The name of Camelot has come down to us as the appellation of the legendary seat of the equally legendary court of King Arthur. But was there actually ever a king (or other military leader) of the ancient Britons called Arthur? Was there truly ever a place somewhere in Britain called something like Camelot – and, if so, where was it?
Camelot has been variously identified by different philological and archaeological experts as being Caerleon in Monmouthshire; the village of Queen Camel in Somerset; Camelford in Cornwall; Winchester in Hampshire; and Cadbury Castle in Somerset. More recently, it has also been identified with a small Roman fort at Slack near Outlane in West Yorkshire. But perhaps we are just dealing here with a whole series of myths?
I am not a historian, but a hypothesis about the location of Camelot which is attractive to me in my capacity as a linguist focuses on the place-name being a derivation from the British Celtic Romano-British settlement called Camulodunum (meaning “the fortress of the war god Camulos”), which was the Latinised version of the ancient British name for what is now the Essex town of Colchester.
Camulodunum served as a major pre-Roman tribal centre; it was the capital of the Celtic Trinovantes tribe and later of the Catuvellauni. The town became the first capital of the official colonia of Roman Britain (where colonia was the Latin term for a settlement or outpost in some newly conquered territory), and would therefore have held considerable significance in Romano-British culture.
In about AD 60/61, Camulodunum was attacked and almost completely destroyed by the Norfolk-based Celtic Iceni tribe, under the leadership of their queen, Boudica. The town was rebuilt and flourished, but eventually lost its status as the capital to Londinium (London).
Dr John Morris, the English historian who specialised in the study of the institutions of the Roman empire and the history of post-Roman Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries, suggested in his (admittedly controversial) book The Age of Arthur that, as the descendants of the Romanised Britons looked back nostalgically from the turmoil of the period of the Germanic invasions (particularly during the 400s and 500s) to what must now have appeared to them to be an earlier golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, they may well have employed the name Camelot of Arthurian legend to refer to the Roman capital of Britannia.
And I would suggest, as a linguist, that the phonetic similarity between CAMELOT and CAMULOD(unum) is too striking for us to ignore completely in this context.
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Cymbeline
Cunobelinus was the British ruler of the Celtic tribe known as the Trinovantes, who controlled a large area of south-eastern Britain, focused on what is now Essex, from roughly AD 10 to AD 42. Cunobelinus was the same personage as the eponymous titular royal figure of William Shakespeare’s 1611 play Cymbeline – King of Britain. Cunobelinus, alias Cymbeline, treated Camulodunum as his capital, and his mint was located there.
