Camelot, maybe

Hill-forts are among the most impressive pre-Roman structures to be found in Britain. They are particularly common in southern England, as Paul Jackson described in his blog post A Handful of Hill Forts. Despite the name, hill-forts weren’t really military structures so much as small, self-contained towns that were defended by artificially built ramparts. An example can be seen in the photograph above, which shows Cadbury Castle in Somerset.

Cadbury Castle was built during the Iron Age, around 500 BC, and was continuously occupied until it was overrun by the Romans in the first century AD, in what seems to have been a particularly brutal and violent event. According to the Somerset County Council website, there is “clear evidence of destruction by fire and the massacre of a group of inhabitants”. However, after the departure of the Romans, the South Cadbury site was reoccupied and redeveloped in the early Middle Ages.

In 1533, a man named John Leland was given a commission by King Henry VIII “to make a search after England’s Antiquities”. This assignment took him to all corners of the country, including the Somerset village of South Cadbury, where he wrote “At the very south end of the church of South Cadbury standeth Camelot, sometime a famous town or castle” and that “The people can tell nothing there but that they have heard say that Arthur much restored to Camelot.”

In other words, Leland was saying that Cadbury Castle was nothing less than King Arthur’s Camelot!

Now King Arthur is one of the most frustrating figures in British history. Almost everyone has heard of him, but there is no firm consensus on what century he lived in, what kingdom he ruled over, or even if he existed in the real world at all. As I said last year in The Lost Tomb of King Arthur:

Down here in the south-west, the prevailing opinion is that he was the King of Dumnonia around 500 AD, a century or so after the departure of the Romans. Dumnonia roughly corresponded to modern-day Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, which remained resolutely Celtic while Wessex to the East (Dorset/Wiltshire/Hampshire) adopted the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

According to this view, it’s not that unreasonable to suggest that Cadbury Castle might have been associated with King Arthur – possibly even one of his main courts. It was occupied at the right time, and it’s in the right place. I made this point in my book Bloody British History: Somerset:

Cadbury Castle is one of the best natural defences on what would have been the eastern border of Dumnonia. Although the hillfort had existed for more than a thousand years in Arthur’s time, its modern name dates from precisely that period. Cadbury means ‘Cado’s Fort’... and Cado was king of Dumnonia around the time Arthur was born. Archaeologically, too, the evidence points to the site being an important military installation of the period. It was refortified in the fifth century with massive stone walls, and in the middle of the hilltop a timber-framed Great Hall was built – a splendid palace fit for a King!

These days, the only structure on the top of Cadbury Castle is a stone plinth dated “2000 AD” (see picture below). The plaque on top of this shows the directions and distances to a number of other places in southwest England. I struggled at first to discern a common theme to these, eventually deciding that they're all places dear to the hearts of hippies and New Agers! There are nine places in all, as follows:

• Two other “Arthurian” sites, Tintagel and Glastonbury
• Two other hill-forts, Ham Hill and Maiden Castle
• Another Iron Age site, Hengistbury Head, which was a busy seaport and trading centre
• Two megalithic sites, Stonehenge and Avebury
• Lamyatt Beacon, the site of a Romano-Celtic temple
• Alfred’s Tower, an 18th century folly commemorating Alfred the Great

The Lost Tomb of King Arthur

Glastonbury in Somerset is a town about which many fascinating claims have been made. In previous posts I’ve mentioned its reputed connections with Psychic Archaeology, the Knights Templar and even Saint Patrick. My book Bloody British History: Somerset has no fewer than 18 references to Glastonbury in the index. Not all of these are literally “bloody”, although many of them are. There was the group of Irish pilgrims who were massacred while visiting the shrine of Saint Patrick in 708 AD. There was the first Norman Abbot of Glastonbury, who dealt with a group of unruly monks by having them slaughtered at the altar of the church. And then there was the last Abbot of Glastonbury, who was hung, drawn and quartered on the orders of Henry VIII in 1539.

Some of the Glastonbury stories in the book are not so much bloody as mysterious. An example is the supposed discovery of the bones of King Arthur in the grounds of the Abbey in 1191. In my brief account of this, I took the standard modern-day view that it was just a cynical publicity stunt, aimed at luring pilgrims to the Abbey when the monks were short of funds to rebuild it after a disastrous fire. But was it really that simple? I’ve just read a short ebook on the subject, The Lost Tomb of King Arthur by Oliver Hayes – and now I’m not so certain.

I reviewed another of Oliver’s ebooks last year – The Papal Prophecies. That book, although it was a fascinating story, showed signs of having been put together in a hurry to coincide with the election of the new Pope. In contrast, The Lost Tomb of King Arthur appears to be the end result of long and careful research on the subject. It’s part of a series called Celtic Twilight, which seeks to demystify some of the semi-legendary events that took place in the British Isles during the early Middle Ages.

King Arthur, of course, is as semi-legendary as they come. Different parts of the country have their own views as to who he was, when he lived, and what he did. Down here in the south-west, the prevailing opinion is that he was the King of Dumnonia around 500 AD, a century or so after the departure of the Romans. Dumnonia roughly corresponded to modern-day Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, which remained resolutely Celtic while Wessex to the East (Dorset/Wiltshire/Hampshire) adopted the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

If it’s true that King Arthur really existed, then he must have been buried somewhere. To be honest, this blindingly obvious fact never occurred to me until I read Oliver’s book. Putting all the myths and legends to one side, where was the most likely place for a king to be interred? People have always buried their important leaders in important places. In Christian times, that generally meant a major religious establishment. If Arthur was King of Dumnonia, it makes perfect sense that he would have been buried at Glastonbury. The monastery there was an important centre of the Celtic Church, and it lay within the boundaries of Dumnonia as they existed in the 6th century.

For Oliver, this is just the starting point. The focus of his book is not on Arthur’s burial in the 6th century, but on the supposed rediscovery of his remains in the 12th century. Did Glastonbury monks really unearth his tomb in 1191, or did they fake it? Oliver’s surprising answer is... neither of the above! I won’t spoil the fun by giving his argument away, but it’s ingenious and persuasive – and it may even be right!

Relics of the Knights Templar

In a previous post (Another Templar Head) I mentioned Juliet Faith’s book The Knights Templar in Somerset. While the Templars had churches in many other counties as well, Somerset is unique in having two particular relics—both depictions of heads—that were found in or near two of these churches. One is a wood carving and the other is a painting on a wood panel. This ties in with the idea, popular among amateur devotees of the Templars but derided by academics, that the Knights Templar were guardians of some mysterious secret which involved (among other things) the symbolic worship of a Head.

Now Juliet has written another book: Glastonbury, the Templars, and the Sovran Cloth: A New Perspective on the Grail Legends. People who instinctively groan when they hear the phrase “Templar Head” also groan when they hear “Holy Grail” or “Turin Shroud”. But the truth is that relics such as the Grail and the Shroud were major preoccupations of the mediaeval world. As I pointed out in The History of Biblical Literalism, the modern-day conception of Christianity as a text-based religion is really an invention of the Printing Press and the Protestant Reformation. Before then—in the time of the Knights Templar and earlier—the focus was more that of a European-style mystery religion... all about symbolism and ritual. Relics (and symbolic copies of relics) would have played a huge role, particularly those connected with the central “mystery” of Christianity – the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Legends connecting Glastonbury with the Holy Grail can be traced back to the 12th century (at least some of the “legends” were probably the work of the monks at Glastonbury Abbey!). The Grail, of course, was supposed to have been the chalice used at the Last Supper, which subsequently caught the blood of the dying Christ. For mediaeval Christians, this would have been one of the most sought-after relics of all. Of equal importance was the burial shroud of Christ – which again would have been soaked in Christ’s blood. Without giving away too much of Juliet’s book, her central idea is that the Shroud would have been a kind of “Holy Grail” in itself, and the Templecombe panel painting may have been the lid of a vestment case designed to hold the original Shroud or a copy of it.

I think Juliet may be onto something here. No doubt “rational skeptics” will be utterly dismissive of the idea, but rational skepticism breaks down if you try to apply it to a culture that wasn’t rational in the way that modern scientific culture is. To my mind, the fact that veneration of relics played such an important part in mediaeval life, and that piety came before historical accuracy (in fact the very concept of “historical accuracy” is a post-mediaeval invention) make it very likely things like this would pop up in and around a major religious centre – which Glastonbury undoubtedly was in mediaeval times.

(Ahem) It may also be worth mentioning that my own book, Bloody British History: Somerset, has a chapter on “Secrets of the Knights Templar”, for which Juliet kindly provided a couple of images. As a result, she received a complimentary copy of the book, as seen in this photograph with the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in the background.

Forteana Blog 2nd Annual Report

This blog has been going for two years now! The most visible change over the past 12 months is that I changed the name from “Forteana” to “Andrew May’s Forteana Blog”. This may look like blatant self-aggrandizement, which it would be if I imagined that adding my name to the blog’s title would cause people to take it more seriously rather than less seriously. Actually it was the exact opposite – I realized from comments that were being posted that some people expected the blog to be an authoritative and impartial source of information, and then they got angry when they found it wasn’t. The last straw was when someone accused me of being a troll on my own blog! So I changed the name to reflect the fact that what you get here is me, not some would-be rival to Wikipedia.

Another reason for the name change is that over the last year I’ve been trying my hand at writing on non-Fortean subjects, such as my book Bloody British History: Somerset (left) which came out in September. I wanted to be able to mention such writing without being accused of going off topic – hence “Andrew May” gets equal billing to “Forteana” in the blog title. As it is, I haven’t really gone in for the hard sell as much as I ought to – I just don’t have the perseverance, ego or thick skin required to be a successful writer!

This time last year I’d done 130 posts and had 47,000 page views. I’m now up to 180 posts and 107,000 page views. So the rate of posting is down (to essentially one per week) but the number of views per post is definitely up. By far the most successful post I’ve ever done is my annotated version of Raphael’s School of Athens, which continues to get hundreds of referrals from Google every month... nothing else comes close. That one wasn’t even a particularly Fortean subject, and I had to make an effort to come up with Fortean connections for the various individuals depicted. In light of the post’s unexpected popularity, I wish I hadn’t bothered with the Fortean angle at all, and just played it straight!

When I started this blog (and I suspect this is true of most first-time bloggers) I was only thinking a few months ahead, for which I had plenty of material. Since then it’s got steadily harder and harder to think of new ideas that are up to standard and “on topic”. The trick, of course, is in thinking of a format for the blog that is effortlessly self-perpetuating. This is exactly what my former colleague and long-time fellow Fortean Paul Jackson did when he started his own blog, Random Encounters with the Unusual, last June. Paul describes this as “a repository for the oddities that me and Mrs J have encountered on our travels, which we find interesting or amusing in some way”... the result is definitely worth adding to your RSS reader if you haven’t already.

I did one guest post for Paul during the year, on Somerset’s WW2 Oddities, and another guest post for the Sevagram blog, devoted to the works of A.E. van Vogt, on the subject of Unravelling van Vogt's Fix-Up Novels. Other blogs I contribute regularly to are Jon Downes’s CFZ blog, where I do a twice-weekly “Words from the Wild Frontier” post, as well as the Lyme Regis Museum blog (currently hosted on Blogger but soon to move to the main Museum website). Also last year I started to do occasional posts for the Montacute House blog – including several folklore/mythology-related subjects that could easily have been at home on this blog, such as The Skimmington Ride, A Devilish Candlestick, Montacute's Hunky Punks and The Nine Worthies.

A Fortean History of Somerset

I was very pleased to be given the opportunity to write a volume on Somerset for the Bloody British History series from The History Press. This is my kind of history – all the good bits and none of the boring bits. As well as the eponymous “bloody” history (prehistoric cannibals, Viking invaders, Catholic-massacring Puritans and Victorian murderers) there is no shortage of more offbeat items to interest a Fortean audience:

• Joseph of Arimathea is reputed to have brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury in 63 AD.
• Cadbury Castle may have been the inspiration for the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot – it was certainly the stronghold of a powerful warrior chief around the time Arthur is presumed to have lived.
• When the Saxons invaded Somerset in the 7th century, they found that the locals believed Saint Patrick was buried at Glastonbury... this may not have been true (see Saint Patrick of Glastonbury?) but it did wonders for the pilgrimage trade.
• During the 12th century, when Glastonbury Abbey was in desperate need of funds for rebuilding work, the monks dug up an even more lucrative pilgrimage attraction – nothing less than the bones of King Arthur himself!
• At their height, the Knights Templar owned much of the land in Somerset, and at two Templar sites symbolic “heads” have been found that might be related to the mysterious Head that the Templars are supposed to have worshipped (much more detail is given in Juliet Faith’s book The Knights Templar in Somerset).
• When Henry VIII ransacked Glastonbury Abbey in 1539, he found a vast treasure trove of gold and jewels that he was quick to turn into much-needed cash for the royal coffers. Relics – including the reputed horn of a unicorn – that had no obvious financial value were thrown away. Later in the 16th century, a man rummaging through the ruins of the Abbey found what he claimed was the alchemists’ secret formula that would transmute base metals into gold. That man was Edward Kelley... soon to become the most notorious and sought-after occultist in Europe.
• The “whistling” ghost of Mother Leakey from Minehead was famous enough to be described in some detail by Sir Walter Scott. Less well known is the role the ghost played in the downfall and execution of John Atherton – a man from Bridgwater who became the first and only Anglican Bishop to be hanged for sodomy.
• Much of the theoretical basis for the 17th century witch-hunts, in America as well as England, was laid down by the book Saducismus Triumphatus by Somerset-born Joseph Glanvill – who has a reasonable claim to having been the world’s first paranormal investigator (see The Daemon of Tedworth).
• One of the best-documented exorcisms of the 18th century took place in the Temple Church in Bristol, but the subject was a man from Somerset: George Lukins, the Yatton demoniac. In the same century, another Somerset man, a professional geologist named John Beaumont, wrote extensively about a race of demons that he believed had a personal vendetta against him.
• Some years before she wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley attended a lecture by the Somerset-based electrical experimenter Andrew Crosse. The latter subsequently gained an undeserved reputation as a “real-life Frankenstein”, when the press announced that he had created artificial life in his laboratory – something Crosse himself never claimed to have done.
• During the 19th century, a former Church of England vicar named Henry Prince set up a “free love commune” in rural Somerset that he called the Abode of Love, where he and the other members indulged in Hieros Gamos style sex rituals behind 15-foot high walls.

Bloody British History: Somerset is available from Amazon UK and all good booksellers.

Post-Fortean Books

Several years ago I used the lulu.com self-publishing website to set up my own “publishing imprint” called Post-Fortean Books. But because I had a properly paying job at the time, I didn’t really have the leisure or motivation to do much in the way of marketing or publicity. Since then times have changed, and I’ve just gone through the process of reissuing all the books on Kindle. Four of them are also listed on iTunes, while the other two have just been submitted. Here are the details (in each case the link at the beginning goes to the US Amazon site and the one at the end to amazon.co.uk):

The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries: A collection of Sherlock-Holmes style detective stories set in present-day Oxford. All the stories have loosely Fortean themes (“The Dangerous Book”, “The Invisible College”, “The Shakespearean Super-Chimp”, “The Abducted Astrobiologist”, “The Ghost in the Machine”, “The Shocking Science Quarterly” and “The Inverted Pyramid”). This one is listed on iBooks. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Aquarius Code: A loose pastiche of The Da Vinci Code, written in 2006 when such things were topical. My story has a stronger fantasy/sci-fi element, though, and plenty of Fortean trappings (Earth Mysteries, Glastonbury, occult rites, Illuminati etc). A 17,000 word novella. This one has just shown up on iTunes as well as Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Promethean Galaxy: This is the only non-fiction work on the list. It’s a short (18,000 words) "exploration of the Galaxy" in science, philosophy, arts, mysticism and literature. It’s Fortean only in the sense that it refuses to take sides. Again, this one has just appeared on iTunes as well. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Kundalini Conspiracy: A 23,000 word novella that I stitched together in 2004 from several earlier short stories. Not great literature, but it’s bursting with Fortean themes (abductions, government conspiracies, past-life regression, mind control, Lovecraftian cults, cattle mutilation and probably other things I’ve forgotten). I tried to make the hero sympathetic, but I’ve been told he’s an obnoxious little pervert. This one is available as a printed book as well as being listed on iTunes and Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Naked Guru: Just a short story (7,000 words). This is another one set in Oxford, but the style is very different from The Invisible College... more in the “sleazy comic-book sci-fi” genre (if such a thing exists). I billed this one as “For Mature Readers Only” because it’s all about a sex cult, though actually the sexual content isn’t much greater than Kundalini Conspiracy or The Aquarius Code. Only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Six Dimensional Sex: Another one for mature readers! This is set in the Swinging Sixties, and it’s a parody of a particular type of science fiction that was popular at that time -- both in its repetitively sexual narrative and avant-garde writing style. It’s an absolutely terrible book (deliberately, because I was parodying a terrible style) but my hope is that the word Sex in the title will sell it despite its awfulness. Again, this one is only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Saint Patrick of Glastonbury?

As with all the early saints, there are a lot of legends about Saint Patrick and a scarcity of facts. One of the few certain things is that he wasn’t Irish! He couldn’t have been, since he was a Christian, and the Irish he converted were all pagans!

There are plenty of legends connecting St Patrick with Glastonbury in Somerset. Some people even think he was born there! According to one well-established legend, the Pope sent him to Ireland as a missionary in the year 425. After converting the Irish to Christianity, he returned to Glastonbury Abbey in 433, where he became Abbot and eventually died in 472. He is reputed to have been buried alongside the altar.

[This isn't something I'm claiming to be true... I'm simply recounting a legend that people used to  believe  in the past. I'm not making it up -- see the display from the Museum of Somerset shown above!]

Nowadays, Glastonbury is a magnet for hippies, neo-pagans and New Agers, and it seems paradoxical to associate it with a Christian saint. Glastonbury’s shops are filled with books on religion—Buddhism, Witchcraft, Goddess Worship, Sacred Sexuality—but you won’t find many Bibles! While the ruined Abbey is a big tourist attraction, it's more often described as ‘mystical’, ‘mysterious’ or ‘magical’ than as a place of Christian worship. The Abbey was destroyed by King Henry VIII when he abolished the monasteries in the 1530s, but before that time it was the most magnificent building in the country. If you picture Chartres Cathedral transplanted into the Somerset Levels, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

During the Middle Ages, Glastonbury was the religious heart of Britain -- a place of pilgrimage comparable to Rome or Jerusalem. What was important in those days wasn’t what was true, but what people believed. And people believed a lot when it came to Glastonbury. Not only Saint Patrick, but countless other saints were supposed to have been buried there. According to the 12th century chronicler William of Malmesbury, "...nor is there any space in the building that is free of their ashes. So much so that the stone pavement, and indeed the sides of the altar itself, above and below, is crammed with the multitude of the relics. Rightly, therefore, it is called the heavenly sanctuary on earth, of so large a number of saints it is the repository."

Besides St Patrick, Glastonbury is associated with his successor St Benignus, and the presence of their shrines (or supposed shrines) made the Abbey a popular destination for Irish pilgrims for centuries. Around the year 710, a group of them led by St Indract were massacred by local soldiers, and their remains were added to those already interred in the Abbey.

One of the reasons Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome was that he believed the British church was older and more valid! According to a widely believed legend, the Apostle Philip sent a group of twelve missionaries to Britain in 63 AD. The leader of the twelve was none other than Joseph of Arimathea—the man who, according to the Gospels, had allowed the body of Jesus to be interred in his own tomb. The twelve proto-monks were drawn towards Glastonbury, where a heavenly vision led them to found the Abbey!

Psychic archaeology

The town of Glastonbury in Somerset has several claims to fame that, evocative as they are, don't stand up to close scrutiny. Jesus probably never visited the town as a child, and King Arthur probably isn't buried there. The Glastonbury Zodiac is an excellent example of topographical pareidolia, and even the town's eponymous Festival takes place ten miles away, much closer to Shepton Mallet than to Glastonbury! There is, however, at least one perfectly real and historically important thing in Glastonbury, and that's its Abbey.

Glastonbury Abbey was one of the first Christian monasteries in Britain, dating as far back as late Roman times, circa 600 AD. By the time it was dissolved in 1539, on the orders of King Henry VIII, it was the largest, wealthiest and most prestigious abbey in England. So prestigious, in fact, that the King was determined to make an example of it, ensuring that it was almost totally destroyed. As a result the Abbey was lost to history for 370 years, until the site was re-purchased by the Church of England and archaeological excavations were started. What is remarkable, in light of all the hyped-up pseudo-mysticism surrounding Glastonbury, is the well-documented role that genuine mysticism played in those excavations!

The picture above shows the remains of the Edgar Chapel at the eastern end of Glastonbury Abbey, excavated around 1910. In charge of the excavations was a professional architect (and amateur archaeologist) named Frederick Bligh Bond. Prior to the excavations, only the existence and general location of the Edgar Chapel were known... nothing about its shape, dimensions or exact position. Yet Bond seemed to know precisely where to dig -- a fact which baffled his colleagues, who couldn't follow his methods at all.

In 1918, while the archaeological work was still continuing, Bond finally revealed his secret in a book called The Gate of Remembrance. It turned out that he had used a spiritualist medium, who had obtained information about the Abbey from long-dead monks using a technique known as automatic writing. The book records no less than sixteen specific pieces of information, which were not known at the time from any other source, but which were proved correct by excavations.

Spiritualism was far more popular a hundred years ago than it is today, but even in those days it was frowned on both by the Church (who thought it was the work of the Devil) and by academics (who thought it was the work of charlatans). So given that Bond was employed by the Church, and all his colleagues were academics, his fate was pretty certain! Not only did he lose his job, but he was ostracized by the authorities and his role in the excavations was airbrushed out of the official history.

Although skeptics love to dismiss all "communications from the dead" as deliberate and conscious fabrications, it's difficult to see how this can be true in Bond's case. Even if he was so naïve as to think he could publish The Gate of Remembrance and keep his job, as soon as he saw that things were going against him it would have been easy to say "but it was only meant as a joke" or "I was conducting a social experiment on the gullibility of the masses" or something. But he didn't -- he stuck to his story even when it was so disastrously career-limiting.

In the cosy world of the Excluded Middle (where most skeptics and believers live), if The Gate of Remembrance isn't a deliberate hoax, then it must be evidence for survival after death. But Forteans don't have an Excluded Middle, and I'm sure there are alternative explanations that are more credible than either of the knee-jerk extremes. I'm struck particularly by the similarity between the "messages" recorded in The Gate of Remembrance and the sort of things people come up with under Past-Life Regression Hypnosis. That makes me think that both these phenomena have a common cause, which is probably nothing to do with dead people (whether surviving as spirits or reincarnated)... but just something that gets translated into those terms by the unconscious.