by Keith Redfern

Created on: September 02, 2010

King Arthur was probably not a real person, but an amalgam of several, and exactly when and where these several people lived, or what their actual names were, are facts shrouded deep in that grey area between myth, legend and truth.

Some say Arthur was a Norman invention - others that he really did preside over a Round Table surrounded by the Knights with such well known names, Lancelot, Galahad and the rest.

My parents took us to Tintagel in Cornwall for several successive holidays, and there it is very difficult to separate truth from legend and speculation designed to attract spending tourists.

So who was the real Arthur?    Or was there a real Arthur?

To discover the truth we must travel back to the pagan era in the British Isles - a time when High Kings ruled their separate kingdoms, druid priests led the people in pagan rites, and, as Norman Davies has written in “The Isles”, “tribal wars and cattle raids raged unabated”.

It was a period of superstition and great instability, with fighting and force the only means of establishing and maintaining local rule.     There were kings in Gaelic Eire, clan chiefs in Caledonia - later Scotland, powerful princes in Wales and kings and chiefs in the land now known as England, and it is here that the Arthur legend is based.

England changed over a period of about five hundred years from an untidy collection of tiny states, to a dozen or so warring kingdoms, and eventually to two rival regions, one to the west in which the ancient Celts or Britons still maintained supremacy, and the other dominated by invaders from across the North Sea, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other lesser tribal groups.     The Celtic area was gradually eroded away by attritional fighting until only Cumbria (NW England), Wales and Cornwall remained.     Meanwhile the region of the Anglo-Saxons, as the invaders became known, was eventually united into one individual kingdom.

As the Anglo-Saxons advanced and the Britons were required to fight one rearguard action after another, British leaders took on heroic status, and there is evidence to suggest that King Arthur was one of these.    Certainly the castle at Tintagel, where Arthur is said, by the locals, to have held his court, would have been the type of defensive position of vital importance to the defensive British armies.

But was Arthur the leader of the Celtic Britons?   

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