Camelot

Camelot has no place in the oldest Arthurian tradition. The earliest Welsh texts put Arthur's court at Celliwig in Cornwall, and the Welsh poems and triads know nothing of any city called Camelot. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the book that made Arthur famous across Europe around 1136, places his great plenary court at Caerleon-on-Usk, the Roman city of the legions, and describes its gilded roofs and marble-like splendour in lavish detail without ever breathing the name Camelot. The name appears for the first time anywhere in the 1170s, in Chretien de Troyes' romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and even there it is almost an aside: Arthur comes from Caerleon and holds a magnificent court at Camelot on Ascension Day, as was fitting on such a day. The name may echo Camulodunum, the Romano-British fortress of the war god Camulos, now Colchester, though some scholars suspect Chretien simply invented it. For Chretien it was scenery. The great French prose cycles that followed turned that scenery into the centre of the Arthurian world.

In the Lancelot-Grail cycle of the early 13th century, Camelot becomes Arthur's principal city and the home of the Round Table. Here the knights gather for the great feasts, above all at Pentecost, and here the rhythm of romance is set: a court at peace, a damsel or a challenger riding in with an impossible demand, a knight riding out to answer it, and at last a return to the hall to tell the tale. Here stands the Round Table itself, and beside the king's own seat the Siege Perilous, the place fatal to every knight but the one destined to achieve the Grail. At one famous Pentecost, while the court sat at meat, the Holy Grail entered the hall covered in white samite, the hall was filled with sweet odours, and every knight was served the food he most desired, and then the vessel vanished. The knights rose and swore the quest there in Camelot, from Camelot they rode out in the morning, and to Camelot the survivors came home diminished. Camelot in these romances is the still point around which all adventure turns, the place where the world is as it should be, measured against the wild and magical country beyond its walls.

The Gawain-poet gives us the most vivid medieval picture of the city. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in the late 14th century, opens with Arthur holding his Christmas court at Camelot among the most famous knights in the world, and establishes the custom that gives the city its dramatic heartbeat: on such a high day the king would not eat until he had heard tell of some adventure, some uncouth tale, or until some challenger had come to demand a bout. Into that waiting hall rides the Green Knight on his green horse, and the greatest of all Arthurian adventures begins. Camelot here is youth and brilliance incarnate, a court in its first age, the king boyish and restless, and the whole city glows with untested light.

Thomas Malory, writing Le Morte d'Arthur in prison around 1470, gave Camelot its most durable address. He identifies it outright with Winchester, and Winchester could back the claim: the Great Hall of Winchester Castle held, and still holds, a vast round table of oak, dated by its tree rings to the late 13th century and painted in 1522 for Henry VIII with a Tudor rose at its centre and the names of Arthur's knights around its rim. Malory's Camelot is the capital of the realm of Logres in every sense that matters: here the Pentecostal oath is renewed, here Balin draws the sword that ruins him, here Tristram is honoured, here the Grail quest begins and ends. In the last act the fellowship that defined the city is broken. When Agravain's malice forces the love of Lancelot and Guinevere into the open, the crack runs straight through the Round Table itself; Arthur rides out to make war first on Lancelot and then on Mordred, and Camelot simply passes from the tale, as if the city could not survive the fellowship that had given it meaning.

Because Malory wrote Winchester into the legend, and because legend is restless, the search for a real Camelot has filled shelf after shelf. The strongest candidate by local tradition is Cadbury Castle in Somerset, a great Iron Age hillfort of some eighteen acres. John Leland, touring England in 1542, recorded that the villagers called it Camallate and could tell him nothing except that they had heard say Arthur much resorted there. When Leslie Alcock excavated the hill between 1966 and 1970, he found that the old fortress had been massively refortified in exactly the Arthurian period, the late 5th and 6th centuries: a new timber-laced rampart, a defended gatehouse, a great hall of timber, and pottery imported from the Mediterranean, the rubbish of a rich and powerful warlord's household. It is the strongest fortress known from Arthur's Britain, yet not one stone of it names Arthur, and Camelot itself enters literature six centuries after its gates rotted. Other claimants trade on the name: Colchester, the Roman Camulodunum, and a second Camulodunum proposed near Huddersfield, championed by those who want a northern Arthur. Caerleon holds the older literary claim, and Tintagel, where Arthur was conceived, has soaked up so much of the popular image that visitors now expect to find Camelot there. The scholarly verdict is dry but firm: Camelot is a 12th-century literary invention, and looking for it on a map mistakes a symbol for a survey.

The afterlife of the city is as rich as its romance. Tennyson fixed its silhouette in the Victorian imagination: the road to "many-tower'd Camelot" runs through The Lady of Shalott, and in the Idylls of the King he gave the city its most beautiful epitaph, when the seer answers Gareth's dazzled question - the city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever. T.H. White made it the capital of a thoughtful, comic and tragic realm in The Once and Future King, and Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot of 1960 turned White's book into a score that carried the name around the world. When Jacqueline Kennedy told Life magazine in December 1963 that her husband's presidency should be remembered by the musical's closing lines - do not let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot - the name became permanent shorthand for a lost age of promise. On screen it has been John Boorman's dream-city in Excalibur, the gleaming ideal of First Knight, and the stern, magic-banning citadel of the BBC's Merlin.

Camelot endures because it was never really a place at all but the geography of an idea: that might can be made to serve right, that equals can sit at one table with no head and no foot, that a kingdom can be organised around justice rather than fear. Its unreality is the source of its power. A real city can be besieged, taxed, burned and rebuilt in brick, but a city built to music is built for ever. Every age constructs its own Camelot, and every Camelot falls the same way, not to the enemy at the gate but to the flaw within the fellowship, which is why the name still carries the shine and the shadow together: the certainty that such a place could exist, and the equal certainty of what it costs when it does not last.