His approach was in many ways similar to the popular histories of an earlier time where much was erected on sometimes flimsy evidence, dubiously interpreted and stated with no uncertain authority. Unfortunately he entitled his tome The Age of Arthur.Īlcock had received some criticism for the title of his book, which appeared two years before Morris’, but at least he tried to argue from the evidence he presented. Marshalling a huge mass of documents and references to material culture he put together an unprecedentedly detailed history of Britain over three centuries, exactly that timescale that had traditionally been called the Dark Ages. His wide interests, learning and experience (which ranged from army service to socialism, from academic work in India to pacifism) made him an interesting candidate to attempt a syncretised survey of Late Antiquity in the British Isles, which incidentally for him included Ireland and Brittany. In the wake of this Dr John Morris, a senior lecturer at UCL, published his monumental The Age of Arthur, the synthesis of years of study in Late Antiquity – as the closing centuries of the Later Roman Empire were often described – and its aftermath. The legendary figure was lending his aura to the current zeitgeist, appealing to a range of opinions from highbrow through middlebrow to lowbrow, from students through Romantics to New Agers.

Alcock also published an archaeological and historical overview of the period called, significantly, Arthur’s Britain (1971), in which he made a tentative case for the existence of a Dark Age warlord called Arthur. The sixties also saw the rise of popular interest in archaeology, and Leslie Alcock, director of excavations at sites such as South Cadbury in Somerset, was one of many discovering clear evidence for major activity during this period in Wales and the West, not least at South Cadbury itself, dubbed Camelot because of its ‘Arthurian’ finds. Long disparaged as the ‘Dark Ages’ or the ‘lost centuries’, this Cinderella period was then becoming more acceptable to scholars to study under alternative, less romantic labels: post-Roman, Early Medieval, Late Celtic, Early Christian, Late Antiquity or Anglo-Saxon, depending on your point of view or your specialisation.

The sixties and early seventies were an exciting time for those interested in that transitional period between the removal of Roman troops from Britain and the lowland’s transformation into England, the ‘land of the Angles’ (and Saxons, of course).

The Age of Arthur by John Robert Morris