Historicity of King Arthur

The historicity of King Arthur is treated in the book’s prefatory material as a question distinct from the imaginative authority of the Arthurian story. Caxton argues that Arthur was a real king, drawing on chronicles, reported relics, and traditions attached to places; the later editor declines to settle the historical question and judges that most of the narrative’s events and geography cannot be placed within verifiable history. The contrast is not simply between belief and disbelief: it shows how medieval claims, local memory, literary geography, and later historical caution give Arthur both a putative past and a legendary reach.

The question and its evidence

The editor notes that recent critics tended to prefer the belief in Arthur’s actual existence associated with Hume and Gibbon over Milton’s scepticism, but explicitly declines to decide the matter. He observes that Malory’s so-called historical chapters seem mainly derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Brithonum, while some of their material also appears in romances. That account identifies a literary source for the historical narrative; it does not, by itself, confirm the narrated events.

Caxton’s preface presents a more affirmative case. He says that some people held Arthur to be fictitious because certain chronicles omitted him. In answer, those who urged Caxton to print the history pointed to Arthur’s reported tomb at Glastonbury, accounts in the Polychronicon and the history of Bochas, Geoffrey’s British history, and remembered traces in different parts of England. Their argument treats the convergence of written authorities and place-bound traditions as evidence against dismissing Arthur altogether.

The preface also invokes material objects. It names a seal said to remain at Westminster in a setting of beryl, Gawaine’s skull and Cradok’s mantle at Dover Castle, a Round Table at Winchester, and Launcelot’s sword elsewhere. Caxton further cites great stones, underground ironwork, and royal vaults at Camelot, reportedly seen by people then living. The list conveys the force of the evidence as Caxton presents it: Arthur’s past seems distributed across shrines, castles, relics, and local monuments. It records an argument made on the authority of those claims, rather than independently verifying the objects or their attribution.

Caxton concludes that it would be unreasonable to deny a king named Arthur. He emphasizes that Arthur is counted among the Nine Worthies and described as the foremost of the three Christian figures, and that stories of his deeds circulated widely beyond England in French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Yet Caxton also frames the relative neglect of Arthur in his own country as a puzzle, invoking the biblical saying that a prophet is not accepted in his own country. The preface thus makes Arthur’s international renown and his English associations part of the case for remembering him.

A historicalized story, a legendary chronology

The editor draws a firm distinction between the apparent specificity of one campaign and the broader historical limits of Malory’s account. Arthur’s march to Rome, he argues, is described with enough geographical accuracy to suggest that Malory may have known the route, which would have been familiar to soldiers, priests, and merchants in the time of Edward IV. The qualification matters: a plausible knowledge of roads is not presented as proof that the campaign happened as narrated.

The larger sequence belongs, in the editor’s assessment, to Arthur’s legendary golden age rather than to a history that can be fixed in time. It begins with Arthur’s election after Uther’s death, following an assembly of the Lords and Commons at London’s greatest church, guided by Merlin and the Bishop of Canterbury. Arthur then makes Carlion, Camelot, or both his headquarters in wars against Cornwall, Wales, and the North, aided by the king of France. The narrative gives this succession of political and military events the shape of national history, but the editor says they cannot be brought within historical limits.

The Roman episode makes that historicalizing scale especially clear. After Lucius demands tribute, Arthur claims the empire for himself as Constantine’s representative, holds a parliament at York, and crosses from Sandwich to Barflete in Flanders. He fights the Roman and Saracen forces in Burgundy, kills Lucius and his allies, and sends their bodies to the Roman Senate and Podestà as his answer to the demand for tribute. He then travels through Lombardy and Tuscany to Rome, where the Pope crowns him emperor. After establishing his lands from Rome to France and rewarding his followers, he returns to England, apparently to devote himself to his role as head of Christian knighthood. The route and political detail give the episode historical texture; in the editor’s account, they do not secure the whole sequence as documented history.

The unstable geography of Arthur’s kingdom

Elsewhere the editor calls the geography fanciful, describing a narrative that moves as if by Merlin’s magic among Caerleon, Carlisle, Winchester, London, St Albans, and Camelot. The story begins within a night’s ride of Tintagil Castle, then passes through several locations before reaching Carlion. The editor identifies Carlion with Caerleon-upon-Usk but notes that Malory appears to make it interchangeable with Carlisle, also known by the Anglo-Norman form Cardoile. In the History of Merlin, Cardoile is said to be in Wales; elsewhere, Wales and Cumberland are similarly blurred. Place names therefore supply the impression of a mapped kingdom even as their identities and locations shift.

Camelot is the most revealing instance of that instability. Caxton’s preface seems to place it in Wales, perhaps identifying it with Caerleon, where the Roman amphitheatre was called Arthur’s Round Table. Malory appears at one point to connect Camelot with Avelion, or Glastonbury, and elsewhere identifies it with Winchester, whose Round Table was described as an oaken board bearing the knights’ names. These identifications associate Arthur’s court with several places and objects; they do not resolve the question of where the literary Camelot is meant to be.

The editor sets these competing identifications beside the Somerset site then known by the name Camelot. Leland, writing early in Henry VIII’s reign, called it Camallate or Camalat and described a famous town or castle on a naturally strong hill. Four ditches and four walls enclosed a central area of about thirty acres; foundations and wall remains were visible, and Roman pavements, urns, and coins had been found there. Maps used names including the Castle of Camellek, while the 1727 edition of Camden’s Magna Britannica reports that inhabitants called it King Arthur’s Palace. The later name Cadbury Castle, the editor suggests, may reflect successive Roman, British, and Saxon associations with the site. Such remains make a compelling landscape for Arthurian memory, but the editorial account does not identify them as proof that Arthur lived or ruled there.

Local memory and the life of legend

The Somerset traditions extend beyond ruins and names into stories attached to the surrounding landscape. Queen-Camel, East Camel, and West Camel still bore names connected with Camalat; the river Camel ran nearby, crossed by Arthur’s Bridge, and Arthur’s well rose from the hillside. Although visitors could no longer be shown Arthur’s Hunting Causeway, Round Table, or Palace as they once had been, a local account preserved the image of a king and his court visible through golden gates within the enchanted circle. The reported disappearance of particular landmarks did not end the tradition: the landscape continued to be read through Arthur’s story.

The editor attributes a detailed topographical description of Camelot to the Somerset antiquarian J. H. Bennett, rector of South Cadbury, who gathered local accounts as well as traditions recorded by Leland and others. Bennett connected the site’s strategic position with the Isle of Avilion, Glastonbury Abbey, and Almesbury Nunnery. He proposed that, during the century after the Saxons took Sarum in 551, Camelot may have served as the capital of the South British kingdoms and helped hold back further conquest in Somerset. The editor presents this as Bennett’s suggestion about circumstances that might have joined Camelot to the hero’s legend, not as an established identification of Arthur’s capital.

A tale of silver-shod horses illustrates how local tradition could persist across centuries. Leland recorded a silver horseshoe said to have been found at Camelot; Bennett later reported a peasant’s account that Arthur and his men rode around the hill at the full moon and watered their horses at the wishing well. The editor connects this living local story to a much earlier report by Gervase of Tilbury, writing around 1212. Gervase described foresters who said that, at noon on alternate days or at midnight under a full moon, they saw hunters with dogs and heard horns; when questioned, the hunters identified themselves as members of Arthur’s household and fellowship. In this account, repeated retelling supplies continuity between medieval report and local memory, while leaving the supernatural story distinct from verifiable history.

Historical caution and literary authority

The editor’s final position is deliberately limited: apart from the potentially familiar Roman route, the history and geography offer no secure basis for dating the successive events. The narrative’s inconsistent place identifications and undatable sequence resist reconstruction as ordinary political history. At the same time, the text’s historical language, named routes, claimed monuments, and accumulated local associations explain how Arthur could be treated as more than a fictional name by Caxton and his informants.

The distinction matters to the book’s purpose as well as to historical inquiry. Caxton presents the deeds of Arthur and his knights as worthy of remembrance and proposes reading them for instruction: virtuous conduct may be followed, while vice may bring shame. The editor’s caution about whether Arthur existed does not erase that cultural force. Instead, the different claims remain visible together: Arthur as a king asserted by Caxton’s authorities, as the center of a romance whose geography expands and shifts, and as a figure kept present in the ruins and stories of places associated with his name.