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 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.
The Most Addictive
Strategy Game Of 2022
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.
