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In the Dark Ages, a legendary warrior arises to unite a divided land . . .

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Uther, the High King of Britain, is dead. His only heir is the infant Mordred. Yet each of the country’s lesser kings seeks to claim the crown for themselves. While they squabble and spoil for war, a host of Saxon armies gather, preparing for invasion.

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But no one has counted on the fearsome warlord Arthur.

Handed power by Merlin and pursuing a doomed romance with the beautiful Guinevere, Arthur knows he will struggle to unite the country – let alone hold back the Saxon enemy at the gates. Yet destiny awaits him . . .

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The first in The Warlord Chronicles, an epic Arthurian trilogy, The Winter King is a superb retelling of the Arthurian legend, combining myth, history and thrilling battlefield action.

‘Spellbinding realism’ The Times COVER SIGN OFF

‘Of all the books I have written these are my favourites’ Bernard Cornwell

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penguin books THE WINTER KING

Before becoming a full-time writer Bernard Cornwell worked as a television producer in London and Belfast. He now lives in Massachusetts with his American wife. He is the author of the hugely successful Sharpe series of historical novels.

Penguin publish his bestselling contemporary thrillers Sea Lord, Wildtrack, Crackdown, Stormchild and Scoundrel, and the historical novel Redcoat.

Penguin also publish his myth-imbued Arthurian romance, The Warlord Chronicles, which consists of The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur.

For more information about Bernard Cornwell’s books, please visit his official website: www.bernardcornwell.net

P EN GU I N B O O K S

The Winter King is for Judy, with love

P E NGUI N BOOKS UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Michael Joseph 1995 Published in Penguin Books 1996 Reissued in this edition 2023 1 Copyright © Bernard Cornwell, 1995 The moral right of the author has been asserted Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin d02 yh68 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978–1–405–95534–8

www.greenpenguin.co.uk Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Introduction

‘King’ Arthur lies at the taproot of British history, an heroic figure celebrated in myth, but for whom there is a lamentable lack of evidence that proves his very existence. He is very much alive in legend, in novels, films and TV series, but did he live?

And does he deserve his undying fame?

Like every child in Britain, I grew up knowing about Arthur and I was captivated by the world he inhabited; a world of towering castles, noble knights, and unfortunate maidens lucky enough to be rescued. The stories were romantic, noble, and magical, yet also, as I came to realize, utterly misleading. The knights of the round table were depicted in armour that would not be developed for another eight centuries, while their castles owed more to the late gothic revival period than to the crude timber and earth fortresses of early mediaeval Britain.

So, though adulthood had dissolved childhood fantasies of a sword in the stone, of Camelot, and of a great quest to find the holy grail, I was still obsessed by the Arthurian stories; the ‘matter of Britain’, and, perhaps precociously, decided to write novels of Arthur. My ambition was to place Arthur in his own time, which I decided had been the obscure period between the Roman abandonment of Britain in the early fifth century and the conquest of what would become England by the Angles and Saxons. I also determined to populate the novels only by characters who appear in the very earliest extant versions of the Arthurian legend, stubbornly refusing to admit characters introduced by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century. I failed in the latter aim, because as the stories developed I discovered I needed Lancelot and so yielded to the need. Lancelot is a late addition to the legend, placed there by Chrétien de Troyes and v

I have often observed that it took a Frenchman to introduce adultery to a good British story.

I was also initially reluctant to give Merlin a place in the tales, again on the basis that he does not appear in the earliest tales of Arthur, but seemed to have inspired his own quite separate myths which eventually became entangled with the Arthurian stories. My initial reluctance vanished when I recognized the value M ­ erlin added to the story. Nevertheless, while surrendering to the dubious charms of Lancelot and the subtle cleverness of Merlin, I still tried to keep the story true to the remote period when Arthur might have lived and when his life blazed so bright that to this day we remember him.

It was, by any measure, a brutal period. The Romans left behind a country of British tribes who each had their own kingdom and who fought each other with depressing regularity. Those tribesmen were what we would call today the Welsh, and the departure of the Romans initiated a crisis for those people. That crisis was the arrival of the Angles and Saxons, warlike tribes from present day north Germany, Jutland and Denmark, who saw in Britain an easy target for good farmland.

Their ships, not dissimilar from the ships of the much later Viking invaders, brought warriors and their families across the North Sea, and so precipitated centuries of warfare against the native British. In the end the British lost and the invading German tribes established the kingdom of England, but if Arthur existed then he was much involved in that long desperate war.

We know very little of the details of that struggle, only that it happened and that, gradually, the Saxons (or Sais as the Britons called them), captured the land and drove the British tribesmen over the sea to Brittany, back into the Welsh hills and north into what is now Lowland Scotland. The poem Y Gododdin, written in Welsh, describes a foray from Lowland Scotland to attack a Saxon encampment at Catraeth (now Catterick in Yorkshire). The attack was a failure, but the poem extols the bravery of the Welsh warriors who fought there.

The poem survives in a thirteenth century book, but is plainly much earlier, and scholarly consensus dates the original ­version, vi

maybe in oral form, back to the seventh century when the war between the Sais and the Welsh was still being fought.

Its importance for us is that Y Gododdin contains the earliest literary mention of Arthur. It is a glancing mention; the poet wishes to praise a Welsh warrior called Gwawrddur who performed mighty feats of bravery though, the poet adds, ‘he was no Arthur’. That line ‘though he was no Arthur’ suggests that the poet was entirely comfortable that his audience would know who Arthur was; that he was already famous. Sadly many scholars, using textual analysis, now reckon that the mention of Arthur was a late addition to the poem, but it still attests to Arthur’s fame, whenever it was written.

If Arthur existed at all then I suspect he was alive in the late fifth and early sixth century when the struggle between the Britons and the Sais was still undecided and, fortunately for us, a Welsh monk named Nennius wrote a history of that period in a book which came to be known as the Historia Brittonum – the History of the Britons. The Historia Brittonum was written in the late ninth century, almost half a millennium after Arthur’s lifetime, but it celebrates Arthur as a magnificent war leader who fought twelve battles, all of them victories. It is a fanciful history; Arthur is credited with slaughtering 960 men in one charge, but despite its flights of fancy, the Historia Brittonum leaves no doubt that Arthur was a great British hero. Yet, crucially, he is never given the title of King – instead Nennius describes him as the Dux bellorum – the leader of battles or, as I preferred, the warlord. I adopted that distinction in the novels, never claiming a kingship for Arthur, but leaving him as Nennius, a man who plainly wants to elevate Arthur to great importance, describes him – a warlord.

The twelfth battle in Nennius’s chronicle is a crucial event – the Battle of Mount Badon, the most famous of all the clashes between the Britons and the Saxons. Sadly we do not know the exact date of the battle, nor the location of the slaughter, but we can be confident that the battle was a signal event that was recorded and remembered by both sides. Nennius claims that Arthur was the British leader who gained the ­victory at vii

Mount Badon (indeed it is at Mount Badon that Nennius ascribes 960 victims to Arthur alone), and despite Nennius’s many exaggerations and flourishes, I am inclined to believe him. Unfortunately for that belief, we have a history written much earlier than the Historia Brittonum, indeed written not long after the great Battle of Mount Badon, and that history, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, while mentioning the Battle of Mount Badon, makes no mention of Arthur (nor names any other man or woman as the British leader at that battle).

De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, which translates as ‘On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain’, is a savage condemnation of the British kings and their behaviour, rather in the ranting manner of an Old Testament prophet, accusing the kings of disappointing God with their actions which God rewards with defeat and ruin. Yet Mount Badon was a huge British victory, and Gildas, the churchman who wrote the book, claims it was fought in the year of his birth (circa 500 ad), and he surely knew who had led the British forces. One a­ rgument explains why he might have ignored Arthur, not wanting to give him any credit, because Arthur had killed Gildas’s brother. That may or may not be true, but it is certainly disappointing that Gildas, another monk, does not name the British leader.

Another reason why Gildas might have ignored Arthur, indeed might have wanted to write him out of history altogether, was that there is evidence that the church disliked Arthur. That evidence is found in the early Welsh saints’ lives in which Arthur is mentioned, but almost always as a villain; as an enemy of the church, a tyrant, a thief, and even as a would-be rapist.

Arthur’s villainy is consistently defeated by these early and obscure saints; Saint Padarn recovers his red tunic that Arthur had stolen, likewise Saint Carannog retrieves his altar that Arthur had stolen to use as his dining table, while Saint Cadoc frustrates Arthur many times, including rescuing the girl who had interrupted Arthur’s game of dice and was in danger of rape.

So was Nennius’s warlord, the victor of Mount Badon, really nothing more than a petty thief and sexual predator? The early viii

Welsh hagiography certainly suggests that, but I suspect those accounts are an early example of fake news. The church dislikes Arthur intensely and, as his fame spreads, they try to blacken his name. Why? The simple answer is that we do not know, but it has never been difficult to incur the church’s disapproval and usually there are two reasons. The first is doctrinal, that the church ­perceived Arthur as a heretic or a pagan, while the second is e­ conomic; that Arthur caused the church financial loss.

Both are possible. If Arthur led a warband that roamed southern B ­ ritain looking for Saxon enemies he would need supplies, especially food, and the storehouses of monasteries would be an obvious place to look. The other reason for the church’s hostility is their perception that Arthur was a pagan.

That is entirely possible. Britain had become largely Christian, but that religion, introduced by the Romans, had not ­entirely extirpated the old religion which, for convenience, I will call Druidism. We know very little about Druidism, and what we do know is largely based on Roman, and therefore enemy, accounts. The druids had inspired British opposition to the R ­ omans and the Romans did their best to eradicate the religion, but it is extremely doubtful that they succeeded in eliminating all adherence, and more than possible that, after the Romans abandoned Britain, there was a resurgence of belief in the old gods. If Arthur subscribed to Druidism, or merely tolerated it, he would have been the church’s enemy.

Nennius ignores the church’s dislike of Arthur and depicts him as a hero, while Gildas simply ignores him altogether, presumably in the hope that Arthur’s growing fame will fade to nothing.

Yet Arthur’s fame did not fade, but continued to grow, turning a British warlord into a fantastic hero. Even the church ­surrendered to his renown, subtly turning Arthur into a Christian warrior. A tenth century chronicle, the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) claims that at the Battle of Mount Badon ‘­Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights’, and so the villainous wretch had become a servant of the church and a famed hero. ix

What intrigued me was the source of that fame, and my answer was to trust Nennius and ascribe the victory of Mount Badon to Arthur. That victory occurred against the tide of the war; the Saxons were winning and gradually conquering Britain from the east to the west. To the indigenous Britons it must have seemed as if the Sais were unstoppable, and were remorselessly taking the land and so beginning the process that would turn most of Britain into England. Then, suddenly, the Britons win a great victory that checks the Saxon advance and, it seems, halted that inexorable conquest for at least a generation. Suddenly, at least in western Britain, the fears were lifted. Men could sow crops trusting they would live to harvest them, children were safe from being captured as slaves, and the hated Saxons were humiliated. And who was responsible? Arthur. As time passed the inexorable Saxon advance continued, but folk still looked back on the period after Mount Badon as a golden age.

The myth of a golden age is extraordinarily seductive; that there was a time when life was almost perfect. Under England’s disastrous Stuart kings people recalled the age of Elizabeth I as a golden age; maybe every society has a golden age in its past when their world was not beset by the political and economic pressures that can render life so unsatisfying, and to the defeated Britons, driven from their land, Arthur’s victory at Mount Badon ushered in that brief golden period which contained the implicit promise that it might occur again, another golden age brought by a resurrected Arthur. ‘A grave for Mark’, the Black Book of Carmarthen records, ‘a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the red sword, but, perish the thought, a grave for Arthur.’ Other heroes are dead and buried, but Arthur lives, ready to bring another victory and renewed happiness.

That explanation of Arthur’s significance to the defeated Britons makes sense, but why then did he become a hero to the winners, the Saxons? Mount Badon was an ignominious defeat for the Saxon invaders, yet in time Arthur becomes a hero to the English, the very people he had been fighting. Indeed it is the English who develop the Arthurian myths into its modern form x

which surely reached its apotheosis in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King where Arthur is a Christian warrior, modelled on Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, and an exemplar of manners, morals, valour, and courtesy. How on earth could a dark-ages British warlord transmute into this hero-king of England?

I believe the answer to that goes back to those early troubled centuries as the Saxons gradually captured the land that would become England. Not all the conquest was by sword and spear; a good deal of it came in the form of mixed marriages as the Saxons took British women as their wives. And women are the pre-eminent agents of cultural transmission.

Mothers tell their children stories and it is likely that many children of Saxon fathers grew up hearing tales of a great warlord who ushered in a time of peace and plenty, and over time the nationality of that hero became blurred and the Saxons, as susceptible as any other race to the notion of a golden age, adopted him as their own and added the Holy Grail to the stories. Tennyson surely had it right when he wrote ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’. History provides many ironies, but the change of a great Welsh hero into an exemplar of a Christian English gentleman is surely among the most astonishing.

The Black Book of Carmarthen probably has it right when it implies that Arthur will never die, but will live on in legend; now no longer an exclusively English or British hero, but a man whose exploits are celebrated worldwide. He continues to offer hope; that defeat can be turned into victory, that peace and prosperity can spring from devastated lands, and that the good and decent can defeat evil. He is the world’s once and future king, the hope of mankind; and in our present days, in a world corrupted by stupidity, venality and cruelty, we need his inspiration as much as ever.

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