Of King Author's Legend

Graves of dozens of kings from the time of King Arthur uncovered in Britain

By Tom Metcalfe published 1 day ago

Up to 65 burials of kings and queens have been discovered.

 

The new study identifies British Royal graves from the era of the mythical King Arthur. Several places in Britain are claimed to be the location of his burial; but according to some legends Arthur was taken by a magical boat to the mystical Isle of Avalon after being mortally wounded in battle. (Image credit: The Death of Arthur, John Garrick 1862)

The graves of dozens of what may have been early British kings, queens, princes and princesses from the era of the mythical King Arthur have been revealed by a new study. 

It suggests that British royal graves dating from between the fifth and the seventh centuries A.D. have been overlooked until now, possibly because they weren’t elaborate and contained no valuable grave goods. 

The research reconsiders archaeological evidence from a little-understood period of British history, between the end of Roman rule and the late Anglo-Saxon kingdoms — a time traditionally described by the legends of King Arthur.

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The new study by Ken Dark, an emeritus professor of archaeology and history at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, identifies what may be up to 65 graves of post-Roman British kings and their families at about 20 burial sites across the west of England and Wales, including the modern English counties of Somerset and Cornwall.

The British continued to rule in what are now the west of England, Wales, and parts of Scotland in the centuries after the end of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century, while the invading Anglo-Saxons settled in the east. 

But while Anglo-Saxon rulers of the time were given elaborate burials with valuable and ornate grave gifts, the Christian British may have viewed this as a pagan practice, Dark said. 

Instead, the British seemed to have buried their royalty without grave goods in simple graves without stone inscriptions alongside the graves of common Chistians – although many of the royal graves were enclosed by a rectangular ditch and probably surrounded by a fence that has since rotted away, he said.

Dark, who is now at the University of Navarra in Spain, is the author of the study published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

"The royal graves are very standardized," he told Live Science. "They have some variation, just like the ordinary graves do — some are bigger, some are smaller, some have only one grave in the center while others have two or three."

Post-Roman Britain

Roman rule in Britain lasted from A.D. 43, following a Roman invasion under the emperor Claudius, until about A.D. 410, when the last Roman troops were recalled to Gaul (modern France) amid internal rebellions in the Roman Empire and invasions by Germanic tribes. (The Roman general Julius Caesar invaded southern Britain in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C., but he didn’t establish permanent Roman rule.)

Between the fifth and seventh centuries, the Christian British ruled what are now western England and Wales as a patchwork of small kingdoms that tried to continue Christian Roman traditions. In the same period, pagan Germanic tribes — the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who originated in the north of Europe — invaded and settled in the eastern parts of the country.

The legends of King Arthur, who was supposedly British and Christian, are set in this period, although most historians think Arthur didn't actually exist. (Dark, however, suggests that a real person or a fictional hero of that name was famous as early as the sixth century, because Dark's previous studies have suggested there was a sudden spike in the use of the name "Arthur" among British and Irish royal families at the time.)

Dark began his investigation to address a long-standing archaeological mystery: while many British kings were known to have lived during this time period, almost none of their graves had ever been found.

Until this study, the burial of only one British king from this era was known after being discovered in the northwest of Wales; an inscription on a gravestone names the person buried there as Catamanus (Cadfan in Welsh) and declares that he was a king (rex in Latin.) 

But Cadfan may have retired from the kingship to become a monk before his death, and the phrasing of the inscription implies his grave was being commemorated because of his status as a monk, Dark said. 

Meanwhile, the graves of at least nine Anglo-Saxon rulers from the period have been found, including one at the famous ship-burial at Sutton Hoo near the east coast of England.