The Great Captains

PrefaceThis is the story of “King” Arthur, as I think it might have happened. It is not easy now to throw off all the accretions of legend and, later, poetry and to see the situation with an objective historical eye. They were men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to re-create them as inhuman cyphers. But whatever one does, they loom and fade, slide sideways, shift out of focus, the pathetic and malevolent ghosts of a period quite unlike any other in the history of Britain and for which we have no adequate terms of reference. Yet it is a tale which sooner or later most storytellers wish to set down in their own way, for the struggles and characters portrayed are archetypal, and there is no getting away from them! I do not presume to have found out who Arthur was; all I know is that Malory and Tennyson were wrong! Men very much closer to his time called him ursus horribilis, which should give a clear enough clue. Looking at the problem decently from a number of directions, I sympathise with Medrawt, who has had a poor defence in the Court of History. And this Court, may it be said, took its case from a biassed Knight writing in 1469, nearly a thousand years after the event. The only safe assumption in a case like this is that we are all wrong—but it makes a good story. Henry Treece