We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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in his cheek, these zigzagging genealogies always seemed to foreground one single name, the man who became the ultimate British hero – and perhaps still is.
Sir Gawain, who slew the green knight, was a member of King Arthur’s court, a Knight of the Round Table. Andrew of Wyntoun says that at the time of the first Pope Leo in Rome, when Lucius was Roman emperor, the ‘King of Brettane than wes Arthour’ … And not of Britain alone. Rather than a misty, romantic figure hanging around Avalon, King Arthur was regarded as the ultimate military overlord – Andrew reckons that his conquests included France, Lombardy, Flanders, Holland, Brabant, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Orkney ‘and all the isles in the sea’. He made Britain all one realm, free from foreign claims.
It’s clear that the first references to Arthur come not from English, but from early Welsh sources. If Arthur ever existed as a historic figure – and it’s a big ‘if’ – he was probably a Romano-British knight, leading campaigns against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Between 800 and 900 he is described as a leader of the ‘British’ – i.e. not the Saxons. In the poem Y Goddodin, mentioned earlier, there is a glancing reference. It’s clear that the retreating British people kept his name alive as a symbol of heroic resistance.
To begin with, the Norman chroniclers regarded him as a ridiculous fantasy of the people they were busily oppressing. William of Malmesbury wrote around 1125 of ‘Arthur, about whom the foolish tales of the Britons rave even today; one who is clearly worthy to be told about in truthful histories rather than to be dreamed about in deceitful fables’; and seventy years later William of Newburgh attacked his rival Geoffrey of Monmouth as ‘a writer … who, in order to expiate the faults of these Britons, weaves the most ridiculous figments of imagination around them, extolling them with the most impudent vanity above the virtues of the Macedonians and the Romans’.
Norman hostility to Arthur is interesting. It suggests that by the time of the Conquest the Saxons (against whom this Welsh hero fought) had already taken him over as one of their own, and saw him as their symbol of resistance to the latest, French-speaking, invaders. But Arthur proves a prize for almost everyone: almost immediately, French poets are appropriating him in turn, and he will flower as a Europe-wide hero and an enduring symbol of chivalry. During the medieval period he is steadily transformed and reshaped into the very image of Christian, knightly behaviour, a hero for all the new British – Welsh-speaking, Saxons and Norman French as well. He becomes, to all intents and purposes, the symbol of Britishness as the country coagulates.
If we want to understand how the medieval British understood themselves, the Arthur poems can’t be ignored. One of the greatest, written around 1400, is the so-called Alliterative Morte Arthure, beautifully translated for modern times by the contemporary poet Simon Armitage. This King Arthur, like Andrew of Wyntoun’s, is an expansive military conqueror. His realm covers France, Germany and Scandinavia, as well as all of Britain; and he claims lordship over Rome itself, as well as all of northern Italy. The enemy is a combination of the Roman emperor Lucius with his Mediterranean allies, who, unhistorically, include Muslim warlords ‘from Babylon and Baghdad’, alongside Greek and Egyptian kings and Roman senators. No doubt this reflects the patriotic mood of England after the great victories against France of the early phase of the Hundred Years War, as well as the effect of centuries of crusading against ‘Saracens’. The result is a medieval world war epic, extremely gory. Consider the unhappy but typical fate of a certain Sir Kay:
Then keen Sir Kay made ready and rode,
went challenging on his charger to chase down a king,
and landed his lance from Lithuania in his side
so that spleen and lungs were skewered on the spear;
with a shudder the shaft pierced the shining knight,
shooting through his shield, shoving through his body.
But as Kay drove forward, he was caught unfairly
by a lily-livered knight of royal lands;
as he tried to turn the traitor hit him,
first in the loins, then further through the flank;
the brutal lance buried into his bowels,
burst them in the brawl, then broke in the middle.
It’s a poem probably based on much earlier oral sources, but by 1400 it’s a modern poem too. It tells us a lot about the truth of medieval combat. In 1996, for instance, workmen at a site by the town of Towton in Yorkshire uncovered a mass grave of men killed during the battle there in 1461, just sixty years after this poem. The skeletons, stripped of their armour, showed horrific injuries. One had had the front of his skull bisected and then a second deep slash across the face splitting the bone, followed by another horizontal cut from the back. It is estimated that 3 per cent of the entire adult population of England took part in the battle, in which 28,000 people died. The corpses of the dead were said to have been mutilated, and evidence from the skeletons suggests that ears and tongues and noses were hacked off.
The audience for this poem, clearly made to be read aloud on long winter nights, well understood what a bloody butchery contemporary warfare was; but they also seem to have had an almost modern enthusiasm for the grotesque. They had been brought up on the stories of Bevis and Guy of Warwick, and our poet knows what they want. At times he sounds like a scriptwriter for a horror movie, as for instance when Arthur comes across a French cannibal giant who has just had his wicked way with an unfortunate princess:
How disgusting he was, guzzling and gorging
lying there lengthways, loathsome and unlordly,
with the haunch of a human thigh in his hand.
His back and his buttocks and his broad limbs
he toasted by the blaze, and his backside was bare.
Appalling and repellent pieces of flesh
of beasts and our brothers were braising there together,
and a cook-pot was crammed with Christian children,
some spiked on a spit …
Poems reflect the politics of their time. By 1400, when the English and the Scots were at war again and the great Welsh rebellion of Owen Glendower was at its height, King Arthur, once a Welsh hero who fought for Edinburgh, can no longer represent all the people of Britain. In this English poem,when he returns to confront his great enemy Mordred, he meets an army of all England’s foes – Danes, Muslims and Saxons – and also
Picts, pagans and proven knights
of Ireland and Argyll, and outlaws of the Highlands.
English archers confront them. Mordred flees to Wales. King Arthur has, in the hands of a few generations of poets, completely changed sides.
But he always belongs to the people, fed on romances and ballads. The anonymous poem Gawain and the Green Knight is the most earthy and local-feeling of any work written in English in medieval times. It was produced, probably in Lancashire or Cheshire, by an educated writer born around 1330; and it was only rediscovered in a manuscript during the nineteenth century. It is, like the previous poem, alliterative rather than rhymed, though there are short rhyming lines, and it brims with the mystery and chilliness of the old English north. Very early on the poet insists that it’s the kind of story the common people knew:
I’ll tell it straight, as I in town heard it,
with tongue;
as it was said and spoken
in story staunch and strong,
with linked letters loaded,
as in this land so long.*
He protests too much. What we are really going to get is an extremely complex, beautifully patterned work, full of symbolism, eroticism and a courtly ethic which has more to do with the French romances than anything