Was Bamburgh Castle Joyous Guard?
At the risk of being thumbs-downed also, there was no Sir Lancelot and there was no Joyous Gard. There was a King Arthur – or maybe a warlord Arthur – but he was dead many centuries before Sir Thomas Mallory decided to fictionalize him as a champion of chivalry. The real King Arthur was a leader who rallied the Britons to hold off the invading Saxons, after the Roman Empire abandoned Britain. This was in the late 400’s, or very early 500’s C.E. Eventually the Saxons won, pushing the Britons into Wales where the legend of King Arthur was kept alive. The Normans conquered the Saxons several hundred years later, and this was the England Mallory lived in. I think Mallory liked the Arthur legend because he was pre-Saxon, and the Briton kingdoms of Arthur’s time had territories in Normandy. He put quite a few surviving pre-Saxon legends into his book, including the romance of Tristram and Iseult. But Sir Lancelot is his own invention. According to Geoffrey Ashe there is an area in France wit
