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Cadbury: Was It Camelot?

© David White

It has been put forward that Camelot as the romance authors would have us fancy it did not exist, at least not for Arthur. Where to look for Camelot, then? Geoffrey of Monmouth says Arthur held court at Caerleon. Was this Camelot? It very well might have been, at least in Geoffrey's mind. But the historian is concerned with facts. It is a fact that the term Camelot was not mentioned until after Geoffrey had written his "history." Technically, Geoffrey's Arthur's Caerleon can never be Arthur's Camelot. History is defined by hairs split thinner. Yet, for our purposes, such technicalities need not slow us down. Camelot as defined in the popular Arthurian legends cannot be found except in the imaginations of the authors. But two giants in the field of history and archaeology believe they have found the historical precedent for Camelot. It is at Cadbury.

South Cadbury, to be exact. This place contains a hill-fort, which in the 5th and 6th centuries was a castle. This painting shows an assault on a castle. Notice how small the castle is. The perception that a castle has to be massive is based on our perception of the medieval castles, which were massive, and the perpetuation of this ideal by the authors of the romances, who lived in the medieval period. A common theme throughout these pages is the idea that the Arthurian story can and is shaped to the times of the authors of the stories. In the Welsh tales, he is a Welsh hero. In Nennius, he is a British hero fighting against the Saxons. In Geoffrey, he is a medival warrior who holds in a court and accepts homage from knights. In Malory, he is a later medieval king who ... You see the point.

Anyway, back to Cadbury. It was a hill-fort that was defended by earthwork ramparts and ditches and fortified as early as the first century B.C. In Roman times, it was the stronghold of one Arviragus, who held out for quite some time before being driven out by the Roman army. The Romans left, for all intents and purposes, in 410. Arthur is said to have lived not too long after. For him to have refortified Cadbury, once home to Arviragus, would serve two purposes:

It would have already been a stronghold, proving its adaptability. It would fire dedication to the British cause against the Saxons.

A woman walking a dog in the 1950s stumbled on some flints and pottery shards similar to those found at Tintagel in the 1930s. These have been dated to the mid-to-late 5th century; they were brought from the Eastern Mediterranean region, suggesting a wealthy household as their acquirer.

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