With great skill comes great respect. The English feared him so much that they respected him.

It may surprise you to learn that Arthur doesn't appear in any contemporary English texts at all. It's worth noting that there is no mention of a mythical Romano-British leader at all in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, which does mention the Battle of Badon, but makes no mention of any Arthur figure in relation to it. Indeed, Bede's account of the "Conquest" of England attributes the survival of the Britons not to a great secular ruler but instead to the Bishops of the Britons, who he says not only resolved their morale, but also came up with a successful military strategy. Bede draws heavily from Gildas' de Excidio... Britanniæ, a 6th Century British text which also denotes a battle at Badon, but similarly makes no mention of an Arthur figure.

It's important to note at this point that the idea of an English "Conquest" is fairly outdated. The most up-to-date summary of the current consensus can be found in Oosthuizen's (2020) The Emergence of the English. Current archaeological research (and some genetic research although this field is still emergent and somewhat prone to inconclusivity over such long timeframes) simply doesn't support the narrative of Gildas and Bede's large invasion, conquest, and replacement, where the brutal Pagan English swept all before them until they were halted by the last hold-outs of the Christian Britons. Rather, the evidence suggests a rather piecemeal process of immigration and settlement which varied greatly at the local level, as individual warbands, armies, clans or small groups largely settled alongside or integrated into and assimilated with pre-existing British communities. In Canterbury, for example, the use of Cyningas Cantwaras suggests that the incoming English integrated into, and even outwardly identified with, the Sub-Roman (or even Pre-Roman) inhabitants of the region. Extensive excavations at Mucking in Essex suggest that the English who arrived in the 5th Century initially settled on the periphery of the existing British settlement and set about working its more peripheral lands before integrating more fully with the local populace over subsequent generations. In St Alban's, on the other hand, evidence suggests that the Wæclingas established their own settlement on (presumably vacant) land adjacent to, but not integrated with, the urban British population.

This doesn't preclude any Conquest, of course: while many of the names of 5th-8th Century West Saxon rulers gives rise to theories of significant integration with existing British leaders, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself records how that kingdom expanded as much through force of arms as by diplomacy. What remains elusive, however, is a single coherent Angle, Saxon or Jutish invasion which posed an existential crisis to the Britons for Arthur to fight against. Indeed, it has been argued that "Arthur" only exists as a figure of any reality due to a persistent Victorian historical penchant for unquestionably accepting any written narrative as verified historical fact, regardless of the archaeological evidence. Indeed, David Dumville famously stated: "I think we can dispose of him quite briefly. He owes his place in our history books to a 'no smoke without fire' school of thought" (Dumville ,(1977), 'Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend') and argued that he should be stricken from the historical record entirely.

So where does the Arthur myth come from if not the English? Arthur emerges somewhat hazily in a number of Early Medieval Welsh sources, although there remains a lively debate about the reliability and historicity of many of them, and the extent to which the Arthur they depict is a real or mythical figure, jf indeed they depict the same Arthur. A famous reference to Arthur comes from the Welsh epic Y Gododdin, typically dated to the 6th Century but surviving only from a 13th Century manuscript. Arthur does however exist as a peripheral figure in a number of Early Welsh Vitæ and features in a number of poems.

Arthur doesn't really enter the English (or pseudo-English) literary canon, however, until the 12th Century, where he is the main character of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Geoffrey's Arthur doesn't just fight the Saxons, he invades Scandinavia and even marches on Rome to teach the Emperor Lucius a good lesson, carving out an empire from Iceland to the Alps. There is significant debate as to how much of his Historia Geoffrey drew from earlier Welsh sources, and how much was his own invention. Either way the work was a roaring success in its popularity, and a significant number of manuscripts survive. It did, however, have its contemporary detractors. Noted Cambro-Norman writer, historian, polemicist and hater of all things Irish Gerald de Barri (aka Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales) wrote particularly angrily (and somewhat ironically) about Geoffrey's work, warning his readers not to fall for their blatant falsehoods and even accusing the work of being a 'demon-magnet', while William of Newburgh openly accused Geoffrey of being a liar. Julia Crick argues that Geoffrey's Historia used earlier pseudo-mythological Arthurian themes to create a unifying Welsh figure as a symbol of resistance to invasion and promised strength and deliverance at a time when direct Norman conquest and rule was making far more significant inroads into Wales than more indirect English overkingship had ever managed pre-Conquest, which is something of a irony given that Geoffrey himself may well have been a member of the incoming elite. Given that Geoffrey may have been a Breton, however, his writings may have reflected an interest in a perceived common history (Bede and Procopius both suggest that Brittany was settled by Britons fleeing the incoming English), and a common resentment of Norman overlordship.