
On the Hunt for the Lost Wonders of Medieval Britain - Thevet
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lost-wonders-of-medieval-britain
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dghf
> Cabal, who was the dog of the soldier Arthur

Possibly interesting tidbit for fans of Arthuriana: as this quote indicates,
the _Historia Brittonum_ , like other early sources, does not refer to Arthur
as a king. Elsewhere in the document, he is described as _dux bellorum,_ which
literally translates as something like "leader of battles", but which could be
a nod to the Roman military title _dux_ , one of a number of such titles that
can be loosely rendered as "general".

The early Welsh stories about Arthur sometimes call him _amerawdwr_ , which is
usually translated "emperor", but which could, like the Latin _imperator_ from
which it is derived, also be translated as "commander".

As far as I know, the earliest writing to call Arthur a king is Geoffrey of
Monmouth's _History of the Kings of Britain,_ conventionally dated to 1136.

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wincy
Wow, very interesting article. Thanks for posting. There’s something that
makes you feel a little sad, seeing the site of “King Arthur’s Son’s grave”
just a parking lot and a gas station.

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richsherwood
While I see where you’re coming from, there is nothing sad about it at all.
It’s actually quite beautiful that our world just keeps moving on.
Impermanence is the only constant here and while I t is important to honour
our history as humans, at what point do we draw the line between preservation
and progress? Also, it’s a parking lot now but won’t always be a parking lot.
50,100 or even 1000 years from now, this same spot could become abandoned and
overgrown with trees and nature (a random example scenario). Therefore coming
full circle.

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alltakendamned
This is simply delightful. I'm so happy to be able to read about people going
of on little adventures like this even though the results would be,
expectedly, limited.

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contingencies
Limited in the UK, perhaps, but there are plenty of places without such
limitations where written texts stretch back millennia. I have seen many
things unnoticed by others but recorded in 1000 year old travelogues here in
China.

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slaskow
What are some examples of those things??

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contingencies
Well, I was once hired to follow the Tang Dynasty travelogue of a buddhist
monk who visited China from Japan in search of scriptures, and recorded his
travels in a colloquial period Chinese diary. You can read about him[0] and
the journey.[1] Some things that come to mind are temples still standing in
the same area with the same name (though no doubt rebuilt), people still
raising ducks on the same river bend mentioned 1000 years ago, and the same
cities and towns with the same water features, mountains, and weather and the
same seasons, surrounded by fields of the same crops (eg. mulberries for
silkworms).

Entirely separately I have been translating another Tang Dynasty historical
text[2] on Wikisource[3] and have visited and seen many of the mentioned
places and cultural features: geography, people playing music on leaves or
flutes, certain kinds of attire, flora and fauna, surviving remnants of period
built and cultural environment such as Sanskrit carved stelae, recovered tomb
ware, endemic foods and festivals, caves, neolithic paintings, etc.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennin)
[1] [http://pratyeka.org/ennin/](http://pratyeka.org/ennin/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manshu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manshu)
[3]
[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu)

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xioxox
I used to live a few miles from Richard's Castle. It's a beautiful area. There
was an old unmarked motte and bailey castle down the road in a nearby field.
The area's also know for fantastic fossils. I'd regularly find trilobites in
what was an ancient lake bed.

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cairo_x
This is incredibly well written.

