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Camelot
The capital of King Arthur where,
according to legend, he reigned over the
Britons before the
Saxon conquest.
Camelot is not located on any authentic early map.
However, 'cam' and 'camel' do occur as elements in British place-names of
pre-Saxon origin.
According to romances, Camelot was named after a
pagan king called
Camaalis. At the time
Joseph of Arimathea arrived in
Britain, it was the most important city of the country. In Joseph's time,
King Agrestes ruled it.
The hero of a famous cycle of legends
and romances, Arthur was said to have been born at
Tintagel in
Cornwall. He became King of
Britain and held court at
Camelot
as the leader of a band of noble warriors, the Knights of the Round Table.
The knights
rode out to seek adventure and great deeds, notably in the quest of the Grail — in Christian
legend the holy cup used by Christ at the
Last Supper. Arthur was betrayed by his wife Guinevere and his nephew, or son, Mordred.
Wounded in battle against Mordred, he was carried away by three fairy queens to Avalon,
the land of immortal heroes, from which he will return to lead his countrymen in the time
of their greatest peril.
The oldest known stories
of Arthur never refer to Camelot, as such. The King first holds court there explicitly in
the romance 'Lancelot,'
written by
Chretien de Troyes between 1160 and 1180. Three centuries later
Sir Thomas Mallory makes it the chief
city of the realm, where the Round Table is housed. He sometimes equates it with
Winchester, yet in one passage of his work it seems to be north of
Carlisle.
Baron Alfred Tennyson never attempts to localize Camelot: in the 'Idylls of the King,'
it is symbolic, in the poet's own words 'of the gradual growth of human beliefs and
institutions, and of the spiritual development of man.' The name in fact has tended to
become evocative rather than geographical. Thus the conversion of
T. H. White's Arthur
cycle into a musical involved an almost inevitable change of title from 'The Once and
Future King' to 'Camelot.'
Local legends and
antiquarian guesswork have proposed several sites for this elusive city. One is
Colchester, the
Roman
Camulodunum. Another theory places it near
Tintagel, Arthur's reputed Cornish birthplace, in a district which contains the
River Camel and
Camelford. However, the candidate with the strongest claim to a genuine
underlying tradition is
Cadbury Castle in
Somerset. The 'Castle' is an earthwork fort of
the pre-Roman
Iron Age on an isolated hill 500 feet high, which looks over the
Vale of Avalon to
Glastonbury Tor in the distance. The ramparts surround an enclosure of 18 acres
on top of the hill. The village of
Queen Camel — once simply Camel — is fairly
close, as is the
River Cam. The antiquary John Leland, in the reign of
Henry VIII, speaks
of local people referring to the hill-fort as 'Camalat' and as the home of Arthur.
Folklore of immemorial age has clustered round it. A well inside the ramparts is called
King Arthur's Well, and the summit plateau King Arthur's Palace. The King is said to lie
asleep in a cave and at midsummer the ghostly hoof-beats of his knights can be heard.
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