Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The last time an archaeologist seriously engaged with the matter of Arthur was in 1971 with the publication of Leslie Alcock's book Arthur's Britain. Subtitled History and Archaeology AD 367–634, this was a rigorous academic attempt to put the historical evidence for Arthur alongside the archaeology for the period in which he might have existed. It was written in the context of the late Professor Alcock's excavations between 1966 and 1973 at Cadbury Castle, Somerset, where he had investigated the major Iron Age hill fort identified by Leland as the alleged site of Camelot (Alcock 1972). Alcock's work was a detailed account of the archaeology, framed by a critical discussion of the early historical evidence for the period and the few sparse “early” references to Arthur. Aimed at both students and an interested public, it ranged over both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic evidence throughout the British Isles.Arthur's Britain offered an analysis of the supposed Arthurian evidence but was perhaps unfortunate in coinciding with an upsurge in Arthurian iconoclasm whereby most historians decided Arthur was either a myth or at best unknowable. Alcock concluded that one reference – that to Arthur in the Annales Cambriae (“Welsh Annals”) for 537, “The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell” – was “the irreducible minimum of historical fact” and that this assured us “that Arthur was an ... log in or subscribe to read full text