Geoffrey Ashe
|
Geoffrey Ashe MBE FRSL |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
29 March 1923 London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater |
Cambridge University University of British Columbia |
| Occupation | historian, author |
| Notable work | King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury |
Geoffrey Thomas Leslie Ashe MBE FRSL (born 29 March 1923) is a British cultural historian, lecturer, and author of historical books and novels, known for his focus on King Arthur.
Born in London, Ashe spent several years in Canada. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, before continuing at Cambridge.
Many of his historical books are centered on factual analysis of the Arthurian legend, and the archaeological past of King Arthur, beginning with his King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury, in 1957. The book was inspired by what Ashe had read in G. K. Chesterton's Short History of England.
He is a major proponent of the theory that the historical King Arthur was Riothamus, presented in an article in Speculum, April 1981, and expanded in The Discovery of King Arthur (1985), The Landscape of King Arthur (1987), and in various further articles. His fresh idea was to scrutinize Arthur's foreign campaigns in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and take the material seriously, concluding that, though the legendary Arthur is a composite figure, the career of Riothamus seems to underlie at least a major portion of Geoffrey's account, for which Ashe adduces passages in a Breton text and several chronicles.
Ashe, Co-founder (with Dr. C. A. Ralegh Radford) and Secretary of the Camelot Research Committee has also helped demonstrate, through a dig directed by Leslie Alcock in 1966-70, that Cadbury Castle, identified as Camelot by the 16th-century antiquary John Leland, was actually refortified in the latter part of the fifth century, in works as yet unparalleled elsewhere in Britain at the time. Ashe's point is that when Leland picked out this hill as Camelot, he picked what seems to be the most plausible candidate; yet even an archaeologist could not have guessed that the fifth-century fortification was embedded in the earthworks, just by looking without digging.
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