21. The Real Warrior Behind the Fictional King Arthur
Through their puppet ruler Vortigern, the Saxons extorted great tracts of land from the Romano-Britons, then sought more. They eventually launched a massive onslaught that was described by Saint Gildas, a British cleric, who penned De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”), circa 510 – 530. From gradual expansion, the Saxon effort – eventually joined in by fellow Germanic tribes the Jutes and Angles – became a war of conquest that sought to seize all of Britain. As the invaders fought to displace the local inhabitants and replace them with Germanic settlers, the hard-pressed Britons had the good fortune to find an effective warlord, whom subsequent mythology morphed into the fictional King Arthur.
Arthur does not appear in any contemporary sources, but there is evidence that a British war leader, perhaps named Arthur or something close, was active at the time. For example, a sixth-century engraving found in Cornwall bore the name of an important person named “Artognu”. In 2010, Archaeologists found what might have been Arthur’s real Round Table at the site of his reputed Camelot. The fabled edifice was not in a purpose-built castle but was housed instead in a preexisting structure: a Roman amphitheater in Chester. The Round Table was not a literal piece of furniture, but a vast wood and stone structure that could have allowed up to 1,000 of Arthur’s men to gather. Historians believe noblemen would have sat in the front rows of a circular meeting place, while lower-ranked attendees sat on stone benches further back.
