Tea at Trianon: "King Arthur's Hall"

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 17, 2025

"King Arthur's Hall"

From Live Science:

A structure in southwest England that's associated with King Arthur isn't medieval as scientists had long thought. Instead, it dates back more than 5,000 years, to the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, archaeologists say — thousands of years before the mythical king and his knights are said to have lived.
The scientists who were involved in recent excavations at "King Arthur's Hall," an unusual rectangular structure on the Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, used several dating techniques to establish that the hall was built between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago.
The results challenge the idea that the structure had anything to do with the mythical Arthur, who would have lived in the fifth or sixth centuries A.D. — although most historians think he didn't exist at all and, in reality, was a medieval fiction based on traditional tales. (Read more.)

Royal graves from the Age of Arthur. Also from Live Science:

To get to the bottom of the mystery, Dark reviewed the archaeological work previously done at thousands of burial sites from this period in the west of Britain and Ireland.
His study suggests that the British royal graves were placed within early Christian cemeteries; and while they were marked out as those of high-status people, they seem very humble compared to ornate pagan graves and none have stones with inscriptions stating who was buried there.
The outer enclosures vary in size and some contain up to four graves, but they are typically about 15 to 30 feet (4 to 9 meters) across and up to 30 feet (9 m) long.
"We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others," Dark said. "When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials." (Read more.)