The Camelot Post
The curious case of the castle that wasn't there
Of all the real, tangible things that a historical Arthur might thoughtfully have left behind for the benefit of once and future archeologists, the largest and most obvious of them would probably have been Camelot.
Naturally, like almost everything to do with King Arthur, Camelot has never actually materialized. Equally naturally, we can’t seem to stop looking for it.
No one really knows why we call Camelot Camelot. The origin and meaning of the name are—it will not shock regular readers of this Substack to know—disputed. Does it come from Camlann, site of Arthur’s last battle? The Roman city of Camulodunum? The handsome yet relatable leading man Timothée Chalamet? We may never know for sure.
We do have a pretty good idea who came up with it: “Camelot” is yet another flight of fancy of the incorrigible, indefatigable Chrétien de Troyes, who coined it in the 12th century in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. Until that time a lot of writers had Arthur’s royal seat as Caerleon, which is a real actual town in Wales; in fact Chrétien would’ve agreed with them. He gave Camelot only a passing mention, as a kind of royal summer house:
King Arthur, one Ascension Day, had left Caerleon and held a most magnificent court at Camelot with all the splendor appropriate to the day.
As far as I can tell the name ‘Camelot’ here is a throwaway, put there for worldbuilding purposes, much the same way Star Wars mentions the spice mines of Kessel with no context or explanation and then never comes back to them. (Till the ill-fated Han Solo biopic, that is.)
But others came back to Camelot, and it gradually began to take on a life of its own that Chrétien probably never intended or foresaw. The anonymous author(s) of the 13th-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle decided that Camelot was Arthur’s main residence, not Caerleon. They gave it a backstory: Joseph of Arimathea converted the folk of Camelot, and built a church to Saint Stephen there, where Arthur and Guinevere were married. The Post-Vulgate Cycle used Camelot as well, as did Gawain and the Green Knight. Malory’s adoption of Camelot in the Morte d’Arthur more or less sealed its status as canonical.
One thing those writers might have liked about Camelot is that unlike Caerleon it has no fixed location in space. Malory identified Camelot with Winchester, probably for political reasons, and because there’s a large round table there (it was built for an Arthur-themed tournament under Edward I), but hardly anybody agreed with him. (Even William Caxton, who published the Morte d’Arthur, thought Camelot was in Wales, and said so in his introduction to the book.) Dozens of other locations have been proposed for Camelot, including the hill-fort Cadbury Castle in Somerset, Camelford in Cornwall, Camulodunum in West Yorkshire and numerous other places beginning with C. There are archeologists who spent a good chunk of their careers digging up would-be Camelots. But as far as I can tell the question, like so much about the geography of Arthur’s Britain, is unresolved and unresolvable.
Of course any actual historical Arthur wouldn’t have had a castle at all, or at least not as we know them. Castle-building was a fad brought over by the Normans post-1066. In the 6th century, when Arthur lived, if you wanted a house that other people couldn’t get into, you occupied a decommissioned Roman fort or an old Iron Age hill-fort. Something earthy and solid and old.
This is an inconvenient and unglamorous fact, and it is widely ignored by writers like, for example, Tennyson, who imagined an airy, fairy-like, upward-soaring Camelot built by magic on a mountain-top:
And all the dim rich city, roof by roof,
Tower after tower, spire beyond spire,
By grove, and garden-lawn, and rushing brook,
Climbs to the mighty hall that Merlin built.
In The Bright Sword I tried to chart a middle-course between Tennyson and the historical reality. My Camelot is, like Windsor Castle, a king’s seat, so it’s a defensive fortification, but it’s also a royal residence, with the usual luxury amenities and mod cons: a rose garden, a library, a menagerie and so on. Like Tennyson’s Camelot it has absurdly, romantically tall towers, including one that belongs to Merlin that sometimes vanishes for long periods of time.
But those towers have foundations. A real Camelot would’ve been a place of power long before Arthur. In The Bright Sword, if you descend into the dungeons of Camelot, or take a moment to inspect the base of its inner curtain wall, you’ll find old Roman stone there. This was once a Roman fort. And it goes back farther—it’s hard to see for all the greenery, and the hedge maze, but the hillside around Camelot has the stepped green ramparts of an ancient hill fort, which the Romans built their fort on top of. So there’s history here.
Just not too much of it.
To quote the song, "It's a metaphor, Your Highness."