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- Taken together, the finds at this site suggest a thriving, cosmopolitan center that maintained connections with the rest of Europe as well as the far end of the Eastern Mediterranean, even as the Roman Empire was supposedly falling apart.
- Taken together, the finds at this site suggest a thriving, cosmopolitan center that maintained connections with the rest of Europe as well as the far end of the Eastern Mediterranean, even as the Roman Empire was supposedly falling apart.
Recent research at Tintagel Castle (in Cornwall, England) has uncovered some fascinating finds. In addition to ceramics from what's now Turkey (and maybe Cyprus) and glassware from the Iberian peninsula, archeologists from English Heritage working at the site have just uncovered a stone from the 7th century CE that seems to contain writing in 3 different languages - a Celtic name, some Greek letters, and a name and phrase in Latin.
Tintagel itself is maybe most famous for its legendary connection to King Arthur, a connection which seems to originate with the 12th-century medieval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth. In Geoffrey's telling, Uther Pendragon falls in love with the duke of Cornwall's wife and convinces the wizard Merlin to change his shape so that Uther can sneak into the duke's castle (Tintagel) and sleep with the lady Igerna. Uther succeeds. Conveniently though, the duke is killed shortly after this and Uther ends up marrying Igerna. Their child is Arthur. (You can read the relevant section of Geoffrey's Chronicle here.)
As Professor Guy Halsall has shown in his book Worlds of Arthur, even though Geoffrey's tale (along with all other legends related to Arthur) is little more than fiction, it has led to many problematic modern attempts to find the "real" King Arthur. Most often, this search has led historians back to the so-called "Fall of Rome" and beginning of the "Dark Ages." This approach was popularized, for example, by the 2004 film King Arthur, directed by Antoine Fuqua.
But Halsall debunks this approach, concluding that any attempt to push through the legend to the "real history" related to Arthur still piles inference on inference and so never approaches the truth. In other words, the historical Arthur is a shadow that can never be caught. These recent finds, in other words, tell us nothing about "King Arthur."
That said, the real history of the period in which Arthur supposedly lived - Britain sometime between the 5th and 7th centuries - is interesting in its own right. And that's what these new discoveries at Tintagel ultimately show us.
Most people tend to think of years 500-700 CE as the stereotypical "Dark Ages" - indeed, English Heritage still refers to the period in this way, despite the outcry of historians against it. This was a time, the popular thinking tends to go, that learning stopped, that the wisdom of Antiquity was lost, that the mental horizons of people across the Mediterranean and Europe contracted. This idea was cemented into the popular consciousness by the Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne in his 1937 book Mohammed and Charlemagne, which argued that the Arab conquests of the 7th century effectively ended trade and travel across the Mediterranean Sea. Although heavily critiqued by generations of historians, that reasoning has proven remarkably durable particularly among the political right.
But think about the finds at Tintagel altogether:
- Greek writing
- Latin writing
- Celtic writing
- Glass from Iberia
- Ceramics from Turkey (and perhaps Cyprus)
These are all remarkable for the distance with which these objects and ideas travelled. The glassware and ceramics - fragile luxury items - made their way more than 2,000 miles. This, in a world where the average sailing speed was about 4 knots (5 miles/ hour) is itself remarkable.
But perhaps more remarkable are the mix of languages that complement the world in which these luxury items from across the Mediterranean were found in the far southwest of England. Languages travel with people. Latin from the Roman Western Mediterranean, Greek from the Roman Eastern Mediterranean, and Celtic as native to Britain. This suggests anything but the static, unmoving society suggested by the "Dark Ages." In fact, it suggests just the opposite - that people and goods moved from one end of the old Roman world to the other and then sometimes settled.
The recent finds at Tintagel may not say anything at all about King Arthur but they do say something about the world that created his legend. It was one constantly in motion, connected across vast distances and filled with diverse voices and diverse peoples. Archeology is just adding to our understanding that the Middle Ages was never "just Europe," but was indeed global. And these finds are also reminding us of how much about the Middle Ages we have yet to discover.
