Was King Arthur a real person? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Whether or not there is a historical King Arthur has been hotly debated for generations, but what can be agreed upon is that his legend -- even putting aside the obvious mystical aspects -- is riddled with anachronisms and embellishment. For instance, he's often associated with his castle, Camelot. However, castles weren't invented until the late-10th or early-11th century (I got these dates from Robert Liddiard's book Castles in Context), some 500 to 600 years after Arthur supposedly lived. Even then, castles weren't the enormous, regal structures we see in movies and television. They were simply towers built on top of man-made hills, and more often than not constructed of wood rather than stone. Camelot could have existed, perhaps as a town or early-medieval fortification, but the popular depiction of a beautiful, sprawling castle would not be one seen in England until many centuries after the Anglo-Saxon conquest that Arthur supposedly fought against. The rise of the castle in England is documented quite well in The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris.

Also, the concept of a king of a unified England is an anachronism in and of itself. England, as a singular kingdom, was not united until the 10th century. King of English or British ethnicity is a possibility; King of England he was not, and king of all Brittons is just ridiculous.

What I'm getting at is that, while there may have been an actual person that King Arthur is based on, the character has become so mythologized as to be completely divorced from reality. Even the earliest known mention of King Arthur, the Historia Brittonum, was written some two or three centuries after his lifetime and attributes absurd achievements to his name. For instance, it claims that he single-handedly slew nearly a thousand men at the Battle of Mons Badonus. There are, as of now, no known contemporary sources that corroborate his existence, and the closest sources that even acknowledge him do so in such a superhuman fashion that you may as well be asking if Hercules was a real person.

Even if somebody found out today who exactly he was, he would not be the same person as the one in the myths. So, no, the King Arthur you're talking about never existed and, certainly, the idea of a sort of messianic figure who will come again to claim his right is not something history is concerned with (outside of the cultural relevance of the myth). He is possibly a deification of a real man, though.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that the relic known as the True Cross didn't surface until the First Crusade, so King Arthur wouldn't have even known of its existence. In fact, Christianity didn't really come to England until after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Much of Europe outside of what made up the Carolingian Empire was still in the process of conversion well past Arthur's supposed lifetime. So the association of Arthur to Jesus would be a later revision to the myth that has no basis in history.