot mound, suggesting an earthwork monument had preceded it.

Arthur’s or the King’s Knot was desecrated in the early seventeenth century to please Charles I, when stepped earthworks were added to form an ornamental garden. Then it was “restored”
in the nineteenth century to the point where only modern archaeological techniques have allowed us to see what was there in the first millennium.

It appears that local tradition preserved something of what had happened at Stirling and that this echoed down over the centuries in several works by various writers. Of course there are some who will say that the local tradition was inspired by these several works by various writers but, if they do, they have to explain why, of all the places Stirling might have been chosen to be the site of the Round Table. So many writers chose Stirling when Stirling was contrary to their interests. Béroul, a twelfth-century Norman poet writing of Tristan and Isolde, said that the Round Table was in Stirling. A squire called Perenis is sent by Tristan to “King” Arthur, with a message. Béroul says Perenis,

did not cease to spur his horse on until he reached Caerleon. He took great trouble in carrying out this errand and he deserved a fine reward. He inquired for news of the king and learned that he was at Stirling. Fair Yseut’s [Isolde’s] squire went along the road which led in that direction. He asked a shepherd who was playing a reed-pipe: “Where is the king?” “Sir,” said he, “he is seated on his throne. You will see the Round Table which turns like the world; his household sits around it.”
¹¹

Béroul had no reason to place the Round Table in Scotland, far less in Stirling; on the contrary, he was writing for a southern British and French audience. He must have had some source that placed the Round Table in Stirling.

In his
Oeuvres
, written in 1365, Froissart, secretary to Queen Phillipa of England, writes of a visit he made to Stirling, where he was told that Stirling was once the castle of “King” Arthur and that there resided the Knights of the Round Table.
The Brus
(
The Bruce
), a poem by the Scottish poet John Barbour written circa 1377, tells of the escape of the English king, Edward, from Stirling Castle, after the Battle of Bannockburn.

And beneuth the castell went thai sone

Rycht be the Rond Table away …

And towart Lythkow …

Beneath the castle [Stirling] they soon went

Right by the
Round Table
away …

And toward Linlithgow.

This describes exactly where the Round Table is today. William of Worcester, an English chronicler writing in 1478, said that “King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle.” Sir David Lindsay, an early sixteenth-century Scottish poet, wrote, “Adew, fair Snawdoun, with thy towris hie, / Thy Chapell-royal, park, and Tabyll Round … / Adieu, fair Stirling, with thy towers high, / Your Chapel-royal, park, and Table Round …”

For Malory and others who were determined to set Arthur in the south, Stirling was just far too far north, and so they simply said the Round Table was in the south—Winchester is the favorite location—but this is fiction, pure and simple. The mound beneath the Knot of Stirling that came with marriage into Arthur’s family is the earthly foundation for the fabulous fiction that is the story of the Round Table.

There was once a wisp of glory at Stirling, as the song in the musical
Camelot
almost says, but this wisp of glory was not known as “Camelot.” Camelot was somewhere else, far away to the west.

5

La Naissance d’Arthur

A
EDAN WAS PROBABLY LITTLE MORE THAN SIXTEEN YEARS OLD IN THE
mid-540s when he married Domelch, a Pictish “princess” of Manau. Women’s names rarely survive in the records. We only know the name of Aedan’s wife because one of his sons, Gartnait, is also referred to as the son of Domelch. Rights passed through the female line among the Picts and so this marriage made Aedan an even more important man in Manau.

In his
Life of Columba
, Adamnan says Aedan had four sons: Arthur; Eochaid Find; Domangart and Eochaid Buide (but not who their mother was). The
Senchus
says Arthur was Aedan’s grandson, but then the
Senchus
is a somewhat suspect source (it also says Aedan had two sons named Eochaid). I prefer the evidence of Adamnan, corroborated by the
Annals of Tigernach
, which says Arthur was Aedan’s son. There is no real dispute in this connection.

Aedan was born circa 530 and so would probably have been in his late twenties when Arthur was born, probably around 559. There is no record of the date of Arthur’s birth, because no one knew he would go on to be so celebrated. The only birthdates available tend to be for saints, and these were probably made up after they became famous.

After Arthur became famous people were not content only to know about the events that made him famous, they wanted to believe that Arthur was innately heroic. This meant there had to be something about his birth that presaged his future heroism. Of course there was nothing of this kind in reality, and so men like Geoffrey invented stories like the one in which Merlin did some shape-changing. The invention of extraordinary events at the time of the birth of heroes is a common practice. The most famous instance of this phenomenon is perhaps the stories of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth included in two of the four Christian gospels.

Geoffrey said Uther Pendragon was Arthur’s father, because if he had written the truth, that Arthur’s father was a Scots king called Aedan, it would have been impossible for him to maintain the fiction that Arthur was a man of the south of Britain. Geoffrey’s patrons and audience lived in the south and they wanted their hero to live there too.

It is possible that Geoffrey really did not know who Arthur’s father was and that he simply made a mistake when he said it was Uther Pen Dragon, but this is unlikely. It is likely that Geoffrey knew exactly what he was doing when he took history and used it to create a commercial behemoth. However he could not have known when he wrote his
History
that he had written an immortal work of genius. Nor would he have cared when he abused his sources to suit his book that he had left in enough original material to allow the historical Arthur to be rediscovered, but he did.

Geoffrey says that the crown of the kingdom was bestowed upon Arthur when “Arthur was a young man only fifteen years old.”
¹
The
Scotichronicon
, written by John of Fordun around 1384 and continued by Walter Bower around 1449 in Scotland, says Arthur was fifteen years old when he became “King.” It is generally accepted that Arthur was fifteen years old at the time of the episode of the sword and the stone: “When Arthur was 15 years old he attended a coronation of the chiefs of the Britons who elected him their commander in chief.”
²

Several books say that Arthur Mac Aedan was born in 559, but there is no primary authority to this effect. However, given Aedan’s age and the average time between generations, it makes sense to suppose that Arthur was born around 559.

If the evidence in Geoffrey and the
Scotichronicon
is accepted, then the legendary Arthur took a sword from a stone when he was fifteen years old. The historical Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, took a sword from a stone in 574. If he was born in 559, then he too was fifteen at this time. I know this reasoning is a bit circular but the birth date 559 just makes sense given the later career of Arthur Mac Aedan. He could not have been born any later than 559, because he would then have been too young to have been at Arderydd, and, if he had not been at Arderydd, it is unlikely he would have been given military command in time to fight the first of the twelve Nennius battles. He could, however, have been born as much as five years earlier and still have been young enough to do all that he did. Of course, fifteen years of age may well be a standard coming-of-age age. I understand that men of the Sioux Nation went into battle at this same young age. Be that as it may, circa 559 is as good a date for the birth of Arthur as any other.