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

this episode is brought to you by autotrader now if car shopping feels like a massive faff buying your car online at autotrader makes it way easier really so you can shop loads and loads of cars online you can compare prices you can check the financing and trade-in options and of course you can do it from wherever you are you start online go to the dealer for your test drive and finish wherever works for you your information your data stays with you so there is no starting over plus you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help so buy your car online on autotrader really this episode is brought to you by mint mobile right now all of mint's plans are fifteen dollars per month even unlimited so go to mintmobile.com slash history upfront payment of forty five dollars for three months ninety dollars for six months or one hundred and eighty dollars for twelve months plan required fifteen dollars per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than fifty gigabytes may slow when network is busy includes up to twenty gigabytes of hotspot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mintmobile.com this episode is supported by anthropic the team behind claude now history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked yeah there's a classic example of that at the end of the fifteenth century and the hard question in particular was what is out there beyond the atlantic ocean to the west and as you will know the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer christopher columbus and he realizes or rather everybody else realizes that there is a vast continent out there and it is of course the americas so you know anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why anthropic is founded on one hard question above all how can we ensure that the ai revolution really goes well for ordinary people so they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear there was hope as well people wanted to know will cancer ever be cured can kids have a better future it turns out that there is hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking a week went by and the king's passion for a grain had become more than he could bear he summoned alfin of rid caradoc one of his friends and told him how desperately besotted he was with the grain if i cannot have her then i'm 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 passion which is burning me up what you request is impossible answered alfin we can't possibly approach a grain 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 merlin with his assistance you might i think be able to obtain what you want and so the king recognizing the truth of what alfin had said sent for merlin so that's a thrillingly dramatic moment in the history of the kings of britain by jeffrey of monmouth so jeffrey of monmouth wrote that in the late 1130s it was the british bonk buster 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 remind 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 gulwar the duke of cornwall and jeffrey describes igraine as being the most beautiful woman in britain and uther and gulwar had originally been allies in the fight against the saxons who will be coming to in due course in this episode but then uther holds court um and he gets his first glimpse of the wife of gulwar the 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 gulwar 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 gulwar return with igraine gulwar refuses and so uther um invades cornwall torching its towns and castles um burning everything in his path and because gulwar knows that he can't resist the might of the king of britain in the open field of battle he pursues a guerrilla strategy um but not before you know he goes out into um 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 um passage that you read is tintagel the fortress of the narrow entrance and it stands to this day uh on the northern cliffs of cornwall built on a kind of rocky precipitous headland very narrow isthmus as described in that passage um and it has a natural water supply as well so you can hold out for a 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 um effectively impregnable yeah however it's impregnable if you are attacking with conventional you know conventional forces correct but what if you have the world's ultimate weapon of mass destruction indeed the world's greatest wizard on your side well in that case everything is slightly different um 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 uh where she had lived a life of virginal purity but she had been met in her 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 um 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 um it endows him with all kinds of powers so he is a prophet 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 um jeffrey of monmouth has merlin say by means of my magic i can make you look exactly like goulwa so that you will resemble him in every way and everything goes to plan so uther who is now looking exactly like goulwa is able to ride across the narrow isthmus he's recognized by the guards who open the 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 goulwa sleeps with a grain and again to quote jeffrey of monmouth that very night she conceived our father and that is what we are going to see in this episode we're going to be talking about a man named arthur most famous of men yeah but was he this is the question so when we were introducing this episode we talked about how jeffrey of monmouth had effectively invented or created the arthur industry so up to this point is arthur the most famous of men or or is jeffrey making that up well the mad thing is is that by describing arthur as the most famous of men jeffrey basically succeeds in making that claim true hitherto it had been that he was one of the most famous of men in the history of the kingdom of england and that he was also one of the most famous of men in the history of the kingdom of england and loads that he was also one of the most famous of men in the history of the kingdom of england and loads of what jeffrey includes in this book of men in the history of the kingdom of england and loads of what jeffrey includes in this book will become part of the come the common of what jeffrey includes in this book will become part of the come the common currency of arthurian legend and of medieval literature more generally. And it's actually 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, which he actually calls it Caliburnus, so that's 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. 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 Monmouth. 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. You know, 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. And 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, but he says, oh, you know, Leonardo was part of it. And, you know, the Knights Templar and things like that. 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 seem 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. 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 a massive fraud. Yeah. You 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, I suppose, 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 and replaced by Geoffrey's book, then back they would flock and enlarge the numbers than before." This 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 when 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 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, he 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 of remarkable stories and entertaining tales, but as a serious, credible work of history. And a measure of how rapidly it gains a reputation as something that can be trusted is that 10 years after Henry of Huntingdon had given his commendation, another English chronicler, Alfred of Beverley, 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 published. 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 absolute tosh." Except that Geoffrey's. 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 in 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, the peer of Alexander the Great 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 abroad 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's treachery. And this promotion by Geoffrey of Arthur as a world conqueror has real-world political consequences because it's invoked by Edward I to justify his attempt at conquest of Scotland. And as late as the Elizabethan period. John Dee, so Elizabeth's kind of court necromancer, 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, it's because he's invoking the memory of Arthur. So there's a sense in which the whole British Empire. 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 subject 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 guy who's a wizard and a prophet, surely people thought that he was a figure of myth and folk tale 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 he is the only figure who issues prophecies. Yeah. 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. Yeah. But from the scene directly, he has transformed Uther into the image of Gaulois. Geoffrey, Goulwar, the husband of Igraine, is killed that same night in a skirmish. Uther is therefore free to marry Igraine, 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 on 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 Obi-Wan Kenobi role that he's best known for. No need at all. But anyone who has seen The Sword and the Stone will know that this is not how the myth ultimately takes form. Because by the time Mallory comes to write The Morte d'Arthur, and we've been saying basically the myth. The myth of Arthur that people have in their heads now essentially comes from Mallory. In Mallory's account, Merlin takes the newborn Arthur and he gives him to an obscure knight called Ser Ector to be raised alongside Ser 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 and 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 this story is introduced, are drawing swords from stones. Why are they taking swords from stones? To demonstrate their holiness. I mean, to demonstrate that what they say is right. Essentially, it seems to have become a kind of recognised way of demonstrating. 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 is too much inquiry, to be honest. Anyway, you just have to accept it. Arthur draws the sword from the stone and he 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, the 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. An 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, it's entertainment. But I mean, just to reiterate, they do think that Merlin, as well as being a figure of romance and fantasy, there 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 Mathers, 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 authentic 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 history was published. So very shortly after it appeared, there was an Anglo-Norman monk called Alderic 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 Alderic 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 believes 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. Well, 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 events of the 600 years that have followed on, that are separating Merlin from Alderic Vitalis, and to work out, well, what did Merlin prophesy? I love how it doesn't occur to him that Geoffrey. 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 Alderic Vitalis is not as cynical as I am. He's actually a clear-eyed scepticism. Right. So when Alderic reads Merlin's prophecies in Geoffrey's history, what does he find foretold? Well, very obviously, Merlin speaks of a boar of Cornwall. He was 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, an 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 and impose on them the yoke of perpetual slavery. So who do you think they are? 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. Dominic, there's more. So here's another prophecy. The lion's cubs should be transformed into saltwater fishes. What do you make of that? I mean, some people might say meaningless and so vague that it could mean anything. I 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 only legitimate heir in the White House. Mm-hmm. is that you end up with this civil war between Henry's daughter, Matilda. Yeah. 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. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. this is a very interesting book. Yeah. and it's a very interesting book. Yeah. And it's a very interesting book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. names of Zurich. Right. Yeah. The names of Zurich is actually from an older um from the from a 60s devaluation crisis oh okay whatever well maybe it's that one then it could be 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 there's that 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 all that um the poppies going over the side of the tower 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 passages 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 extension of the london underground i think it's twyford that um the uh the extension of the london underground the m3 and they drove it through the twyford yeah that's my thing that's my feeling swampy was opposing it maybe he's a hedgehog so i used to live in nostradamus's hometown of salon de provence in the south of france and i went to the nostradamus museum there which was absolutely useless to have waxworks rubbish waxwork it had waxworks had lots of waxworks yeah i can imagine it was a it was it was terrible it was a that staring at you about an empty room would have been a better way to spend a rainy afternoon um and the thing that struck me about nostradamus's uh predictions which i've been quite interested in when i was about 10 um is that they were absolutely worthless because that's they're so vague and so cryptic they could obviously it'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 uh prophecies by murder yeah well because merlin is the archetype of um a prophet who comes up with mad mad cryptic clues that yeah 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 the 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 of history so one of them um was in 1400 when owen glendower raised the banner of welsh independence against henry the fourth more welsh history really yeah when this appointment 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 yeah and he he reads into them a prophecy that he is going to defeat the english and didn't work out for him obviously um and in 1428 it was invoked by atmaris of joan of arc who again discovered in merlin's prophecies but she the hedgehog i did i can't remember what she is i mean i don't who knows but i'll tell you who else is inspired 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 the seventh another welshman and he is inspired by merlin's prophecies to launch his invasion of england and overthrow richard the third so i mean i admire both those men to be fair so the salient fact is merlin's prophecies are in jeffrey'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 politics and culture but also end up influencing okay 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 oh 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 who as you as you rightly say somebody like audrey 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 jeffrey's account does include uh sources which are are obscure and authentically ancient and someone like henry of huntingdon who's written a history of england is particularly qualified to recognize this that he he recognizes source material that jeffrey is using in the fabric of of his history and so he is therefore inclined to accept the truth of what jeffrey 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 jeffrey's time i mean centuries before jeffrey's time do in the opinion of people like henry of huntingdon and audrey vitalis seem to indicate that both merlin and arthur were more than just figments of jeffrey'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 answers after the break this episode is brought to you by tiktok we obviously love history here it's always a treat to make a new discovery especially in unexpected ways which is exactly what happens on tiktok like you know coffee you make it add milk drink it nothing more except except when you hop on tiktok you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino you can also discover videos about how in the 1700s people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it and suddenly you're imagining how people lived drank socialized makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us and that's the joy of tiktok you look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different your next discovery is waiting on tiktok visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more this episode is brought to you by tiktok we obviously love history here it's always a treat to make a new discovery especially in unexpected ways which is exactly what happens on tiktok like you know coffee you make it add milk drink it nothing more except except when you hop on tiktok you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino you can also discover videos about how in the 1700s people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it and suddenly you're imagining how people lived drank socialized makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us and that's the joy of tiktok you look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different your next discovery is waiting on tiktok visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more this episode is brought to you by the gates foundation we have touched on the fall of the roman empire a few times on this show haven't we but what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about it's not just barbarian invasions there's also talk of a disease which people call roman fever which i believe we know now as malaria for thousands of years humanity was defenseless against it but thankfully we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and american scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the world and they're fighting back with support from the world and they're fighting back from the gates foundation yes so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90 percent of mosquitoes that leads to a 50 percent drop in malaria saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities the gates foundation partners of human potential search gates foundation.org mosquito to learn more welcome back to the 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 is a sort of uh as a little amuse bouche before that let's try to pin down something else first and this is about merlin um so we've done you know jeffrey we talked about jeffrey monmouth we 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 for Geoffrey's purposes that he situate Merlin and indeed Arthur in a very, very precise historical context. And this context, it's basically the fifth and sixth centuries AD, which is one of the darkest and therefore the most intensely debated periods in the whole of British history. In terms of sources, it's a huge black hole. And in Geoffrey's case, it's a huge black hole. This period begins with the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain in 410. And in Geoffrey's account, the Romans withdraw for very kind 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 yourself. Unfortunately, the Britons proved 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 and flooding southwards. And the cities of the Roman province of Britannia start going up in flames. And the Britons tried 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, 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, bring 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 Constantine. 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, kind of 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 of them in due course. Quite different names. 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 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, it's a bad name. Anyway, 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, he's back in Britain. He's growing up. He's being trained in arms. 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 is he going to handle this? And it's at this point that a seeming solution hoves into view. And what hoves into 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 the 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 the 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 on. 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. And so ever more boatloads of armed young Saxons start to arrive and settle in Britain. And 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. Oh 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 country. 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. Where 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 to say 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 the 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 being 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. And so he invites all his court magicians to give him advice. They 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, okay, well, that's a good plan. Where should I build it? The obvious place, I'll build it on Mount Snowdon. 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 gets 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 magician. He summons his magician again and says, well, what's going on here? What's the problem? 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. He's brought to Vortigern's presence. But already, even though he's just a young boy, it's evident that he is a much 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 musicians who said, kill this boy. Listen, Dominic, I honestly think that they this is a story that doesn't bear too much investigation, doesn't bear too much skeptical and close analysis. Just accept that the workmen, they 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. one dragon is white and they start to fight 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 who 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 britain's 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 so 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 uh 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 first 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 jeffrey with the hill above bath all right nice to be winning a battle on an old roman site well that's what jeffrey says and what jeffrey 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 okay where it is erected to serve as a war memorial to the britons murdered by hengist in his attack on them oh that's a nice explanation yeah that's how stonehenge came to uh exist but the saxons are still there aren't they they i mean they are and growing in number yes a growing menace um and once arthur has gone off to avalon they return with renewed force and jeffrey's history if you're a welsh reader ends on a very somber note because the saxons under the rule of their great king athelstan are now the masters of what has become loggers the lost land the kingdom of england and it is with the reign of athelstan that jeffrey ends his history of the kings of britain and as for the britons jeffrey 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 huntingdon and audrey fatalis i mean we've been emphasizing that these are not gullible stupid men at all what do they make of all the stuff about dragons and caves and people being burned in towers and all of these goings-on i think they assume that that this is the material that was in this mysterious welsh book right given to jeffrey by the archdeacon of oxford which no one has ever seen apart from jeffrey i think is what they assume but the reason they don't just dismiss jeffrey as a liar is because they can recognize 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 okay so this reminds me of that famous academic book i remember what it's from where some academic professor wrote the footnote just says this was revealed to me in a dream it's not i mean it's not a dream that's the point yeah it is uh you know it there is this mysterious work of history which yeah jeffrey says is true but he but he is drawing on texts that certainly henry henry of huntingdon can recognize there aren't many of them okay they are there so let's just have a look at what 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 do enable the life to be written of a kind of wild prophet called mirthin and the earliest of these um it only derives from the 10th century but mirthin himself by the lifetime of jeffrey is supposed to have lived much earlier so in around the sixth century and tradition said that he had been driven mad by the death and death of jeffrey in battle of the king who he'd been serving and that mirthin had fled into the woods where he'd lived on roots and wild berries and uttered wild prophecies and the key thing that jeffrey takes from this tradition aside from the prophecies is the name of merlin mirthin and merlin are obviously cognate when mirthin is written in welsh if you're a french reader seeing it in jeffrey's latin text it's going to read like merd so so french word for shit basically and so this is generally thought why jeffrey changes his name to merlin okay but you were you were saying what about merlin's meeting with vortigern the stuff about the red and white dragons the link with arthur and all of that essentially the the germ of this derives from another earlier source which was written in in um 829 purportedly by a welsh monk called nennius and this is the historia bretonum the history of the britons and it includes vortigern welcoming hengist and horser to britain yeah when they land in kent the kind of the mass arrival of the saxons from across the sea vortigern retreating to uh 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 white dragons so they are all in nennius the boy in this story isn't called merlin or in jordan 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 jeffrey's history is clearly a very separate character from merlin and it's presumably this that enabled jeffrey when he kind of read the historia bretonum to separate out ambrosius who is the infant prophet and ambrosius aurelianus who is the great warrior who you know goes on to to defeat a vortigern and defeat the saxons and to defeat the greeks and to defeat the romans and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and it's a masterstroke because by eliding this kind of infant ambrosius the infant prophet with um mirthin jeffrey is able to create this composite character called merlin but even more 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 recognize it and think oh yeah jeffrey's really onto something and he's it's just clearly that he has better sources than us but the scaffolding for that story is what jeffrey is using so the scaffolding is for from nennius basically and so nennius is our oldest source for arthur is that effectively what you're saying yes and so nennius the story of 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 you know said it's from 829 so early ninth century but also because it situates arthur in a context that seemed to jeffrey'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 bellorum 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 jeffrey gets it from this is the genesis of jeffrey's idea of stuff about the battles about arthur about the showdown in bath well baden hill it's jeffrey 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 the kind of the acorn from which the entire massive oak of jeffrey's history and then the arthurian legends more generally will sprout so it's absolutely crucial to the whole edifice and the reason that it's crucial is because the other two key sources for the fifth and sixth centuries that jeffrey is drawing on and which henry of huntingdon obviously recognizes 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 who's a northumbrian monk and he is writing around 7 30 the ecclesiastic 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. He might not be interested in them. But in Bede's history, you do get lots of familiar names and details. So you get Vortigern, you get Hengist and Horsa, you get the three ships landing in Kent, you get Ambrosius or Aurelianus. Bede mentions all of those. And Bede himself is drawing on an even earlier source. And this is the only source that was 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 Gwynevere that we talked about in the previous episode. That is not historic. That's something that's made 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 suggested 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. It's about a century after the Romans have withdrawn. It implies that 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 Jeremiah ad, which laments a country going to the dogs, a country that's been ruined by incompetent establishment stooges. 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, by 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, there 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' writing. Gildas does also mention a proud tyrant who 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, rucially, Dominic, there is no mention of Arthur. The implication in Gildas is that the battle leader who wins Baden Hill is Ambrosius Aurelianus. What 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 and 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 bus, and the members of The Rest Is History Club. And you can do that by going to therestishistory.com and signing up. You will get ad-free listening, you will get early access to the series, and a whole host of supplementary benefits. So, on that bombshell, I literally cannot wait. I'm so excited. We'll see you next time for the answers to the questions that have perplexed so many great minds for so long. Who was King Arthur, and did he really exist? Goodbye. Bye-bye. Hello, Goldhanger History listeners. This is Marina Hyde and Richard Osman from The Rest Is Entertainment. Hello, everybody. Every Thursday and Friday, we are reacting to the pop culture phenomenon that is the celebrity traitors. We'll be on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, and Marina and I are digging into all the castle's twists and turns, giving our expert opinion on what should happen next. Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor? It's tempting to think of an actual traitor. Yeah. A Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby, but then all of those are traitors who got caught. Philby had a great run, though. He did have a great run. I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne. Yes, maybe. And probably sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well. So, maybe there's some sort of equivalence. So, if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday. Friday night at 10pm. Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.