By the time he began to write The History of Britain (1671) in the late 1640s, John Milton had come to view the historical reality of the legendary exploits of King Arthur as dubious at best. As he says in The History, “But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign’d in Britain, hath bin doubted heertofore, and may again with good reason.” Milton was not alone in this assessment. Polydore Vergil, the sixteenth-century Italian humanist commissioned by Henry VII to write the history of England, was the first “humanist” historiographer to call into question the veracity of the Arthurian legends. By the seventeenth century, eminent English antiquarians such as William Camden, John Selden, and John Speed had also joined the ranks of Arthurian skeptics. However, unlike the antiquarians who went beyond written sources to investigate even material artifacts, Milton bases his skepticism on a methodology rooted in the comparison of written sources, though his comparisons in no way results in a simple conflation of narratives in the fashion of sixteenth-century chroniclers like Raphael Holinshed. Instead, Milton applies rational criteria to test, and even exclude, sources that do not measure up to his standards. I would like to delineate some of these criteria by examining Milton’s presentation of the episode known as the Battle of Badon Hill. Furthermore, I would like to argue that Milton’s methodology is tantamount to a form of iconoclasm, what I will identify as “historiographical iconoclasm,” a term I derive from the “iconoclasm” discussed by critics with regard to Milton’s Eikonoklastes, but, to date, not The History of Britain.

In the third book of The History of Britain, Milton takes up a thread of narrative from the end of book 2 which tells how the Romans relinquished jurisdiction over Britain after 462 years of imperial rule because of circumstances surrounding the collapse of Rome (127). The year was 409. Book 3 then relates how the Britons attempted to fill the void left by the Romans and to establish sovereignty for themselves over the various foreign peoples who subsequently invaded Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, peoples such as the Picts, the Scots, and, most importantly, the Saxons.