By Francis Young, The Telegraph / Tintagel is a bleak and remote place. It takes determination to reach this village on the north coast of Cornwall: tourists have to stray from the main roads that lead to sun and surf. But that doesn’t stop those drawn to the legend of King Arthur. Since the 12th century, the impressive castle has been mythologized as the place of his conception; a cave that you can walk through at low tide is named after Arthur’s legendary wizard, Merlin.
The memory of Arthur (and the question of his existence) looms over Tintagel in the truest sense of the word - in the form of Rubin Eynon's eight-foot-tall [2.43-meter] bronze sculpture, as unreal and ethereal as the legend itself.
It has long been fashionable to question whether Arthur was ever a real person - indeed, such skepticism is practically academic orthodoxy. But in Tyrants and Traders - a history of early medieval Britain - Ken Dark is prepared to shake up this trend, at least to some extent. The lack of sources, he argues, does not completely destroy the evidence for the king.
"Arthur" was a relatively rare name in Britain, and the fact that it began to appear as a name for royal males, even from the second half of the 6th century onwards, suggests that there was a real person behind this wave. The often-heard claim that Arthur is simply "fiction" also ignores the embarrassing problem that we have no evidence that 5th-century Britons wrote speculative literature - nor any reason to think that they did.
So dark is the era in which Arthur (probably) lived that historians and archaeologists aren’t even sure what to call it. The period, often described as stretching from the end of Roman Britain in 410 to the Anglo-Saxon invasion around 577 and the creation of their kingdoms, was once called the Dark Ages (a term that has become unpopular, but which refers to the obscurity of the evidence rather than the lack of culture or human achievement).
But today it is more often called “post-Roman”, “sub-Roman” or “Arthurian” for those of a more romantic bent. There is no clearly defined chronology, because Roman rule continued in many parts of the country, especially Wales. Our sources are limited to a handful of well-known texts by authors such as Gildas, Bede, Neni and Patrick, and, until recently, the post-Roman period was quite inscrutable even to archaeologists.
But advances in archaeology are changing that. While archaeological interpretation has often centered around a single, famous site (Stonehenge for the Bronze Age; Bath for the Romans), Tintagel has become the symbol of archaeologists of the post-Roman era.
In the 20th century, a Dark Ages trading center was discovered under Ralegh Radford's trowel. More recently, historians have suggested that Tintagel was an important royal center, perhaps a kind of capital of the kingdom of Dumnonia (modern-day Devon and Cornwall). On an island ravaged by internal and interethnic wars, it made more sense to settle on a deserted cape - even if it meant facing a dangerous sea.
Everything else we know about the period comes from a small number of sources, such as Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae [On the Destruction of Britain], a powerful denunciation of the corruption of Britain (and its fate under the invading Saxons).
It is difficult to date, but it gives us a vivid picture of the divisive politics and religion of Dark Medieval Britain, along with five kings (compared to a lion, a leopard, a bear, and a dragon), whom Gildas harshly condemns for breaking oaths, sacrilege, murder, fornication, adultery, and deceit. Bede, meanwhile, tells us that the Briton community was scattered in a diaspora, from southern Scotland in the north to Brittany and Galicia in the south. It was the connection with Brittany that explains why medieval French speakers so quickly began to tell stories about Arthur.
Darku has a possible candidate for Arthur - Arthur, son of Peter, a low-ranking member of the 6th-century Welsh royal family, who would have been of the right age to have won a battle in 537 (one of the most reliable accounts of a battle involving Arthur). But even if not all readers are convinced, Darku's general claim that a flesh-and-blood Arthur existed will still be compelling.
The book strikes a rare balance between conveying, on the one hand, the often ambiguous and controversial nature of archaeological interpretation and, on the other, keeping the narrative understandable to the general reader.
"Tyrants and Traders" intelligently tackles some controversial issues, comprehensively deals with the latest archaeological research, and puts forward some intriguing - though ultimately unprovable - hypotheses about Britain's most mysterious historical era. /Telegraph
