The Historical King Arthur: Fact and Fiction

• After centuries of controversy, the real King Arthur is unmasked in this epoch-making study. Thanks to analysis of writings by Gildas (493-570) and others, Arthur emerges as neither a king nor a Roman commander, but the captain of a royal host in what is now southern Scotland. He there led raids on other North Britons for supplies during the terrible “volcanic winter” of the 530s, before dying a soldier’s death at “Camlan” (Castlesteads, on Hadrian’s Wall) in 537. All this is proved by systematic application of textual criticism and historical linguistics to material (place-names, genealogies, Celtic law, bardic elegy) in Welsh and Latin sources, allowing us (for instance) to locate eleven of Arthur’s mysterious “Twelve Battles”. They all lay between Forth and Tyne, unlike the twelfth battle of Mount “Badon”, which can be dated by similar techniques to 493 and placed at Braydon, Wiltshire. That British victory against Saxon invaders thus had no link with Arthur the North Briton. He instead fought on behalf of Strathclyde men and women during a time of famine, so that he became a hero for his people, and then a legend that has spread all over the world.

Arthur, Scotland, Gildas, Mount Badon, Sixth-Century Britain

• Dr Andrew Breeze (b. 1954), FSA, FRHistS, was educated in Kent at Sir Roger Manwood’s School, Sandwich, and then at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1987 he was appointed profesor de filología at the University of Navarre, Pamplona. Married with six children, he is the author of many research papers on Celtic Britain and medieval England, as well as books that include The Historical Arthur and the “Gawain” Poet (Lexington Books, 2023), England’s Earliest Woman Writer and Other Studies on Dark-Age Christianity (Cambridge Scholars, 2024), and King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition (Uppsala Books, 2025).