This evening I attended a talk at the M-Shed Museum in Bristol on that great West Country mystery, King Arthur. It was given by Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University who is an expert on all sorts of things, including medieval paganism and witchcraft. He’s very much my sort of historian, in that he believes in presenting facts and finds it interesting what stories people see in them.

Many of you, I am sure will be familiar with the vast swathes of scholarship surrounding the existence or lack thereof of Arthur. You will have read Gildas, Bede and Nennius, not to mention John Morris and Geoffrey Ashe. I don’t want to hash over all of that. I’m just going to concentrate on what Hutton said that was new to me.

Firstly it is a commonly held belief that Arthur was just a Welsh legend until that memorable chancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, made up a whole load of nonsense for his History of the Kings of Britain. I’m sure Geoffrey would be delighted to accept the credit for inventing the whole Arthurian mythos, and a near-contemporary historian, William of Newburgh, accused him of as much. William was writing in around 1190, some 50 years after Geoffrey published his History.

However, contrary to William’s view, I give you the illustration above. As you can see, it clearly shows a knight named as Artus De Bretani. Other knights in the illustration are named as Galvagin and Che. They are attacking a castle in which can be found a man called Mardoc and a woman called Winlogee. The carving is on the north gate of the cathedral at Modena in Italy. It is believed to date from the early 12th Century, possibly as early as 1120, some 20 years before Geoffrey published his History.

Now obviously there is a certain amount of leeway in historical dates, but it seems pretty clear that the whole Arthur legend, including Gawain, Kay and Guinevere, was well known in Italy at roughly the same time that Geoffrey was writing his book. That suggests that he didn’t make it up but instead, as he claimed, got it from an older work that is now lost.

Fast forward now to 2016, There have been two major archaeological discoveries in Britain this year that have bearing on the Arthur legend. The first was at Tintagel, and was covered in some detail by Alice Roberts in her new series of Digging for Britain that premiered last night on the BBC. The dig at Tintagel has uncovered a major “high status” complex of buildings dating from the 5th or 6th Century. Not only were there impressive stone buildings, but there was clear evidence of extensive trading with the Mediterranean.

If the people of Cornwall were trading with Greece, for which we have good evidence, they were almost certainly trading with Byzantium. I asked Hutton about this and he reminded me that the 6th Century was a period of significant expansion of westward links thanks to a smart Emperor called Justinian, so this all makes a lot of sense. Hutton added that Procopius makes no mention of Britain save to note that it is so far away it may be the place where the souls of the dead end up. But then Procopius didn’t like Theodora and was horribly two-faced when it came to Justinian so I’m not inclined to place much trust in him.

Anyway, if the dates we have for Arthur are correct then he and Justinian were contemporaries. Which means that Guinevere, Morgan and Theodora were contemporaries. I so much want to throw them together in a book and see what happens.

Hutton also noted that the site at Tintagel was abandoned around 700, and yet Geoffrey, writing over 400 years later, knew enough about Cornish history to claim it as the place of Arthur’s birth.

Finally we move to Glastonbury. Pretty much everyone agrees that the claims by the medieval monks to have found Arthur’s tomb are fanciful. The cross on which Arthur and Guinevere’s names were inscribed had a style of writing that was unknown in the 6th Century. And the graveyard in which the monks claimed to have dug has since been excavated and found to be Saxon. Furthermore, there was no clear evidence that there was any monastery at Glastonbury in Arthurian times. The Abbey was believed to have been founded by the Saxons.

Until this week. On Monday archaeologists working on a site at Beckery near Glastonbury announced the discovery of a monastery dating from the 5th or 6th Century. It is now the oldest known monastery in Britain, displacing Iona which is late 6th Century.

There is still no clear evidence for the existence of Arthur as an historical character. But his legend is clearly older, and much more widely spread around Europe, than is generally believed. And the post-Roman civilization in 5th and 6th Century Britain is clearly much richer and more powerful than anyone thought.