Robin Melrose - Warriors and Wilderness in Medieval Britain: From Arthur and Beowulf to Sir Gawain and Robin Hood

Also by ROBIN MELROSE

Religion in Britain from the Megaliths to Arthur: An Archaeological and Mythological Exploration (McFarland, 2016)

The Druids and King Arthur: A New View of Early Britain (McFarland, 2011)

ROBIN MELROSE

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2758-8

2017 Robin Melrose. All rights reserved

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Front cover image of King Arthur and his knights 2017 Duncan Walker/iStock

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I recently published a book entitled British Religion from the Megaliths to Arthur: An Archaeological and Mythological Exploration, in which among other things I attempted to trace the history of Arthur from prehistory to the 12th century and Geoffrey of Monmouths History of the Kings of Britain. I was looking at Arthur from a Welsh perspective, at works written in Welsh or (in the case of Geoffrey of Monmouth) in Latin. This was in a sense just the beginning of the story of Arthur, for the court of King Arthur was soon adopted by the French poet Chrtien de Troyes, who created the most famous Arthurian knight, Lancelot, in his romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and whose unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail was taken up by another French writer, Robert de Boron, who transformed the Grail into the Holy Grail. Soon the story of Arthur expanded into the early 13th century prose epic, the Lancelot-Grail, which created a whole new Arthurian world with Lancelot, Galahad and the quest for the Holy Grail.

My main interest, however, is in seeing how the story of Arthur evolved in England, in the language we now call Middle English. After the Norman Conquest, Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, suffered an eclipse, being replaced among the elite by Norman French. For a long time, only one English text survived, and that was the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was recorded by the monks of Peterborough Abbey until 1154. Most literature after the Conquest was written in French, and one of the first literary texts in English was Layamons Brut, a Middle English version of Geoffreys History of the Kings of Britain.

Middle English literature began to flower in the 14th century, which saw a new version of the last days of Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, but presenting a more ambiguous version of Arthur than that presented by Layamon. However, the most fascinating Arthurian romance of this period is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which focuses on the Arthurian hero Gawain, and his nemesis the Green Knight, an Arthurian villain like no other. This may have inspired three Arthurian romances set in Inglewood Forest (Cumbria) where Arthur is present but Gawain often plays the leading role.

As I trace the evolution of Arthur, I necessarily cover some of the ground covered in British Religion from the Megaliths to Arthur. This ground includes the 11th century Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen, but here I focus on Arthur as the leader of a band of heroes who live outside of society, whose main world is one of magical animals, giants and other wonderful happenings, located in the wild parts of the landscape, But I also go into previously unexplored territory, with an investigation of the northern Romano-British hunter/warrior god, perhaps an ancestor of the later Welsh Arthur.

I also go over other ground not usually covered in accounts of Arthur. The figure of Arthur partly arose as a result of conflicts between the British of the Old North (northern England and Southern Scotland) and the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Here I examine what we know of these conflicts from literary sources such as the Welsh poem Y Gododdin and the Triads of the Island of Britain, in the encyclopedic edition by the late Rachel Bromwich. But I also look at the Anglo-Saxon world, and Anglo-Saxon heroes, including Oswald, the warrior-saint of early Northumbria; the powerful man buried at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia; the warriors who accumulated the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard; the Mercian soldier-saint Guthlac who spent his last years in the wild fens of south Lincolnshire; and Alfred the Great of Wessex, who defeated the Vikings and became in effect the first king of England.

Most of these Anglo-Saxon heroes were celebrated in Old English poetry or prose. Guthlacs Life was originally written in Latin but later translated into Old English; and the deeds of Alfred and his successors were recounted in the Old English Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was originally produced in Wessex (southern England) in the late 9th century. As the name implies, the Chronicle was mainly a history, but occasionally it includes poetry, like the Battle of Brunaburh, which celebrates a Wessex victory against the Vikings in 937. Much Anglo-Saxon literature was religious (saints lives, homilies), or military (the Battle of Brunaburh and the Battle of Maldon, about another later encounter between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings). However there were also poems of exile like The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and the epic Beowulf, which is set in Scandinavia and describes Beowulfs battle with three monsters: Grendel, Grendels Mother and a dragon. Although Anglo-Saxon literature was ended by the Conquest, it continued to influence Middle English literature, and we cant really understand Sir Gawain and the Green Knight without being aware of Beowulf and poems of exile like The Wanderer.

After the Conquest a new figure emerged in England, the figure of the outlaw, first represented by Hereward (later known as Hereward the Wake), who led a rebellion against the Norman invaders from the fens of Cambridgeshire and south Lincolnshire. Hereward may have been the model for Robin Hood, who emerged in the 14th century, at the time of the Hundred Years War (13371453), the Black Death (13489 and 13612), and the Peasants Revolt (1381), but was most popular in the 15th century, when England lost the Hundred Years War and was plunged into the War of the Roses (14551487). Robin Hood may seem to have little in common with King Arthur, but there are connections: like the Welsh Arthur, Robin Hood operated in the wilderness (Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire), and was even associated with Inglewood Forest in Cumbria, the location of three late Arthurian tales. The Welsh Arthur fights monsters, and in one of the most bizarre of the Robin Hood tales Robin is pitted against a monster, a bounty hunter called Guy of Gisborne, who is clad in a horse-hide.

Since this book shifts between Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxon England, Welsh Arthur, Norman Britain, English Arthur and Robin Hood, it might be a good idea to give an outline of the chapters to show how the book hangs together. As the title suggests, one of the unifying threads of this book is wilderness, and in Chapter 1 I look at resistance to Roman rule in Britain, especially in the frontier region around Hadrians Wall, that is, large parts of Northumberland and southern Scotland as far north as the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. To the Romans this was in all senses a wilderness, so it is no surprise that the frontier peoples worshipped a hunter/warrior god, who may well have fed into the myth of Arthur.