About King Arthur: The History of England

To understand King Arthur, you have to understand the history of England. It is the backdrop to the stories, and what pushes and pulls the evolution of the mythology. King Arthur is unlike virtually all mythic traditions in that many different stages of the mythology's history have been recorded, rather than one final form of the story. As the history of England changes, the stories themselves change with it, recontextualizing to the different times they are told in.

The Roman Empire invaded and conquered England over the course of a decade starting around 40 AD. After a period of ruling the province for three hundred and fifty years, the Roman troops were removed as the empire was in dire need of protection elsewhere and such a faraway and costly province was not considered worth spending effort on. However, the Roman colonists who had made the British isles their home remained, essentially carrying on their business as normal.

With the Romans vacated, England became a prime target for invasion. Specifically the Germanic tribes the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes progressively began to invade and resettle the land. The culture clash between the Christian Romans (collectively known as Britons) and the pagan Anglo-Saxons split the islands into a period of tribal warfare between these groups. The basis of much of the early King Arthur stories lies in the gorilla warfare of the British kings against the pagan invaders. In fact, the most likely candidate for a historical King Arthur is Ambrosius Aurelianus, who did exactly that. The oldest poems and stories of King Arthur are Welsh stories, as the Welsh were the final remains of the Roman culture in the British Isles, and King Arthur represented an ethnic hero to them.

In 1066 William of Brittany invaded and conquered England from his home in France. He brought with him a French court and imposed French customs and language on the Germanic peoples. And with him revived the long dormant stories of King Arthur. This was a political and propaganda tactic. The French considered themselves heirs to the Roman Empire, and King Arthur justified their conquest of England. They were liberating the nation from foreign usurpers. Most of the stories most commonly associated with King Arthur are actually a hodgepodge of French myths and innovations grafted onto the existent Welsh stories.

By the 1500s, the French and Anglo-Saxons had achieved unity into a single nation, England. And with that unity came an increasing nationalism. A nationalism that needed heroic, mythic figures, resulting in King Arthur being embraced by the nation in general as a representation of the character of England. This was the period when the vast collection of stories written by dozens of different authors over hundreds of years was coalesced into a single narrative, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. which has become the basis of all subsequent interpretations and adaptations.