Read an Excerpt

1. King Arthur

He didn’t exist. That’s the headline. It’s a disappointing start, I know, but it’s an early sign of how tricky history can be. England’s (though more usually Britain’s, but often Wales’s and Cornwall’s, sometimes Brittany’s) most famous king turns out to be fictional. That’s putting it politely. Gandalf is fictional. King Arthur is a lie.

Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they’re just saying he didn’t exist in a different way. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Oh yeah, there was a real Superman except he didn’t have any actual superpowers and he dressed as a bat.’

For the avoidance of doubt, and of a catastrophic collapse in readers’ confidence in the first chapter, let me make clear that I realize Batman also did not exist.

Who do people say ‘the real’ King Arthur might have been? Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king—some senior figure who lived at any point from the third to the sixth century (the 200s to the 500s). Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl.

Personally, I don’t think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees. What caused the Arthur pearl was the persistent longing of humans, of almost all eras and cultures, to hark back to something better. It’s a far more enduring psychological habit than a belief in progress. People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future. They still do: hence ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’.

For most of the period covered by this book, any claims or attempts by leaders to change or improve things are most persuasively labelled, to the people of the time, as restorations of some kind. Saying that something was totally new often played badly. The ultimate, most glorious restoration would be to the golden age of King Arthur.

We get most of our sense of King Arthur from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who completed his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) in 1138, and from Sir Thomas Malory, whose fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur  ) was, in 1485, one of the first books to be printed in England. That gave the Arthur myth wider circulation. There’s now been so much talk about King Arthur over the centuries that many people feel, like they do with ghosts, that ‘there must be something in it’. There is: it just happens to be deep-seated psychological need rather than historical reality.

The story of Arthur reflects our longing, as a species, for the ancient, concealed and magical. Towards the end of Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory suggests the title is not the spoiler it seems: ‘Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had gone by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and . . . many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus  ’ (Here lies Arthur, the once and future king).

This is great stuff and poses a haunting and exciting question: will King Arthur return? It’s clever because, as well as being haunting and exciting, it’s a leading question, of the ‘When did you start taking cocaine?’ kind. Whether you answer yes or no, you’ve accidentally accepted the premise that Arthur existed.

The dates of those two books explain why Arthur, supposedly a fifth- or sixth-century ruler, looks like a medieval king in most of the surviving imagery. To us, King Arthur is an olde-worlde figure—to the people of the middle ages he was in modern dress. They imagined him like a contemporary king but less shit – a paragon of justice, might and legitimacy.

He could be whomever and whatever they needed. What he was king of, in the most real sense, is Albion. And what is Albion? Its poetic and ancient connotations go beyond merely being the old name for Britain. It’s pretty much whatever you want it to be: an English Britain, a Welsh Britain, a Scottish Britain, a Celtic Britain, an ancient British Britain—a nice version of here.

So, while King Arthur didn’t exist, the idea of him is lurking, guiltily or inspiringly, in the minds of many of the rulers who did.

2. King King

Another thing that didn’t exist in the sixth century was England. No one called it that for hundreds of years. It’s impossible to know exactly how many years, though, as there was no official rebranding moment. It wasn’t like when Royal Mail became Consignia, or Andersen Consulting became Accenture, or Consignia became Royal Mail. There wasn’t a day when all the signs saying ‘Britannia’ got taken down. There was no signage. Hardly anyone could read. Those last two sentences can be applied to most of human history, so I hope you’re not expecting this book to be about anything nice.

England was a word that gradually gained currency, like mansplain or staycation, and it was fully in use by the time William the Conqueror was king of it. I expect you’ve heard of him. Most people know that, in 1066, William the Conqueror (not at that point so named) won the Battle of Hastings and became king of England. When it comes to the likely readership of this book, that ‘most’ must rise to ‘all’. If there is anyone reading this book who didn’t already know that, I would love to hear from you because you are genuinely reading in a genre that was previously of no interest. You, if you exist, and I bet you don’t, are an absolute confounder of the algorithms. It would be like someone reading a biography of Elvis Presley who did not already know that he was a singer. What you are doing is probably more statistically remarkable than what William the Conqueror did.

Perhaps that’s where we should start: the Norman Conquest, the beginning of proper English history. You know, the normal sort, with the current monarch numbering. If Prince William becomes king, and takes the name that people actually call him by as his regnal name (which they don’t always, confusingly—cf. Edward ‘David’ VIII and George ‘Albert’ VI), he’ll be William V and that’s a fifth where the Conqueror is first. It’s almost official that English history starts then.

A few months before that first William’s arrival on these shores, King Edward the Confessor died. His posthumous career was more glittering than his living one because he became a saint. Trumps king, doesn’t it? To be honest, I slightly disapprove of kings being made saints. It’s like CEOs getting knighthoods, standing alongside all those dedicated charity volunteers who raised millions for incubators but only get MBEs. Still, there it is. Edward the Confessor makes saint, even though he was never burned to death or nailed to anything—and a saint in honour of whom a later King Edward was named. But that later one is still King Edward the first. Even the revered Confessor, as with all English kings before William of Normandy, literally doesn’t count.

The only trouble with calling William the Conqueror the first king of England is that it’s not what he called himself. It’s not what he chose to identify as, you might say if you happen to be living in the early twenty-first century. William would have said he was the rightful successor to the Confessor, and not because he was the sort of idiot who assumed things were more true if they rhymed. I reckon that kind of thing makes an ass out of you and me.

Edward the Confessor would have said he was the rightful ruler from the royal House of Cerdic, which had consolidated its hold over what was beginning to be referred to as ‘Engla londe’ after expelling the Vikings a few times. Before that it had ruled the kingdom of Wessex since its establishment by Cerdic himself (he was supposedly a person) in 519, soon after the arrival in Britain of ‘the Anglo-Saxons’, an umbrella term for various tribes from what is now north Germany and Denmark who started turning up once the Roman Empire withdrew its legions around 410, leaving lots of vulnerable Romano-British dignitaries wondering who was going to service the central heating in their villas—plus a few not particularly tough local warlords none of whom, as discussed, was in any meaningful way King Arthur, and all of whom had lived rather comfortably being looked after by the Roman Empire since it had taken the place over in the year 43.

Shit, this history’s going backwards! Although, if you think about it, that’s the logical direction to go in. It’s how archaeology works. You can’t start with stone age axes and work your way up through Roman pots to clay pipes and finally ration cards and an old Nokia. The starting point for our enquiries into the past is the present. Historical narratives proceeding chronologically are a bit like sets of directions that start with where you’re going and then work their way back to where you are.