It is probably impossible to disentangle this rich tradition to find the truth of Arthur, though many have tried and doubtless many will try again. Arthur is said to be a man of northern Britain, an Essex man, as well as a West Countryman. One recent work positively identifies Arthur as a sixth-century Welsh ruler called Owain Ddantgwyn, but as the authors then note that ‘nothing is recorded of Owain Ddantgwyn’ it does not prove very helpful. Camelot has been variously placed at Carlisle, Winchester, South Cadbury, Colchester and a dozen other places. My choice in this matter is capricious at best and fortified by the certainty that no real answer exists. I have given Camelot the invented name of Caer Cadarn and set it at South Cadbury in Somerset, not because I think it the likeliest site (though I do not think it the least likely), but because I know and love that part of Britain. Delve as we like, all we can safely deduce from history is that a man called Arthur probably lived in the fifth and sixth centuries, that he was a great warlord even if he was never a king, and that his greatest battles were fought against the hated Saxon invaders.
We might know very little about Arthur, but we can infer a lot from the times in which he probably lived. Fifth- and sixth-century Britain must have been a horrid place. The protective Romans left early in the fifth century and the Romanized Britons were thus abandoned to a ring of fearsome enemies. From the west came the marauding Irish who were close Celtic relatives to the British, but invaders, colonizers and slavers all the same. To the north were the strange people of the Scottish Highlands who were ever ready to come south on destructive raids, but neither of these enemies was so feared as the hated Saxons who first raided, then colonized, and afterwards captured eastern Britain, and who, in time, went on to capture Britain’s heartland and rename it England.
The Britons who faced these enemies were far from united. Their kingdoms seemed to spend as much energy fighting each other as opposing the invaders, and they were doubtless divided ideologically as well. The Romans left a legacy of law, industry, learning and religion, but that legacy must have been opposed by many native traditions that had been violently suppressed in the long Roman occupation, but which had never entirely disappeared, and chief amongst those traditions is Druidism. The Romans crushed Druidism because of its associations with British (and thus anti-Roman) nationalism, and in its place introduced a welter of other religions including, of course, Christianity. Scholarly opinion suggests that Christianity was widespread in post-Roman Britain (though it would be an unfamiliar Christianity to modern minds), but undoubtedly paganism also existed, especially in the countryside (pagan comes from the Latin word for country people) and, as the post-Roman state crumbled, men and women must have clutched at whatever supernatural straws offered themselves. At least one modern scholar has suggested that Christianity was sympathetic to the remnants of British Druidism and that the two creeds existed in peaceful cooperation, but toleration has never been the strongest suit of the church and I doubt his conclusions. My belief is that Arthur’s Britain was a place as racked by religious dissent as it was by invasion and politics. In time, of course, the Arthur stories became heavily Christianized, especially in their obsession with the Holy Grail, though we might doubt whether any such chalice was known to Arthur. Yet the Grail Quest legends might not be wholly later fabrications for they bear a striking resemblance to popular Celtic folktales of warriors seeking magic cauldrons; heathen tales on to which, like so much else in Arthurian mythology, later Christian authors put their own pious gloss, thus burying a much earlier Arthurian tradition which now exists only in some very ancient and obscure lives of Celtic saints. That tradition, surprisingly, depicts Arthur as a villain and as an enemy of Christianity. The Celtic church, it seems, was not fond of Arthur and the saints’ lives suggest that it was because he sequestered the church’s money to fund his wars, which could explain why Gildas, a churchman and the closest contemporary historian to Arthur, refuses to give him credit for the British victories which temporarily checked the Saxon advance.
The Holy Thorn, of course, would have existed at Ynys Wydryn (Glastonbury) if we believe the legend that Joseph of Arimathaea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury in AD 63, though that story only really emerges in the twelfth century so I suspect my inclusion of the Thorn in The Winter King is one of my many deliberate anachronisms. When I began the book I was determined to exclude every anachronism, including the embellishments of Chrétien de Troyes, but such purity would have excluded Lancelot, Galahad, Excalibur and Camelot, let alone such figures as Merlin, Morgan and Nimue. Did Merlin exist? The evidence for his life is even less compelling than that for Arthur, and it is highly improbable that the two coexisted, yet they are inseparable and I found it impossible to leave Merlin out. Much anachronism could, however, happily be jettisoned, thus the fifth-century Arthur does not wear plate armour nor carry a mediaeval lance. He has no round table, though his warriors (not knights) would, in Celtic fashion, often have feasted in a circle on the ground. His castles would have been made of earth and wood, not from towering and turreted stone, and I doubt, sadly, that any arm clad in white samite, mystic and wonderful, rose from a misty mere to snatch his sword into eternity, though it is almost certain that the personal treasures of a great leader would, on his death, be cast into a lake as an offering to the Gods.
Most of the characters’ names in the book are drawn from records of the fifth and sixth centuries, but about the people attached to those names we know next to nothing, just as we know very little about the post-Roman kingdoms of Britain – indeed modern histories even disagree on the number of kingdoms and their names. Dumnonia existed, as did Powys, while the narrator of the tale, Derfel (pronounced, in Welsh fashion, Dervel) is identified in some of the early tales as one of Arthur’s warriors and it is noted that he later became a monk, but we know nothing else about him. Others, like Bishop Sansum, undoubtedly existed and remain known today as saints, though it seems precious little virtue was required of those early holy men.
The Winter King is, then, a tale of the Dark Ages in which legend and imagination must compensate for the dearth of historical records. About the only thing of which we can be fairly certain is the broad historical background: a Britain in which Roman towns, Roman roads, Roman villas and some Roman manners are still present, but also a Britain fast being destroyed by invasion and civil strife. Some of the Britons had already abandoned the fight and settled in Armorica, Brittany, which explains the persistence of the Arthurian tales in that part of France. But for those Britons who remained in their beloved island it was a time when they desperately sought salvation, both spiritual and military, and into that unhappy place came a man who, at least for a time, repelled the enemy. That man is my Arthur, a great warlord and a hero who fought against impossible odds to such effect that even fifteen hundred years later his enemies love and revere his memory.
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First published by Michael Joseph 1995
Published in Penguin Books 1996
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell, 1995
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ISBN: 978-0-14-195212-3
Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King
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