Dr Mary Bateman

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168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr Mary Bateman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast

There are familiar names. So we have Bedvir or Bedwyr, Gwalchmai, which doesn't sound very familiar, but it's the Welsh name for Gawain.

And Arthur's wife here is Guinevere, which sounds very familiar.

And there's lots of weird names in Arthur's court as well.

Killuck.

Sight, son of Seer, who has amazing eyesight. Okay, that's good. Which sounds useful, but then you also have Penpingyan, who walks on his head to save his feet. LAUGHTER

Less useful.

I assume he's just walking around upside down on his hands all the time. But surely that's a superpower. Not a very helpful one. I don't think his nightly peak years are going to last him long, to be honest.

Yes.

No, maybe they left him behind. They don't all go on the quest, just the useful ones.

Like a kind of rogue figure.

It's a very, it's a really complicated question. Monmouthshire is in what is now modern day Wales. But for much of the Middle Ages, it was in what we call the Welsh March. So that kind of border between Wales and England. And we don't really know the extent to which Geoffrey had familial Welsh connections or whether he came from the kind of Anglo-Norman elite who were ruling or kind of...

Yeah, who were the leaders in the marches at that time. He's kind of extremely famous in the Arthurian tradition because around 1136, 1137, he produces this book called The Historia Regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain. I think you probably have heard of this one. Yeah, yeah.

And you might notice an overlap there with the Historia Brittonum. And that is a major source for Geoffrey. But he's a lot more elaborate on Arthur's life than what has come before. So much so that people think, did he make all of this up? Is it completely his own invention?

In the ancient Welsh, the British language.

No. I think people are overly keen to be really, really sceptical about Geoffrey. I would imagine that if he'd grown up in Monmouthshire and if he did indeed have Welsh family, he would have been familiar with oral stories that we know were circulating about Arthur. But I think a lot of the detail is his own biographical elaborations, if you like. And it is so, so popular.

So there's, I think, something like 215 copies that survive from the Middle Ages.

And not even just in Latin, which it was written in.

And that's big. Like, that's big. You know, like, Bevis of Hampton, one of the other really popular romances in the Middle Ages. there are far fewer copies than that in English.

It's just like a huge, huge change in terms of the record of the history of Britain.

Yeah, massively. So because we don't have much of a biography of Arthur before, what Geoffrey adds in terms of details is incredibly important for the romancers. And even though Geoffrey is much more interested in what Arthur is doing during wartime than during peacetime, which is what the romancers are interested in, the details added are a great starting point.

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