Tales of Merlin and King Arthur Resurface After 750 Years, Hidden in a Bookbinding

In 2019, scholars at Cambridge University Library discovered an extremely rare 750-year-old text on the legends of King Arthur hiding in plain sight. A fragment of the fragile manuscript had been repurposed in the binding of a 16th-century property record, making it almost impossible to study the medieval text without dismantling and certainly damaging the record’s cover. Almost impossible—but not completely.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars from the University of Cambridge used various advanced imaging techniques to create a virtual copy of the binding, allowing them to digitally unfold the rare text without having to damage it or the property record. This ground-breaking approach also preserves the artifact as an example of 16th-century archival binding practice, which is “a piece of history in its own right,” Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, a French Specialist in Collections and Academic Liaison at Cambridge University Library who was involved in the project, explained in a university statement.

Written in the first half of the 13th century, it recounts the Arthurian legends in a monumental five-part epic prose. The fragment found at Cambridge University Library is from the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a part of the Vulgate Cycle that recounts events that take place after King Arthur’s coronation. One passage from the fragment tells of the Christian victory over the Saxons at the Battle of Cambénic involving the knight Gauvin (also Gawain) with his Excalibur sword. Another recounts when a disguised Merlin appears at King Arthur’s court during the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

Due to a degree in history and voracious reading habits, I have read about a half dozen histories involving immediate post-Roman Britain. Goodrich was neither an archaeologist nor an historian but studied language and taught comparative literature. These are worthy disciplines with valid scholarship, but decades of modern archaeology has changed our foundational understanding of that era and made obsolete much of the prior literary approach to the Arthurian legend.

How? In essence, literary sources have been tested against the ground truth as revealed by archaeology. What the Arthur legend created for entertainment as a world of castles, nobles, romantic quests, and knightly battles was a reflection of grim struggles after Roman Britain collapsed.

Most of the battles were brutal fights over wooden hill forts, involving not valiant knights in armor but farmers, tribal chiefs, and warlords, with hard men doing violent things up close to each other using simple clubs, pikes, arrows, and knives. One of those warlords was apparently of a better and less cruel sort, seeking to preserve some of the old order and peace based on Roman rule.

What I read of Goodrich in one of her books was to me a waste of time because she made a hash of the modern archaeology by picking and choosing bits to support her literary theories. Similarly, the Celtic Church story found traction among feminists but not among serious historians. If one thinks about it, a brutal era of disorder and warfare in which women were routinely mistreated and held in low regard is unlikely to have given them the role of priest in any sort of serious way.

Actually, it was organized Christianity and devotion to Mary and the sanctity of marriage that elevated women. And archaeology in Britain and elsewhere shows that Roman women in settled areas were usually also treated well, with spaces of their own and goods that catered to them. It is not a coincidence that the root of the term romantic is Rome, or that traditional Roman life and Christianity both placed a high regard on marriage and its virtues.

I do see an important point, even if not quite what Goodrich saw. The Arthurian romance applied a veneer to make a better account of crude and cruel times. It also combined old Roman domestic culture and Christianity to teach men something essential: to treat women better, with chivalry, so to speak, and to cultivate marriage and its virtues. And in that, we all have much to be thankful for and to continue to draw on the fictions of the Arthur legend for inspiration.

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