Camelot

Arthur has a court throughout every early telling of his story, but for more than a generation of retellings that court has no fixed name. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the twelfth century Latin history that gives Arthur his first developed literary form, places his court variously and never settles on one named seat the way later tradition would. The name Camelot itself is first attested in Chretien de Troyes's French romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, written in the 1170s, where it appears almost in passing, already assumed familiar to Chretien's audience rather than introduced as something new, which suggests the name may have been circulating in oral or now lost written tradition before Chretien wrote it down. Once established, Camelot spreads quickly through the following century of French and English Arthurian writing and becomes the fixed, expected name for Arthur's court by the time later prose cycles and Malory's own fifteenth century Le Morte Darthur take up the story, so thoroughly that it is easy to forget the name was ever absent from the legend at all.

Medieval and later writers repeatedly tried to pin Camelot to a real, visitable place, and the guesses do not agree. Malory's Le Morte Darthur identifies it with Winchester, the city that had by his fifteenth century a genuine claim to Arthurian association through the Round Table displayed in its Great Hall, itself a medieval object rather than a genuine relic of Arthur's age. Other candidates proposed across the centuries include Caerleon in south Wales, a real Roman legionary fortress with monumental ruins that made it an obvious model for a legendary capital, Tintagel in Cornwall, already tied to Arthur through his birth in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, and Cadbury Castle in Somerset, an Iron Age hillfort that nineteenth and twentieth century antiquarians and archaeologists linked to Camelot partly on the strength of local tradition and partly on its scale and its refortification in the right general period for a fifth or sixth century warlord. None of these identifications rests on a document or an inscription naming the place Camelot; each is built from resemblance, local legend or scholarly inference rather than direct evidence, and the debate over where Camelot might have stood, if the question is even the right one to ask of a name that first appears in a twelfth century French romance, remains exactly that, a debate rather than a settled finding.