Who Was the Real King Arthur?

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Speaker 1 It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and Happy New Year.

Speaker 1 2025 is here and for the Ancients, where we have some huge treats for you over the next few weeks as we kick off January in style. Watch this space.

Speaker 1 Now, it is still the holiday season and the Ancients team are just wrapping up their Christmas break.

Speaker 1 So today we're bringing back to the fore another of my favourite episodes from the Bat Catalogue and I had a lot of fun choosing this particular episode because it's all about King Arthur and the real life ancient figures who inspired this legendary King of the Britons.

Speaker 1 Because there was more than one. As the brilliant Dr.
Miles Russell from Bournemouth University explained to me in this interview that I did did with him back in early 2021, almost four years ago.

Speaker 1 Miles has been a regular on the Ancients and on the History Hit YouTube channel since then.

Speaker 1 We filmed with him about the great Iron Age British hill fort Maiden Castle and about the mysterious Roman 9th Legion Legio 9 Hispana.

Speaker 1 He is a lovely man and a brilliant speaker, talking Romans, Iron Age Britons, and King Arthur. You name it, he knows it.
What's not to love?

Speaker 1 Enjoy.

Speaker 1 The question of who was the real King Arthur, it's kind of like what happened to the Knight Legion. It's one of those great mystery questions of history.

Speaker 17 It is. I mean, Arthur is such an incredible character.
He's a world character, really. You know, he's famous everywhere.

Speaker 17 And I think his story is one that just keeps getting reinvented for every generation.

Speaker 17 You know, he's one of those characters from the past where it's now very difficult to disentangle the historical truth from the sort of mythology and the fantasy that's built on it.

Speaker 17 But because the story's been enlarged and enlarged and enlarged over time, you know, every generation makes the Arthur that they want.

Speaker 17 So we'll see in the last few decades, there's been TV series, there's been films, there's been computer games. It's just building on that mythology.

Speaker 17 So probably of all characters in the past, King Arthur is probably one of the most famous, really. He's world-renowned.

Speaker 1 Absolutely world-renowned. And you are an archaeologist of ancient history.

Speaker 1 And although we sometimes think of Arthur as this medieval figure, he has these incredible links, shall we say, when you look at the research to ancient Britain.

Speaker 17 Absolutely, yes, yes.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's, I guess, you know, King Arthur is one of those characters who's always fascinated historians and archaeologists alike, trying to get back to the actual physical truth of him.

Speaker 17 You know, did he, the argument is always going, there are those who believe he was a real character operating at the end of Roman Britain, and those who believe he's complete fantasy.

Speaker 17 And within that, they're trying to find some middle ground of trying to actually place him because it's such an emotive time you know when you're talking about the end of roman britain we're talking about the the beginning of the kingdoms of what becomes england what becomes the you know principality of wales the kingdom of scotland it's all these formative uh stories or these foundation myths all begin at that all coalesce at that one time so so arthur's there at the epicentre of all that so they're trying to uh you know he's got great resonance today trying to find out uh who he was where he existed and what he actually did super interesting questions arthur right at the Epicentre.

Speaker 1 So Miles, to really start off this chat, the background, we are talking about the book at the heart of your research on this topic.

Speaker 1 It's not an ancient book, but this literary source, it's key to our discussion today. What is this book?

Speaker 17 It's A History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Historia Regum Britanniae, I give it his Latin title, and it's written in around 1136 AD.

Speaker 17 So it's written a very long time after the events that it describes.

Speaker 17 It divides opinion, I think it's fair to say, in that in the past it was viewed as one of the most important texts relating to the history of the Britons, giving them their lost voice.

Speaker 17 But in the last 200 years, people have trended to be a bit more critical of it and say, well, actually, it appears to just be either complete fantasy, it's made up, or it's some kind of misguided patriotic drivel, which really made sense in the 12th century but doesn't today.

Speaker 17 The difficulty really is we don't know anything about the man who wrote it, Geoffrey of Monmouth. I mean, we know that he existed, which is good.
We know that he was living in Oxford in the 1130s.

Speaker 17 We know that by his name, Geoffrey of Monmouth, he must have grown up or spent his formative years on the Welsh-English border.

Speaker 17 But beyond that, we know very little about him, or indeed why he chose to write this book.

Speaker 17 He says in his foreword that Walter, the Archdeacon of Oxford, his ultimate boss, gave him the task of translating a very ancient book in what he calls the Celtic tongue, translating it into Latin.

Speaker 17 But people have taken that to think, well, this is some kind of smokescreen, some kind of cover for something he's actually inventing, because there is no original Celtic text that people have found.

Speaker 17 But all the way through his book, we can see he's making reference to oral history.

Speaker 17 And other writers of the same time are, like Henry of Huntingdon and William of Marlesby, they're talking about the stories of the Britons, which are known by heart.

Speaker 17 So there is this sort of tradition of all storytelling, of passing myths down from generation to generation, but not actually writing anything down.

Speaker 17 And it is actually at the beginning of the 12th century that we start seeing things like the Mabinogion in Wales, a whole series of different texts.

Speaker 17 We see the Welsh Triads, we see Geoffrey of Monmouth. They're starting to write down stories which seem to have been passed around.

Speaker 17 Now, the difficulty with an oral history is obviously tracing its origins. And of course, it's the possibility that every generation is slightly modifying it or changing it.

Speaker 17 and therefore the story becomes distorted names become garbled and it becomes increasingly difficult to look back and think well what is the actual kernel of truth there what is the actual origins of this but geoffrey is writing this down and he presents a history that he describes of the britons he's putting this as an attempt to counter the overtly englished stories like bede who writes the ecclesiastical history of the English people.

Speaker 17 He's got William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntington, and their stories are very Anglo-Saxon-centric. You know, they're based on the first English migrants setting up kingdoms.

Speaker 17 He's presenting a story that counters that and said, actually, before they arrived, there is this great heritage going back on all the kings and queens and monarchs.

Speaker 17 And he claims they are descended ultimately from Trojans who were escaping the Trojan wars, who are sort of refugees who landed in Britain and established this sort of series of kingdoms.

Speaker 17 And effectively, it's a polemic really sort of saying that all these people existed before the the Saxons arrived and going through their history and identifying key heroes.

Speaker 17 But the difficulty from our perspective, you know, from a historical point of view, is because these names aren't mentioned anywhere else, have they got any kind of historical truth to them?

Speaker 17 Is he making them up? Is he using some kind of oral tradition that hasn't been written down anywhere else? What is the basis of this?

Speaker 17 But it's important for us because Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first person to give us an entire life history of King Arthur from his conception to his mortal wounding.

Speaker 17 So all our understanding of Arthur the man, all the mythology that's built around him, begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Speaker 17 There's scattered references to an Arthur character before that, but Geoffrey gives us everything. There's a full download of his entire life history.

Speaker 1 Miles, that is super interesting.

Speaker 1 And just before we've gone to Arthur, that mentioning of this oral tradition, as it were, should we say pre-Saxon, is it looking at the ancient Celtic history as it were, in this oral tradition?

Speaker 1 Because you see so many parallels. I was immediately thinking of perhaps Homer, the Odyssey, the Iliad, that oral tradition.

Speaker 1 But you could also then look at the Polynesians and their oral tradition before the Europeans and the interactions there.

Speaker 1 And it seems like it's quite similar here, how he is now writing down hundreds and hundreds of years later, Geoffrey of Monmouth, this tradition that may well have been passed down through many of the Celtic-speaking peoples and said for generations.

Speaker 17 Absolutely. So he's remembering sort of heroes from the past.

Speaker 17 Another good sort of example is the stories that are first being written down or recorded in 19th century Afghanistan about Iskander, you know, Alexander the Great.

Speaker 17 Here you've got a Macedonian general from the third century BC who's being remembered thousands of years later.

Speaker 17 And the stories have multiplied, but at its core, there is a historical, verifiable figure. So we can see that oral tradition has a very long history, you know, that tales do survive.

Speaker 17 But because they're not being recorded, it is very difficult to see when they mutate and when they change.

Speaker 17 And that's the tricky thing with Geoffrey of Monmouth, is we can identify some of these characters, not all of them but we don't know when these particular tales are mutating and evolving absolutely don't you worry Mars we'll be going back to Alexander the Great very soon I'm sure but let's focus on Arthur so Arthur in Geoffrey's book how significant a figure is he in the history of the kings of Britain Arthur is coming towards the end I mean he occupies about a third of the book so he's the most significant character.

Speaker 17 He's given the most amount of space to develop. And in a way, everything is leading leading up towards Arthur.

Speaker 17 I mean, there are characters after him in the story, but they're less significant and they're given sort of less time, really.

Speaker 17 But throughout the story, Geoffrey presents a series of important men and women who are trying to defend their kingdom and trying to establish the laws of the land and all these sort of things.

Speaker 17 And Arthur occurs at a point when the kingdom's under its greatest threat.

Speaker 17 because Geoffrey identifies the Saxons coming in from, you know, migrating across the North Sea as the biggest threat to the kingdom of the Britons.

Speaker 17 So Arthur's there at that point defending everything that's gone before.

Speaker 17 But it's interesting because the story that he gives of Arthur is repeating lots of key tropes, lots of key aspects of other people's story. And it's presented without comment.

Speaker 17 It's some kind of divine plan. Everything that's happened before.
is coalescing under Arthur and is repeated under Arthur. And he is the ultimate warrior in the story.

Speaker 17 And his demise signifies the high point of the Britain story, but also the point which they sort of descend and the kingdom sort of crashes to a halt.

Speaker 1 The Arsman warrior portrayal, so is he very much portrayed in this book, Miles, as a warlord?

Speaker 17 He's a horrible character in the Geoffrey of Monmouth because he's a psychopath. He is very quick to anger.
He slaughters people for no apparent reason.

Speaker 17 He invades countries just because he wants power. But that is

Speaker 17 in the post-Roman, indeed pre-Roman period, that is how heroes are remembered. You know, they're not remembered for having a kingdom of peace and prosperity.

Speaker 17 They're not remembered for the laws that they pass. They are remembered for being strong individuals who don't take any prisoners.
So Arthur, his story is just drenched in blood.

Speaker 17 He is not a very nice character from our point of view. But from the point of view, I guess, of a post-Roman society, he's exactly the kind of individual you want on your side.

Speaker 17 You've got these descriptions of him in a battle, almost going into berserker mode and slaughtering hundreds of individuals just with his sword. He is there, he's doing all the killing.

Speaker 17 And I think in a way that is important to understand because the Arthur that Geoffrey presents us is completely unlike the medieval Arthur that we get.

Speaker 17 All the later romances built around him from the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries really make him more human. They bring in the romance cycle of Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere.

Speaker 17 They bring in the quest for the Holy Grail. They bring in other characters like Bedivere and Percival and Galahad and all these other individuals.
So they make Arthur a more human individual.

Speaker 17 They emphasise his humanity, whereas Geoffrey just presents us with the warlord.

Speaker 17 And it's interesting to see how little of the original story that Geoffrey gives us actually appears in the later accounts. He almost gets edited out completely.

Speaker 17 and other elements come in and therefore there's no sword in the stone, there's no lady in the lake, there's no Lancelot Guinevere romance, there's no Holy Grail.

Speaker 17 None of those aspects are in Geoffrey's primary account. It's all about conquest and killing and being the strongest man, the last man standing, effectively.

Speaker 1 Miles, the parallels are so striking. We're going back to Alexander now because of that whole portrayal with the Alexander historians first of all, like the original sources.

Speaker 1 You mentioned how Arthur is portrayed as this sometimes psychopathic warlord.

Speaker 1 Well, I think Alexander is portrayed very similarly at times, this killing of hundreds of thousands of people, particularly in the Indus River Valley.

Speaker 1 But it's only later on when you get the romance added with the Alexander romance stories where you see him going to mythical lands almost what they thought mythical lands like in Africa or visiting Jerusalem etc etc and those are added later so it's so interesting you see these striking parallels between two of the most well-known warlords of history who have become two of the most well-known warlords in history have these striking parallels and how their story in the literature develops over time to become shall we say more popular among audiences?

Speaker 17 It is, it is, I mean, it's still going on today. I mean, you can think when you look back to all the ancient sort of Greek myths, really none of the characters in there are particularly nice.

Speaker 17 You think of someone like Achilles. I mean, he is a really unpleasant individual.

Speaker 17 And yet, when people are trying to dramatize the Trojan Wars today, they downplay the death and killing side and they try to bring in romance and try to make this person likable because ultimately we want to see see an element of our heroes that we empathize with, that we like.

Speaker 17 Otherwise, what's the point? So, you can see a lot of more modern interpretations of Achilles. And yeah, he's quite a nice chap.
He's got compassion.

Speaker 17 It doesn't appear in the original sources, you know. Basically, he is a murderous sociopath.
And that is the same with Alexander. I mean, there's nothing about his story.

Speaker 17 He's not going eastwards in a missionary zeal to bring his brand of civilization and to benefit society. He's conquering and killing and destroying another civilization.

Speaker 17 But later on, the romances are added and they're trying to make him ultimately a more likable person.

Speaker 17 And that is exactly what's happening with Arthur, because he is a deeply unlikable person when you read his accounts in Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Speaker 1 Now, let's go back to Arthur then. Thank you for that, Tangino.
That was very much appreciated.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, the stories of King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth, many of these stories that are given to Arthur, Miles, they happen to other individuals before him.

Speaker 17 Exactly.

Speaker 17 I mean, the interesting thing looking through geoffrey of monmouth if you do read it from cover to cover which i've done many times it's not something i'd alter to actually recommend to people because it's not like reading a novel and it's plagued with names and dates and events but you see that certain themes do get repeated and this is one of the reasons i think that geoffrey's history his skill is he's weaving together a series of stories and trying to put them in a chronology that makes sense to him so we often see stories repeated like the invasion of Julius Caesar in 54 BC in Britain as a documented event, it appears twice in Geoffrey and Monmouth's account from different perspectives and it's almost as if he doesn't realize it's the same event and therefore he separates it out and we get three invasions of Caesar rather than the two that we know about and the 54 BC is repeated and he does this with individuals.

Speaker 17 We see someone whose story is very similar to somebody else and their name form is slightly different. It's Garbwan.

Speaker 17 It's evidently it's the same person but Geoffrey's presented with two rather different accounts and rather than pushing them together he treats them as two separate individuals.

Speaker 17 So when we look at Arthur, you can disentangle. There's at least five individuals which come together.
So Arthur is a composite in Geoffrey of Monmouth. His story has already happened to other people.

Speaker 17 And these are sort of people who are in some way significant. They've been remembered as heroes in that old psychopathic L aside.
You know, they are prominent warlords of their time.

Speaker 17 But their stories have undoubtedly been remembered and therefore they are coalescing around Arthur and Geoffrey brings them together to create this sort of composite Celtic superhero.

Speaker 1 Composite Celtic superhero, five key figures from ancient Britain. Miles, let's delve into these five figures now.
I want you to go wild with the detail of each of these people.

Speaker 1 Let's start with the first one.

Speaker 1 This is someone who I actually think is particularly interesting, particularly because he seems to be very much an influence on Clive Owen for the King Arthur of that in the 2000s.

Speaker 1 Miles, number one, Ambrosius Aurelianus. Aurelianus.

Speaker 17 Yes, I mean Ambrosius Aurelianus is one of those figures who in post-Roman Britain we do have some detail of.

Speaker 17 It is not much to go on really, but Ambrosius Aurelianus appears in the writings of a man called Gildas and Gildas is writing at some point in the mid-6th century.

Speaker 17 Gildas is not the best historian to rely on because he's not a historian, he's the man of the clergy and his account on the ruin of Britain, it's a polemic, it's a sermon basically explaining why the Britons have suffered because they're all diseased and sinful and corrupt.

Speaker 17 And therefore, the Saxons are like a scourge from God cleansing them. So it's full of blood and fire and anger.
And Gildas hasn't got a good word to say about anybody.

Speaker 17 Everybody's corrupt and horrible, apart from one person who is Ambrosius Aurelianus. And he says that he's a man of good character.
He's descended of sort of noble Roman stock.

Speaker 17 And he is responsible for this great defeat of this rascally crew, the Saxons.

Speaker 17 He defeats them at the battle or the siege of Mount Badden and because Gildas is so complimentary about him and he mentions this battle and this battle gets referred to time and time again.

Speaker 17 It becomes a key battle of King Arthur in the later sort of rewrites. But Gildas doesn't give us any information about who is besieging whom at this great affair.
He doesn't tell us where Badden is.

Speaker 17 but because Gildas is writing somewhere in the West Country or possibly sort of southern Wales, we assume it's within that sort of general area.

Speaker 17 But it's important to him and it's important to the people he's speaking to. So Ambrosius is this major cat.

Speaker 17 Now, he appears a lot in other oral histories, which were later written down, like the Triads of Wales, like the Mabinogion, briefly.

Speaker 17 Nennius in his Storia Britonum, the history of the Britons, Ambrosius is in there.

Speaker 17 And he features very heavily in Geoffrey Monmouth's work because he's treated as the immediate sort of predecessor of Arthur.

Speaker 17 But Ambrosius is somebody in Geoffrey Monmouth who, yes, he fights the Battle of Baden, which Geoffrey places at Bath in the West Country.

Speaker 17 He is trying to establish his kingdom in the face of Saxon advances. He defeats them a number of times.
And Geoffrey has him being having his coronation at Stonehenge.

Speaker 17 And of course, this becomes, you know, archaeologists have picked up on this recently, going back to Geoffrey, this idea that in Geoffrey's account, Ambrosius asks his chief advisor, Merlin, to build a monument to commemorate all those British aristocrats who'd been murdered by the Saxons.

Speaker 17 And Merlin goes goes off to Ireland and brings back this great stone circle which they set up on Salisbury Plain. And that's where Ambrosius has his coronation.

Speaker 17 And of course, from an archaeological perspective, that seems utterly ludicrous, you know, because we know the history of Stonehenge and it's not post-Roman in essence.

Speaker 17 Although it's possible, you know, there's debate whether the bluestones have come from West Wales, which might be sort of remembered.

Speaker 17 But the key thing in Geoffrey's text is he's talking about the monument being restructured.

Speaker 17 And we know that archaeologically, you know, I've I've excavated inside Stonehenge entirely legally, by the way, it was part of a bigger project.

Speaker 17 But a lot of the bluestones that we see in Stonehenge today were reshaped and modified in the post-Roman period.

Speaker 17 So there is some kind of structural modification going on in there at the time that Ambrosius is supposed to have existed. And of course, you've got Amesbury, the town nearby, Ambrosius's burr.

Speaker 17 His name is resonant in the landscape.

Speaker 17 So it's possible Geoffrey is remembering remembering or writing down an event involving the reshaping of Stonehenge and the coronation of this king, whom Gildas has mentioned before.

Speaker 17 But he's there and he's the only post-Roman warlord for whom we've got anything vaguely complementary written about. So in that sense, he's in the right space at the right time.

Speaker 17 for the Arthur character.

Speaker 17 And when we look at Ambrosius in Geoffrey's text, aspects about his childhood, aspects about his kingship, and of course the Battle of Baden get absorbed into the Arthur story.

Speaker 17 So they're repeated without comment later on. So we can see there's about 16%

Speaker 17 of the King Arthur story, as it appears in Geoffrey Monmouth, is taken from Ambrosius' life.

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Speaker 1 Well, you kind of read my mind what the next question would be, which would be like, What elements of Ambrosius Radianus' story does Geoffrey adopt, mold into the character of Arthur?

Speaker 1 But is it really the battle narrative?

Speaker 17 It is, yes. It's the battle narrative, and it's the sort of aspects about his kingship and his position and his power.

Speaker 17 And it is actually interesting that later writers take other aspects of Ambrosius because, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, although Merlin is there, he and Arthur never meet, they occupy different timelines, as it were.

Speaker 17 But later writers have Merlin becoming Arthur's advisor and his wizard. So it's interesting, but it's Ambrosius and Merlin in the original text.

Speaker 17 But later, when Ambrosius is written out, Merlin sort of gets absorbed into the Arthur story.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. I never clicked that link between Ambrosius, Aurelianus, and Amesbury.

Speaker 1 And Miles, if we then move on, it sounds like Ambrosius, he is a significant core of the character of Arthur in Geoffrey's Monmouth.

Speaker 1 But moving on to the next figure, he also seems very, very significant. Character number two, Magnus Maximus.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, Magnus Maximus, I guess, is one of those individuals who doesn't resonate so much today. We don't hear a lot about him.

Speaker 17 But he was a significant character in the later fourth century Roman Empire because we know that there's not a lot about his life story.

Speaker 17 that has been recorded, but it is known that he is of Spanish ethnicity. He's serving in Britain, possibly as a commander of the northern armies, the Dux Britanniorum.

Speaker 17 but in 383 AD, his soldiers proclaim him as emperor. So he is illegally created as leader of the Roman world.
And lots of people are doing this around the Roman Empire.

Speaker 17 You know, throughout the third and fourth centuries, the empire is tearing itself apart with multiple leaders and claims and civil wars. So in that respect, Magnus Maximus is not that different.

Speaker 17 But he seems to have the support of the troops in Britain.

Speaker 17 There seems to be a lot of disaffection with the government in Britain with Rome, Rome, feeling that they're not perhaps being looked after, they're a distant province, they're not that important.

Speaker 17 And Magnus Maximus, who we know from the histories, takes troops out of Britain. He gets support in northern Gaul,

Speaker 17 northern France, Belgium, Germany. He's minting coins with his face on and with images of victory.
His army besiege the forces of the legitimate emperor Gratian, who is killed in the retreat.

Speaker 17 So the Emperor of the West dies. The Emperor's mother and his younger brother then go over to the East.

Speaker 17 And Magnus Maximus is sitting there above the Alps, about to advance down into Italy, when the Eastern Emperor arrives with an army, cuts him off, and he is executed and killed.

Speaker 17 And the rebellion is put down. But it's a huge political and social upheaval because it's completely destabilised the West.
It's involved a loss of life.

Speaker 17 It's an own goal as far as Rome's concerned because it's destroying its own army. and saw lots of it in fighting.
But the fact that his story, you think, well, why is Magnus Maximus remembered?

Speaker 17 What possible relevance has he got to Britain? But he is remembered.

Speaker 17 If you look in a lot of the early Welsh genealogies, lots of the leaders of Powys and so on, they trace their ancestry back to Magnus Maximus, who's often cited as the king who killed the king of the Romans.

Speaker 17 You know, he is remembered.

Speaker 17 And in the Mabinogion, we get the story of the dream of Maxon, who is Magnus Maximus, who in that version of the story, he's an emperor in Rome who dreams of this distant, faraway mythical land with a castle and a beautiful princess.

Speaker 17 And he sends people out to look for her, and they eventually come back and say, We found her. She's in effectively North Wales.

Speaker 17 And he travels over there and meets the woman, literally, of his dreams, and they fall in love. And he stays there for long enough for a rival to take power in Rome.

Speaker 17 And then he has to take troops out of Britain to go and reclaim his kingdom. So it's sort of a reverse version of the story.
But he's remembered in so many different accounts.

Speaker 17 You think, well, there's something about him. Okay, yes, he was a prominent warlord.
That's something that, you know, Tick, you are remembered for. Undoubtedly, there were praise poems about him.

Speaker 17 I suspect he restructured Britain significantly. So he devolved authority, perhaps to individual tribes or leaders.

Speaker 17 And that's why they later treated him as their sort of progenitor, as the founder of their dynasty. But a lot of the story, certainly the Mabinogium, centres around Carnarvon in North Wales.

Speaker 17 And that's where the later sort of Plantagenet dynasty builds Carnarvon Castle. And it's supposed to be the sort of myth fulfilment.

Speaker 17 They are building a fortress that resembles the castle that Magnus Maximus had in this dream.

Speaker 17 So sort of the later Norman monarchs are building on this mythology quite literally and representing themselves as the ultimate sort of fulfilment of the Magnus Maximus story.

Speaker 17 But when we look at Geoffrey Monmouth, when we look at the fact that he leaves Britain, he invades Gaul, modern-day France, he defeats armies, he kills the emperor, and he's just about to go over the Alps to invade Italy when he suddenly turned away.

Speaker 17 All this is Magnus Maximus' story that's been repackaged for Arthur. So 39% of the King Arthur story comes from Magnus Maximus in Geoffrey Monmouth.

Speaker 17 So he is the most significant person to contribute to the Arthur tale.

Speaker 1 Mars, it's so interesting how the most significant person for creating this Celtic superhero is this rather infamous Roman general.

Speaker 17 It is, I guess to our perspective, it is.

Speaker 17 But given that he's portrayed as a strong leader, someone who is successful in battle, someone who galvanises the Britons and the Gauls and the Germans against Rome, this becomes a significant factor in this story.

Speaker 17 And of course, bear in mind, he doesn't come back to Britain. One of the later aspects developed with Arthur is he's gone.
He's not killed, but he might come back one day.

Speaker 17 And I guess that is something about Magnus Maximus is that he's gone abroad. Stories of his death might be treated as a bit of an over-exaggeration.

Speaker 17 But there's that sense that one day he will return and save us all. So you can see how that's in.

Speaker 17 But yeah, from our perspective, you know, from most people's perspective, I guess Magnus Maximus, whose name translates as the great, the greatest, you know, so he's

Speaker 17 he's quite a show-off.

Speaker 1 He's not modest, yeah.

Speaker 17 He's not modest in that sense, but he doesn't feature much in our history. He's just another name in that list of rebels.

Speaker 17 But for the sort of beginnings of the great Welsh dynasties and the princes of Wales, he's a key character from their past. And therefore, he gets built into the story of Arthur.

Speaker 1 Fair enough. Well, from Magnus Maximus, let's move on to another person who is definitely not modest in the slightest.
Figure number three, Constantine the Great.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, again, Constantine is another character who ultimately hasn't really got anything to do with Britain.

Speaker 17 You know, he's from the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Balkans, but he is serving in Britain with his father in 306 AD, and his father is Constantius, his father is the emperor.

Speaker 17 And at that stage, there is a system called the Tetrarchy, which is thereby whoever's emperor chooses their successor and it's not somebody of their bloodline.

Speaker 17 They choose the most capable leader to succeed them. And it's a way of trying to get rid of all these fighting dynasties.
Now, in 306, Constantius dies in Britain at York. He's on campaign in Britain.

Speaker 17 And Constantine, his son, effectively says, well, I'm the son of the emperor. I'm going to be emperor.
And his troops proclaim him as such at York.

Speaker 17 So it's this major uprising, another sort of time when a general has illegally seized power.

Speaker 17 And Constantine does what Magnus Maximus does later, is he takes troops out of Britain, he goes into Gaul, and then he starts his campaign downwards into Italy, down towards Rome.

Speaker 17 And so, in effect, there are elements of his story which are repeated in the Arthur story of him invading.

Speaker 17 But Constantine is the first emperor who literally is just before he dies, he's on his deathbed, he converts to Christianity and he allows Christianity to flourish.

Speaker 17 And of course, for writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, who are in that Christian tradition, he is the most important Roman of all. And we can see aspects of his story.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's very, very similar to what happens to Magnus Maximus.

Speaker 17 And to be fair, Constantine, although he's treated as a great Roman, when you actually look at his story, he's a deeply unpleasant individual.

Speaker 17 And he murders all his rivals and he suffocates people in baths and he poisoned. He is horrific.

Speaker 17 But he fits that profile of a strong leader and Constantine is successful you know unlike Magnus Maximus who dies at the last hurdle Constantine does become emperor of Rome and the fact that his rebellion starts in Britain and York features a lot in Geoffrey and Monmouth's texts so it's that side of it I mean Constantine is eight percent of his so it's not a great deal but he's there and when you look at Constantine as he appears in Geoffrey and Monmouth there are elements of his rebellion and his war in Gaul which feature in the story of Arthur it's such a difficult question but I'm going to ask it quickly because you mentioned how Constantine is such a significant figure when we imagine about the world Geoffrey's living in the medieval period when looking back at ancient Rome.

Speaker 1 Do you think when Geoffrey's writing this and he knows Constantine's links to Britain and to York and how he's such a significant figure that perhaps he thinks that when I'm creating this Celtic superhero, I must get elements of this significant figure's history in the story, in the creation of Arthur?

Speaker 17 I think you're right, he does.

Speaker 17 And also bear in mind that a lot of the characters like Constantine, although his life story is remembered elsewhere, Geoffrey and other writers give him a British mother.

Speaker 17 So we see there is this, his mother, Helena, who's often actually treated as the patron saint of archaeology because she goes off to the east and she finds evidence of the true cross and Christ crucifix and all this stuff.

Speaker 17 But in various accounts, she is perhaps confused with a Helena character in North Wales. But it's as if Constantine, he's got British heritage, therefore he becomes a king of Britain.

Speaker 17 But it's vital to get him in there because he's such a significant player in the story, not just of the Roman Empire, but critically of Christianity and its acceptance.

Speaker 17 So to have him as one of us, and it's another string to Geoffrey's bow to say the Britons are far more important than the Saxons.

Speaker 17 You know, yeah, Saxons have got monasteries and they convert to Christianity and all that sort of stuff. But the Britons, we've got Constantine as one of us.

Speaker 17 And therefore, yeah, that makes our royal lineage far more significant. You know, you've got Athelstan and Alfred, yeah, great.

Speaker 17 But we've got Arthur and Constantine and these people, and they are far more important in world history than any of your lot.

Speaker 1 Ah, there you go, always thinking about the Saxons as well in that whole narrative. Very, very interesting indeed.

Speaker 1 Now, figure number four, we're going further back to late Iron Age Britain, and Miles, the figure of Cassivellornus.

Speaker 17 Yeah, Cassivellaunus, or Cassibellaon, as he appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's text, he's one of those individuals who we do have an independent account of because he features in Julius Caesar's account of his invasion into Britain.

Speaker 17 And of course, Caesar, as the consummate politician, he writes everything down. He justifies all his actions as a series of dispatches from the front line.

Speaker 17 So in his account of the wars in Gaul, he describes in detail his invasions of Britain in 55. and 54 BC.

Speaker 17 And in 54 BC, he comes up against a preeminent leader, he's got a preeminent war leader of the Britons called Cassival Launus.

Speaker 17 And of course, Cassivolaunus, that name form gets garbled in Geoffrey of Monmouth and becomes Cassiverlow and it appears in other forms as well but in essence he is the man who stands up to Caesar.

Speaker 17 Now in Caesar's account of the war he manages to defeat Cassivolaunus. Of course he does you know it's Caesar writing and he gets tribute out of him and he leaves.

Speaker 17 Now that particular invasion, the great thing about us, because we've got Caesar's account, we can compare it with what Geoffrey of Monmouth writes.

Speaker 17 And Geoffrey doesn't seem to have Caesar's account to hand because there's nothing in Caesar's writings that fit Geoffrey of Monmouth's.

Speaker 17 So perhaps the Gallic Wars is not something he had in his library or accessed to. But we get the invasion of 54 BC mentioned twice, but it's two different accounts of that same action.

Speaker 17 In the first account that Geoffrey gives us, Cassiope Launus is victorious. He drives Caesar into the sea.
He defeats him comprehensively and sends the Roman packing.

Speaker 17 You know, that's what the Britons want to hear that's what probably in praise poems after that event that's what people were saying you know the romans have gone the gauls were defeated by them but we kicked him back into the sea back to where he came from the second version that appears in jefferies we've got the same invasion cassibalaun fighting caesar but there is another character in there and that is a chap called androgius who is a powerful British leader who's on Caesar's side, but helps Caesar.

Speaker 17 Caesar couldn't defeat Cassibalaune without Androgius' Androgius' help. So he's presented as a great warlord who is far greater than Caesar and far greater than Cassivalaunus.

Speaker 17 So there are three different versions of the same event. One by Caesar or his supporters, one by Cassivalaunus and his lot, and one by Androgius.

Speaker 17 Now Caesar mentions Androgius, he calls him Mandibrachius, and he's of the Trinovantes tribe of Essex. So you've got this Briton on the Roman side.

Speaker 17 Now interestingly in Geoffrey of Monmouth, when he's describing this, Androgius is presented as the nephew, the treacherous nephew of Cassivolaunus.

Speaker 17 And when we see Caesar landing and the description giving of the Romans arriving, is replicated much, much later on when we get the Saxons invading, the same number of ships, the same battle tactics, and Cassivolaunus is betrayed by Androgius.

Speaker 17 When Geoffrey Monmouth describes Arthur, Arthur is betrayed by his nephew, Mordred.

Speaker 17 And so you get Mandu Brachius becomes Mordred, and Cassibalaunus, that element of the story, gets morphed into Arthur's tale.

Speaker 17 So no doubt, this is a prominent British Iron Age king who is mentioned by the Romans, but becomes something very different in Geoffrey and Monmouth's account, depending on who's writing the story.

Speaker 17 So in some versions, in Geoffrey and Monmouth, Cassibalaunus is the hero. In the other versions, he is an unpleasant character who needs to be defeated.

Speaker 17 It depends who's giving you that oral tradition.

Speaker 17 But Geoffrey looks at that completely unfiltered and doesn't realise it's from two different sources and just tries to blend it into one so we don't understand why in one stage Cassibalaunus is the hero and then 10 pages later he's the villain it's never explained but it's because it's two different accounts sort of knitted into this singular account and the intriguing thing is also when we look at Geoffrey Monmouth he keeps talking about I mean effectively there are two prominent royal houses in Britain there's the house of cornwall and there's the House of London and it's their story that filters throughout and when we look at Cassivolaunus, he is from the House of Cornwall.

Speaker 17 But when we actually sort of identify these characters and their tribal affiliations, it's not Cornwall and London, it's the Cativalauni tribe of Hertfordshire and it's the Trinovantes of Essex.

Speaker 17 It's those two tribal accounts that seem to survive as oral traditions. And perhaps when Geoffrey was writing the name for Alms Garbo, he didn't understand what Cativalauni was.

Speaker 17 So it becomes Kernow or Cornobia, it becomes Cornwall. And Trinovantis, he translates as New Troy, which for him means London.

Speaker 17 So his geography becomes across the whole of Britain, but whereas the origins are just these two tribal groups fighting for survival in Hertfordshire and Essex.

Speaker 17 But Geoffrey transposes that across the whole of Britain.

Speaker 1 That is super interesting. Slightandra, does he talk about Brittany at all then in these links?

Speaker 17 Yes, yeah, Brittany features quite a lot, especially in Arthur's story.

Speaker 17 There's lots of later sort of myths that Magnus Maximus, when he goes to Gaul, he sort of invigorates the sort of aristocracy of Brittany.

Speaker 17 He places his troops there and they sort of intermingle with the local population. And certainly, there's a lot of sort of Breton tradition with Arthur.

Speaker 17 Now, part of that might be because we know there are channel migrations. You know, Brittany is Little Britain and Britain itself is Great Britain.

Speaker 17 So it might be that the stories migrate across the channel in the 6th, 7th centuries AD.

Speaker 17 Or it might be that Magnus Maximus, just as he was doing in North Wales, was doing something equivalent in Brittany. And that's because the Breton connection becomes attached to Arthur.

Speaker 17 But some accounts also say that Cassibalaunus, having driven Caesar to the sea, then led raids against him in northern Gaul. So, you know, it's all tied up.

Speaker 17 There is certainly a great oral tradition of these leaders involving themselves in the most northern parts of France.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. It's so, so interesting, Mars, right there.
So we're going to move on to the last and final figure, a figure who I'd never even heard of before this. Figure number five.

Speaker 17 arviragus

Speaker 17 again we face that problem that a lot of what occurs what appears in jeffrey is garbled name forms and presumably they've been mistranslated or the oral tradition has in some way garbled like alexander becomes iscanda and various other sort of way forms but the story of Arviragus is important because we get Arviragus as a great British leader who is negotiating with the Emperor Claudius.

Speaker 17 He at some point refuses to pay tribute to the Emperor, which is what Arthur does later. The Romans try and invade, and Arviragus fights them, then he becomes allied to them.

Speaker 17 And there's a key moment when Arviragus marries this great British noble called Genvisa, who is described as the great beauty of her time.

Speaker 17 And this is later, almost word for word, we get Arthur marrying Ganhumara, who later becomes Guinevere in later romances.

Speaker 17 So the whole key element of Arviragus' story with fighting Rome, then allying with Rome and marrying this great beauty gets added to the key beginning of Arthur's story.

Speaker 17 Now, it's difficult to really place Arviragus as a historical character, but the name form seems to become a degenerate of Caratarchus, who is properly referred to as Caraticus in other sort of anglicized forms.

Speaker 17 And Caraticus

Speaker 17 is one of those forgotten characters of early Roman Britain.

Speaker 17 Boudicca sort of takes up all the air of most of our sort of stories of that time because Boudicca in AD 60 leads the great revolt of the Achani tribe of Norfolk against Rome and Colchester, London, St Albans are all burnt to the ground.

Speaker 17 But Caratarchus is there at the beginning. He is opposing Rome from day one in AD 43 when they invade.
His capital, his centre at Colchester, is captured by the Romans.

Speaker 17 He retreats into Wales and in 47 AD, so some years later, he re-emerges in what is now South Wales, having galvanised the tribes there to fight the Romans.

Speaker 17 And then he transfers the centre of operations into North Wales.

Speaker 17 And then he later goes up, tries to open up another front in what is now Yorkshire with the Brigantis tribe and their queen, Cartimanda. And she eventually hands him in chains over to the Romans.

Speaker 17 I don't want you. Go away.
Where you go, the Romans follow. And so he's handed over.
And he's taken to Rome in triumph. Claudius has him in a great procession.

Speaker 17 Caratakis is supposed to give him this great speech saying, why do you envy us in our mud hut when you've got all this marble? I would have greeted you as a friend rather than survived.

Speaker 17 When he gives this great speech and Claudius, according to the Roman writers like Tacitus, is so impressed by this speech that he lets Caratarchus go. He gives him his freedom.

Speaker 17 He's not allowed to leave Rome, but effectively he's not executed either, which is a plus, you know, and he lives out his life. in Rome.

Speaker 17 So here is this great character who appears in lots of early Welsh literature because he is actually there fighting the Romans on the ground. No doubt, lots of praise poems around him.

Speaker 17 Other elements of his story appear in much later tales. So the relationship between Caratarchus and Cartimandua gets evolved into sort of Arthur and Guinevere.

Speaker 17 The betrayal of Guinevere developed from the betrayal of Cartimandua as she hands him over to the Romans.

Speaker 17 But we see Caradoc and Craddock and Curdic, all these name-variant forms of Caratarchus survive in lots of early Welsh literature. So he is remembered.

Speaker 17 And these key aspects of him, I mean, again, he's another character who leaves Britain and never returns. So it's that once and future king, he's not dead, but he will come back and save us.

Speaker 17 And that gets built into the Arthur story as well. So Arvu Argus Karatakis is another character.
It's about 24% of his story becomes absorbed into the Arthur tale as presented by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

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Speaker 1 There's one part of that last figure, Arviragus, that I would like to specifically ask about, and that's to do with an island off the north coast of Britain, Orkney.

Speaker 1 Because we do hear in one source, I believe, with Claudius accepting the surrenders of British chiefs, that there is one chief who comes from Orkney. Could this all be linked?

Speaker 1 I mean, what is the story here? Could there be connections connections between all of this?

Speaker 17 It is very, very diff I mean, bear in mind the Romans' sense of geography is not quite as accurate as ours.

Speaker 17 We know that in the 80s AD, so 40 years after Claudius, a Roman fleet does circumnavigate Britain, and it is actually an island, and so now that probably got to the Orkneys and so on.

Speaker 17 There is some Roman material on Orkney, and people have tried to make a link.

Speaker 17 I mean, it seems unlikely if the Romans having invaded Kent and Essex, a delegation would come down from Orkney to surrender that.

Speaker 17 But then it might just be that the name has become sort of mistranslated or garbled from another different tribe.

Speaker 17 And we know that in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Icani tribe of Norfolk or Iceni, as they're sometimes referred to, are described as Scythians.

Speaker 17 And the Scythians, of course, are fright, you know, it's a name later given to the Huns. You know, this is a tribe right the way across from the other side of the Black Sea.

Speaker 17 So Icani becomes Scythians, Boudicca becomes Soderic, king of the Scythians.

Speaker 17 So it may be that we are looking at this and saying Orkneys, whereas the Romans were actually using a different tribal name and it's not actually that far north.

Speaker 17 It would seem odd that a tribe from those far distant islands would A have heard that the Romans had invaded and B sent a delegation down to say we surrender because you know they're so far away it doesn't really make any odds to them.

Speaker 17 But the conquest of the Orkneys is represented in Geoffrey Monmouth quite a lot. Arthur conquers the Orkneys with Claudius' help.
Arviragus Caratakis, he invades the Orkneys.

Speaker 17 Lots of other characters got it it almost becomes like a generic name for taking the whole of Britain.

Speaker 17 You've conquered everything including the Orkneys, but quite what the origins of that story are, sadly, we don't know.

Speaker 1 So that is kind of similar to saying like a Sasanian ruler conquered as far as the Caspian Gates, or the Romans conquered as far as the Pillars of Hercules.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it becomes a byword for the limits of the known world.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Gotcha.
Now, you've mentioned them in passing as we've chatted, these percentages. So I've got to go to the maths now, Miles.

Speaker 1 To sum it all up of these five figures, what's the percentages of each of them in the story, the elements of the Arthur story?

Speaker 17 If you break it down in a purely mathematical way, looking at what Geoffrey Monmouth says, Magnus Maximus is 39%,

Speaker 17 Caratakis is 24%, Ambrosius Aurelianus is 16, Cassivolaunus is 12%, Constantine is 8%.

Speaker 1 Hang on, there's one percentage missing. That's 99%.
What is this 1%?

Speaker 17 Well done. That's good maths.
Yeah, there's 1% in there. And basically that just relates.

Speaker 17 There's an element of Arthur's story where just before he conquers Gaul and fights the Roman Emperor, he conquers Norway. You know, he conquers Iceland.

Speaker 17 And these are aspects that don't actually feature in any other character story in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account. So it's an element that is not repeating something that's gone before.

Speaker 17 But there have been a lot of invasions from Norway.

Speaker 17 and there are later in his text as well so it might be something just slipped in there as a sort of uh giving it it back to the Northmen that they have invaded time and time again, but we were there first.

Speaker 17 The Britons conquered you before you conquered us. And that might be a sly dig at the Normans.
Of course, Geoffrey Wormis is writing in the 1130s in Norman England.

Speaker 17 It's quite clear he's not a fan of the Normans, quite definitely. But the Normans like what he's writing because they like to link themselves to Arthur.
You know, they are doing what Arthur does.

Speaker 17 They are subjugating the Saxons, the English. And so they connect with Arthur and they like this idea idea of our grand and glorious heritage in Britain, which they want to connect to.

Speaker 17 And it might just be Geoffrey having a little sly dig that the hero of his account went and attacked Norway and attacked the land of the Norsemen, the Normans, you know, before they came to Normandy.

Speaker 17 He was there before you came to us. But that's that 1%.

Speaker 17 99% belongs to someone else. If you take all these other stories of other characters out of the Arthur tale that Geoffrey gives us, there's nothing left for Arthur.
He becomes a non-person.

Speaker 17 So it's quite clear he cannot have existed, effectively, as far as Jeffrey is concerned. He is the composite of everyone who's gone before him, or at least the five key characters who've gone before.

Speaker 1 I mean, if the Arthur tale is made up of all of these stories from earlier in British history, we've been chatting through this and you did mention her name earlier, Boudica.

Speaker 1 Is it surprising or do you think it's not that surprising that actually,

Speaker 1 of all the figures, even though Boudicca is perhaps the most well-known figure from ancient Britain today, that's he didn't take any of Boudicca's story for the tale of King Arthur.

Speaker 17 No, Boudicca, she's important to us, absolutely, and she has a key figure in the early history of Roman Britain and gives us a lesson about what it means to side with the Romans, you know, because Boudicca and her husband Prasutagus are on the Roman side to begin with.

Speaker 17 And it's only after his death. is her people betrayed by Rome and we get this huge fiery vengeance raining down upon the key cities.

Speaker 17 So it has become a major part of our mythology today or British history.

Speaker 17 But bearing in mind that much of what Geoffrey's writing relates to the tribes of what is now Essex and Hertfordshire in that part of the southeast, Boudicca isn't part of that story.

Speaker 17 And the one character who does appear at about the right time is this character, Soderic, which arguably is a garbalisation of Boudicca. and Geoffrey of Monmouth turns her into a man.

Speaker 17 You know, it's King Soderic of the Scythians rather than Queen Boudica of the Acani. And she arrives and starts looting stuff, or he arrives and starts looting stuff in Geoffrey's account.

Speaker 17 And it's swiftly dealt with by a British leader with Roman support. So I think she is there, but her name form has been garbled.

Speaker 17 And bearing in mind that it's only really from the time of Queen Elizabeth I does Boudica take on more resonance in Britain because they're looking for historical precedence of strong female characters resisting an alien sort of imperialism.

Speaker 17 And at the time of Elizabeth I with the Spanish Armada, suddenly Boudicca becomes that model. And she's picked up again during the reign of Charles I when he's with Catherine of Braganza.

Speaker 17 She's picked up again with Victoria. And we get that great big statue that we're familiar with now at the very end of Victoria's reign of Bodicea with her chariot outside the houses of parliament.

Speaker 17 So Boudica arguably has become a far more important person in the last 500 years than she probably was at the time.

Speaker 17 And she doesn't really feature much in Geoffrey Monmouth's account rather than this garbled character at the very beginning.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. Now, Miles, this has been an incredible chat talking about what we know about Arthur, particularly from Geoffrey and Monmouth.

Speaker 1 And looking back at ancient Britain, I must ask before we go, Tristan and Isolde, are there any ancient links to this tale which could be similar to Arthur that you can think of?

Speaker 17 Well, again, I mean, Tristan and Isolde at the court of King Mark, these are very important aspects of Cornish mythology today. And of course, it seems to be that it's their story.

Speaker 17 I was trying to argue whether or not they were real people or not, but their story is very much linked to the islands of Tintangel and North Cornwall.

Speaker 17 So you've got King Mark as this powerful agent, and he does appear in other sort of sources, and there's the Drustanus stone, the sort of big memorial stone, perhaps of the sixth century in southern Cornwall, which could be a precedent for Tristan.

Speaker 17 But the story of King Mark sending Tristan over to Ireland to bring back Isolda, and Tristan and Isolda fall in love, and they sort of Mark seeks vengeance and they hide on the island.

Speaker 17 All these sort of things are very much linked to Tintagil and I think when Geoffrey of Monmouth is writing his text he's looking for places that he can anchor his story to and Kerley in South Wales which is near Monmouth becomes the court of King Arthur that's probably a site that Geoffrey knew quite well the old Roman legionary fortress but Tintagil becomes the point bearing in mind that Arthur is supposed to be descended via his father, Uther, from the House of London, but through his mother from the House of Cornwall, he needs a place for Arthur to be conceived.

Speaker 17 And Tintagl is so resonant with mythology, the story of Tristan and his old and mark, that that is where King Golois, or Golois, as some people call him, and Igurna, that's where they are.

Speaker 17 And that's where Igerna and Uther conceived. Not to put too fine a point on it.
Arthur is conceived there, but it becomes such a strong, mythical, important place in Cornish history.

Speaker 17 It's the ideal place for Geoffrey of Monmouth to place Arthur. He doesn't say he was born there, but certainly his history begins there.

Speaker 17 And it's later versions of the Tristan and Isolde myth that get reworked into the Arthur story. And Tristan becomes Lancelot and Isolde becomes Guinevere.

Speaker 17 And we get that sort of love triangle between them and Mark becomes Arthur. So much later that story does get absorbed into it, but I think it was well known.

Speaker 17 at the time that's why Geoffrey places Tintagl as Arthur's conception point.

Speaker 17 That's why when you go to Tintagil today everything is Arthur connected because it's that side of the story that has been placed there becomes one of those key points upon which the whole mythology of Arthur is grounded.

Speaker 1 Absolutely an absolutely incredible site down in the southwest. Miles this has been an incredible chat.

Speaker 17 Your book on this topic is called Arthur and the Kings of Britain, published by Amberley from All Good and Probably Some Bad Bookshops.

Speaker 1 Fantastic. Miles, it's always great to see you.
So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Speaker 17 Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Dr.
Miles Russell talking through the figures, the real-life historical figures that helped shape the legendary King of the Britons, King Arthur.

Speaker 1 I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening.
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