h century, the various stories were brought together in a new version by Sir Thomas Malory in his Morte Darthur. Our vision of Camelot derives largely from Malory's book (O'Neal 14-17).
One of the problems with discovering the historical Arthur is that the period in which he would have lived is a period of darkness as far as the historical record is concerned. Britain alone among the lands of the Roman Empire achieved independence before the northern barbarians attacked, and the people of Britain put up a fight against them. This was a very long fight, and at one stage at least it was successful:
Between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England there is an interregnum, which is not a chaos as historians once imagined, but a creative epoch with a character of its own. This rally of a Celtic people in some degree Romanized and Christianized is the reality of Arthur's Britain. It occurs in a dark age, the mysterious gap in British history (Ashe 27).
The record is not completely blank, however. One of the pieces of evidence that has been offered as to the reality o
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