It is now common to write about the discovery of Arthur’s grave as an obvious fraud perpetrated by the monks to raise money after the recent fire. This cynicism is supported by a misapprehension about the money-spinning potential of the find. Medieval pilgrims, though they bear some affinity to modern tourists, did not visit religious sites just for a chance to see the graves of famous people and buy the souvenirs. They went to receive the religious benefits, usually indulgences off some time due in Purgatory, bestowed on those sites by the ecclesiastical authorities, or, more immediately, to experience the healing or other miraculous powers attributed to the bones of the saints. If they were handing money over to the church, they expected a quid pro quo.
Churches like Glastonbury wished to have powerful men and women buried in them for prestige, certainly, but more importantly for the grants of land and other sources of revenue which accompanied them, to provide chantries for the souls of the deceased.
The grave of Arthur failed on both these counts. Glastonbury was already famous for its antiquity and claimed many important relics. All the monks had to gain was a slightly raised profile and the possibility that upper-class Arthurian enthusiasts might choose to be buried in proximity to their hero. That was a vain hope, and it does not explain why they would arbitrarily choose Arthur. There were plenty of important characters, saints like Joseph of Arimathea, for instance, the discovery of whose bones would be just as sensational. This is not to say that the discovery of Arthur’s tomb was not made up or embellished by the monks, but it does cast doubt on the casual charges that it was a money-making hoax too common in modern accounts.
If the monks did not stand to benefit from the find, another culprit often singled out to gain is the King of England. The argument runs, to follow Barber (1986), among many others, ‘Arthur’s grave may have been inspired by Henry II himself: the hope of Arthur’s return was still a political rallying point for the Welsh, and the discovery neatly destroyed a propaganda weapon used to good effect by the king’s enemies.’ There is absolutely nothing to support this view. The intelligentsia of whatever political persuasion saw belief of Arthur’s survival as a vulgar superstition. It beggars belief how the king’s enemies (who included his sons and his wife as much as Welsh nationalists) could expect to benefit from a popular superstition. Arthur was hardly likely to turn up to help them out, nor is it easy to see how they could have used the legend to mobilise support.
The belief of Arthur’s survival was particularly strong in Cornwall (Coe and Young 1995), which had no noticeably anti-Plantagenet feeling, and was a cause célèbre, as reported earlier, between Henry’s allies the Bretons and his enemies the French. Gerald reports that Henry heard the story from an aged British singer and passed on the exact location of the burial. If this is true (and there is no reason to think it is) and the king had a political agenda which involved the discovery, why did he not get the monks to ‘find’ it straight away? He was, remember, dead before the body turned up. Richard the Lionheart, his successor, made no political capital out of the burial. Richard’s nephew and heir, Arthur of Brittany (aged three when the burial was discovered), seems to have been specifically named to hark back to the Arthurian glories, and could be readily seen by Welsh and Bretons as a potential King Arthur come again.
Even if the Plantagenets had some peculiar agenda for proving that Arthur was dead, why they would have chosen to do this by discovering his body at Glastonbury is not explained. They could, for instance, have refused to support such court writers as Wace and Layamon who, in works written for them, disseminated the idea of Arthur’s survival in the vernacular languages. With the whole Angevin Empire to choose from, they could have decided to find Arthur on Isle de Sein, at Camelford, Caerleon, London, Silchester, Stonehenge or any other location which took their fancy which actually featured in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works. The choice of Glastonbury is inexplicable.
The motives of making money or political capital do not seem likely for inventing a burial. That leaves the simplest explanation the most plausible: the monks actually thought they had discovered the body of King Arthur. Could they have been right?
Let us start with the most obvious piece of evidence, the cross. As Camden draws it, it does not have the look of a late twelfth-century object. Its shape and inscription seem earlier than this. It does not, however, look like a fifth/sixth-century memorial. Nothing like it has ever been found at any other site of the period. Monuments to Arthur’s contemporaries are of carved stone. Their inscriptions are in an expansive, curving script. We have already noted the memorial of Voteporix, but we could also add, among many others, one actually sited at Slaughter Bridge, Camelford. The metal cross was, however, found – according to Gerald – attached to a stone slab, and in association with two no-longer legible inscribed stones. It is therefore possible that its inscription might be based on an older carved one, and represent a renovation of a period between the sixth and the late twelfth centuries. Ralegh Radford (Ashe 1968) suggests that the cross was added to the burial in the middle of the tenth century, when the work of St Dunstan raised the level of the cemetery. This might have made the standing stones unreadable and necessitated a new marker.
Some have drawn sceptical attention to the phrase ‘The famous King Arthur’ as an unlikely one for a contemporary inscription, arguing that Arthur was not a king. As we have seen, Arthur could have at least ended his reign with the title rex, self-styled or granted by contemporaries. Vortiporius was almost certainly a king. However, his memorial says he was Protector, not Rex. Even the hyperbole of the description ‘famous’ is not unparalleled. The memorial stone to Catmanus of Gwynedd calls him ‘most renowned of all kings’. Boasting was a Celtic tradition and his heirs might want to celebrate the deceased’s fame. Perhaps significantly, though, the phrase is almost a direct quotation from Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The most problematic feature of the cross is that it proclaims that Arthur is ‘buried in the Isle of Avalon’. While grave slabs could use a variety of words to describe who they commemorated, I cannot find a single example where the place of burial is named. By their nature, this is obvious as the memorial marks the location. The only conceivable value of the inscription giving the name of its own location was to identify Glastonbury as the Isle of Avalon.
The discovery of Arthur’s body at Glastonbury was bound to raise objections from readers of Geoffrey of Monmouth that Arthur had last been seen en route to the Isle of Avalon. If he had not recovered, but had died there, it might be expected that he was buried there as well. For twelfth-century etymologists, it was clear that Glastonbury was an English name and that, if the foundation pre-dated the Saxon Conquest, it must have had an earlier British name. Caradoc of Llancarfan obligingly gives it – Inis Guitrin. Gerald of Wales copies this ‘[Glastonbury] used also to be called in British Inis Guitrin, that is the isle of glass; hence the Saxons called it Glastonbury. For in their tongue glas means Glass and a camp or town is called buri’ (de Principis Instructione in Bromwich 1961).
Welsh sources do not know of anywhere called Avalon. The Welsh Bruts opted for Ynis Afallach as a translation of Geoffrey’s Avalon. After the discovery of Arthur’s body, this name rather than the established Ynis Guitrin was applied to Glastonbury. Afallach means orchard and Bromwich (1961) argues fiercely that this is its meaning here, following the consensus that Avalon means place of apples. However, an equally persuasive case can be made that the name was read as a personal one, yielding a meaning of ‘Afallach’s Island’. Aballac appears near the head of two of the Harleian Genealogies, and it is from a similar source that Geoffrey appears to have drawn the name Aballac, used in his History for one of the daughters of ancient King Ebraucus. Owain’s mother in the Triads is named Modron, daughter of Aballach, reinforcing the idea that this is a personal name.
The Margam Chronicle explains the inscription thus: ‘for that place [Glastonbury] was once surrounded by marshes, and is called the Isle of Avalon, that is the isle
of apples. For Aval means in British an apple.’ Gerald elaborates the same theme, saying that apples used to abound in that place. He draws on Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini to add that ‘Morgan, a noblewoman who was ruler of that region and closely related to Arthur [in a later source he says cousin] . . . carried him away to the island now called Glastonbury to be healed of his wounds’ (Thorpe 1978). Gerald later berates those who made this ‘Morgan le Fay’ a fantastical sorceress. By this time, Gerald had heard the version deriving Avalon from a personal name, ‘a certain Vallo, who used to rule over the area’. In the confusion that exists over William of Malmesbury’s de Antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesiae, we cannot be sure when a similar passage translating ‘insula Avallonia’ as ‘island of Apples’ from the British Aballa – apple, or alternatively from ‘a certain Avalloc, who used to live in this place with his daughters’ was incorporated in the text (Scott 1981).
Geoffrey’s Avalon is not Glastonbury, an identification he was perfectly able to make if he had considered it. It is an island in the sea and not an ancient ecclesiastical foundation. The inscription on the cross seems intended to harmonise an established idea that Arthur’s last resting place was Avalon with the fact that his body had turned up at Glastonbury. That can only mean that the inscription on the cross post-dates Geoffrey and is therefore, at the most, only a generation earlier than the discovery.
Radford’s mid-tenth-century explanation is implausible as we do have material from this period relating to Arthur, Annales Cambriae and the Vatican Recension. The latter is the closest a Saxon abbot might have been expected to come to Arthurian material. In those sources, there is no indication that Arthur is a famous king. In fact, the Vatican Recension specifically denies this. Finally, it is inconceivable that all sources between then and 1190 omitted to mention that Glastonbury was once called Avalon. This in spite of the fact that some, like Caradoc, provided a British name for the monastic centre. Radford’s tenth-century cross is just as unlikely as a sixth-century one. If an inscribed cross was an original feature of Arthur’s grave, it is highly unlikely to have been the one seen and described by Gerald.
The records of Glastonbury Abbey were extensively reproduced by William of Malmesbury. However, they were soon revised in the light of Geoffrey of Monmouth and increasing interest in Arthurian material, making it difficult to disentangle the various strands. Gerald confirms that by the time of his visit Arthur was ‘much praised in the history of the excellent monastery of Glastonbury, of which he himself was in his time a distinguished patron and a generous endower and supporter’ (Thorpe 1978), a feature to which Caradoc of Llancarfan alluded.
If we set aside for the moment the issue of the cross, could the grave have been Arthur’s? One possibility, given the unusual oak coffin and the healed head wounds, which could be evidence of trepanning, is a Bronze Age burial. The lack of any concept of prehistory frequently led to extremely ancient finds and sites being associated with historical figures. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s attribution of Stonehenge to a fifth/sixth-century Merlin is a case in point.
However, the absence of grave-goods, the Christian context and the seeming alignment of the grave with the wall of the ancient church all suggest that a historic and Christian burial was intended. If the inscribed ‘pyramids’ were associated with the grave, this would again point to a Christian inhumation. The burial has no affinity to the practice of the only other literate culture, the pagan Romans.
Arthur would certainly have been a Christian. Historia Brittonum and the Annales both associate his victories with Christian symbolism and devotion. From Gildas, there can be no doubt that the victors of Badon were Christians. We would therefore expect that, in reality, he would have been buried at a Christian site according to Christian rites.
Glastonbury was a flourishing centre of some kind in the fifth/sixth centuries. Some high-status person was living on top of Glastonbury Tor, as evidenced by the remains of the dwelling and the indicative ‘Tintagel ware’. The ancient church, too, was probably in existence, given that it was ‘ancient’ in the early eighth century. The site is in the civitas of the Durotriges, close to its border with the Dobunni. This, as we have seen, was a likely site of Arthurian activity and could easily have been patronised by Arthur and his heirs. It might also be seen as the nearest major ecclesiastical site to a final battle in Cornwall, although it seems rather far to come from North Wales or Camboglanna.
If Arthur was buried in Glastonbury, it might explain the lack of a Welsh tradition of his last resting place, or at least the lack of a tradition that his tomb was in Wales. If he was buried outside this locality in an area which soon after would become a Saxon possession, it would explain why his grave became an unknown or unlocatable site.
The burial does not, therefore, stretch credulity very far. As Arthur must be buried somewhere, then outside the ancient church at Glastonbury is the kind of place, if not the very place, that we might expect to find him.
That more than one body was recovered is a common feature of all accounts. No motive has ever been advanced for anyone faking Guenevere’s grave, still less Modred’s. Their presence points towards an actual find of more than one body, with a sweep of likely characters to identify them. Guenevere had been associated with Glastonbury in the Life of St Gildas. As with Arthur, all previous sources were silent as to her burial. From Geoffrey’s account, it seems that he imagined her to be buried at Caerleon.
Though there are hints in the Medieval romances of Arthur having two wives called Guenevere – the False-Guenevere story – these would not result in Arthur’s burial with a ‘second wife’. Similarly, although Guenevere features in abduction stories, none results in Arthur remarrying her, or any scenario where she could be called his second wife. One might argue that such stories preserve a memory of Arthur’s multiple marriages, but unfortunately most were written after the evidence that the Glastonbury cross called her Arthur’s second wife had been disseminated. The Triads alone give an explicit claim that Arthur had three wives, all called Guenevere.
If the Triad and the Glastonbury cross derive from the same legend, then either the Triads have inflated the number of Gueneveres, or we might imagine that the third wife, the adulterous daughter of Ogvran the Giant, would not be buried with Arthur but that Arthur might choose to lie in the same grave as a favoured earlier wife. Gerald was surprised to hear that Arthur was married twice, which suggests the monks might have added to their credibility by omitting that single word Secunda from the cross inscription as Gerald saw it. We might wonder if the Isle of Avalon wording was added to a cross which formerly only included Arthur and his (second) wife.
It is not completely clear that Gerald did read an inscription on the cross. He traced the letters but, given their antiquity or poor state of preservation, may have been reliant on the monks for the transliteration he gives. He was at pains to set down that the cross was not the only proof that this was Arthur’s grave. He referred to ‘signs that the body had been buried here were found in the records of the place, in the letters inscribed on the pyramids (although these were almost obliterated by age) and in the visions . . . of holy men’ (Thorpe 1978).
If Annales Cambriae, or the Mirabilia, for argument’s sake, said that Arthur’s grave was at Glastonbury, and no actual grave had been discovered there, then the information would have fitted comfortably into our theory. It seems a reasonable place for a Christian king operating in south-east Wales and the adjoining area of England to be buried. The burial itself and the circumstances of its discovery are quite believable. Even an inscription calling Arthur a famous king and saying he was buried with his second wife do not strain credulity.
If the monks had left it there, we would have been disposed to view the discovery leniently. It is the inscription identifying the site of Arthur’s grave with Avalon which is unbelievable. It seems, ironically, that the monks, in trying to prove their case, fatally weakened its plausibility.
‘Many tales are told and many l
egends have been invented about King Arthur and his mysterious ending. In their stupidly the British people maintain that he is still alive. Now that the truth is known, I have taken the trouble to add a few more details in this present chapter. The fairy-tales have been snuffed out, and the true and indubitable facts are made known, so that what really happened must be made crystal clear to all and separated from the myths that have accumulated on the subject.’ Gerald of Wales, Speculum Ecclesiae 1216 (White 1997).
So, was there ever a time when a King Arthur ruled over Britain? The popular conception of Arthur as a medieval king of England, was an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth, along with other twelfth-century writers. It is futile to trace that particular model any further back. It is not based on sources, but on assumptions arising from the era in which the authors wrote. That medieval King Arthur could not have existed in the fifth or sixth century. Yet behind that illusory image are the figures of two men with whom we have been particularly concerned, both of whom did exist.
The first was called Arthur. Sometime before the ninth century (and we have argued about 300 years before) northern Britons listened to a lament on the fallen hero Guaurthur. As the poet brought to mind his generosity with his valued horses, his prowess, the 300 men who fought around him, the slaughter before the Roman walls, the audience understood how a comparison between this man and Arthur strengthened the image and the poignancy of his death.
The Reign of Arthur Page 31