 First of all, can you hear me at the back? Hands up at the back? Excellent. I'm very glad to see what Mallory would have called a goodly fellowship here today. And since this is an Arthurian talk, we will imitate Merlin in The Once and Future King. And time, at least to start with, will run backwards. So we begin at the end of the Middle Ages, in the year of 1478, in William Caxton's printing shop in Westminster. His revolutionary machine can produce multiple copies very quickly. And although he doesn't know it, he has just become England's first publisher. Scribes would use manuscripts one at a time to order. Now Caxton needed to know, or rather guess, what his customers wanted and how many copies he should print. At first he had played safe with historical biographies and books of philosophy. Today a group of gentlemen have come to see the new machine. And one of them has just asked him why he hasn't done a book on Arthur. Caxton says he's not in the business of printing fiction. Fiction? Arthur's no fiction. First you can see his tomb at Glastonbury, where his body was found and later transferred to the High Altar. Then Geoffrey of Monmouth has written about his life. And in many places in England you can see reminders of him and of his nights. At Westminster there is an impression of his seal in red wax. At Dover you will find Gawain's skull and Craddock's mantle. At Winchester there is the round table. Elsewhere there are large slot swords and many other things. Caxton claims that it was this conversation which he may well have invented himself that convinced him to print a book about Arthur. The relic showed him that Arthur was real enough, at least in popular imagination, for such a book to have a place on his list. But what was he to print? He only found it a year or two later when somebody brought him a manuscript of Sir Thomas Mallory's Mort Arthur. A work which, written in English and which unlike most books on Arthur, told the whole of his story. This only surviving copy was in his workshop at some point but as there are faint impressions of his type on some of the pages. Caxton's Mort Arthur was a huge success and launched Arthur into the world of the printed book. So the relics of Arthur's existence may have been hugely influential in ensuring that the Arthurian stories continue to be popular at the crucial changeover from manuscript to print. But what were these supposed relics? Did they really exist? Who created them? And why did they take the trouble to fake them? Our next scene is at Oxford Castle three-and-a-half centuries earlier. We'll follow normal time rules from now on. At the moment when Arthur's fame really begins, the date is around 1135 AD at the end of the reign of Henry I. In this castle was a chapel served by the cannons of the College of St George. Their provost Archdeacon Walter of Oxford was a man known for his great learning and had probably studied in Paris. The cannons were scholars and one of them was a Welshman, Geoffrey Arthur or Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was deeply interested in the history of Wales. This was a time of nationalist histories and heroes. The French celebrated the deeds of Charlemagne and traced their ancestry back to the Trojans. While the English had beads great work on the history of the English church, which praised the Anglo-Saxon kings and their nation, Geoffrey wanted to find material for a similar history of the Welsh nation that was at a loss to find a good source. One day Walter came into Geoffrey's room and gave him a very old book in the British town which set out in excellent style a continuous narrative of all their deeds from the first king of the Britons. Now this book no longer exists and most scholars believe that it very probably did not exist in the way Geoffrey describes it. What he found was a book which furnished scraps of Welsh history and Geoffrey's fertile imagination used these scraps to create a new narrative of the Welsh past with Arthur as its hero. If you like, Geoffrey ffaked Arthur in spineless. Geoffrey wrote with seeming authority. He placed Arthur in the nebulous historical context of the period between the Roman withdrawal and the Saxon invasions. He recorded how Arthur had conquered his rival British kings and had united the island, culminating in a splendid crown-wearing ceremony at his capital, Carlyon. He then goes on to tell how the Romans sent an embassy demanding that Arthur do homage because Britain belonged to the Roman Empire. Arthur refused to do so, invaded the Roman Empire, conquered France and threatened Rome itself. At this point he was forced to turn back by trechery at home where his nephew, Mordred, had seized his crown and his Queen Guinevere. Mordred was slain in a great battle. Arthur himself was mortally wounded and taken to the Isle of Avalon. When Geoffrey's manuscript was circulated, his fellow historians were at first startled and then later not amused. Henry of Huntingdon, who had written a fine history of the English, was asked by a friend if he knew of anything similar on the Welsh. He answered that he had not come across anything of the sword until to his stupor faction he was shown Geoffrey's book at the Abbey of Beck in Normandy by a fellow historian. He was so struck by this that he summarised most of the book in his letter in reply because Geoffrey had created a hugely successful forgery and it lies at the heart of the story of Arthur. Historians might be dubious but there was a ready audience for Arthur among readers. As early as 1150 the author of an abridged version of Geoffrey's book prefaced it by saying everyone was talking about the tales of the history of the Britons and those who did not know them were regarded as country bumpkins. Not everyone accepted them at face value. A fellow writer, Gerald of Wales at the end of the 12th century tells a good tale about a madman who was seen to be possessed, surrounded by a cloud of devils. When the Bible was laid on his chest they fled but when it was replaced by Geoffrey's book they returned more numerous than ever. But from the 13th century onwards until the Renaissance most historians accepted Geoffrey's work as genuine. Now one Welsh tradition about Arthur and an important one is not included in Geoffrey's history. Geoffrey tells us flatly that Arthur was mortally wounded but there was already a well-known tradition that Arthur would one day return. Even English historians wrote about it and the return of Arthur became a political rallying cry for the Welsh in their wars against Henry II. Henry himself was aware of it according to Gerald of Wales who knew him quite well and we shall see that this legend of the returning hero may have helped to shape the first physical relic on our list. Our next scene is at Messina in 1190. Richard I is on his way on crusade to Palestine and has stopped at the great seaport of Messina. Here he has come to be the guest or not unexpected guest of King Tancred, the Norman King of Sicily and he is in the company of Philip II of France. When he first arrived he rapidly came to an agreement with Tancred that Tancred's daughter should marry his nephew, the three-year-old Arthur, Count of Brittany. Arthur was the posthumous son of Richard's brother Geoffrey and Richard now named Arthur as his heir. This looked like a useful alliance but in the following turbulent six months Richard managed to quarrel both with Tancred and with Philip II of France who was his partner in the crusading venture. But at the end of the winter anxious to be on his way he patched up both quarrels for the time being. After Philip's fleet sailed in the first week of March 1191 he and Tancred exchanged gifts. In return for the gold and silver vessels and bolts of silk which Tancred gave him Richard presented the Sicilian King with one thing, the finest sword of Arthur once the noble king of Britain which the Britons call Excalibur. Geoffrey of Monmouth lists Caliburnas as Arthur's sword, an excellent blade forged in the Isle of Avalon and Arthur uses it in his victories over the Saxons and the Romans. Why should the precious weapon be given to Tancred of Sicil. Excalibur was deeply symbolic and was probably intended to be passed on to the young Arthur in due course when he came of age as a sword of his great namesake. A further twist was that the Plantagenuts seemed to have thought that by producing a living Arthur they might destroy the Welsh use of his story as a rallying cry. Their argument was that Arthur had once been king of Britain Arthur of Britain would be the Arthur who would return as a Plantagenut king of all Britain. Richard who was said to know the Arthurian legend well one writer said that he was particularly fond of an episode in the story of the Grail would have impressed the significance of all this on Tancred. We return home again for our next sight, the one you may well be expecting Glastonbury Abbey. News of Richard's nomination of Arthur as his heir had reached England at the latest by the end of 1190. It is a few months later and at Glastonbury the oldest monastery in England there has just been a spectacular discovery. The monks have unearthed the tomb of King Arthur. We do not have an exact date but it was definitely after word came from Sicily that Arthur was to be Richard's heir. Glastonbury was one of the richest of the English monasteries and it claimed a history which went back at least to the 6th century. The visible proof of this had been a very ancient church built of wattles that the Tusta Ecclesia revered as the oldest Christian building in the land. But in May 1184 a huge fire had destroyed most of the monastery including disasterously the ancient church itself. The abbot had died some months previously and no successor had yet been appointed. During the interregnum the abbey and its revenue was in the king's hands. Henry II's response to the news of the fire was massive and immediate. The revenues from the abbey which were being paid into his exchequer were to be paid direct to Glastonbury and when these were not sufficient Henry himself provided funds. Within two years plans for a great new church had been prepared. Then a double disaster struck the administrator of the abbey the king's chamber in Wraithford Stephen and the king himself died in 1189. When Richard came to the throne his desperate need for money for the crusade meant that the abbey revenues were diverted back to the exchequer. What happened in the spring of 1191 according to the abbey chronicle was this. In the old cemetery to the newly built church there were two ancient pyramids with an illegible inscription a monk had especially requested that he should be buried between them. When they came to dig the grave they surrounded the place with curtains. First they found a coffin containing a woman's body. They removed this and found a further coffin with a man's bones below which was a third coffin. On this was a lead cross inscribed here lies the noble King Arthur the renowned King Arthur buried in the Isle of Avalon note buried in the Isle of Avalon. Newsletters were sent out in which the bodies were identified as those of Gwynevere, Mordred and Arthur. Glastonbury's unique selling point if you like was its antiquity and without the visible evidence of the old church the monks needed to secure their place in history by discovering the burial place of Arthur the monks provided a new proof that the monastery was very ancient to take the place of their lost ancient church. Further more from now on they now presented Arthur as their founder. To this end two or three years later when the writer general of Wales visited Glastonbury he seems to have been commissioned to write up the finding of the grave in a fulsome literary style. Now the monks had already refined their find with Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Arthur's End by the curious inscription on the cross buried in the Isle of Avalon. If you were standing at Avalon you didn't need to be told you were there so it's very odd to have that place name on the cross. Glastonbury contrary to many modern scholars was only identified with Avalon after the cross was found. Geoffrey had said that Arthur had gone to Avalon mortally wounded. The cross was evidence both that the body was Arthur's and that the place was Arthur and that Arthur was dead. Soon after the supposed discovery of Arthur's grave in the old cemetery a splendid new black marble tomb was erected near the high altar in the body of the church in which the king was remarried with Gryff Gwynevere. Today visitors come to Glastonbury in search of King Arthur but all you can see in the Abbey ruins are two standard mid 20th century ministry of works cast down plaques. One marks the site of the monks discovery in 1191 in the old cemetery to the old church and the others a spot where the 13th century tomb stood until its destruction in 1539 after the Reformation. The whole of this elaborate exercise was not as modern writers myself included have suggested a ploy to attract more pilgrims and visitors. Rather it was aimed at recovering the royal sponsorship they had so recently lost. Arthur was dead and therefore hopefully the Welsh idea that he would return would die down particularly since Richard could now present his nephew Arthur as the new incarnation of the hero. Indeed there is very little evidence that ordinary visitors came to see Glastonbury to see the tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury. We have a late medieval history mounted on boards which was kept in the church and used by the monks to guide pilgrims around the site. In it Arthur gets the barest of mentions even though he was by now supposedly the founder of the Abbey. If ordinary visitors weren't interested the English royal family was very definitely interested. In 1278 Edward I fresh from his victory over the Welsh came to the Abbey and had the remains of Arthur and Guinevere uncovered and the tomb moved to the central point of the church before the high altar. Edward III came to Glastonbury with Queen Philippa in December 1331 as part of a series of journeys through his kingdom after he'd thrown off the tutelage of his mother Isabella. He stayed at South Cadbury later reputed to have been the site of Camelot. The lead cross from the original tomb was kept out after the 1278 reburial and was shown to distinguished visitors. It was still in the Abbey when John Leland saw it in the 1530s but there is no firm evidence that it survived the dissolution of the monasteries. The engraving that we have was taken by William Camden from what he calls rather curiously the first original and in the Latin version of his history implies that it could mean that all he saw was actually a drawing from a Glastonbury manuscript rather than the cross itself and there is no record of firm record of the cross after the dissolution although there are rumours that it existed as late as the 18th century. We now turn from the sacred to the profane. Copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth's work multiplied until it became one of the most widely known of medieval histories. At the same time stories of Arthur and his knights dominated a new form of literature which we know as medieval romance. It is in the 12th century a time of massive intellectual change that we find for the first time writers of fictional stories centred on individuals. These replaced the old heroic poems which were standard fare at court poems which had celebrated warriors and kings and their deeds in battle. The new stories were based on the ideas which we now call courtly love. This chart shows the rise of the Arthurian romances and the very rapid given the time that it took to copy and distribute manuscripts distribution and fame of Arthur. By the 1170s we have the first versions of the stories of Arthurian Tristan and Ivan and Lancelot. By 1190 these romances included the story of the Grail. Several of the authors were collected with a Plantagenot court. By 1220 there were dozens if not hundreds of manuscripts on Arthur and his court and their adventures and the stories from which Mallory retold his version were more or less complete. Arthur was the best seller of the age both in fiction and history. Now we come to a slightly different aspect. Our next visit is to the wardrobe at Wallingford Castle. Wardrobe comes from the French word Garderobe a place where robe was kept. The original meaning of robe in 12th century French was booty robber in German or possessions. Soon after the word first appeared in French it took on the more limited meaning of robes in the sense of clothes. So in the wardrobe both treasure and dress were kept including lord's personal weapons. What we are interested in for the moment is swords. Swords were undoubtedly passed on and treasured. Particularly those said to have belonged to famous heroes. As early as 1012 Athelston, the son of Ethel read the second, left to his brother in his will the sword of offer the great king of Mercia who had died in 796. Excalibur handed by Richard I to Tancred was no longer in the Plantagenate Armory. But there were other weapons belonging to the new Arthurian heroes. It is no surprise to find that in 1207 a list of swords in the possession of King John includes the sword of Tristram. This was part of the English Royal Regalia and as such it has a remarkable history. The hero Odia de Dain from the French story of the song of Roland was reputed to have inherited a sword from Tristram called Cotana or shortened because its point was broken. Cotana next formed part of the regalia of Henry III and was used in the coronation of his queen Eleanor of Provence in 1236. Remarkably Cotana is still part of the English coronation regalia known as a sword of mercy because its point is blunted. I hasten to add that the sword itself has been replaced probably more than once since the 13th century. This is a 17th century drawing of Cotana as it then existed. The next Plantagenate Arthurian sword is certainly the least known but here a splendid example of scholarly serendipity came into play. I was at a gathering in honour of Toshit Akamir a Japanese fellow of this society at Cambridge a fortnight ago and happened to mention to Richard Beedle a professor of English literature there that I was interested in a curious record of Gawain's sword in a 14th century manuscript which quoted the inscription on its blade. Ah, he said you obviously haven't read my article in Toshit's first script which you published a couple of years ago. My partner in publishing Derek Brough once said we only publish books, we don't read them. And there to my delight I found a much fuller record of the Gawain's sword including remarkably its measurements. Three manuscripts from Canterbury, Barry St Edmonds and Coventry mention the sword and the Coventry writer tells us that it was kept at Wallingford. The armoury there was evidently well known. In the contemporary romance The Death of Arthur recently translated by Simon Armitage Arthur laments that it has looted a sword belonging to him called Clarent. That was Arthur's own and was the youth of his father which was held in high honour in the wardrobe at Wallingford. And it is with this sword that Arthur is mortally wounded. The measurements of Gawain's sword were carefully recorded in the Barry St Edmonds manuscript. It had a blade 53 inches long a hilt 11.5 inches by 5 inches and was 66.5 inches overall. This makes it a great war sword or two handed sword almost as large as the sword of Edward III preserved in the Garter Chapel at Windsor which measures 76 inches overall. I've put the knight in for scale so you can see how very large it was and for the conusente it's oak shot type 13a. And these swords were relatively common in the late 15th century. Earlier examples are rare. The next extraordinary aspect of it is the inscription on the blade. It is the only instance I know where Norse and Arthurian myth cross. Weyland was the legendary Saxon Smith who had fashioned Beowulf's chainmail and the inscription reads I am strong, sharp and hard. Weyland made me with great care. It was 14 years after Jesus Christ when Weyland tempered me and made me an extraordinary cross reference which has yet to be explored. Wallingford was a royal castle from Anglo-Saxon times and in the 13th century was the almost palatial residence as we saw in the first side of Henry III's brother Richard of Cornwall. It passed to the black prince in 1337 and to his widow Joan before reverting to Richard II on her death in 1386. So although we have no description of the contents of the castle it would have been the perfect place to house such an important rally. None of these swords is in fact in Caxton's list though he does cover himself by saying there are many other things elsewhere. He does cite Lancelot sword and this is listed in an inventory of the Armory of the Kings of France at Ombois in 1499 14 years after Caxton printed his edition of Mallory. If it was indeed the sword which Caxton or his informant had in mind it says quite a lot for the fame of relics of this kind that a sword kept in France should be known in London. We move on our erratic time track back to 1285 to Winchester Castle. Here we will find the one relic named by Caxton that still survives Arthur's Round Table probably a familiar image. Its history was long in doubt but we now know with reasonable certainty when it was made by whom and for what purpose. We're back to Edward I. In September 1285 he convened a great chivalric gathering at Winchester Castle with 7 out of the 10 English Earls present and almost all the laymen of any consequence. He made 44 nights there including Lord such as Edmund Mortimer, his nephew John of Brittany and two future Earls. We have no record that the Round Table was made specifically for this occasion but it ties in with the dates from the tree rings in the timber used to make it and indeed the timber analysis on the Winchester Round Table was at the very early days of dendro chronology which we now take absolutely for granted. A great chivalric gathering is also exactly the right kind of festival for such an object. Furthermore Edward had just held a kind of tournament at Neffin in Snowdonia to celebrate his Welsh victory. The Winchester Festival seems to have been a reprise of this triumph for the benefit of the court. The physical table was preserved as a relic in the castle. For the first 50 years of its existence it may simply have been an enormous piece of furniture 18 feet in diameter made of solid oak and weighing about one and a quarter tonnes. When it was first used it was probably covered with a cloth there is nothing to suggest it was painted when it was first made. It seems likely that it was hung on the wall in 1350 when the great hall was revamped as a lower court and the space was needed on the floor. It was taken down and repaired for the first time in 1516 and the present painting was almost certainly applied then with a portrait of Henry VIII as Arthur. Edward I is also said to have possessed Arthur's crown which he acquired after the defeat of Llewellyn the second in 1283. It was one of three relics acquired then but the crown of Arthur once the famous King of the Britons was surrendered with other jewels to Edward. Now this is very probably the same as a certain girl crown which belonged to Llewellyn Prince of Wales which was presented by the 12-year-old Alfonso Edward's eldest son at the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey in 1284. The fact that it was no longer labelled even then as Arthur's crown indicates that even somebody as enthusiastic about Arthur as Edward I was not convinced that it was a genuine relic. And finally to dover castle. At dover you will find Gawain's skull and Craddock's mantle. In the romances Gawain was killed on the beach at Dover when Arthur landed there on his return to England and was attacked by Mordred and his men. This explains the suppose present of a Gawain's skull which again no longer exists. Craddock's mantle however may be the product of a very curious episode in the summer of 1328 involving Edward III who was still under the tutelage of his mother Isabella. She was having a notorious affair with Roger Mortimer her co-conspirator her co-conspirator in the overthrow of Edward II. That summer the accounts tell us that Edward III had tunics made for himself 12 knights and their squires for the game of the fellowship of Craddock. Craddock appears in the Arthurian stories as the owner of a beautiful but magical mantle which tested the chastity of ladies. It covered decently those who were faithful but those who had strayed were revealed as in various states of nakedness depending on the severity of their misdemeanors. When Craddock produced the mantle at Arthur's Court he severely embarrassed Gwynevere who delighted with its beauty insisted on trying the mantle on even though she was having an affair with Lancelot we need to go no further. So it's very possible that Edward's game may have been a pointed satire on his mother's affair which was to lead to her downfall two years later. Now one of the knights in Edward's entourage at this time was William Clinton who was also constable of Dover Castle so and it's only a possibility he may have brought one of the costumes for the Society of Craddock to Dover it could easily have been one of the short mantles made for the squires when the rest of the story was forgotten it was kept as Craddock's mantle. Finally, a small diversion. Even in the 15th century new historical claims were being made about Arthur. The University of Cambridge wishing to rival Oxford whose legendary founder was Alfred seized on Arthur to claim seniority and copied into their records a charter from the Royal Patron King Arthur issued by him in London in 531. It granted exemption from all royal taxes and extended his protection to the community of scholars at Cambridge. The charter was conveyed to Cynot rector of the University by Sir Gawain. It was duly copied into the privileges of the University about 1600 with this particularly fine portrait of the King himself. In all this there is a common thread which I hope you have been able to follow through the historical and literary maze. Almost all the relics quoted by Caxton owe their origin to the desire of the Plantation at Kings of England to connect themselves with the figure of Arthur. There were two reasons why they were keen to appear as as to his traditions. Arthur was accepted by historians as the first great unifier of the British Isles and he was also remembered as the ruler of wide continental domains which the Plantagenets continued to try to recuperate until the middle of the 15th century. As such he was the ideal model for their kingly ambitions. And so, my friends, I cease. Thank you.