The Making of King Arthur

Who's our greatest national hero?

Churchill, perhaps?

Admiral Nelson, maybe?

Nobby Stiles, anyone?

It's tricky, but my hero is someone of unrivalled legendary status.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

He drew his sword, Excalibur, from the stone.

He assembled the Knights of the Round Table at Camelot.

She ever grows more beautiful.

He was betrayed by his queen, Guinevere, and Lancelot.

This was the knight who came so swift to my rescue.

And it's said he will one day return in our hour of need.

His name is King Arthur.

Hail King Arthur, King of England!

But where does this timeless legend come from?

It's difficult to know,

but I believe its origins lie here,

at Hastings.

When the Normans defeated King Harold here in 1066,

it wasn't the end of the conquest, it was only the beginning.

To exert control, they had to conquer not just the country,

but the culture.

And in doing so, they embraced the legend of King Arthur

to such an extent that the Arthur that we think of today,

that great icon of Britishness,

is as much a Norman creation as he is our own.

As a poet, I am not interested in whether Arthur existed or not.

Instead, I want to trace the story

through the literature and manuscripts of the medieval age.

To show how the Norman invaders plundered him from the poems

of Welsh bards, fixing him in their own image and language.

How foppish French poets would recast him as cuckold and coward.

And finally, how a new generation of English writers

would reclaim him as our quintessential national hero.

Some men in England say that King Arthur is not dead,

that he shall come again, he is the Once and Future King.

Those are the words of Thomas Malory,

the greatest of all Arthurian writers.

And he was right, too.

About 10 years ago,

King Arthur actually came to my home town in Yorkshire.

One, two...one, two, three, four!

# It's time to open curtain it's time to light the lights

# It's time to know for certain it's the panto night tonight. #

I was there, all-singing, all-dancing,

the night Pureside Working Men's Club put on our annual panto.

This surreal version of Arthur was dreamed up in the overactive mind

of one Peter Armitage - my dad.

The first voice that anyone heard was the voice of Merlin,

who said, "Roll up, over here, over here.

"Get the sword out of the stone and rule England."

Have a go, you'd make a lovely king!

CHEERING

I've broken my nail!

-There's some dresses there.

-Yeah, look at them.

-That were Guinevere's dress.

-Yeah.

There's a bit of quality there. Hey, look at these!

It's got blood on it!

Yeah, well, it will, you've got to have realism.

Look at that, man.

A man's got a certain amount of pride

when he writes his initials on his own sword.

I remember being in one of the battles with one of these swords.

Ha! Hey, look here! What can't speak, can't lie. Have a look at that -

SA, Simon Armitage, my sword.

-It is, that's my writing.

-It's you're writing, isn't it?

Hey, reunited. I am the true Arthur.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

It's an Aladdin's Cave.

-I'm reluctant to let that go now, I have to say.

-Do you want it?

-I think it's part of my inheritance.

-Do you want it?

-I do, yeah.

Speaking of inheritance, that might be it, pal!

The way I'm spending all my holidays at the moment,

-that might be what you're getting!

-Are you ready?

-Ready!

-1, 2, 3, pull!

My dad's panto was an idiosyncratic take on the Arthur story.

But every generation has seen Arthur in a different way.

For the Victorians,

he offered a nostalgia kick in an age of industrialisation.

In the 20th century,

he was popularised in children's literature.

For archaeologists,

evidence of Arthur can be the key to fame and fortune.

Maybe the bones of King Arthur's lie beneath this grass,

maybe they don't.

My Lord,

let me go in search of the Grail.

There have been countless screen adaptations.

And who could forget Rick Wakeman's prog rock extravaganza -

Arthur On...Ice.

The one thing that unites them all

is the image of Arthur as our great national hero.

But it's only when I started translating medieval poetry

that I realised that our Arthur is a Norman.

Imagine you're William the Conqueror.

You were victorious at the Battle of Hastings, and now you're marching

to Wales to subdue the people and to see what else you can filch.

But in this part of the country, the natives just won't lie down.

This area around here, along the English-Welsh border,

it seems very serene and pleasant and quiet this morning,

but it would've been a scene of great conflict and skirmishes.

And castles like this remind us how the Normans

not only wanted to fortify their interests and subdue the people,

but almost stands as a metaphor for how they wanted to impose themselves

on the cultural landscape.

The Norman conquest would be a total conquest of land,

of people, of culture.

And to achieve that, they needed someone to rewrite history.

You're a Norman cleric with literary ambitions.

You live and work here.

These days, the place is empty.

There's only Hazel, who works in the office weekdays, nine until noon.

But in 1135, Monmouth Priory was a thriving monastery,

and home to the writer Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Geoffrey was determined to write a new Norman version of history

to please his superiors.

In doing so, he would kick-start the Arthurian legend we know today.

You get the impression of Geoffrey as a young and ambitious man.

He was a cleric, he was a scholar with an eye for the main chance,

maybe noticing a gap in the market

and contemplating writing a bestseller.

"Oftentimes, in turning over

"in mine own mind the many themes

"that might be subject matter of a book,

"my thoughts would fall upon the plan of writing a history

"of the kings of Britain."

That's Geoffrey himself in his preface

to what would become his famous work.

It gives us a little insight into the man himself,

sitting down with the intention of writing

a lucid, sober, clear-minded history of these islands.

At the heart of his history would be the reign of King Arthur.

But Geoffrey's Arthur would prove a very different character

from the Arthur celebrated by the local Welsh bards.

This Arthur was a mythological Welsh chieftain

whose spirit inhabited the landscape.

SPOKEN IN WELSH

He was a shadowy character,

his mere name a symbol of hope and unity in uncertain times.

And in the taverns of the Welsh hills, his story is still told.

Arthur, from very early times,

his name was always sung like a bell

down through the centuries in Welsh poetry as a

wonderful example of what all chieftains or leaders

or patrons should be.

Do you think it would have been politically convenient

-for the Normans to appropriate Arthur?

-I do.

The Normans, being a very canny people,

they knew how to use history and legend,

and if they could appropriate the story of King Arthur

they could also become the proprietors

of all that Arthur belonged to.

So by possessing one of their heroes,

they become possessors of the hearts and minds of the people as well?

I think so, yeah.

But we know

that he is one of us.

Am I one of us?

-You can be, if you like.

-Thank you.

In writing his history, Geoffrey of Monmouth stole the figure of Arthur

from the Welsh bards,

and began moulding him into a Norman character.

He forged an ancestral link

between Arthur and the new Norman ruling elite.

He hammered out Arthur's rough edges, creating a polished

and refined, magisterial king.

He even drew comparisons between Arthur

and William the Conqueror himself.

Geoffrey had crafted the first clear image of King Arthur,

and that image was of a Norman conqueror.

'Arthur did set upon his head the helm of gold.'

'Girt was he also with Excalibur,'

'best of swords, that was forged within the Isle of Avalon.'

And Arthur's tool of conquest was the sword Excalibur.

At his Wiltshire forge,

Hector spends his days contemplating the power of the sword.

All hand-forged swords have character, and then

if they're used by the right person and they're successful, this is where

your myths and legends start.

The swords in Arthurian literature

often seem to be imbued with magical properties as well.

I'm just wondering, when you're making these, do you feel as if

you're working in an ancient craft on sort of almost sacred objects?

That is my pleasure in making them.

There is a magical quality about it, I don't care what anyone says.

It's that earth, fire, water and air that you're using,

all those elements, and they're all going into that blade.

What about in the 12th century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing?

Is this the kind of thing that he would have had in mind?

The sword that we've been working on today

is the sword that he would be familiar with.

It was still very much a slashing weapon, and if you were on horseback

then you needed a long blade, and a reasonable amount of weight

in that sword, so that it would function when you used it.

-It does feel very usable, you know, very balanced.

-Oh they are, yes.

They should float in your hand so that you can use them.

It does, it really does.

No, that could be very handy in Huddersfield on a Friday night.

Oh, definitely!

With Excalibur in his hand, Geoffrey's Arthur defeats the

Anglo-Saxons and conquers vast swathes of the Continent -

just as the Normans had done.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword,

but you feel pretty mighty with a sword in your hand, as well.

And Arthur is certainly mighty when Geoffrey of Monmouth

writes about him going into battle. And this is the sign of his power.

He says that Arthur

goes swishing into the thickest part of the battle, crying out,

"Holy Mary", and kills 470 of the enemy just by touching them.

It's as if Excalibur is the embodiment of Arthur himself.

London, 1150,

and Geoffrey's King Arthur is all the rage.

If you're a poet looking to make a quick bob,

you can do much worse than pick up Geoffrey's history

and make it your own, cutting here, and adding there.

It was the Norman poet, Robert Wace, who first translated

Geoffrey's prose history into poetry.

He wrote in old French and called it the Roman de Brut,

the Romance of the Britons.

One of the few remaining copies rests here

at the Royal College of Arms.

This is the nerve centre from which all of Britain's

heraldry is administered.

Step inside and it's like a medieval world that time forgot.

Even today, members of the College of Arms have a heraldic title.

This is Bluemantle Pursuivant,

also known as Peter.

He's the keeper of Robert Wace's precious manuscript.

SPOKEN IN FRENCH

It is always exciting to see an original,

and exciting for me because this is a poem, you can see it's a poem

from the way it's laid out.

I can't really read it,

my old French is not too hot,

in fact some people say that my English isn't great either,

but I can make out references in the poem.

I can see Arthur's name popping up here,

and mention of the Round Table.

In fact the first ever reference to the Round Table

in Arthurian literature.

The rhyming couplets are pretty clear.

Arthur da-de-da-de-da......

..table...da-de-da-de-da-de-da...

..fable.

It just makes me think of the stamina needed for a task like this,

some huge work in rhyming couplets

and suddenly you're confronted with

finding a rhyme for "Round Table" once again

and you've used fable already, and where do you go from there?

I'd be trying to get the Tower of Babel in there, I think.

Or Auntie Mabel.

Robert Wace's mention of the Round Table was inspired.

These two words were to change the course

of the Arthurian legend forever.

Poets and writers from across Europe saw the opportunity to create

wonderful tales that focused not on Arthur,

but on the quests of the knights who sat at the Round Table.

I'm heading back to Wales,

hot on the tracks of the most famous and daring of all Arthurian quests.

It's a quest taken up by the Welsh knight Percival,

who leaves the court of King Arthur

and sets out in search of the Holy Grail -

the humble cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper.

The tale captivated medieval readers across Christendom.

Presumably these knights of the road are unaware that

Al & Glo's Diner on the A40 sits on a sacred route of pilgrimage,

to what is believed to be the true Holy Grail.

Many people think the Holy Grail still exists.

The story is this -

after the death and resurrection of Jesus,

Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain and brought the Holy Grail with him.

He left at Glastonbury when he died.

It stayed there until 1539,

when Henry VIII's men came to sack that Abbey,

and then the abbot ordered the monks

to flee with the precious cup into Wales.

And here the cup stayed.

The cup fell into the hands of the Powell family,

who kept it at their home, Nanteos Mansion,

for 400 years until the estate was broken up in the 1950s.

Mrs Bliss, you live here now, but when you were a child

-you know this house as a visitor.

-Yes.

-Did you ever see the cup itself?

-Yes, I did.

Do people still come to see it?

Oh yes, they do.

But unfortunately, we have to send them away because

we no longer have the cup at Nanteos.

Do people come from a long way away to see it?

Yes, they do. A lot of people from abroad - America, Italy -

they have heard of the Nanteos Cup.

I haven't been allowed to see, leave alone film, the Grail,

or the Cup, as it is, in its present resting place.

But there are many, many stories of miraculous cures brought about

by drinking from the Nanteos Cup.

When the Powells left Nanteos

the whereabouts of the Grail became a mystery.

But I've tracked down one of the last descendants

of the once-great Powell dynasty.

She lives alone at a secret address,

with only her Pekingese dogs for company.

It's she who must shoulder the burden of guarding the Holy Grail.

KNOCKING

-Oh, welcome.

-Hello.

Welcome to the home of the Grail, pleased to meet you.

Hiya, nice to meet you. I've got your little pressie,

I got you some Welsh daffodils.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

-It's a pleasure. May I come in?

-Yes.

Thank you very much.

Fiona, I'm on the trail of the Holy Grail.

Oh, right, you've come a long way.

Percival had to go through huge trials and tribulations

-to eventually see the Grail.

-Yes.

Should that be the way it is now, should people have to overcome

the same obstacles to be able to achieve the Grail?

Yes, you have to go through certain challenges

to see the Grail, the real Grail.

Quite a challenge for me, finding your house,

I don't know whether that's the equivalent.

Yes, I'm sure it was, yes.

And I see the road was dug up today as well,

that was like Percival's challenge.

I think it said, "Road closed", yeah.

And would you let anybody see the Grail?

No, certainly not.

Nowadays the world is quite a wicked and evil place.

Only the pure in heart find the Holy Grail.

Is that right? How do you think I'm fixed on that front?

Yes, I think you look like someone who is pure in heart,

and you like poetry,

which I like, and literature.

Well, I'm taking my heart in my mouth now,

but I'm going to ask you, Fiona.

Can I see the Grail?

Um... I feel you are a person who should see the Grail,

you've got the right spirit and the right faith.

So I'll get it out and show it you now.

Right, we usually keep it in here for safety.

Before you show me this, Fiona, if what you're saying is true,

what I'm going to look at now is the actual vessel

from which Christ drank at the Last Supper.

It is the Holy Grail that Jesus drank out of at the Last Supper, yes.

So we preserve it very carefully.

-It has always been in this box.

-Yeah.

That is the glass bowl.

It has seen better days.

Yes, there is not much left now.

I mean, forgive me for pointing out the obvious,

but has somebody had a bite out of this?

Yes.

Yes, I think people did bite bits off it, yes.

What, thinking it would be good luck to swallow a bit?

Yes, but now we don't let anyone even see or touch it.

-No. I'm not going to bite it, don't worry.

-I'll just turn it over.

OK.

Oh, yes. There's the base.

And is it OK for me to pick that up?

If you don't want me to, I won't. It's fine.

If you just touch it with your hand, Simon, just say a prayer.

I want to thank you for showing me that,

-because I know it means a great deal to you.

-Yes, it does.

I guard it with my life, yes.

Well, I didn't hear a host of golden angels

when I touched the Nanteos Cup,

and I don't think I feel any more enlightened.

But it was quite humbling that Fiona would share with me

something which was clearly so important to her,

and it does remind me that if you are prepared to let them be,

these ancient stories can be very powerful, and very persuasive.

And it is quite fantastic, really,

that signs and symbols of these myths that started in the Dark Ages

and were written down almost 1,000 years ago

should still be existing today in our contemporary, new-fangled world.

You may have noticed something in this story.

Arthur has all but disappeared,

eclipsed by his more courageous knights.

But for the king, things were about to get much worse.

The Arthurian tales were the literary sensation

of the Middle Ages,

and they became a common language among all people of Europe.

As the stories seeped deeper into the culture of medieval France,

King Arthur would fall victim

to the whims and fancy of French writers.

We might think of France as a foreign country,

the old enemy, even.

But during the 12th century, parts of Britain and parts of France

were the same kingdom, with shared monarchs and a shared culture.

So there were no border controls as far as literature was concerned,

and no immigration checks for its characters.

The hand of the French writers was reaching out towards our Arthur,

and he was about to go all ooh-la-la.

It was here, around Provins, 60 or so miles south-east of Paris,

that the Arthurian tale was about to take this new turn.

The French writers decided to spice up the legend

with the soupcon of sex.

And the sauciest of them all was a wandering minstrel

named Chretien de Troyes.

SPOKEN IN FRENCH

We tend to think of authors these days as people who write whatever

they want whenever they want, and long may it be so.

But back in Chretien's time,

though often little more than jobbing tradespeople,

people who would kneel at the feet of their patrons

and produce work according to the needs and desires of the day.

Sometimes for the Royal Family.

Imagine that.

Chretien was writing at the service of his great patron,

the Countess Marie de Champagne.

At her court, Marie demanded refined manners

and utter devotion from her male subjects.

This kind of behaviour became known as courtly love.

At the medieval Rose Garden in Provins, the ideals of courtly love

are alive in Claudine Glot.

If I wanted to practise courtly love,

what kind of things would I need to learn?

You must be proud,

generous, full of charity.

You must have a great valour in yourself,

and you must do wonderful things.

You have to be elegant, clever, well-clothed.

You have to have excellent manners.

And you have to accept to do everything your lady asks you to do.

-Quite a challenge.

-A big challenge.

A full-life challenge.

So in that world, in the world of Arthur and the Round Table,

courtly love would be the most noble moral code, would it?

It is. It is a big fight in this Arthurian books and texts,

because we still have the old chivalrous codes

and we have this new story, with this new way of life.

And Chretien le Troyes put courtly love and courtesy

at such a high level.

In 2010, if I started practising courtly love, do you think that

that would be appreciated by women,

or do you think they would just think I was insane?

No, I think it would be appreciated, because we're at that moment where

all books and magazines are full of sex, and maybe it is too much.

We are not only sex machines, you know.

It was Chretien who brought the idea of courtly love

into the legend of King Arthur.

But in his hands, Arthur is barely recognisable.

Chretien opens his story at the Court of Camelot, perhaps inspired

by this building, the Tour Cesar, which Chretien would have known well

as he began to write.

We first find King Arthur

luxuriating with his queen, Guinevere.

But this Arthur is not the courageous hero you might expect.

One day, a stranger arrives at court,

taunting Arthur about his lack of power and wealth,

and claiming to be holding some of Arthur's people.

So, as part of a medieval hostage exchange programme,

Arthur rather meekly allow Guinevere

to be taken off into the forest.

And it will need someone more manly and handsome than Arthur

to rescue Guinevere.

Enter Lancelot.

Lancelot is perhaps Chretien's greatest invention.

He outshines all the other nights, even Arthur himself.

Needless to say, he is a Frenchman, oozing Gallic charm.

And when he falls for Queen Guinevere,

he can't help but fear the worst.

It is the sight of a golden strand of hair caught in a comb

that first sets Lancelot's heart racing.

And there's swooning and fainting and heartbreak and histrionics.

All this, and the couple have barely spoken, let alone kissed.

Lancelot fights to reach the imprisoned Queen Guinevere.

And in Chretien's story of courtly love, there can only be one ending.

Love must have its way.

And one night, Lancelot steals through an orchard

towards where Guinevere is sleeping.

He bends back the bars at the window with his bare hands,

and he lays with Guinevere until dawn.

TRANSLATION:

It is quite shocking to read that adultery scene.

It is quite a racy passage in the book. And I suppose

in modern terms, you could say that Chretien takes it all the way.

It leaves Arthur cuckolded and emasculated.

It is as if Lancelot hasn't just stolen his wife,

he has stolen the story.

It would be 200 years before a poem restored Arthur's reputation.

A poem written much closer to home.

Come on, Albion!

Go on, boys!

Come on, lads!

It is now the 14th century.

England is at war with France.

England is a new sovereign nation, fighting for her independence.

Out of this atmosphere came a new patriotic spirit,

a spirit reflected in the emergence of the English language.

-Oi! Get in your

-BLEEP

-half!

Poems and songs were written down in English for the first time,

and for me, one of the best is an anonymous epic poem

known by its unsexy academic title as The Alliterative Morte Arthure.

French and Latin were the established

literary languages of the day,

and nearly all Arthurian literature was presented

in those languages.

But this was a poem written in the emerging English language.

I suppose back in Paris it was a little bit minor-league,

something a little bit subversive about it as well, and Northern.

In fact, some people go as far as to say

that the poem was probably written by somebody from West Yorkshire,

with a West Yorkshire dialect.

Go on!

Handball!

Sir Arthur's army set eyes on the enemy,

shoved for'ard their shields

and shunned further delay.

Shunting forward at the foe withfierce shouts,

and battering through the bright bucklers at the wurriers.

This is a very different Arthur emerging through the English poems.

In the French literature, he was a marginalised character, really,

a gentleman concerned with etiquette

and courtly love, but pushed slightly to one side.

Here, he is at the very centre of everything that is going on.

He is a national hero, a ruler at home, and he is a conqueror abroad.

He is going to make the whole world bow to his whim.

Arthur had come home.

But it would take a true masterpiece of English literature

to establish him as the great national hero we know today.

You're well-bred and refined, you did your stint in the army

and inherited the family estate.

It's true, you've had a privileged life,

but at heart you're an unsavoury character.

Only you know why you did it.

Robbery, rape

and murder.

It was around 1450 while awaiting trial for his heinous misdeeds

that Sir Thomas Malory was locked up in the Tower of London.

To say that Malory

had led a colourful life is a bit of an understatement.

He'd enjoyed power, rank and privilege on the one hand.

On the other hand, he'd been a notorious criminal,

living the life of a fugitive.

But all that would come to an abrupt halt with his incarceration here.

From now on, Malory's days would be spent in enforced contemplation.

It was during his years of imprisonment

that Sir Thomas Malory first started to write.

Malory wasn't a writer at all until his imprisonment here,

but with books at his disposal,

with stories in his memories

and with, frankly, lots of time on his hands,

he threw himself into this hugely ambitious project.

He set about writing a coherent and compelling version

of the Arthur story, and he couldn't have foreseen it,

but it would become one of the great masterpieces

of English literature and would fix King Arthur

in the imagination of the British people for centuries to come.

There are very few people in the world who can truly

appreciate Malory's achievement.

But the author Erwin James,

who also began his writing career in prison, is one of them.

I was living on the fringes of society, smashing windows,

getting drunk, getting into fights, total directionless behaviour.

I just became worse. I met this chap.

We were living in a squat, basically.

We'd go out together committing grubby crimes like

breaking into cars, doing pathetic things, really.

And ultimately, we ended up being involved in two murders.

Two ordinary people lost their lives because of me and my co-accused.

I was locked up in Wandsworth, my first year just locked up in a cell

23 hours a day.

Six books a week from the prison library,

bucket in the corner from my toilet

and lots of time to think, you know.

And at what stage, then, did writing become important to you,

or even reading before that?

Well, reading... I was literate.

In many ways, I had the edge on a lot of my fellow prisoners

because I was literate. I was barely literate.

I wasn't educated.

But I could read and I could write a bit.

I could write a letter.

But they weren't particular strengths.

Did you read Malory in prison and do you remember

what you thought of it at the time?

Initially when I read it, I couldn't imagine that this person

who'd written this classic thing that everybody knows about,

the story of Arthur and all these legends,

was sort of conjured up and made palatable

by this person in a prison cell,

who also had the opprobrium of his community.

It took me a while to really accept that this was somebody

that was in prison that did this.

But once he started, he could probably see

this great tapestry stretching out before him.

When you're locked up and you're isolated,

your imagination is unbelievable.

Cos in prison you spend most of your time in your head.

But of course for Malory, he created an amazing sort of

environment populated with these great characters.

One think that I think is the very winning in Malory is the way that he

keeps addressing you, the reader.

He's always telling you about his predicament,

and he asks for deliverance.

Do you think that the writing is a redemptive act in that sense?

That's a really good point because I wonder if Malory did have some sense

of remorse.

Remorse is a great driver.

This was drawn by a knight prisoner, Sir Thomas Malory,

and I pray you all that readeth this tale to pray for him

that God send him good recovery soon and hastily.

Amen.

That's Malory speaking, wanting to make his peace with us.

But his work has a wider resonance than his own redemption.

He wrote during the War of the Roses,

the civil war that had divided England.

In the legend of King Arthur,

he saw a parable for his own fractured times,

and his book is dominated by the themes of loyalty and unity.

It's called Le Morte d'Arthur.

It tells the story of Arthur's death, and this is the landscape

of the King's last stand.

I can't imagine that these...

landscapes have changed that much in several hundred years.

Apart from the odd the odd B road, it's still largely

empty, unoccupied,

and I think to any writer, that offers a blank canvas.

You can imagine Malory in his cell, in all that confinement

and claustrophobia, thinking about this wide expanse and dreaming

of filling it with a charging knight and storming soldiers.

To journey through this landscape is to understand the meaning of

Malory's masterpiece and to understand why Le Morte d'Arthur

is the one of the jewels in the crown of English literature.

The beginning of the end finds Arthur away

fighting Lancelot to avenge him for sleeping with Guinevere.

But news reaches him of trouble back home at Camelot.

Arthur's son, Mordred, has betrayed his father and taken the throne.

Denied vengeance against Lancelot, Arthur must instead

begin the long march back to do battle with Mordred.

I'm striding along a tank track on MoD land on Salisbury Plain,

which is where Malory located the last great battle.

It's still a place full of danger - one of those places on the map

with nothing in it and "keep out" signs all around the edge.

It's also one of those places where the noise of weaponry

is never far away

and where warfare is still being practised and perfected.

So to my mind, it's the perfect place

to be thinking about Arthur's last stand.

The stage is set.

But before giving battle, the army set up camp to rest for the night.

This is Copehill Down,

the artificial village where the British Army practise urban warfare.

It's a lonely and haunting place, evoking the vision of desolation

that King Arthur sees as he drifts off to sleep.

Arthur dreams of fortune's wheel.

It's a kind of metaphysical Ferris wheel.

It Arthur the right up to the top and then tips him out of the seat

into a pond full of serpents and worms. It's a prophecy of doom,

and the significance is that Arthur has reached the very pinnacle

of his powers and the only direction to go after that is down.

It's a recurring scene in Arthurian literature, but Malory,

the master craftsman, heightens it to its full dramatic effect.

It gives us a foretaste of the complete dismantling

of Arthur's kingdom and makes Arthur

one of the great tragic figures of literature.

At dawn, Arthur is resolved to avoid war at all costs,

but he's powerless to prevent it.

The decisive battle commences.

And never since was there seen a more doleful battle

in no Christian land;

for there was but rushing and riding, foining and striking,

and many a grim word was there spoken of either to other,

and many a deadly stroke.

And thus they fought all the long day, and never stinted

till the noble knights were laid to the cold earth;

and ever they fought still till it was near night,

and by then there were a hundred thousand laid dead upon the earth.

Aware that his narrative was reaching its climax,

Malory cranks up the rhetoric and ratchets up the numbers.

It's almost as if every conflict in British history

had led to this point.

What's at stake here is both the future of the King

and the future of the kingdom.

Hundreds of thousands of men are pitched against each other

in bloody battle,

but it would still come down to a fight between father and son.

Mordred is killed, but Arthur is mortally wounded.

His dying wish is for Sir Bedivere, his last surviving knight,

to throw the sword Excalibur into the lake.

Malory makes it a supreme test of loyalty.

Sir Bedivere has been

Arthur's most trusted and loyal knight,

and I think for Bedivere this would have been like

disposing of the King himself.

He would be bringing an end

to the round table and he would be bringing about the end of the life

of his friend and his king.

Then Sir Bedivere departed and went to the sword and lightly took it up

and so he went unto the water's side

and there he bound the girdle about the hilt and threw the sword

as far into the water as he might, and there came an arm and a hand

above the water and took it and clutched it and shook it thrice

and brandished and then vanished with the sword into the water.

It's now time for Arthur to depart from this world.

Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back

and so went with him to the water's side, and when they were there

even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it.

"Now put me into that barge," said the King.

And anon they rowed from the land and Sir Bedivere beheld

all those ladies go from him.

"Comfort thyself," said the King, "For I will into the Vale of Avalon

"to heal me of my grievous wound.

"And if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul."

If I ever need reminding of the power of literature and myth,

it's there in that passage.

No matter how many times I read it, it never fails

to move me and I don't really know why.

Something to do with Bedivere carrying King Arthur on his back,

the end of everything.

Arthur's kingdom finished, separated from his family,

the round table smashed to pieces, and yet King Arthur accepts all this

with great dignity and grace.

I think he understands that his time has come.

And then he's borne away on this funereal barge

to the Isle of Avalon.

I suppose back into the mists of time, out of which he first came.

Of course there's still a little bit of unfinished business

in the shape and form of our unfaithful lovers

Guinevere and Lancelot.

And Malory manages to tie up these loose ends

in a very poignant coda at the end of the story.

In repentance for her infidelity,

Guinevere lives the rest of her life as a nun.

It's only after her death

that Lancelot, too, can be redeemed

by bringing her body to Arthur's grave at Glastonbury Abbey,

where the tomb is still marked today.

Significantly and symbolically, these three characters are reunited

for one final time.

And with great ceremony and with great dignity,

Lancelot lays her in the cold earth next to the body of her husband,

King Arthur.

It's a powerful final scene -

Malory's heartfelt plea for unity in a country beset by civil war.

It's quite difficult to know what to think and feel

at the end of this journey, a journey of thousands of years

and thousands of miles.

You end up standing on some modern paving stones

next to what is quite possibly

a fictitious grave for two fictitious people.

And yet the fact that there is a grave here in this very holy

and historical site is a testament to the importance of Arthur

in the imagination of the British people.

It was Malory's Morte d'Arthur

that became the definitive account of the story.

It brought to a close the golden age of Arthurian literature

which had begun with the Normans.

It seems to me that the story of Arthur

is the story of these islands.

Look for King Arthur and what you find is a character who's been

embraced and then adapted by waves of succeeding cultures,

a man who's been remodelled and recast to fit the needs of the day,

but somebody who still manages to offer us a shared sense

of common history and common purpose.

So, real or imaginary, in my view, that makes King Arthur

our most enduring and appealing national hero.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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