A contemporary journey following the fictional itinerary of King Arthur from England to Rome. Click on the first post in January (see right-hand sidebar) and then follow the posts up to the present.
Friends–I’m interrupting this narrative journey to walk a part of the Via Francigena, from the amazing medieval city of Viterbo (the largest intact medieval quarter in Italy) to Rome! When done, I’ll post a daily capture of the journey.
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Ryght so [Arthur] sought, and his knyghtes, towarde Sandewyche where he founde before hym many galyard [sturdy] knyghtes—for there were the moste part of all the Rounde Table redy on tho bankes for to sayle whan the Kynge lyked.
Despite its historic and literary pedigree, I’m glad to leave the crammed city of Canterbury behind. I trundle my rolling suitcase past the busy tourists’ shops to the bus station, waiting in the glorious late-afternoon sun for the bus to Sandwich. At last, as winter-weary English folk have sung for centuries: Summer is icumen in [Summer is a coming in], possibly the oldest known English song (13th c).
No one seems to know when the bus is due, so I perch atop my suitcase and wait alongside the elderly women with their shopping bags and students in school uniforms heading home. The “queue” is long, and I’m nervous about not getting on the bus, but we all manage to squeeze on. After many local stops at country roads and corners in small towns, the bus pulls in at last to Sandwich.
The bus driver directs me to the New Inn, a pub where I have booked a room up on the second floor, one of the few accommodations in this small town. The entry door to the pub is stuck and when it gives way to my insistent pressure, I burst into a small-town pub filled with men enjoying a pint at the end of the workday. All heads turn my way to assess this unlikely addition to the scene.
My entry to the New Inn pub is a gender-inflected moment: pubs are still predominantly male spaces. I step up to the bar and, while waiting to get my key, easily chat with three young men and an older gent, asking for directions to the river. Their directions are hopelessly confusing, but it’s fun to have an excuse to be in a space that I would not normally feel able to enter on my own.
Despite the convoluted directions, I find my way to the peaceful River Stour and take an evening walk on this long, northern-summer’s evening.. In contrast to the intensity of York, London, and Canterbury, Sandwich is a quiet town and the tree-lined banks afford a solitary amble. The July sun is low in the sky and a brisk breeze with a slight tang of salt and sea disturbs the surface of the water.
The placid, curving river is lined with rushes and small pleasure boats; pathways, marshes, and small woodlands form part of the river’s geography.
In the town, there are quaint half-timbered, medieval houses and shops that lean over narrow cobble streets.
A surgeon’s office, I kid you not, is located on Butchery Lane.
Of course, Sandwich is not only an idealized town, but part of the modern British landscape. The town has an authentic ‘self-ness,”with practical shops that sell shoes and bread boxes, flowers and groceries. In the distance, I can see the massive cooling towers of a nuclear plant, but the juxtaposition of modern energy production doesn’t perturb the bucolic ethos and textual geography. Walking alongside the river, it is easy to feel immersed in a landscape with a far past, textual and geographic. I can still enter Malory’s text.
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Source: Antony McCallum, on Wikipedia
Canterbury is in the general direction of Sandwich, and I couldn’t resist the minor detour. As a professor of medieval literature, I’ve often taught Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with its inimitable characters—the pious, the bawdy, and the loathsome. Who doesn’t love the Wife of Bath and her humorous tirade about her five husbands?
The justly famous Cathedral at Canterbury, rich in ecclesiastical history, is the destination of Chaucer’s motley pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. The opening of the Canterbury Tales form one of the most amazing poetic single sentences in English literature, ending with these lines:
And specially, from every shires end
Of Englonde, to Canterbury they wende
The hooly [holy] blissful martyr for to seke [seek]
That hem hath holpen [who had helped them] whan that they were seke [sick]
As the train “wends” its way from London to Canterbury, I review essays I am carrying by Arthurian scholars Drs. Peter Field, Thomas Crofts, Edward Donald Kennedy, Kevin Whetter, Ralph Norris, Masako Tagaki, and Takako Kato—wonderful medievalists who research the manuscript and printed text versions of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. We are on panels together at the Congress next week about the editorial and interpretive questions that arise as a result of the two versions of Malory’s Roman War episode.
This English book, Le Morte Darthur, has traveled to the quiet, lamp-lit offices of scholars in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the far west coast of America: to my home in Portland, Oregon. My wheelie suitcase is crammed with professional clothes and my briefcase is heavy with a laptop and work papers for the upcoming International Arthurian Congress in Rennes, France.
As I near Canterbury, the Kent countryside is dotted with woodlands and large oak trees that spread their broad canopies over the landscape.
~ ~ ~
Canterbury, like many English cities with cathedrals or colleges, is packed with tourists and lively groups of youngsters studying English for the summer. It makes for an intense crowd experience and shapes the space of these cities such that, at a certain level, they feel almost indistinguishable.
I stash my heavy bags at a tourist shop, then wander through the hushed twilight of the Cathedral interior, craning my neck to see the exquisite fan vaulting. English pilgrims came seeking healing from St. Thomas a’ Becket, once archbishop of Canterbury.
It is also the home cathedral of the 9th century Archbishop Siguric who was the first to record the itinerary of what is now known as the Via Francigena, the route between England and Rome that I am roughly following. For more on Siguric, see this post.
As I amble around the town, I happen to see a nondescript sign on a nondescript building: it reads: Watling Street.
Hey!
Do you recall Arthur’s injunction to the fleeing Roman ambassadors?
loke ye go by Watlynge Strete and no way [else]
Come to find out — Watling Street was one of the first and most important Roman roads in Britain! It once stretched across the width of the island running west from Dover through Canterbury, London, and on to Wroxeter in the northwest.
A map of Watling Street overlaid on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica map of Roman Britain. Annotated to show Winchester, London, and Canterbury. Source: Wikipedia
On the map above, Winchester, London, and Canterbury are circled in orange. The red line marks the length of Watling Street (we don’t know what the Romans called it; the name derives from Anglo-Saxon). From London it would be a straight shot to Sandwich, near the Roman fort at Richborough (it was a Roman road, after all).
No wonder the Roman ambassadors in Le Morte Darthur “so blithe [relieved] were they never” upon arriving at Sandwich! It is a formidable journey to cover from Winchester to London and then on to Sandwich in just seven days (almost 150 miles). Once they arrived, the ambassadors breathed a shaky sigh of relief and boarded their ships, leaving Britain behind.
To get from London to Canterbury to Sandwich to the ferry crossing to France without a car is not a simple journey. Train to Canterbury, local bus to Sandwich where I’ll spend the night. Train to Dover, ferry to Calais in France, rental car to Rennes. I realize I don’t have a map . . . just a copy of Le Morte Darthur with its Roman War itinerary as a guide.
For Further Reading:
John Higgs, Watling Street: Travels Through Britain’s Ever-Present Past (2017)
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All Roads Lead to Sandwich! The route in orange is that of the Roman Ambassadors: “go by Watling Street and no way else.” Source: Google Maps, annotated.
Meanwhile . . . while Arthur was in York taking counsel, the Roman ambassadors were hustling out of England, in fear of their lives. After Arthur refused their demand for taxes, he sent them packing:
And I shall gyff you seven dayes to passe unto Sandwyche. Now spede you, I counceyle you, and spare nat youre horsis [horses], and loke ye go by Watlynge Strete and no way [else].
And [if any] be founde a spere-lengthe oute of the way . . . there [is] no golde undir God [that will] pay for youre raunsom. . .
The Roman ambassadors took the threat seriously and fled to Sandwich, a port from where they could cross the English Channel.
The southeast coast of England during Roman times. Source: English Heritage
I have no idea if “Watling Street” still exists, but I’ll head to Sandwich, a small town on the southeast coast of England, as well.
Thus they passed from Carleyle unto Sandwyche-warde, that hadde but seven dayes for to passe thorow [through] the londe . . .but the senatours spared for no horse, but [hired] hakeneyes frome towne to towne, and by the sonnee [sun] was sette at the seven dayes ende they come unto Sandwyche –so blithe [relieved] were they never!
And so the same nyght they toke the water and passed into Flaundres, Almayn, and aftire that over the grete mountayne [called] Godarde, and so aftir thorow [through] Lumbardy and thorow Tuskayne [Tuscany]. And sone[soon] aftir they come to the Emperour Lucius, and there they shewed hym the lettyrs of Kynge Arthure, and how he was the gasfullyst [most terrifying] man that ever they on loked. (117)
“Gastful” Arthur will pretty much follow this same route to Rome. Upon completion of the ‘parlement at Yorke,’ he will marshal his troops at Sandwich then cross the English Channel to embark on the overland campaign to Rome.
. . . there they concluded shortly to areste all the shyppes of this londe, and within fyftene days to be redy at Sandwych.
I return from York late at night and spend another day in London to meet up with colleagues from the map seminar. We attend two searing short plays, “The Lovers” and “The Collection,” both by Harold Pinter and both about the dysfunction of marriage. We emerge from the theater shaken, then steady ourselves with a pint at a nearby pub. As we consider our own marriages, I calmly share a bit of austere wisdom from my mother, the kind you grow up with in an Irish-American Catholic family: “Well, no one gets everything in this life.”
I seem so centered as I say this. But I have had dreams of late in which my house teeters on the brink of a precipice, about to slide over the edge.
For now, I’m following the geography of a book, and it’s taken hold of my imagination. Could I follow it all the way to Rome? It seems an outlandish thought. At any rate, I am making plans to follow it to Rennes, in northwestern France, where my conference begins next week and where my husband and sons will meet up with me. But first, I’ll passe unto Sandwich, along with the Roman ambassadors, Arthur, his troops, and every ship they can commandeer.
Looking at a map, I see I could stop over in Canterbury on the way to Sandwich. Though not expressly stated as part of Arthur’s fast-paced route from York to Sandwich . . . it is on the way from London. I decide to briefly visit this site of the much more famous literary journey, The Canterbury Tales.
For Further Reading:
Harold Pinter, The Lover; The Collection.
All citations are from Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, P. J. C. Field, editor (2013).
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~ ~ ~
Constantine our kinsman conquered [Rome], and dame Helena’s son of England was Emperour of Rome.
I spend the day wandering inside the cavernous Minster (a cathedral that was, at one time, part of a monastary) and taking refuge from the crowds by walking the ramparts of the city walls, a kind of urban greenspace. The Minster is beautiful and soaring, its stained-glass windows cast shadows of red and blue across the stone floor. Outside, the city ramparts create a leafy, summer green space where I can walk and think.
Source: Friends of York Walls
Towards afternoon, I double back alongside the exterior of the Minster and come upon . . . a statue of the Roman Emperor Constantine, considered the first Christian emperor of Rome! Constantine leans back with an easy authority in front of the medieval Minster: the power of Rome juxtaposed with what came to supplant it: medieval Christianity.
I read the inscription and a theory starts to form. The 1998 sculpture commemorates the proclamation of Constantine as Roman Emperor in 306 AD — at York! Ah.
Constantine was on campaign in the north of England with his father, battling the Rome-resistant Picts [of present-day Scotland], when his father was killed or fell ill. The Roman troops affirmed Constantine’s right of succession as emperor right here in York. A complicated struggle for the title ensued, with Constantine advancing fromYork to Rome to claim sole title of Emperor and famously converting to Christianity at the Milvian Bridge.
Could Constantine’s march to Rome be a possible template for Arthur’s Roman War route? In Malory’s tale of the Roman War (drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account),[1] Arthur’s claims that:
Constantine our kinsman conquered [Rome], and dame Helena’s son of England was Emperour of Rome.
It is thought that Constantine mother, Helena, was British. Perhaps for Malory and his medieval readers, holding a parliament in York represented, geographically and symbolically, Arthur’s right to the emperorship of Rome vis-à-vis the figure of Constantine, aka a “son of England.” In fact, Arthur had earlier told the Roman ambassadors that “all his trew auncettryes [true ancestors] sauff [except] his fair Uther were emperours of Rome.” A bit of alternative history, but the claim is gathering strength by merely repeating it, a common power trick today as well.
Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313 (known as the Edict of Milan). Since then, York has proudly claimed Constantine as the only Roman emperor crowned in England.
Here is the benefit of walking a text’s geography: a passage that seems easy to disregard while reading–such as Arthur’s big detour to York–becomes key, connecting the reader to a richer reading of the text. As Elizabeth F. Evans writes, “Literature explores and gives expression to the myriad ways in which space impacts human experience.” I’m reading the geography of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in a new way.
The result of Arthur’s parliament in York is a resounding affirmation by his gathered lords to take on the fight against Rome. Arthur had stated back in Winchester that he would consult his “most trusty knights and dukes” and not be “over-hasty” [yes, Tolkien borrowed that phrase for his Ent tree elders]. But now, after the deliberations, it is time for action.
In York, his assembled liege lords“concluded shortly to arrest all the shyppes of this londe, and within fyftene dayes [15 days] to be redy at Sandwych.
At an average rate of travel of 20 to 30 miles a day on horseback, they have a very short time to prepare to depart for the greatest campaign of Arthur’s reign.
Source: Google Maps.
The day after tomorrow, I’ll depart from London, after my dream week of studying maps at the London Rare Book School, and continue this Roman War-inspired journey. Guided by Malory’s text, I’ll head southeast to the coastal town of Sandwich, 270 miles southeast of York. Sandwich is not far from the ferry port at Dover, and from there I can catch a ferry to Normandy, rent a car, and find my way to Rennes, where the International Arthurian Congress begins in a few days.
Looking at the map, I notice . . . Canterbury is on the way to Sandwich. Hmmm. Being a medievalist as well as a reader and teacher of Chaucer’s famed Canterbury Tales, I can’t resist a stop over! To do so, I’ll need to take a train from London to Canterbury and then catch a local bus to the small town of Sandwich. Figuring it out as I go.
[1] For information on the cleric and writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, see my earlier post.
Further Reading:
Elizabeth F. Evans, Introduction, Space and Literary Studies (2025).
Meg Roland “Malory’s Sandwich: Marginalized Geography and the Global Middle Ages,” in Marginal Figures in the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance (2020).
All citations are from Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, P. J. C. Field, editor (2013).
John Speed’s 1610/11 Map of York. Note the city walls. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Once the parliament in York is gathered, Arthur speaks to his noble followers: “I purpose me to passe many perelles [perilous] ways and to ocupye the empyre [empire] that myne elders afore have claymed. There I pray you, counseyle me that may be best . . .”
As I ride the early morning fast-speed train from London to York, the two-hour journey gives me time to mull over why Malory’s fictional Arthur took the long trek from Winchester 200 miles—north— to York to hold a “parlement” before heading—south—toward Rome. Was there a bishop that needed to be consulted? A powerful noble whose men and arms would be essential? Was York the ancient or symbolic starting place for campaigns? It’s perplexing to me as a reader of Malory, perhaps confounded by being an American; I don’t know my Roman British history well enough to grasp a reason for this big detour.
The train has a lovely tea trolley that comes through the aisles. As a tea drinker, I love this!
The train is filled with vacationers, including many children. There is an air of festivity and a great stir each time we enter a tunnel: the fast-speed train causes an air pressure change and everyone’s ears pop. “Whoo!” shout the children amid laughter, tunnel after tunnel.
Triangulated between the River Ouse and the River Foss, York was long considered a center of government in the north—from the Romans, to the Anglo-Saxons, to medieval kings. York is known for its incredible “Minster,” an 11th century cathedral . . .
York Minster
A well-preserved medieval “shambles” district . . .
York “Shambles” with timber-framed houses and shops
And massive 13-foot-high city walls, some with foundations dating to Roman times but most built during the 13th-14thcentury (just before Malory’s time). The walls surround the historic city center are the longest town walls in England.
Before the medieval period, York was a Roman provincial capital, Eboracum, the northernmost city of the Roman Empire. Rome withdrew from England in the 5th century, the historical moment that gave rise to the legends of King Arthur.
If York represents the far reach of Rome, could Arthur’s campaign in Malory’s tale be seen as traversing from the furthest periphery of the Roman empire to its center? I am grasping at straws and decide to see what unfolds in York.
The train is so fast that it is difficult to look out the window as the nearby trees and hedge rows fly past at a dizzying rate. As in life, the distant views seem discernible, but the near view is disorienting.
Following the geography of Malory’s Roman War episode is a full-body reading experience akin to stepping through the wardrobe door of Narnia, a portal where a reader can enter the landscape of the book. Looking out to the distant fields, the same feeling from yesterday rises up in me: “Could I be any happier?”
~ ~ ~
To my surprise, I do not love York. As I wander the city center, it is packed with large groups of Italian school children, as is every historic town in England in the summer. The kids are pretty hilarious—they link arms, sing songs, and stamp around town. But, with the many tourists and school groups, the streets are crowded and claustrophobic. The summer that would not come has now arrived, hot and slightly humid.
But I do discover in York what I came for—a possible answer as to why Arthur went north to York before embarking on the Roman War campaign. See next post!
Further Reading:
All citations are from Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, P. J. C. Field, editor (2013).
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Now leve we Sir Lucius and speke we of Kyng Arthure . . .
Source: Space.com
Mikhail Bahktin refers to the chronotope—the interplay of time and space in literature. In following this journey, I’m breaking out of—or into—the time and space of the book.
On the train back to London, I idly wonder– in what season is Malory tale set? It seems to be around Christmastime.
The Roman ambassadors, who had traveled to Winchester on behalf of the fictional Roman emperor Lucius, intrude upon the festivities with the emperor’s demand. The young King Arthur counters that he has read the “cronycles of this londe,” drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, in which the Breton kings Belinus and Brennius conquered Rome before Julius Caesar even thought about invading Britain. So, no, Arthur is not going to comply. With his “ferse [fierce] men of armys [arms]” he will, instead, reclaim and conquer Rome for Britain.
The sense of time is expansive here. The episode draws upon a reading of the ancient past to justify the present and to make a claim about the future.
St. Hillary, Feast Day Jan. 13. Source: CatholicCulture.org
Arthur gives the Roman ambassadors just seven days to depart Britain; they must travel from Winchester to the port town of Sandwich and on to Rome to deliver Arthur’s message. The narrative describes the simultaneous-in-time actions of the Roman Emperor Lucius’ once he hears of Arthur’s refusal. Lucius masses an army, filled with allies from places such as “Arabé” and “Turké,” and marches out of Italy intending to meet Arthur’s forces on the plains of Burgundy.
The text then returns to Arthur:
Now leve we Sir Lucius and speke we of Kyng Arthure that commanded all that were under his obeysaunce [rule], aftir the Utas of Seynte Hyllary that all shulde be assembled for to holde a parlement at Yorke, within the wallys [walls].
Utas? I have to look up it.
It turns out that the term “utas” refers to the eighth day of a feast day (related to the term octave), and, as St. Hillary’s feast day is January 13th, this means the parliament is to be held in York on January 20th. Therefore, the festive gathering for the wedding had indeed been held during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
While much of Le Morte Darthur is set in a hazy, unspecified ‘romance’ time, Malory brings in touches of emerging realism in terms of geography. By the mid-fifteenth century, ideas about mapping were undergoing a transformation based on the work of the second-century Alexandrian cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy. In these new maps, distance is represented as a function of time (that is, latitude and longitude). These principles mark the beginning of our modern cartography practices.
World map from Florence, Italy, based on Ptolemy’s 2nd century Geography. 1450s. If you look closely, you can see the grid of latitude and longitude. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Literature, much like maps, is concerned with time and place. Malory is renowned for how he took myriad French and English tales of the adventures of Arthur or his knights (think of the Star Wars’ episodes, prequels, tangents, sequels) and shaped them into a single, linear narrative of “the birth, life, and death” of King Arthur. Malory also tries to wrangle mystical romance time into specific mileage between locations and provides specific town names, telling us, for example, that Arthur’s Camelot “ys [is] in Englysh called Wynchester.”
Based on the “utas of Seynte Hyllary” reference, it is early January in the tale and, by the end of January, Arthur will hold his parliament in wintry York. Be there, in other words, by January 20th. For me, it is a cool and damp July. I arrive back at Waterloo train station and purchase a next-day ticket to York.
Further Reading:
Ptolemy, The Geography, Cosimo edition, (2011).
Elizabeth Evans, ed. Space and Literary Studies (2026).
Meg Roland, Mirror of the World: Literature, Maps, and Geographic Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2021).
All citations are from Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, P. J. C. Field, editor (2013).
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Now, the clouds around the hill have solidified to a leaden presence, closing off the views. I head down to town for the warmth of a cup of tea by way of a deep green wood where I would be no less surprised to encounter Merlin than an aged World War II veteran carrying a gnarled wooden cane with a burnished burl at its top.
I join up with High Street and come across a statue the Veteran told me about—but it is not King Arthur, as he suggested. It is a statue of KingAelfred, the great Anglo-Saxon king!
Aelfred reigned from 871 to 899, renowned for his love of education and law. He made Winchester his capital. Had our Veteran meant Aelfred or Arthur? Was it a matter of confusion between our American and British accents? I look around for my otherworldly guide, but he has disappeared into the labyrinth of wooded pathways.
My photo of the King Alfred statue, under a darkening sky
King Alfred statue. Photo credit: Visit Winchester
Well, this is how the Arthurian legend seems to develop: fragments of the historical become interwoven with the mythical and the personal, becoming the story of a place.
Cathedral, College, Round Table, traces of Rome—Winchester forms a potent starting place for Malory’s tale of Arthur’s Roman War. And something of the journey has coalesced for me, as well.
At home, my marriage is frayed and fragile. My husband and our high school sons will be meeting me in France, but just before I left for this trip my husband told me that when we returned home, he would be moving out. It is not the first time he has expressed this, but we have been married 23 years and are Catholics so despite the increasing feeling of despair, we simultaneously love our family life, and soldier on—a duality of our domestic space.
What began in the morning as a wild idea has now taken hold in my imagination, creating the emotional potency of saying yes to something unplanned. As I head to the train to return to London, I think, “Could I be any happier?” Walking this landscape, momentarily unfettered, releases emotion. The geography is generative to me as a reader of Malory and restorative to me personally. I might tentatively call it joy.
Winchester is in southern England, about 70 miles southwest of London. From here, Malory’s Arthur announces he will hold a parlement in York, over 200 hundred miles north, to determine his strategy in contesting Rome. Why set Arthur on this inexplicable route toward York? It’s hardly on the way to Rome. I’m already checking the train schedule from London to York.
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In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Arthur meets with his knights in a tower to determine how to respond to the Roman ambassadors’ demand that Arthur pay “truage” (taxes but also allegiance) to Rome. One of Arthur’s knights encourages him to resist: “when the Romaynes rained [reigned] upon us . . . [they] put this londe to extortions and taylis [taxes]. Therefore . . . I shall be avenged upon the Romans . . .”
Arthur concurs and delivers his decision to the Roman ambassadors “Now sey ye to youre emperour that I shall in all haste me redy make with my keene knyghtes . . . And I woll brynge with me the beste peple of fyftene [fifteen] realms, and with hem ryde over the mountaynes in the maynelondis [mainlands] . . . and syth [then] ryde unto Roome with my royallyst knyghtes (147).
In other words, the young Arthur will not only NOT pay Rome but will, instead, attack it. He held a council with his noble knights in a nearby fortified tower to make the decision.
In addition to placing Arthur in Winchester at the start of the Roman War episode, Malory also establishes Arthur as having Roman ancestry to legitimize Arthur’s rebuff of Rome’s demand. Arthur intended to out Rome Rome.
4th c. Roman Mosaic floor, Winchester City Museum Photo credit: Hampshire Cultural Trust
Not surprisingly, traces of Roman culture permeated medieval Winchester, including Roman mosaic floors such as those now displayed at the Winchester City Museum. I find myself mesmerized by the detail and pattern of the mosaics. They provide a glimpse of the domestic side of the Roman Empire’s occupation of Britain: people’s feet trod this floor daily! I learn there is an earthen outline of a Roman fort on St. Giles Hill, so I let my curiosity lead and decide to hike up to find it.
As I begin the hike, I meet a World War II veteran. How delightful to come upon an older person when out walking; they are often open and willing to spend a few minutes chatting. Our Veteran takes his daily walk here on the trails. In his right hand, he clutches a burnished wooden walking stick with a gnarled top. “Where are you going?” he asks.
A former navy man, he tells me that his first tour of duty took him around the world but, he adds, “I wouldn’t live anywhere else but here in Winchester.”
“You are too young,” I venture, “to have been in World War II?”
My own father was a young, fit seaman in WWII and, at 86, passed away two years ago. This veteran tells me his well-rehearsed response to my question: “When I joined up, Hitler capitulated.”
We laugh, and I rejoin, “Britain has you to thank.”
He asks me once again, reminding me of my own father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, “Where are you going?”
“Up to the top,” I say.
He again points out the path that I should take. I am grateful for his guidance as the trails between city and hill are not well marked and, with bits of urban debris strewn about and overhanging bushes, the trail is a slightly disconcerting space for a woman walking alone.
He tells me there is an outline of a Roman fort at the top. “This was once the capital of England,” he says with pride, “and King Arthur was the first king.”
Though he had forgotten where I was going, he had not forgotten Arthur—a mythical presence from almost 1500 years ago. Arthur may be the “first” king in our modern conception of English history, but he is not the historical first king of Britain. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century History of the Kings of Britain, you can read a quasi-historical record of the rise and fall of pre-Anglo-Saxon kings. In that text, Arthur is just one of the legendary rulers.
High above the city, under a sky threatening rain and lightning, the hilltop affords sweeping, panoramic views of the town and landscape. No wonder the Romans chose this lofty site from which to survey and dominate the lush surrounding countryside, and no wonder it served as a plausible location for Camelot in Malory’s imagination.
But at the top I find no trace of the Roman fort—only a softly mounded green hill, fringed with trees. Looking down on the city, I see the limestone Cathedral, a bright contrast to the red brick of the modern town buildings.
At first, I am the only one in this green monument of the past, but soon I see an older woman sitting on a park bench, looking out onto the rolling hills. Her white hair and light-yellow jacket create a bright patch of color in the gathering gray of this July day, a summer that will not come. She sits pensively, ignoring the misty clouds.
The Roman centurions could not have imagined her, lightly sitting on a bench built on ground they trammeled underneath, amidst the clamor of sword and horse and sweat. In the moment, I feel a sense of the uncanny: she an older shade of my solitary self, or I a younger version of her solitary self. She is a hummingbird in a moment of stillness.
For further reading:
Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (2014).
Guy de la Bédoyère, Roman Britain: A New History (2014).
Exciting news! I wrote a chapter, “Arthurian Literature and the Global Middle Ages,” for The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture, just out from Cambridge University Press (2026). Related to this blog, I explore the global economic links of various luxuries that are an integral part of medieval romances: silks, spices, armor, golden grails, lapis lazuli, etc. In turn, the stories (romances) that reference these lux items created greater demand for these global goods as well as interest in the faraway places from which they came.
Even in medieval times, there was a global economy. Merchants, diplomats, itinerate storytellers, warriors, slaves, pilgrims–medieval people did not all stay in one place!
The two-volume series is titled The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture, ed. by Raluca L. Radulescu and Andrew Lynch (Cambridge University Press, 2026), 2 vols. There are many wonderful essays in this collection. Perhaps you can request it for your library?
You can find a summary of my essay, “Arthurian Romance in the Global Middle Ages,” here.
In brief: Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility–one that explores the ephemeral nature of love but that is also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. Medieval romances celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages.
For further reading:
Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes (2023).
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (1400). This is an “as told to” book from around 1400 and isn’t easy to read–it is digressive, a little crazy, religious–there are episodic crying jags– but it is also the first autobiography written in English. It is written by a woman who was a brewer, a wife, had 12 children, possibly suffered a psychotic break after one of her childbirths, and then . . . took off for a pilgrimage to Rome. Wouldn’t you??
Former English professor at Marylhurst University for 16 years, then Concordia University. I taught writing, medieval literature, humanities, maps and literature, and history of the book. After five years as a Dean of arts and humanities at Linn-Benton Community College, I am now a writer and an instructor at Willamette University – Pacific Northwest College of Art.
