King Arthur by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert [Christopher Hibbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies/Royalty
ISBN: 9781612308128
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

The rediscovery in 1962 of the apparent site of Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury led to renewed interest in the area of Somerset, and the persistent legend that the hill known as South Cadbury Castle, twelve miles southeast of Glastonbury, was once the famous Camelot.

In the early sixteenth century, the antiquarian John Leland visited the village of South Cadbury while touring England to gather information for his work, History and Antiquities of this Nation. The hill, the villagers told him, was “Camallate, sumtyme a famose toun or castelle.” They had heard “say that Arture much resortid to Camalat.” The top of the hill, where the ramparts of a centuries-old British hill fort could be traced beneath the grass, was known as Arthur’s Palace, or so another antiquarian, William Camden, recorded when he visited Cadbury in Queen Elizabeth I’s day. Within less than an hour’s walk were two villages named Queen’s Camel and West Camel. On the banks of the stream that wound through them, the battle of Camlann had been fought, where Mordred was slain and from which Arthur, seriously wounded, was carried to the Isle of Avalon at Glastonbury, a few miles away.

These local traditions have an undeniable air of authenticity. King Arthur’s Causeway, which used to run across the marsh beneath the ramparts of the hill fort, is still visible along the fields of surrounding farms. The stream still winds through the fields between them, and hurried burials did take place in the past, indicating that a battle had been fought there. Over the centuries, plows turning up the ground of the eighteen-acre field on top of the summit uncovered a remarkable assortment of Roman coins, pottery, sling stones, building materials, and even traces of walls. It seemed that the hill, which had been occupied by Neolithic people more than 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, was still inhabited at the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. What archaeologists and antiquarians did not know, however, was if there ever had been an extensive reoccupation of the fort in the late fifth or early sixth century, the period in which Arthur must have lived.

In the 1890s, a party searching for evidence of such a reoccupation on the hill, an elderly man asked them if they had come to take away the sleeping king from the hollow hill. What that group found was not recorded, but a more rigorous excavation carried out shortly before World War I uncovered fragments of Romano-British pottery, along with artifacts featuring late Celtic workmanship. This was scarcely enough to establish a connection between South Cadbury Castle and Camelot.

In the 1950s, however, further discoveries were made, including pottery dating from the Neolithic period and the pre-Roman Iron Age. Most interesting from the Arthurian point of view were pottery fragments similar to some already unearthed at the Early Christian monastery at Tintagel in Cornwall, as well as other shards of what may be a Merovingian glass bowl imported from the Continent in the sixth century.

These discoveries were identified by Dr.

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