King Arthur, unifier or conqueror?
With the passing of his father, Arthur Pendragon held within his grasp the most powerful kingdom on the isle and the possibility for expansion was very real. With noble and peasant alike wondering how this new ruler would match up to the legacy of the legendary Uther, the new king was under pressure to start and win a war as soon as feasibly possible. We see this a lot in world history by the way, especially in newer kingdoms that haven’t had a tradition of succession drummed into them yet.
The south of Wales seemed the ideal place, having already been mostly conquered by his father already. Deheubarth was weak but traditionally had close ties with the Irish clans, several of which could easily aid the petty kingdom if pressed. Fortunately, Arthur used his familial relations with the chief of Cil Dara to ensure no Irishman would be coming to help the cornered Welsh. Within a year of becoming king, Arthur won his first victory in Wales, granting him a duchy and three counties to distribute.
This led to one of Arthur’s greater legacies that would inform how the rest of Albion would be treated after conquest. To unite the people and nobles around him, the king placed welsh rulers in each county and gave the duchy itself to one of the sons of the defeated prince. This led to the standard practice both in Great Britain and Ireland that local people would hold onto power, just not usually the same people who held it before the English came (the Mongol Empire used a similar method in their campaigns). With this, Arthur guaranteed the languages and cultures of the islands would not be lost. It also meant that local lords could actually
speak to their vassals and more easily gain support from them against the monarch.
Obviously, this approach has been debated for centuries. Most scholars (and members of the public) believe the king made the right choice. The intermixing of the languages and cultures of the people of Albion led to the great works that united culture would produce. ‘Britishness’ was born from the marriage between various peoples all banding together to survive and thrive. Of course there are those, whom because of the pain of recent events, shall remain nameless here, that believe this was a mistake and a heinous one at that. Whilst Arthur is regarded as generally being a hero of multiculturalism today (whether that is deserved or not), it was his statues and monuments that were destroyed first in the Great War.
What is true is that the Welsh were far more rebellious than they might have been under direct English authority for the next century or so (by the time of 1000AD, most had come to accept Camelot and almost everyone by that point followed the monarchy), to the extent that though Wales remains a unique and reasonably well established cultural identity, the kingdom of Wales was never recreated under the Pendragons, remaining the only one of the four home kingdoms of Albion to never come into existence in at least one incarnation.
Arthur saw the wealth in the south and found the infrastructure there acceptable enough to leave to the local lords. He had another campaign to plan, this one far harder an undertaking. Gwynedd was a fully united petty kingdom in the easily defendable north of Wales. Arthur knew that fighting a war there would be long and bloody. To directly attack would be foolhardy. Fortunately the nobility in Powys were unruly, easily bribed and already gravitating towards the more powerful king in Camelot, so with some careful political intrigue, civil unrest soon broke out in the north. When Powys started a war of independence, Camelot rushed to their banner and made it clear to the remaining welsh lords outside of their kingdom that Powys was now beyond them. The independent lords of Powys declared fealty to Arthur, the promised son of the house of Pendragon (or so the histories claim. Several barons were richly rewarded for this display of ‘faith’ in the aftermath of this decision) and soon all that remained of independent Wales were the two northern counties.
The Crownwall, the royal demesne of the Pendragons.
The Duchy of Oxfordshire: Gloucester, Wiltshire, Oxford.
The Duchy of Camelot: Northampton, Bedford, Essex and Middlesex (now London).
The king was pleased with how his reign was going, ordering yet grander celebrations in London and in Camelot. The wealth of his kingdom allowed more development of what I call ‘The Crownwall’: the royal territories stretching unbroken from the Bristol Channel, through Oxfordshire, to the River Thames and the North Sea. Time and again, when invaders attacked the islands, the war was won with troops from the royal lands. It became the bastion for Albion’s defences for nearly 700 years. Only in the age of gunpowder and canons did their military value lessen but by that time, their cultural and economic value were immense. Of the ten oldest institutions in Western Europe, five can be found within the Crownwall (seven if we include the rest of the isles).
Arthur’s aim was to build a great kingdom that fit the legends and myths his family were spreading. The expansion of Camelot castle, the investments in making his personal demesne the most beautiful and mighty in the known world and the beginnings of investment in infrastructures such as roads and bridges all aided that goal. Ten years into his reign, Camelot was overflowing with wealth and well trained soldiers ready to fight the good fight to finish the job in Wales. Whilst Arthur was never the great all-rounder that his father was, his scholarly and political skill eclipsed him. The realm became far more centralised and the dukes more tightly controlled from the capital. The nonstop wealth and promise of more wars to gain prestige in endeared the nobles to him nonetheless. When the old king of Gwynedd died in 915AD, splitting the realm in two, Camelot was ready to strike.
Even with the two counties uniting in an alliance, mutual distrust and the fact they were outnumbered (by some accounts nearly ten to one) meant a speedy end to the war and the completion of uniting the legendary Arthurian kingdom back together. Arthur thus decided to ensure Camelot could grow in the peace that followed. Using the same formula as before, he installed new minor welsh nobles to the counties and duchy of Gwynedd. Whilst he would have some trouble with marauding Icelanders and rebellious welsh subjects, the following decade was quite peaceful for Camelot and thus, often ignored by historians. Yet in this time, Arthur and other members of his court were making the first of many attempts by the English to start a merchant republic to rival that of the Mediterranean city states. This tells us many things, not least among which that Camelot was heavily connected to the outside world and attempting to emulate what it saw as successful parts of it. The failure of the Isle of the Blessed to safely house a rich trading port (due to frequent attacks from Galloway and the Vikings in Scotland) meant that the idea faded from mind as other projects were focused on. However, as any Irishman will tell you, the idea did not stay dead for long.
Speaking of Ireland, the clans were infighting with each other to the degree that Arthur lost his small bit of influence there for some time. His family kept a claim on the land that would eventually prove quite valuable however the completion of the kingdom of the Arthurian legend meant the king had no true right to war elsewhere. Here then we see a new addition to the mythos, that of Avalon, becoming a separate place from the isle of the blessed. The Pendragons had not yet thought up the idea of ‘Albion’ as we know it today but it is clear that by this point they had realised the potency of their situation. They could take what they wished from any of the remaining other players in the British Isles but how much better would it be to be seen as simply reclaiming what was once yours regardless?
The view from the continent, or at least the Frankish kingdoms was that the English were right to press their claims, though stories of the Pendragon’s claims to Arthurian myth were still taken with a pinch of salt. We do know that the tales had reached as far as Rome by 920AD however, for there was a papal inquiry into the subject in that year. As Arthur was ‘coincidentally’ visiting the holy city on a pilgrimage, you can imagine the outcome of such inquires. Pope Jacobus III gave Latin Christendom’s support to the “proud histories of the Britons” and from then on, scholars treated the mythos as solid British history till the early modern era.
The long peace also gave time for marriages and children. Arthur had many daughters and three sons. His youngest two were made barons in the Crownlands whilst his eldest, Mordred, was promised the next duchy the kingdom came to possess. This son had reaffirmed the ties with Ireland (or as it was beginning to be called, Avalon), marrying into the High Chief of Dublin’s family. Arthur’s daughters were flung far and wide over Europe, gaining alliances with the Christian Spanish kingdoms, the Frankish kingdoms and one, Gertrude, even further afield in the court of the Byzantines. That last link becomes much more significant in the time of Lancelot.
With such friends in high places and military strength garnered over the years, King Arthur felt confident in pushing for a war in 927AD against the Vikings in the north, over the Duchy of Lothian. The pagan warriors were by this time nearly spent in Scotland and fell easily to the invasion by Camelot. Mordred then became Duke of Lothian and guarded the border against both Scotland and the Vikings that remained in Great Britain. Emboldened by the ease of the victory, Arthur began to plan more ambitious campaigns against the Vikings in the north, whom at this time controlled the east of Scotland as well as the islands directly north of it.
This changed when the court spymaster and a delegation of welsh nobles arrived in Camelot to hold council with the king. The southern Irish clans were becoming uneasy with the growing ties between the north of Ireland and the Vikings in Scotland. Whilst hindsight and historical study tells us that these fears were well founded (the four northernmost counties did indeed become pagan ruled in 932 and central Ireland in 934AD), at the time it seems Arthur was unsure as to what he should or could do. His spymaster (whom we have recently confirmed to be Sir Howard Ren, the noted philosopher and theologian) however informed him in three letters in 930AD that some of the Irish were leaning towards declaring fealty if Camelot could make a show of protecting them. Thus suitably encouraged, especially by his pro-Irish son and heir, the king personally visited Ireland in 931AD and sure enough two chieftains did join him in that time (Leinster and Ossory, which made up the new Duchy of Leinster). Given a sum of money, they built their keeps and became counts, upon which time the king gave Leinster (the port county and closest to Wales) the duchy title as well.
This version of a king doing nothing till land was offered up was and still is not what popular history (and for a long time, academia) believe. Taking Arthur’s actions in Wales, the tale of a man determined to protect everyone even those not within his kingdom from (depending on who you ask) pagan and/or foreign encroachment was a powerful one, especially when adding in the mistaken belief of the vassals pledging themselves out of gratitude. It is far more likely that even the version stated in the last paragraph is not the full story. Leinster stood to gain much from joining the large and wealthy kingdom of Camelot and had close ties with South Wales, whilst Ossory was too close and too small to refuse its larger neighbour. Still, reviewing Irish history, these two counties got a better deal than many.
Whether Camelot would have gone through with the planned invasion against the Vikings or developed further interests in southern Ireland is alas unknown to us for Arthur died unexpectedly in 933AD at the age of sixty one. Historians have wondered whether this was due to a heart attack or a sudden bought of illness for many years but a study began last month by some of my colleagues on the actual remains of the king (after the surprise discovery of his tomb last year in Glastonbury) might finally answer those questions.
King Arthur I of Camelot (Born: 872AD, Reign: 903-933AD)
What is generally agreed upon was that Arthur was a fine successor to Uther and did well in the way of solidifying the family’s relations with Arthurian myth. The conquest and subsequent treatment of the Welsh codified how the future kings of Camelot would treat the rest of their subjugated subjects in Albion and also was exactly what the later emperors rebelled against doing. Arthur ensured Camelot was wealthy and powerful throughout his reign and the long stretches of peace followed by quick, successful wars were constantly harkened back to by future rulers attempting to emulate his results. His grandson, Arthur II, is recognised as the father of Ireland today. Yet the man remembered for his tolerance and acceptance was also fine with allowing his son and not a Scot rule in Lothian and was disinterested in Leinster until essentially bribed. His is a complex tale full of perhaps more intrigue and deception than we realise and perhaps it makes what happened afterwards more understandable.
The throne passed to Mordred, firstborn of Arthur. And it is here pretty much everyone agrees it all went a bit wrong.