King Arthur
King Arthur hunting, 1300's AD (British Library, London)
Stories about King Arthur may be based on a real man who ruled southern England about 450 AD, just after the Romans left, but nobody knows anything much about this man, or even if he really existed. The stories seem to be a mashup of memories of this man and older stories from Ireland and England that people had always told around the fire. But in the 1200's AD, poets like Thomas of Britain began to write down these stories, and more and more people learned them.
Different poets wrote the stories a little differently, so there's no one right King Arthur story. But these are some of the stories people told:
