I'm Not Going to Say "I told you so ..."

More than three years after The King Arthur Conspiracy was published, the British media have been all over this story (representative sample from The Guardian).

Apparently, a research team from the University of Reading have concluded that the monks of Glastonbury made up the story that King Arthur was buried there, and an awful lot more besides.

I said as much in The King Arthur Conspiracy (and, incidentally, in The Grail, published earlier this year).  So - vindicated!

Wonder what else the media will suddenly discover in the coming months, that I also wrote about a few years back ...

(Watch this space)

Finding Arthur

Very exciting to see this in the Scotsman newspaper yesterday.  It's a short piece about Adam Ardrey's latest Arthurian publication, Finding Arthur: The Truth Behind the Legend of the Once and Future King.

I've had some contact with Adam Ardrey in recent years - although, keen as I am to preserve my historiographical independence, we've not exactly compared notes.  I read his Finding Merlin when it came out in 2007, and we've communicated once or twice since then.  But we're hardly collaborators.

I stress that for a couple of reasons.  First, let me quote Ardrey's words from the back cover of Finding Merlin:

"If I am right, it would appear that, for 1,500 years, those with the power to do so have presented a history that, literally, suited their book, irrespective of its divergence from the evidence, and that the stories of Arthur and Merlin which form the British foundation myth are almost entirely pieces of propaganda based on various biases.  If I am right, British history for the period from the late fifth to the early seventh century stands to be rewritten."

Sounds a bit like me, doesn't it?  I too have argued that propaganda and bias have dictated the retelling of the Arthurian legends through the ages - just as propaganda and bias dictate what we allowed to hear, think and believe about William Shakespeare.

What is more, though, Adam Ardrey argues in his Finding Arthur book, not only that Artur mac Aedain was the original Arthur, but that he was buried on the Isle of Iona.

So we agree on that, too.

In other words, both of us have - independently - identified a known historical prince as the original "King Arthur", and we have both tracked down his grave to the sacred royal burial isle of the Scottish kings.  That's two intelligent and inquisitive individuals who have each devoted years to the subject arriving at very similar conclusions.

I posted the piece in the Scotsman newspaper (link above) to Facebook yesterday, and it was quickly shared by a very successful historical novelist.  The responses were most telling.

First came the observation that a Scottish historian had received coverage in a Scottish newspaper for his theory that Arthur was Scottish.  Evidently, this was all very suspicious (I pointed out that I'm an English historian with Welsh roots, and so the suggestion that only a Scot would think Arthur might have been Scottish doesn't quite stand up).  What makes this kneejerk rush to judgement so interesting is that there is no basis for it.  It is, in fact, a form of projection.  The fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Arthur was what the English like to think he was gets instantly spun round, becoming no other culture is allowed to claim Arthur as its own, regardless of the evidence.

I posted a few days ago about the Ossian poems, translated from the Gaelic and published by James Macpherson in the 1760s, and the English response to the evidence of a thriving, heroic Gaelic culture at a time when England didn't even exist.  The response was nothing short of blind fury - a kind of spluttering outrage that the "primitives" and "savages" of the Highlands and Islands should presume to imagine that they had any pedigree, any marvellous history, for such cultural treasures belonged only to the English!!!

The same prejudice shows itself whenever the Scottish Arthur is mentioned.  Without viewing the evidence, the instinctive response is: "No, he can't have been."  I repeat - without viewing the evidence.  So we are not dealing with considered judgements here.  We are dealing with prejudice, pure and simple.  The implicit racism is apparent in the suggestion that only a Scottish historian would try to place Arthur in Scotland.  Even though the very first Arthur to appear in any historical record was a Scot!

There is, then, a wall of prejudice encountered by anyone who, having spent years studying and researching the evidence, concludes that there was only one viable candidate for the prestigious role of the original Arthur - and it was Artur mac Aedain, whose father was ordained as the King of the Scots by St Columba in AD 574.

It is reassuring, then, to find that others who have devoted themselves to uncovering the historical truth behind the Arthur legend have arrived at much the same conclusion as me - he was Artur mac Aedain, and he was buried on Iona.  The question, then, is when will the tide turn?  When will the wall of prejudice crumble in the face of the evidence?  When will the English finally admit that they have no claim at all to Arthur?

(I don't include the Welsh here because Arthur was British, and Welsh-speaking Britain extended at least as far north as the River Forth in his day; there are no grounds for presuming that, if Arthur was the son of a Scottish king, then he couldn't have been Welsh: rather, that argument is based on a misunderstanding of the geopolitics of 6th-century Britain.)

I'm tempted to post, over the next few days, a number of indisputable facts about Arthur.  These are not assumptions, but genuine facts.  And they all point in one direction, and one direction only.

The English might fight tooth and nail to cling to their myth of King Arthur.  But there can be no reasonable doubt as to who the original Arthur was.

Unless you're determined to ignore the evidence, that is.

Breaking News

A headline in The Scotsman newspaper:

"ISLE OF IONA MAY BE ANCIENT BURIAL SITE"

Now, if I were a cynic I would tempted to respond with a headline of my own.  Something like:

"WESTMINSTER ABBEY MIGHT BE A CHURCH"

But I'm not a cynic - no, really I'm not - so I won't.

The news piece in The Scotsman announces that two geophysical surveys have been carried out on the east side of the Isle of Iona (for the sake of reference, Iona is about one mile across).  These surveys have identified burial sites near the site of the present village hall and beside Martyr's Bay (where the photo, above, was taken).

It's been known for a long time that there were burials near Martyr's Bay.  One site was Clach nan Druineach - probably the "Burial Ground of the Craftsmen" - just to the west of Martyr's Bay.  There is also the peculiar mound known as An Ealadh at the head of Martyr's Bay (An Ealadh means, simply, "The Tomb" - the corpses of kings and lords which were ferried across to Iona for burial were first laid upon, and then carried three times around, this odd little mound).  I discuss this particular mound in The King Arthur Conspiracy.

Previous excavations had revealed something of a mass grave here.  The fact that the bones of an individual from the Middle Ages were discovered underneath bones dating from the 5th or 6th century suggested that there had been a kind of large-scale reburial of human remains at this spot.  Now, a possibility along these lines was something I mooted in The King Arthur Conspiracy - that Arthur's head, originally interred on the far side of the island, was exhumed and reburied in An Ealadh. 

It may be, then, that there was some significance to the use of An Ealadh as a sort of dumping ground for remains found in different parts of the island.  Whoever was buried there (quite a few people, over the centuries) formed something of a spiritual welcoming committee.  A Gaelic dictionary even defines ealadh as "a tomb; the place on Iona where the dead were placed on landing."  In other words, the newly-arrived corpse was placed on top of what was essentially a pile of corpses before it was carried along the processional Street of the Dead to the burial ground near the abbey.

All very exciting, I'm sure you'll agree.  But perhaps the real question is: why that headline?  Iona always was an ancient burial site.  That was what it was for.  Indeed, I'm raising the question in the present chapter of The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion whether the early name for Iona - Ioua - might not be a Latinisation of I-uaighe, the "Island of the Grave".  If it was, then the grave in question was almost certainly a chambered burial cairn on the west side of Iona.  Practically all other burials were incidental.

Still, why should it come as a shock that Iona might have been an "ancient" burial site in use BEFORE St Columba arrived to found his monastic settlement there?

Well, partly, because the Church doesn't like to admit that Iona even existed before St Columba found it.  But it did exist.  In fact, it has existed a lot longer than most land masses on the earth's surface.  Iona is mostly made up of Lewisian gneiss - the first rock to form on the Earth's crust.  It is very, very old indeed.

And the evidence suggests very strongly that Iona was seen as a prime location for burial many years before St Columba arrived.

The problem, as so ever, is that history - our knowledge of the past - is constantly being blurred by the claims of special interest groups (in this instance, the Church).  Church history insists that St Columba was the only thing that ever really happened on Iona.  Anything else - and certainly anything beforehand - is of no interest or relevance.  And so the actual history of Iona is repeatedly being discovered and just as repeatedly covered over and forgotten again.  (A bit like the piece in The Scotsman, which veers away from the burial sites to talk about the 1450th anniversary of St Columba's arrival on Iona.)

We know that Iona was an ancient burial site.  We've known it for a very long time.

But the Church, in this instance, is still stuck in the Middle Ages, and it doesn't want us to know what we already know.

Hence the headline.  "THE ISLE OF IONA IS WHAT IT ALWAYS WAS - New evidence confirms what we already knew but had been obliged to forget because the Church prefers its own version of history."

Okay, so.  Now.  Can we please investigate the really important grave, guys?  The one on the west side of Iona.  That, I reckon, will tell us a lot about the history of the island before the Church tried to remove all memories of the past.

Unearthing the Past

Three cheers for The History Press!!!  For it was they who published The Last Days of Richard III by John Ashdown-Hill.

Dr Ashdown-Hill's years of research into the much-maligned King Richard III, and what happened to his body after he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, has borne fruit today.  Archaeologists, digging underneath a car park in Leicester, have discovered a human skeleton.  The skeleton revealed a disorder of the spine (famously, Richard III was supposed to have been deformed).  There was a barbed arrowhead found between the vertebrae, and damage to the skull consistent with his having been killed in battle.

It should be possible to prove, by means of DNA, that this skeleton was indeed that of Richard III, the not-so-bad-after-all king who was the victim of a cynical Tudor campaign to blacken his reputation.

Exciting stuff.  And great news for my publishers.  After all, wouldn't it be marvellous if they gained an international reputation for publishing books which really do uncover the past and help to resolve its mysteries?  Maybe one day we will see the excavation of sites identified in The King Arthur Conspiracy, also published by The History Press this year - including the site of Arthur's last battle and his burial mound on the Isle of Iona.

The fabulous news to emerge today from Leicester also has a bearing on my current project, Who Killed William Shakespeare?  It was, of course, Shakespeare who popularised the Tudor image of Richard III as a cruel, corrupt, rapacious villain (although, truth be told, I believe Shakespeare's depiction to have been based on Robert Cecil, a very influential, self-serving individual whose own deformities - splay-foot, hunchback - were replicated in Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard 'Crookback').

More pertinently, the difficulty in locating the grave of Richard III owed much to a Puritan map-maker and pamphleteer named John Speed.  Speed completely failed to identify Richard's grave, partly because he looked in the wrong place.  He mistook the Greyfrairs in Leicester for the Blackfriars.  Because he couldn't find the grave, Speed came up with a story that the grave had been emptied and the body dumped in a local river.

Speed was only doing what certain kinds of historian tend to do when they can't find what they're looking for - they make something up.  Something similar happened with the first 'Anne' to whom Will Shakespeare was betrothed: because a leading scholar failed to track her down, he insisted that she must have been a spelling mistake.  It is unfortunate that these guesses can all too easily became the 'truth', until somebody actually comes up with the goods.

John Speed, it would seem, was wrong.  Not only had he misidentified the last resting place of Richard III, but he had also preserved a false story of what happened to King Richard's remains.

Speed also traduced William Shakespeare: in 1611, he branded Father Robert Persons, the Jesuit rector of the English college at Rome, and Will Shakespeare as -

this Papist and his Poet, of like conscience for lies, the one ever feigning, and the other ever falsifying the truth.

In fairness, John Speed might not have been making that up - there were many connections between Shakespeare and the Jesuits.  But the publication of this smear in Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine must have precipitated Shakespeare's retirement from the public stage in that same year.

The news from Leicester is exciting and encouraging.  It reassures us that things need not remain hidden for ever.  Just because a Puritan historian tried to cover his own tracks, doesn't mean that the truth will not out in due course.  And now, it would appear, is the time when things long hidden and covered up can finally be brought to light.

My book, Who Killed William Shakespeare?, will not be published (by those clever folks at The History Press) until next summer, but I am already hopeful that we can reveal something every bit as exciting as the remains of Richard III, if not more so.  These, again, are human remains.  The skull of William Shakespeare, no less, which might not be in his Stratford grave after all.

And, inspired by the example of Dr John Ashdown-Hill and his excellent work on Richard III, perhaps we can look forward to the excavation of the burial mound on Iona where, as I argue in The King Arthur Conspiracy, the original Arthur was laid to rest.

Let's hope, then, that the researcher and the archaeologists who have - apparently - discovered the grave of Richard III and unearthed his remains have started a trend.  The bringing to light of things long hidden.

And let's hope that The History Press can keep up its enviable track record of publishing the books which lead to discoveries like that one!

Arthur's New Jacket

I'm thrilled to be able to announce that one of my own photos has been incorporated into the jacket design for The King Arthur Conspiracy.  It was taken a little to the west of Arthur's grave and forms the main image on the rear of the dust jacket, as well as appearing on the inside of both flaps, above the book blurb and my own potted biography.

I can't take much credit for the jacket design, but I can point to the photo and say "I did that!"

The History Press have added this quote from the book to the rear of the dust jacket:

'The facts are that Arthur did exist and the island of his burial can be visited.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that all this was hidden for so many years because of a conspiracy: a conspiracy which began during Arthur's lifetime, and which led directly to the fall of Britain.'

If that has whetted your appetite, please feel free to pop over to the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-King-Arthur-Conspiracy-Scottish/dp/0752476858/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335979347&sr=1-2), where The King Arthur Conspiracy is already bobbing about in the charts.

It'll be out in the bookshops in a couple of months.

Arthur's Grave

I don't know - maybe I'm getting a bit tired of words, or maybe I'm just enjoying playing with maps and figures, seeing as they do break up the text a bit.  But, well, I'm tempted to sneak this image at the end of the appropriate chapter.

It's black-and-white because that's what the inside of the book will be.  I wasn't planning on having any photos in the book.  But I think I might just get away with a couple of illustrations artfully inserted into the text. 

And, hey, it is The Grave after all.

Try to imagine it with a circle of stones on the summit, which is what it was like up until the eighteenth century.  Or with a great bonfire burning away on its crest on Beltane eve.  Or with "sweet music" emanating mysteriously from inside it, as some have reported.  Or during a total eclipse of the sun - which is what happened at the moment when Arthur's head was laid to rest inside it.

And then tell me I shouldn't sneak this picture into the book.