Royal palace discovered in area believed to be birthplace of King Arthur

Pretty sure he cast Excalibur into the lake and the Lady of the Lake cared for it before returning it to him later. (making the stone sword Excalibur).

If I recall correctly the movie Excalibur used the one where they are different. The Sword in the Stone was Uther Pendragon's that he buried in the rock just before dying from battle wounds. Arthur received Excalibur later from the Lady in the Lake as mentioned in other comments.

Admittedly I was young and deeply in love with all things Swords and Sorcery but I really liked that movie.

Wonder what Le Morte d'Arthur has to say about it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d%27Arthur

Yes, sadly, there are not an awful lot of surviving credible written historical records from Anglo-Saxon England. The ones that have survived often have been written hundreds of years later and generally not considered 100% reliable. This means that we have to go by archeological evidence. Hence the joke that we should bury our deceased pets in elaborate military uniforms, in order to confuse future historians.

Didn't they say the same about Troy?

Vlad, the Poker.

> While the vampire connotations are indeed mostly fabricated,

I was specifically talking about the connection to Bram Stoker's Dracula - Vlad was a real person, (with a bloody history) just as whoever built this English wall they found was/were (presumably minus a few gory tales), but that doesn't mean Stoker knew anything about him.

Vlad is definitely real. There's a legend that Count Dracula (you know, the vampire) was based on Vlad, but there's not much evidence Stoker took anything but the "Dracole" name (though I think that's the German spelling).

Well, adding a bit to this, it's also a huge boom for the town and surrounding area. I've been there, and it's quite overrun by tourism, so anything flying around royal-arthur-castle and adding to the local folklore will be milked appropriately.

I'm not saying that disparagingly regarding archaeology: is is way cool, but the Disneyland grade treatment this particular find will get will be a bit nauseating.

What I most love about it though is that they've found a bunch of buried walls, which lets face it, Britain isn't exactly short of, what with half of the Roman empire being buried... or still visible... across most of the country; and they immediately know it was King Arthur's palace and the piece of clay pot they found was for distributing food at banquets. What if this was the bar from that other famous myth, the one in separate but adjoining buildings in the town that disappeared one night ne'er to be seen again, where Steve the Blacksmith got drunk that night he caught his wife making out with John the Lesser (who she said was much more than his name suggested) and threw that pot across the room smashing it on the wall in a jealous fit of rage before he got wrestled to the ground by the sweaty un-credited barbarian who was staying across the road with Jeff the Cobbler and was thrown out in the torrential downpour that caused the landslide which buried the town... I mean, shit happens.

What I fail to understand is how they reach their conclusions without any real evidence and the media jumps all over it with language proclaiming certainty that this was King Arthur's birth place... a king that while we'd all love to believe in him because he is as much a part of our British heritage as Robin Hood and James Bond largely appears to be a fabrication of our own yearning for a more noble ancestry than we have evidence to support.

What's up with that?

*This story is entirely fictional and any similarity to the Steve at the top of this thread is purely coincidental

> Arthur is just a name, and there's not much direct evidence the legend was a "Romano-British Chief" except via hand-wavy reasoning about themes.

Well, the earliest source we have that talks about Arthur (Historia Brittonum) is talking about a British leader. And the Battle of Badon has more/earlier sources that mention it. Was one of the leaders at the Battle of Badon actually named Arthur? We don't really know, but it does seem more plausible than the story of Atlantis.

If it was originally a round number, that would have been 1.95 metres in France, anyway, right?

You wouldn't have been able to understand what they were saying if it had been 100% authentic. And if you translate the language why not translate the units?