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Who was King Arthur

The past is now becoming clearer.

The hillfort at SOUTH CADBURY, refortified like several others after the departure of the Roman armies, was permanently occupied and defended, the stronghold of a sophisticated leader, even a regional capital.

GLASTONBURY TOR may have been home to a petty chieftain with a taste for wine and oil from the Mediterranean and a facility for metal working. Earlier it might possibly have been a Roman temple site. The pagan temple on Creech Hill, LAMYATT, was probably succeeded by a Christian oratory and cemetery. There were Christians living beside the Roman Fosse Way near what came to be SHEPTON MALLET. Not all was chaos when the Romans withdrew.

But who were the governors who took their place? Our only direct answer from that time comes from St Gildas, a preacher, not an historian. Gildas wanted to stir up his fellow countrymen in Western Britain to return to their old, peaceful and civilised way of life now that the warlords had defeated the English. For Gildas the warlords had failed, and he approved of only one, Ambrosius Aurelianus.

But another warlord was remembered in Western Britain, and epics were written and sung about him there, in Ireland, and even in Brittany in the 6th century. One of these epics, known as Nennius, has survived. The hero of Nennius is King Arthur the warrior, who fought and won twelve battles against the English, the last and greatest the battle of Badon Hill. The Welsh were quite certain about that battle, which they dated to the year 516. And in their Annals they mentioned another, the battle of Camlann in 537,where Arthur and Medraut fell.

Now this is not exactly a provable past. It is agreed that there was a battle at Badon Hill, more likely in the 490's than precisely in 516, but Badon Hill has not been found; Badbury Rings in Dorset or a site near Bath find greatest support. A mobile cavalry commander winning against English troops on foot makes sense of the twelve battles apparently fought all over the country. But proof there is none; no absolute proof of Arthur, the warrior king. Only an early, strong and persistent tradition drawn from the epics of North Western and Western Britain, and a countryside in which to place him.