715. King Arthur: The Mysteries of Merlin (Part 3)

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Uther Pendragon and Igraine

2:45A week went by, and the king's passion for Ygrane had become more than he could bear. He summoned Ulfin of Ridd-Karadoc, one of his friends, and told him how desperately besotted he was with Ygrane. If I cannot have her, then I am convinced that I shall suffer a physical breakdown. You must tell me how I can satisfy my desire for her, for otherwise I shall die of this

3:20passion which is burning me up. What you request is impossible, answered Ulfin. We can't possibly approach Ygrane while she's inside the walls of Tintagel. The castle is built high above the sea, which surrounds it on all sides, and the only way across to it is via a narrow isthmus of rock. Three armed men could hold it against you, even were you to stand there with the entire might of Britain at your back. The only man who could possibly solve such a problem is the prophet

3:51Merlin. With his assistance, you might, I think, be able to obtain what you want. And so the king, recognising the truth of what Ulfin had said, sent for Merlin.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Arthur mythos

4:04So that's a thrillingly dramatic moment in the history of the kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. So Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that in the late 1130s. It was the British bunkbuster of the entire Middle Ages. It's the book that basically invented the legend of King Arthur. It packaged and presented him as this towering figure of European stature, as a conqueror who had ruled as the greatest and most glorious king in all British history. And the passage above is the origin story. So Tom,

4:40remind everybody who Uther Pendragon is. So Uther Pendragon is the king in that passage that you were reading. He is the king of Britain. And Igraine, for whom he has the massive hots, is the wife of Gouloir, the Duke of Cornwall. And Geoffrey describes Igraine as being the most beautiful woman in Britain. And Uther and Gouloir had originally been allies in the fight against the Saxons, who we'll be coming to in due course in this episode. But then Uther holds court and he gets his first glimpse of the wife of Gouloir,

5:16the beauteous Igraine. And he falls madly in love with her. And basically, he can't stop gawping at her, you know, eyes wide, kind of salivating. And Gouloir takes massive umbrage at this. And he leaves, he storms out of Uther's court without getting the king's permission and heads off to his duchy of Cornwall. And Uther has a massive strop about this because he feels it's very disrespectful. And he demands that Gouloir return with Igraine. Gouloir refuses. And so Uther invades Cornwall, torching its towns and castles, burning everything in his path.

5:53And because Gouloir knows that he can't resist the might of the king of Britain in the open field of battle, he pursues a guerrilla strategy. But not before, you know, he goes out into the woods and the wilds of Cornwall to pursue this guerrilla strategy. But first of all, he makes sure that Igraine is secure by putting her in his strongest castle. And this, as we heard in the passage that you read, is Tintagil, the fortress of the narrow entrance. And it stands to this day on the northern

6:24cliffs of Cornwall, built on a kind of rocky, precipitous headland, very narrow isthmus, as described in that passage. And it has a natural water supply as well. So you can hold out for a pretty long time. And if you've never been there, it's, I mean, it's, it's a spectacular setting, incredibly dramatic. Yeah. And effectively impregnable. Yeah. However, it's impregnable if you are attacking with conventional, you know, conventional forces. Correct. But what if you have

6:55the world's ultimate weapon of mass destruction, indeed, the world's greatest wizard on your side? Well, in that case, everything is slightly different. And fortunately, the greatest wizard is floating around Cornwall at this point. And this is Merlin, who is indeed a figure of awesome, supernatural potency. So who is he? He is the son of a princess, who, as a very young girl, had been placed in a nunnery, where she had lived a life of virginal purity. But she had been met in

7:33her dreams by a glamorous and faintly sulfurous figure, who turns out to be an incubus, which is a demon in the form of a very handsome young man. And this incubus gets this, this virgin princess, this virgin nun, pregnant. And so Merlin is the son of a woman, a mortal woman, but doesn't have a mortal father. So that makes him very distinctive. It endows him with all kinds of powers. So he is a

8:04prophet. He can see far into the future. And he is an enchanter. And if you want a brilliant spell, then Merlin is your man. And that is what Uther wants. And specifically, he wants a spell that will enable him to sleep with a grain. And Merlin is told this by Uther, and he obliges. So this is what Geoffrey of Monmouth has Merlin say, by means of my magic, I can make you look exactly like Gouloir,

8:36so that you will resemble him in every way. And everything goes to plan. So Uther, who is now looking exactly like Gouloir, is able to ride across the narrow isthmus. He's recognized by the guards who opened the gates to him. He's admitted to the castle. He goes to a grain, who naturally assumes that this is indeed her husband. Uther, disguised as Gouloir, sleeps with a grain. And again, to quote Geoffrey of Monmouth, that very night, she conceived Arthur, most famous of men.

9:09Yeah, but was he? This is the question. So when we were introducing this episode, we talked about how Geoffrey of Monmouth had effectively invented or created the Arthur industry. So up to this point, is Arthur the most famous of men? Or is Geoffrey making that up? Well, the mad thing is, is that by describing Arthur as the most famous of men, Geoffrey basically succeeds in making that claim true. Hitherto, it had not been the case. Previously, Arthur had featured,

9:40you know, in a few obscure Welsh texts, some enigmatic poems, the odd entry in a Latin chronicle or two, but really nothing more than that, nothing that would reverberate beyond the bounds of Wales. But now, thanks to the incredible success of the history of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey's history, all of this changes. And loads of what Geoffrey includes in this book will become part of the common currency

10:13of Arthurian legend and of medieval literature more generally. And it's actually, it's still being recycled to this day. So examples include the whole Arthur being conceived in Tintagel's story, which Geoffrey basically seems to have made up. Anyone who has seen John Borman's film Excalibur, it opens with this scene. Uther galloping across the dragon's breath, this kind of blue mist, which has been blown by Merlin across the sea. It is also Geoffrey who introduces Excalibur,

10:47which he actually calls it Caliburnus. So that's the kind of the Latin form of it. And it's Geoffrey who gives us the name of Arthur's spear, which we've already mentioned. It's called Ron. Yeah. And so both Ron and Caliburnus are the Latinized forms of names that Geoffrey had found in Welsh poetry describing the sword and spear of Arthur respectively. And also there are other aspects of the legend that we've already touched on. So in episode one, we talked about this Mordred's treachery, the last battle, Arthur being taken to Avalon. All of this originates with Geoffrey of

11:20Monmouth. So essentially, without Geoffrey, there would have been no Arthurian legends. Dominic, you would call it the mythos. No Arthurian mythos. But is Geoffrey conscious that he's inventing the mythos? Well, Geoffrey is describing it to us rather differently, isn't he? He's not like J.R.R. Tolkien, who's happy for his works to be sold as fiction. He's selling this as fact, right? Hence the title of his book. Well, yeah, the history of the Kings of Britain. He's absolutely marketing it as fact.

11:55And since he did actually make most of it up, I think you could compare him not only to Tolkien or Rowling, but perhaps to Dan Brown. There's more than a whiff of the Da Vinci code about this. Because a bit like Dan Brown, I mean, he's got this mad lunatic story, but he says, oh, you know, Leonardo was part of it and, you know, the Knights Templar and things like that. But basically, Geoffrey of Monmouth had done something quite similar. So he's dug up sources for some of the stories that he tells, as we shall see. But I think most of them he does basically

12:30seem to have invented. And he disguises the bits for which he doesn't have recognisable sources by claiming that he'd been given a very ancient book, those are his words, by the Archdeacon of Oxford. It had been written in Welsh, and Geoffrey has translated it. This is the claim. Yeah. Now, it has to be said, there is absolutely no evidence that this book ever existed. And it is true that at the time, there were scholars who basically suspected Geoffrey of having perpetrated

13:03a massive fraud.

Medieval reception of Geoffrey's history

13:04Yeah.

Medieval reception of Geoffrey's history

13:05You know, and they're right. I think this is one of the most influential literary frauds of all time. And a fun example of somebody who suspected that Geoffrey was a fraud is a guy called Gerald of Wales, a very entertaining writer, goes around Ireland and Wales being incredibly rude about the Irish and the Welsh. And he's writing half a century later. And he describes a man who is being oppressed by demons. And to quote Gerald of Wales, whenever the gospel of St. John was placed on this poor man's chest, the evil spirits like startled birds would fly away. But should the gospel be removed

13:37and replaced by Geoffrey's book, then back they would flock and in larger numbers than before. Sounds like a sort of internal Welsh literary spat. It does slightly. And I think it's telling that Gerald was Welsh, because perhaps he's more clear-eyed about exactly what it is that Geoffrey is inventing. But in England, and in fact, across the rest of Christendom, I mean, even the most reputable chroniclers are blown away by Geoffrey's book

14:08when they read it. So the key endorsement for it, and this, I guess, is like Lord Dacre saying that the Hitler diaries were authentic. Except Lord Dacre retracted that, didn't he? He did. This is never retracted. And Geoffrey's book is taken as fact. The guy who is the Lord Dacre of of this whole shenanigans is an English chronicler called Henry of Huntingdon. And he's traveling to Rome. And in January 1139, he stops off at an abbey called Beck in Normandy. And in this abbey,

14:43he is shown Geoffrey's recently completed text. It's just been not exactly published, but it's appeared. And he reads it and he declares himself stupefied. And this matters because Henry of Huntingdon is a much admired historian himself. And to boot, he is the Archdeacon of Huntingdon. So his commendation is very, very influential. There's a feeling that this is a commendation that can be trusted. And so it helps to ensure that Geoffrey's work is read not just as a compilation

15:16of remarkable stories and entertaining tales, but as a serious, credible work of history. And a measure of how rapidly it gains a reputation of something that can be trusted is that 10 years after Henry of Huntingdon had given his commendation, another English chronicler, Alfred of Beverly, he states explicitly that it is essentially an embarrassment for any historian by this point not to have read and engaged with this kind of bombshell research which Geoffrey has

15:51published. This is stuff that any reputable historian should now be on top of. So it's like that, is it Black Athena? It's like one of those kind of books that rockets up and people say, my God, it's transformed the field. Unbelievable. And then only after that do fellow Welshmen say, it's absolutely tosh. Except that Gerald of Wales is ignored. Oh, sad. Though, you know, as we said, there are naysayers, but I think partly people are convinced by it.

16:21In a kind of academic sense, but I think also people just want to believe it. Yeah, of course. It's so fun. It's so exciting. And as a result of this, you get two key figures who previously had been barely known outside Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, being established almost overnight as titanic figures, not in the mythology of Europe, but in the history of Europe. And the first of these, of course, is Arthur, who is portrayed by Geoffrey, as you said, not just as a king of Britain, but as a great conqueror, you know, the peer of Alexander the

16:54Great or Julius Caesar. And Geoffrey describes him conquering Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Gaul. And he would have conquered Rome had Mordred not stabbed him in the back. So this is when the story of the last battle is introduced. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur isn't a broad fighting Lancelot, who hasn't by this stage been invented, but fighting the emperor of Rome and would have won had it not been for Mordred the Treachery. And this promotion by Geoffrey of Arthur as a world conqueror has real world political

17:29consequences because it's invoked by Edward I to justify his conquest of, his attempted conquest, I should say, of Scotland. And as late as the Elizabethan period, John Dee, so Elizabeth's kind of court necromancer, her sorcerer, is invoking Arthur's conquests as a justification for English naval expansion out into the Atlantic. And it's John Dee who first uses the phrase British Empire. And when he uses that rather than an English empire,

18:03it's because he's invoking the memory of Arthur. So there's a sense in which the whole British empire is named after Arthur's conquests. I love that. Which, of course, didn't happen. But of course, the other character whom Geoffrey summons out of the mists of Welsh legend is the

The historical reality of Merlin

18:23subject of today's episode, which is Merlin. So Merlin, we already introduced him. He is the incredibly powerful wizard whom Uther has enlisted to transform him into this bloke so that he can sleep with a grain. And so basically, without Merlin, there would be no Arthur. And to us, it seems obvious that Merlin is made up. Did it seem obvious to people who were reading Geoffrey of Monmouth's book when it was first written? This is the amazing thing. I had always assumed that was the case. I had thought, you know, this

18:58guy who's a wizard and a prophet, surely people thought that he was a figure of myth and folktale or whatever. But this turns out not to be the case at all. Merlin was widely accepted by, not just by kind of general readers, but by scholars in the Middle Ages as absolutely having been an authentic figure of history. And as a result of this, the feats of magic and of prophecy which he is supposed to have performed make him an object of unusual fascination. Because essentially,

19:33he is the only figure who issues prophecies who can be accepted by medieval intellectuals as having actually existed. And the consequence of this is that over the course of the Middle Ages, in the stories that are told about Arthur, Merlin comes to play an ever more kind of proactive role. Because essentially, the writers of the romances are giving readers what they want. People want to know more about Merlin. So in Geoffrey's history, Merlin vanishes from the scene directly. He has transformed

20:09Uther into the image of Gouloir. So according to Geoffrey, Gouloir, the husband of Ygrin, is killed that same night in a skirmish. Uther is therefore free to marry Ygrin, and they live happily ever after as king and queen. And when Arthur is born, he is raised as the heir to the throne. There's no kind of complications about that. And so when Uther dies, he's poisoned in St. Albans, according to Geoffrey. There's a very smooth succession. Arthur is 15 years old. He can sit

20:44on the throne and rule. And there's absolutely no need for him, for instance, to pull a sword from a stone to demonstrate that he's the rightful king of Britain. Everyone accepts it. So no need for Merlin to play the sort of the Obi-Wan Kenobi role that he's best known for? No need at all. But anyone who has seen The Sword and Stone will know that this is not how the myth ultimately takes form. Because by the time Mallory comes to write the Mort to Arthur, and we've been saying basically the myth of Arthur that people have in their heads now essentially comes from Mallory. In Mallory's account, Merlin takes the newborn Arthur,

21:22and he gives him to an obscure knight called Sir Ector, to be raised alongside Sir Ector's own son, Kay. And Kay is the useless knight who in due course will become the seneschal. Because Arthur has been growing up as a boy in obscurity, he needs to demonstrate his right to the throne of Britain. And so to facilitate this, Merlin magics up the sword in the stone to demonstrate in the most spectacular manner possible Arthur's right to rule as king. And this motif seems to be drawn from legends of saints in Italy, who around the period when

21:57the story is introduced, are drawing swords from stones. Why are they taking swords from stones? To demonstrate their holiness. I mean, to demonstrate, you know, what they say is right. It's essentially, it seems to have become a kind of recognized way of demonstrating your fitness. I mean, there must have been an awful lot of people putting swords in stones to begin with. Well, Merlin, I suppose. Or God. I don't think the question of how the swords get in the stones bear too much inquiry, to be honest. Anyway, you just have to accept it. Arthur draws the

22:30sword from the stone and he's thereby becomes the rightful king of Britain. And once he's on the throne, Merlin is serving him as his kind of teacher, his guide, his advisor. He's kind of Gandalf to Frodo, Dumbledore to Harry Potter. But in due course, Merlin does vanish from the scene because he ends up besotted by one of the damsels of the Lady of the Lake, even though he knows as he is falling in love with this damsel that she is going to prove his doom. And sure enough,

23:02the happy couple go on a holiday to Cornwall, where else? And there, Merlin shows his girlfriend a magic stone. So he knows how to show a girl a good time. And to quote Mallory, by her subtle working, she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her wit of the marvels there. But she wrought so there for him that he came never out for all the craft he could do. So this is Nimue, the girl who tricks him. Yeah. Yes. And so supposedly Merlin is still buried beneath that rock to this day. Yeah. Somewhere in Cornwall, waiting to be let out.

23:34An important lesson in not falling for the wiles of beautiful young women. Particularly if they're from lakes. Yes. So people, you know, they read all this, they hear all the stories and they say, well, this definitely happened. Merlin sounds pretty real to me. So these kind of romance stories, I don't think they do think happened. Okay. I mean, I think they recognize that it's entertainment. But I mean, just to reiterate, they do think that Merlin, as well as being a figure of romance and fantasy,

24:07there had been a real figure called Merlin. And there's a brilliant book on this, on just how historical Merlin was believed to have been in the middle ages by Anne Lawrence Mathas, the true history of Merlin, the magician. And she writes in that his feats of magic were at least potentially real historical events in themselves. And thus they provided evidence of what magical power could do. And the one thing more than anything else that people are obsessed by, and this is something that Geoffrey was obsessed by too, is the sense of Merlin as having been an

24:41authentic prophet, a man who had genuinely seen into the future. He had had glimpses of what was to come. And the explosive implications of this were recognized right from the moment that Geoffrey's

Interpreting Merlin's prophecies

24:58history was published. So very shortly after it appeared, there was an Anglo-Norman monk called Aldrich Vitalis, and he's pouring over it. And he comes to this great compilation of Merlin's prophecies, which is contained within Geoffrey's history. And he is blown away by the implications of what he's reading. Now, it has to be said that Aldrich is a very sober, a very reliable historian. He's a key source for the Norman Conquest. We quoted him a lot in our series on 1066. But he's a churchman, and as such, he

25:30believes that prophecy is true. There are prophecies in the Bible, so therefore prophecies must be authentic. And so he sits down and he works out, well, when was Merlin delivering these prophecies? And he works out that the prophecies that Geoffrey has recorded in his history, delivered by Merlin, are six centuries old. And so bearing that in mind, he reads through Merlin's prophecies, as laid out in Geoffrey's history. And he tries to map the prophecies that he's reading onto the

26:00events of the 600 years that have followed on, that are separating Merlin from Aldrich Vitalis, and to work out, well, what did Merlin prophesy? I love how it doesn't occur to him that Geoffrey of Monmouth himself would have known what had happened in the intervening 600 years, and therefore, had he been making it up, he could have ensured that Merlin's prophecies were accurate. But Aldrich Vitalis is not as cynical as I am. You lack your clear-eyed scepticism. Right. So, when Aldrich reads Merlin's prophecies in Geoffrey's history, what does he find foretold?

26:37Well, very obviously, it's... Merlin speaks of a boar of Cornwall, who is going to come to rule both, and I quote, the islands of the ocean and the forests of Gaul, and whose fate would be shrouded in mystery. And this is obviously Arthur. This is the Arthur as detailed in Geoffrey's history. But then, in intriguing prophecy, Merlin foretells that a people dressed in wood and iron mail are destined to invade Britain and punish the English for their wickedness,

27:07and impose on them the yoke of perpetual slavery. So, who do you think they are? Oh, it does sound like it could be the Normans. I think it is the Normans. So, either Merlin is incredibly farsighted, or Geoffrey of Monmouth is making this up and knows that the Normans did actually conquer England. And I can't decide which of those two options is more plausible. Oh, Dominic, there's more. So, here's another prophecy. The lion's cubs shall be transformed into saltwater fishes. What does he make of that? I mean, some people might say meaningless and so vague that it could mean anything.

27:38I guess other people might say the lion's cubs could be, could it be the son of Henry I, killed in the white ship in 1120? Yes, could be. And that's, again, either uncanny from Merlin, or Geoffrey of Monmouth knows that happened. And has constructed a vague prophecy to imply that Merlin also knew that it was, well, knew that it was going to happen. It's incredible stuff, I have to say. Okay, well, set your skepticism aside, because the consequence of the drowning of Henry's

28:10only legitimate heir in the white ship is that you end up with the civil war between Henry's daughter, Matilda, and his nephew, Stephen. The anarchy. So, the anarchy, 20 years of civil war. And this is just kicking off as Alderic is studying Geoffrey's book. And so, he looks again at the prophecies, and what does he find? The island will lie sodden with tears. Oh, my God, it's unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, this is actually, to be fair.

28:41Park your skepticism. I was foolish to have been so skeptical. I was trying to impose my own 21st century sensibility on something that is probably greater and more mysterious than my puny mind can possibly encompass. And I apologize to the listeners. Okay. So, that being so, it's the 1130s when Geoffrey's knowledge of what is to happen in the future cuts off. He doesn't know what's going to happen after that. So, de Merlin's prophecies stop in the 1130s. They don't. They carry on and on for page after page.

29:16Geoffrey's book. And Alderic is, of course, tantalized by this. And he shows great self-discipline in not presuming to analyze what these prophecies might be foretelling. Yeah. Partly, I think, because he feels nervous about probing God's plans for the future. Yeah. But also, it has to be said because the prophecies themselves are sensationally cryptic. They're chilling, actually. I'll try a few out on you. Yeah. So, the ass of wickedness will come next, swift against the goldsmiths, but slow against

29:47the wolves' ravenous appetite. So, what do you think that means? That's Boris Johnson's COVID parties, I think. I was wondering if maybe it was something about the IMF or something. Oh, 1976, the IMF bailout. Who's the ass of wickedness? Tony Benn? Dennis Ely, I guess. Yeah, maybe Tony Benn. I don't know. The goldsmiths are international currency speculators and the wolves' ravenous appetite. Is that the IMF? They're the names of Zurich. Right. Yeah. The names of Zurich is actually from an older, from a 60s devaluation crisis.

30:18Oh, okay. Whatever. Well, maybe it's that one then. It could be the 1967 devaluation of the pound. It could be the sterling crisis of the summer of 1966. I mean, it's multi-purpose. Listen, they're both in the future to Merlin. So, either way, it proves it. And then a tree shall spring up on the top of the Tower of London. I don't know what that means. 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Or that, um, the poppies going over the side of the Tower. Yeah. Yeah. The poppies for the anniversary of the First World War. Completely. And then the hedgehog will hide its apples inside Winchester and will construct hidden

30:51passages under the earth. The hedgehog. Maybe the extension of the M3 through Twyford Down. The failed trust budget. I mean, it's impossible to say, isn't it? Uh, hidden passages under the earth. Is that the construction of the London Underground? I think it's Twyford. That, um, the, uh, the, the extension of the M3 and they drove it through the Twyford. Yeah. That's my thing. That's my feeling. Swampy, we're supposing it. Maybe he's a hedgehog. So, I used to live in Nostradamus' hometown of Saint-Land-de-Provence in the south of France.

31:24And I went to the Nostradamus Museum there, which was absolutely useless. To have waxworks. Rubbish waxwork. It had waxworks. It had lots of waxworks. Yeah, I can imagine. It was a, it was, it was terrible. It was a, that staring at your, an empty room would have been a better way to spend a rainy afternoon. Um, and the thing that struck me about Nostradamus' predictions, which I'd been quite interested in when I was about 10, um, is that they were absolutely worthless because they're so, they're so vague and so cryptic. They could obviously,

31:56it's like a horoscope, basically. It could mean absolutely anything. But of course, that's the appeal of them, isn't it? Yeah, of course. Now, am I right in thinking that Nostradamus may have been inspired to write these ridiculous and worthless prophecies by Merlin? Yeah. Well, because Merlin is the archetype of, um, a prophet who comes up with mad, mad cryptic clues that could basically mean anything. So yes, Nostradamus is absolutely inspired by his example, because as we say, Merlin is the great prophetic star and throughout

32:28the middle ages, people are endlessly identifying Merlin's cryptic imagery with the great events of their own times. But more than that, they are directly being inspired by Merlin's prophecies to undertake what otherwise, I mean, might often seem quite quixotic, um, projects. So we've, we've, um, covered two of these seemingly quixotic projects on, uh, on the rest is history. So one of them, um, was in 1400 when Owen Glendua raised the banner of Welsh independence against Henry

33:05IV. More Welsh history, really? Yeah. And the disappointment becomes overkill. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of Welsh history still to come. Massive overkill. Because he's, he's read Merlin's prophecies and he, he, he reads into them a prophecy that he is going to defeat the English. It didn't work out for him, obviously. Um, and in 1428, it was invoked by at Morris of Joan of Arc, who again discovered in Merlin's prophecies. But she, the hedgehog. I don't, I can't remember what she is. I mean, I don't, who knows. But I'll tell you who else is

33:38inspired by it. A man you admire as a hard headed, shrewd, ruthless analyst of politics. He would never, uh, be model headed. And that is Henry Tudor, the man who becomes Henry VII. Another Welshman. And he is inspired by Merlin's prophecies to launch his invasion of England and overthrow Richard III. So. I mean, I admire both his men to be fair. So the salient fact is Merlin's prophecies are in Geoffrey's book. People in the Middle Ages believe them and they're often inspired by them to kind of change the course of history. So it's a kind of classic example of the way in which the Arthurian legends reflect medieval society and

34:12politics and culture, but also end up influencing the course of events and things like that. I guess the question though is, you know, it's always very tempting for people to think, obviously people in the past from complete fools and gullible and all of this kind of thing. And they believed any old nonsense, but we know that's not true. We know that people in the past were just as skeptical and clear eyed as we are and smart and it's massively patronizing. Yeah. To paint them as idiots, as sort of, you know, dunces and whatnot. So why is it that people

34:45who, as you, as you rightly say, somebody like Aldrich Vitalis, an extremely smart, you know, well-adjusted, successful person, why is it that they believe that this is, you know, this is legitimate stuff and can be trusted? Because Geoffrey's account does include sources which are obscure and authentically ancient. And someone like Henry of Huntingdon, who's written a history of England is particularly

35:18qualified to recognize this, that he, he recognizes source material that Geoffrey is using in the fabric of, of his history. And so he is therefore inclined to accept the truth of what Geoffrey is saying when he says, well, I've come across other sources. Yeah. You know, the fact that he hasn't produced these other sources doesn't, you know, I mean, Henry's relying on him to be telling the truth. And these sources, because they derive from long before Geoffrey's time, I mean, centuries before Geoffrey's time, do, in the opinion of people like Henry of Huntingdon and

35:52Aldrich Vitalis, seem to indicate that both Merlin and Arthur were more than just figments of Geoffrey's imagination. And so the question obviously is, well, what were these sources? What did they reveal about Merlin? And in fact, what were the implications for placing Arthur himself within the sweep of early medieval history? So many questions, but we will be finding out the

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Contextualizing the fifth and sixth centuries

38:56Welcome back to The Rest is History. So we have been dancing around this question now for two and a half episodes. And the time is fast approaching when we will finally get the answer that we're looking for. Did King Arthur actually exist? Now, Tom, as a sort of, as a little amuse-bouche before that, let's try to pin down something else first. And this is about Merlin. So we've done,

39:29you know, Geoffrey, we've talked about Geoffrey Monmouth, we've talked about his mysterious sources, and you're going to cast light on those. Did Merlin exist? If so, when did he live? Who was he? If he didn't exist, how is it possible that Geoffrey of Monmouth could have persuaded so many intelligent scholarly people that he did? Okay, to answer that, we need to look in more detail, I think, at exactly what Geoffrey has to tell us about Merlin. Because, of course, he's claiming to be writing a history, not a romance. And so it is very important to, for Geoffrey's purposes,

40:04that he situate Merlin and indeed Arthur in a very, very precise historical context. And this context, it's basically the 5th and 6th centuries AD, which is one of the darkest and therefore the most intensely debated periods in the whole of British history. It's, you know, in terms of sources, it's a huge black hole. And in Geoffrey's account, this period begins with the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain in 410. And in Geoffrey's account, the Romans withdraw for very

40:40kind of Donald Trump reasons. This is Geoffrey quoting the Romans to the Britons. Stop being lazy, pick up your shields, swords and spears. You'll be more than a match for your enemies. We Romans are fed up with having to travel here to do all your fighting for you. So in other words, man up, do it yourselves. Yeah. Unfortunately, the Britons prove to be complete snowflakes. And so the moment the Romans have withdrawn, the Irish start attacking them from the sea. And the Picts start crossing Hadrian's Wall

41:13and flooding southwards. And the cities of the Roman province of Britannia start going up in flames. And the Britons try to solve this problem by bringing over a king who is a descendant from the ancient line of British kings, going all the way back to Brutus, the Trojan. Yeah. The grandson of Aeneas, who'd sailed to Britain and killed a load of giants. And this is the opening of Geoffrey's history. And basically, all the kings of Britain are descended from Brutus. And Constantine is one of these. He's been living in Brittany. So the Britons go over, get Constantine,

41:49bring him back to Britain. And Constantine proves to be pretty good as a king. He hangs around for about a decade. And then, unfortunately, he gets stabbed to death by a Pictish assassin. And Britain is plunged back into crisis. Now, into this power vacuum, there steps a man called Vortigern. I wondered if we'd get to him. Oh, yeah. So how does Vortigern establish himself as a king of Britain, even though he's not descended from Brutus? Well, first of all, he tries to eliminate the three sons of

42:21Constantine. And the eldest one, he has murdered by a warband of Picts. So the Picts are killing a lot of people at this point. But the other two at this point, who are only toddlers and little babies, are evacuated by their guardians back to Brittany. And there, they're beyond the reach of Vortigern. And the name of these two infant princes, one of them is called Ambrosius Aurelianus. And the other one is called Uther Pendragon. And obviously, we will be hearing more about both

42:54of them in due course. Quite different names. You imagine? Quite. I mean, one looks very much like a Latin name, and the other absolutely does not. Looks like it could be kind of Welsh or something. So, yeah, weird that Constantine would give his kids such wildly different names. But anyway. And also, just to say that Geoffrey just calls him not Uther Paws Pendragon, but Uther Pendragon. It's all one name. It's all one word. Yeah, that's a long name. Which makes it an even madder name. Yeah, that's a mad name.

43:25Anyway, these are details, Dominic. Okay. Because back in Britain, Vortigern has had himself crowned and is now laying claim to the rule of the whole of Britain. But he's understandably paranoid because he knows that Ambrosius Aurelianus, the eldest of the two surviving sons of Constantine, you know, he's back in Brittany. He's growing up. He's being trained in arms. You know, he might come back and try and get his rightful patrimony back from Vortigern. And also, there are still hordes of Picts and Irish rampaging across the country. And so they need to be dealt with. How's he going

43:59to handle this? And it's at this point that a seeming solution hoves into view. And what hoves

Vortigern and the arrival of the Saxons

44:09into view is something that is very 2026. It's three boatloads of illegal immigrants who wash up on the coast of Kent. And they're led by two brothers called Hengist and Horsa, both of which in ancient German means apparently horse. And these migrants turn out to have come from Saxony and that they are armed warriors who, despite not being Christians, they're pagans, seen the answers to Vortigern's prayers. And so Vortigern duly hires them as mercenaries. The Saxons help him to defeat

44:44the Picts and the Irish. And then because Hengist, who is the kind of the leader, he's aware that Vortigern is kind of twitchy about what's going to happen when Ambrosius Aurelianus comes of age. Hengist approaches Vortigern with a cunning plan. And he says, why not let us send to our own country and invite more armed young men to join us so that our battle strength may thereby be enhanced? And Vortigern, rather than smelling a rat, thinks this is an absolutely brilliant idea.

45:16And so ever more boatloads of armed young Saxons start to arrive and settle in Britain. Hmm. And I, I mean, I guess if you, if you weren't a fan of Vortigern, you would call it the Vortigern wave. Very good. Wave of immigration. Very good. So Nigel Farage joins us on the show. Brilliant. Well, the whole thing now starts to play out like a kind of a reform or restore fever dream. So the Saxons settle in Britain and they start hitting on the Britain's women.

45:48Oh no. Plus, there are so many of the Saxons by now that the Britons start to worry that the Saxons are going to take over and establish their rule. It's like being in a foreign land, isn't it? And so a lot of these Britons want their country back. Yeah, of course. But Vortigern is anxious to reconcile them, to create a multicultural society, you might say. And so he says, well, let's have a great peace conference. Let's try and forge a common path and we will live together as brothers.

46:19Where does he invite them? Where does he want to have this conference? Well, he invites them to Wiltshire and the Salisbury area. I probably had said Wiltshire and the Salisbury area back on the show. And so the Britons and the Saxons, the leaders of both sides, they come to Wiltshire and the Salisbury area, to Salisbury Plain, and they're supposed to come unarmed, which the Britons do. But the Saxons, I'm afraid to say, cheat by hiding their daggers, their Saxa, from which they take their names, in their boots. And when Hengist gives the signal, they draw these knives out and they start attacking the Britons. And huge numbers of the Britons are murdered and their bodies end up

46:52being buried by a local holy man on Salisbury Plain. And Vortigern is taken prisoner and he's forced to surrender his kingdom in exchange for his life. And the Saxons then take advantage of this to occupy London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, so all the kind of the major towns of Britain. And to quote Geoffrey, when Vortigern saw the devastation that had befallen Britain, he fled into the depths of Wales, unsure how to combat these accursed people. And it is now at last that Merlin enters the story. Vortigern is stuck for sensible policies.

47:25And so he invites all his court magicians to give him advice.

47:30They give him brilliant advice. They say, basically, what you should do is build a very tall and impregnable tower and hide yourself in it so that no one can get you. And Vortigern thinks, OK, well, that's a good plan. Where should I build it? The obvious place. I'll build it on Mount Snowden. And so his workmen start doing this. But there's a problem because every day his workmen lay the foundations and start building up the wall. And every night the foundations of stonework get swallowed up by the earth so that in the morning there's nothing left. Vortigern gets very cross about this. And so he summons his magicians again and says, well, what's going on here? What's the

48:01problem? And they tell Vortigern, well, what you need to do, you need to find a young boy without a father. So listeners may remember we've had a young boy without a father on the show already. Kill this boy. Mix his blood in with the mortar. Et voila. All will be well. You'll be able to build your tower. And so this is where Merlin comes in. Because remember, of course, he doesn't have a father. He doesn't have a father. He's the son of this incubus, this demon. And so Merlin is brought to Vortigern's presence. But already, even though he's just a young boy, it's evident that he is a

48:35much better magician than any of the magicians that Vortigern has in his court. And he tells Vortigern, look, don't kill me. What you need to do is to get your workmen to dig a hole where they're trying to build the tower. And at the bottom of the hole, Merlin says, they will find a pool. Incredible that Vortigern would listen to him and not to his magicians who said, kill this boy. Listen, Dominic, I honestly think that this is a story that doesn't- Doesn't bear too much investigation. Doesn't bear too much skeptical and close analysis. Just accept that the workmen,

49:07they dig the hole. And just as Merlin had said, they find the pool. And so Merlin then gets the court magicians. And he says to them, tell me, you lying flatterers, what lies beneath the pool? And obviously, the magicians don't know. But Merlin does. And so he tells them, below the pool are two sleeping dragons. And Merlin orders the pool to be drained. And once the water has ebbed away, the two dragons emerge from the respective caves in which they've been sleeping. And one dragon is red, and one dragon is white. And they start to

49:38fight. And first, the white dragon has the better of things, and then the red dragon. And so it goes on. The fight continues and continues and continues. And Vortigern demands to know of Merlin, well, what does this mean? What does it portend? And Merlin goes into a prophetic vision, and then he bursts into tears. And he starts to chant. Alas for the red dragon, its end is near. Its cavernous lair will be occupied by the white dragon, which symbolizes the Saxons whom you, Vortigern, have invited over. The red dragon represents the people of Britain

50:12who will be overrun. And it is the red dragon, of course, that will go on to become the emblem of Wales. But first, Merlin offers the Britons reassurance. First, he says, the boar of Cornwall shall keep these invaders at bay, for it will trample down their necks beneath its feet. And this, of course, is a prophecy of Arthur. And it all comes to pass, just as Merlin had foretold Vortigern that it would. So Ambrosius Aurelianus, who all this time has been growing up, very well trained, very practiced in weaponry. He is now of an age to claim his patrimony.

50:44So he crosses from Brittany back to Britain, seizes the throne from Vortigern. Vortigern himself is cornered in a wooden tower, so not a stone tower, so very foolish of him. And he gets burnt alive. So that's him. He's asking for it. He's had a, yeah, he's useless. Ambrosius Aurelianus then defeats and beheads Hengist. Okay. And he goes on to enjoy a triumphant reign. And in due course, he gets assassinated and he is succeeded first by his brother, Uther Pendragon, and then of course, by Arthur, Uther's son. And Arthur, before he embarks on his career of imperial conquest overseas,

51:19first of all, he defeats the Saxons in a succession of battles. And the most glorious of all these battles is won by Arthur at a place called Baden Hill. And Baden Hill is identified by Geoffrey with the hill above Bath. All right. Nice to be winning a battle on an old Roman site. Well, that's what Geoffrey says. And what Geoffrey also says is that while all this has been going on, Merlin has been getting up to all kinds of shenanigans. And among them is he has transported Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain, where it is erected to serve as a war memorial

51:51to the Britons murdered by Hengist in his attack on them. Oh, that's a nice explanation. Yeah. That's how Stonehenge came to exist. But the Saxons are still there, aren't they? I mean, they are growing in number. Ah, yes. A growing menace. And once Arthur has gone off to Avalon, they return with renewed force. And Geoffrey's history, if you're a Welsh reader, ends on a very sombre note, because the Saxons, under the rule of their great king Athelstan, are now the masters of what has become Logres,

52:23the lost land, the kingdom of England. And it is with the reign of Athelstan that Geoffrey ends his history of the kings of Britain. And as for the Britons, Geoffrey writes, God did not wish them to rule in Britain anymore, until that time should arrive, which had been prophesied to Arthur by Merlin. There's an awful lot going on there. A lot to unpick. When it first comes out, people like Henry of Huntington and Aldrich Vitalis, I mean, we've been emphasising that these are not gullible, stupid men at all. What do they make of all this stuff about dragons in caves,

52:56roofs, and people being burned in towers, and all of these goings on? I think they assume that this is the material that was in this mysterious Welsh book given to Geoffrey by the Archdeacon of Oxford, which no one has ever seen apart from Geoffrey, I think is what they assume. But the reason they don't just dismiss Geoffrey as a liar is because they can recognise in this narrative details that do authentically derive from what are in effect the only written sources for the century or so that follows the collapse of Roman rule in Britain.

Tracing the sources of Merlin and Arthur

53:28Okay. So, do you know what? This reminds me of that famous academic footnote where, I can't remember what it's from, where some academic professor wrote. The footnote just says, this was revealed to me in a dream.

53:38It's not, I mean, it's not a dream. That's the point. It is, you know, there is this mysterious work of history, which Geoffrey says is true, but he is drawing on texts that certainly Henry of Huntingdon can recognise. There aren't many of them, but they are there. So, let's just have a look at what these sources are. The source, specifically for Merlin, there is an assemblage of kind of various Welsh writings that, when you stitch them together,

54:10do enable the life to be written of a kind of wild prophet called Myrthim. And the earliest of these, it only derives from the 10th century, but Myrthim himself, by the lifetime of Geoffrey, is supposed to have lived much earlier, so around the 6th century. And tradition said that he had been driven mad by the death in battle of the king who he'd been serving, and that Myrthim had fled into the woods, where he'd lived on roots and wild berries, and uttered wild prophecies. And the key thing that Geoffrey

54:42takes from this tradition, aside from the prophecies, is the name of Myrthim. Myrthim and Myrthim are obviously cognate. When Myrthim is written in Welsh, if you're a French reader, seeing it in Geoffrey's Latin text, it's going to read like Merde. So, French word for shit, basically. And so, this is generally thought why Geoffrey changes his name to Myrthim. Wow, okay. But you were saying, what about Myrthim's meeting with Vortigern, the stuff about the red and white dragons, the link with Arthur,

55:14and all of that. Essentially, the germ of this derives from another earlier source, which was written in 829, purportedly by a Welsh monk called Nennius. And this is the Historia Britonum, the history of the Britons. And it includes Vortigern welcoming Hengist and Horsa to Britain when they land in Kent, the kind of the mass arrival of the Saxons from across the sea, Vortigern retreating to what Nennius describes as the remote boundaries of his kingdom, and trying to build his tower, the mysterious boy without a father, and the red and

55:48white dragons. So, they are all in Nennius. The boy in this story isn't called Merlin or in Myrthim. Instead, confusingly, he's called Ambrosius. And he ends up revealing that he's the son not of an incubus, but of a Roman consul. And so, it's unclear here whether this is meant to be Ambrosius Aurelianus, who in Geoffrey's history is clearly a very separate character from Merlin. And it's presumably this that enabled Geoffrey, when he kind of read the Historia Britonum, to separate out

56:19Ambrosius, who is the infant prophet, and Ambrosius Aurelianus, who is the great warrior, who, you know, goes on to defeat Vortigern and defeat the Saxons, and to portray Merlin and Ambrosius Aurelianus as two separate and distinct characters. So, he's basically splitting them into two. He's splitting them into two. Yeah. And it's a masterstroke, because by alighting this kind of infant Ambrosius, the infant prophet, with Myrthim, Geoffrey is able to create this composite character called Merlin. But even

56:50more crucially, it enables him to construct a link then between Merlin and Arthur. And it's this that persuades scholars like Henry of Huntingdon that both Merlin and Arthur are authentically rooted in history. Okay. Because there's just enough material that's been drawn from authentic sources that scholars can recognise it and think, oh yeah, Geoffrey's really onto something. And it's just clearly that he has better sources than us. But the scaffolding for that story is what Geoffrey

57:20is using. So, the scaffolding is from Nennius, basically. And so, Nennius is our oldest source for Arthur? Is that effectively what you're saying? Yes. And so, Nennius, the Historia Bretonum, contains what can be described without any fear of exaggeration as the single most consequential paragraph ever written about Arthur. And the reason that it's so consequential is because it is the oldest surviving document to name him. So, it's said it's from 829, so early 9th century. But also because it situates Arthur

57:54in a context that seemed to Geoffrey's contemporaries, and indeed to many scholars in the 20th century, to be an entirely plausible one. Because namely, the resistance of the Britons in post-Roman Britain to the westwards advance of the Saxons. And it's portraying him not as a figure of romance, not as a figure of myth or poetry, but of history. Nennius is describing Arthur as a dux ballorum, the leader of wars. It lists 12 victories that he's supposed to have won against the Saxons. And the 12 of these battles is Baden Hill. So, that's where Geoffrey gets it from.

58:27This is the genesis of Geoffrey's stuff about the battles, about Arthur, about the showdown in Bath. Well, Baden Hill, it's Geoffrey who says that it's Bath. There's nothing to indicate in Nennius where Baden Hill was. There's a kind of big mystery there. And this paragraph is not lengthy. I think it's about 14 sentences. But it provides the kind of the acorn from which the entire massive oak of Geoffrey's history, and then the Arthurian legends more generally, will sprout. So, it's

58:58absolutely crucial to the whole edifice. And the reason that it's crucial is because the other two key sources for the 5th and 6th centuries that Geoffrey is drawing on, and which Henry of Huntingdon obviously recognises, both of them are older than the Historia Bretonum. And neither of them actually mention Arthur. So, that's the problem. So, you need the Historia Bretonum, because otherwise you don't have Arthur. So, these two sources, both of them are much better known, I think, than the Historia Bretonum. The first of these is by Bede, who's a Northumbrian monk, and he is writing around

59:337.30, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the first great work of history in English. And Bede, of course, is essentially English. He's an Anglian of Northumbria. And so, his perspective is very different from that of Nennius, the Welsh monk. And you could see why he might not mention Arthur if he's English. You know, he might not be interested in them. But in Bede's history, you do get lots of familiar names and details. So, you get Vortigone, you get Hengist and Horsa, you get the three ships landing in Kent, you get Ambrosius Aurelianus. Bede mentions all of those. And Bede himself is drawing on an even earlier source. And this is the only source that

1:00:07was available to Geoffrey, certainly, that actually derived from the period in which he was setting Merlin and Arthur. Yeah, because all of these other things are written generations and generations afterwards. But this guy, so he's Gildas, and he's writing what? The late 5th century, early 6th century? So, within possibly living memory of the events that he's talking about. Yeah, so Gildas is the saint who will pop up in the story about Melwas abducting Guinevere that we talked about in the previous episode. That is not historic. That's something that's

1:00:39made up many, many centuries later. But there are certain things that we could probably say with some degree of safety about Gildas. He probably lived in southern Britain, the west country, southern Wales, that's the likeliest. He's definitely a Briton. He has an odd name. So, David Howlett, great scholar of onomastics in this period, he suggests that it might come from Hebrew and mean skinny, which I like. From the Latin that he writes, it's evident that Gildas is highly educated and very familiar with Latin legal terms. That's kind of interesting.

1:01:10It's about a century after the Romans have withdrawn. It implies that the traditional frameworks of Roman culture haven't completely collapsed by this point. And Gildas is the author of what I think can fairly be described as the Dark Ages equivalent of a Daily Mail editorial. And this is a text called the De Exidio Britanniae, the Ruin of Britain. And it is a Jeremiad which laments a country going to the dogs, a country that's been ruined by incompetent establishment

1:01:41stooges. It's resulted in the collapse of property prices across Britain. Britain is now overrun by immigrants. And it's basically on the brink of total collapse. Wow, sounds very familiar. But Gildas' argument, I mean, it's unusual to see even, you know, the most excitable Daily Mail columnist making this argument today. He says this is all because God is having, you know, God is punishing the British people for their sins. They've been licentious and God is taking no prisoners. Wouldn't Peter Hitchens kind of maybe say that? I don't know, maybe something like that. Anyway,

1:02:14by the by. Anyway, yes. So Dominic, as you say, Gildas' thesis is that the British are sinners, God is angry with them, he's punishing them. So essentially, what he's writing isn't a history, it's a sermon. And the form that the punishment that God is sending to the Britons is one that will be echoed in their different ways by Bede, by Nennius, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, namely that the Saxons have been invited into Britain to serve as mercenaries, and they are now running amok like wolves let into a sheepfold. And to quote Gildas, nothing more harmful nor more bitter ever happened to our island than this. So he is writing a sermon, and as a result,

Gildas and the ruin of Britain

1:02:50there is a frustrating lack of historical detail. He's not giving us basically the kind of things that we need and want. So Ambrosius Aurelianus, he does get a mention, and he's described as a Roman nobleman. Also getting a mention is Baden Hill, and it's described as a siege, a successful siege. And Gildas mentions it because it occurs in the year of his birth. So it's maybe 30, 40 years before Gildas is writing. Gildas does also mention a proud tyrant

1:03:22who has employed the Saxons as mercenaries, but otherwise this proud tyrant has no name, and it's left a bead to give him the name of Fortigan, which is then picked up by Geoffrey of Monmouth. But otherwise, that is it. There's nothing in Gildas about Hengist and Horsa, no mention of Red and White Dragons. And ruchally, Dominic, there is no mention of Arthur. The implication in Gildas is that the battle leader who wins Baden Hill is Ambrosius Aurelianus.

1:03:53What are the implications of all this for the question that this whole series has been moving towards? Namely, did Arthur actually exist? Is he a figure of history as well as of legend? Was he a great war leader who, for a short while, managed to keep the Anglo-Saxon invaders at bay? Or is it possible that, in Arthur's case, there really can be smoke without fire? So many questions. And in the next and final episode of this series, we will definitively

1:04:28and exclusively be giving the verdict. We will discuss the theories about who Arthur was, where he lived, when he might have lived. And as I say, exclusively on The Rest is History, Tom Holland will be pronouncing an absolutely definitive verdict on whether King Arthur existed and who he was. This is unbelievable stuff. Now, I can imagine lots of people thinking, I cannot wait to hear this. The way to listen to it right now is to join our own dark ages, small boat, get on the high seas with us, and the members of The Rest is History Club.

1:05:04And you can do that by going to therestishistory.com and signing up. You will get ad-free listening. You will get early access to series and a whole host of supplementary benefits. So on that bombshell, I literally cannot wait. I'm so excited. I will see you next time for the answers to the questions that have perplexed so many great minds for so long. Who was King Arthur

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