📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270 ACTIVE

The Sword in the Stone

The Sword in the Stone is a legend from Glastonbury, Somerset, GB — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.

Where does the legend of The Sword in the Stone come from?

Location: Glastonbury, Somerset, GB
Kind of legend: Folk tale
Coordinates: 51.144, -2.714
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is the legend of The Sword in the Stone?

Two authors are usually credited with fixing this story: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory. Only one of them ever wrote it. Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae, finished around 1136, has no sword, no stone and no test at all: the nobles gather at Silchester and simply ask the archbishop to consecrate Uther's son, whose right to the crown nobody disputes. The earliest surviving telling of the episode is the prose Merlin attributed to Robert de Boron, written around 1200, where a block of stone appears at daybreak before an unnamed minster with an iron anvil half a foot high on it, and gold letters promising the kingdom by the election of Jesus Christ. Kay, not Arthur, is the one who wants a sword that day, and Kay lies about how he got it. Malory, two and a half centuries later, made the anvil steel, moved the letters onto the blade, and turned a divine election into a birthright over England. No stone was ever lost: in the oldest version it vanishes at the end, on purpose. And the phrase that titles this page is not medieval - it is the title of a novel published in 1938.

What is the history of The Sword in the Stone?

Our own record for this legend credited two authors with fixing it: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory. Only one of them ever wrote it down. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, finished around 1136, is the book that turned Arthur into a figure of European literature — and it has no sword, no stone and no test. Its ninth book opens on Uther Pendragon's death: "the nobility from several provinces assembled together at Silchester, and proposed to Dubricius, archbishop of Legions, that he should consecrate Arthur, Uther's son, to be their king." Arthur is fifteen. His paternity is public knowledge, nobody disputes it, and the crown is his, in Geoffrey's own words, "by hereditary right". His sword arrives three chapters later from somewhere else entirely: Caliburn, "an excellent sword made in the isle of Avallon". I searched the whole of J. A. Giles's 1848 translation for the scene our record described. It contains Arthur 134 times, Uther 72, Dubricius 8 and the word stone 73 times. Anvil appears twice — both inside the surname "d'Anville", in a Victorian editor's footnote about Roman milestones. In the text of Geoffrey there is nothing. Wace's Roman de Brut (completed 1155) and Layamon's English Brut a generation later do not have it either: in Eugene Mason's translation of the two, anvil occurs twice, both times as a simile for the noise of blows on a shield. The earliest text I have been able to read that contains the episode is the prose Merlin attributed to Robert de Boron, written around the turn of the thirteenth century and preserved inside the Vulgate cycle's Estoire de Merlin. H. Oskar Sommer edited it from British Museum manuscripts in 1908, and in his French it reads like this. The archbishop tells the assembled barons at Christmas to pray for a sign. During the mass some of them step outside the minster, into an open, empty space, and at daybreak they see "j. perron deuant le monstier si ne porent onques sauoir de quel piere cestoit" — a block of stone before the church, and no one could tell what stone it was. In the middle of it stands an iron anvil half a foot high, and through the anvil a sword is driven down into the stone. The archbishop throws holy water over it, stoops, and reads letters of gold on the stone: whoever draws out this sword "seroit rois de la terre par lelection ihesu crist" — will be king of the land by the election of Jesus Christ. Ten worthy men are set to guard it. Everything our record tells as history is in that French text, and so is everything it lost. Kay, son of Antor, has been knighted at the previous All Saints. In the tumult of the tournament he sends his younger foster-brother on an errand: "ua me querre mespee a lostel" — go and fetch me my sword at the lodging. Arthur cannot find it, because the lady of the house has locked every sword in her chamber and gone out to watch. Riding back past the minster, he takes the sword from the block, because the ten guards have run off to the brawl. Kay then lies: he carries it to Antor and says "sire iou serai rois vees ci lespee del peron" — sir, I shall be king, here is the sword of the stone. Antor does not believe him and threatens never to love him again if he lies; Kay confesses, "comme cil qui ot grant honte", like a man in great shame. The French text also disposes of the object our record says has not survived. After the coronation at Pentecost, Arthur lifts the sword from the anvil "ausi legierement comme sele ne tenist a nule chose" — as easily as if it were held by nothing — and lays it on the altar; and when the mass is sung and the congregation comes out of the minster, "si ne virent point le perron, ne ne sorent quil fu deuenus": they saw no stone, and never knew what had become of it. Seven lines later the author signs his work in the first person. Two manuscripts — Bibliothèque nationale fr. 747 and British Museum Additional 32,125 — close the sequence with "Et ie Robers de Boron qui cest liure retrai": and I, Robert de Boron, who tell this book. Sommer's own footnote marks the spot as the end of "the portion of the Merlin generally described as a prose-rendering of Robert de Boron's poem, of which only 504 verses are known to exist". Malory comes two and a half centuries later. His colophon dates the book to "the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth" — between March 1469 and March 1470 — and Caxton printed it "in the abbey, Westminster, the last day of July the year of our Lord MCCCCLXXXV", 31 July 1485. Set the two side by side and the changes are small, deliberate and consequential. The French anvil is iron and half a foot high; Malory's is "an anvil of steel a foot on high". The French gold letters are on the stone; Malory moves them onto the sword. And where the French promises the drawer the kingdom "by the election of Jesus Christ", Malory writes: "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England." A divine election becomes a birthright, and a nameless land becomes England. Malory also declines to give the story a place. His stone stands "in the greatest church of London, whether it were Paul's or not the French book maketh no mention". And his Arthur does not draw it once. He draws it at New Year, again before Ector and Kay, again on Twelfth Day, again at Candlemas, again at Easter and finally at Pentecost, because the barons kept postponing the outcome — not in astonishment, but because it was "great shame unto them all and the realm, to be overgoverned with a boy of no high blood born". What ends the deadlock is not a miracle but a crowd: at Pentecost "all the commons cried at once, We will have Arthur unto our king... and who that holdeth against it, we will slay him." One more thing happens in Malory, and it is the source of a confusion that has outlived him. In Book I, chapter IX — sixteen chapters before the Lady of the Lake appears — Arthur at Carlion "drew his sword Excalibur, but it was so bright in his enemies' eyes, that it gave light like thirty torches". Only in chapter XXV, after Pellinore has broken his blade in two pieces, does Merlin lead him to the lake and the arm clothed in white samite. Malory's own text names the stone-sword Excalibur before Excalibur exists, and the two swords have been collapsing into one ever since. After Malory the episode nearly disappears. Tennyson, who did more than anyone to make Arthur a household story in Victorian Britain, left it out: his Idylls of the King name Arthur 255 times, Merlin 58 and Excalibur 14, and contain the word anvil not once. The phrase that titles our own record is not medieval at all. The Sword in the Stone became a book title in 1938, when T. H. White published the novel; Disney's animated film followed in 1963. That film, and not the French romance, is why this page was illustrated until August 2026 with a photograph of a theme-park prop.

Timeline: the documented record of The Sword in the Stone

c. 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth finishes the Historia Regum Britanniae. Arthur becomes king without any sword test: the nobles gather at Silchester and ask Archbishop Dubricius to consecrate 'Arthur, Uther's son', who is fifteen and holds the crown 'by hereditary right'. His sword Caliburn is 'made in the isle of Avallon'. In the whole of Giles's translation the word anvil never occurs in Geoffrey's text.
1155 Wace completes the Roman de Brut, and Layamon's English Brut follows a generation later. Neither adds the episode: in Eugene Mason's translation of the two chronicles, 'anvil' appears only twice, both times as a simile for blows landing on a shield.
3 December 1181 Galgano Guidotti dies at his hermitage above Chiusdino, near Siena. The sword standing through the rock in the round chapel of Montesiepi is his, not Arthur's, and it predates by some twenty years the earliest surviving text of the British story.
25 May 1184 'De incendio Glastoniae'. Adam of Domerham records that on St Urban's day fire consumed the whole monastery of Glastonbury except a chamber with its chapel and the bell tower, destroying the relics and a treasury of gold, silver, cloths, silks and books.
c. 1190 Adam of Domerham, the abbey's own chronicler, describes the exhumation: repeatedly urged to house Arthur more fittingly, the abbot 'one day surrounded the place with curtains and ordered them to dig'. The dig was screened from view, and the diggers were 'almost in despair' at the depth before they struck a wooden coffin of astonishing size.
1191 Ralph of Coggeshall enters the find under this year and tells it as an accident: the monks were digging a grave for a brother who had wished to lie there, and came upon a very ancient stone coffin with the lead cross laid on top. His reading of the inscription has no queen in it: 'Hic jacet inclitus rex Arturius, in insula Avallonis sepultus.'
c. 1193 Gerald of Wales writes the account in De principis instructione. He says Henry II - dead since July 1189 - had told the monks in advance, on the word of an ancient British bard, that they would find the body sixteen feet down, in a hollowed oak rather than a stone tomb, with the lettered cross turned face-down. He reports the inscription as naming Guinevere, and says of the cross 'which we too saw, for indeed we handled it'.
c. 1200 The earliest surviving text of the episode: the prose Merlin attributed to Robert de Boron, preserved inside the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin. The stone appears before an unnamed minster at daybreak on Christmas Day, with an iron anvil half a foot high and gold letters on the stone promising the kingdom 'by the election of Jesus Christ'. Kay sends his foster-brother for a sword, lies about how it was got, and confesses. After the coronation the stone vanishes. Seven lines later the author signs: 'And I, Robert de Boron, who tell this book.'
c. 1216 Gerald of Wales tells the Glastonbury story a second time in the Speculum Ecclesiae. Now the cross is drawn out of the stone and shown to him by Abbot Henry - 'we looked at it and read these letters' - and the clauses of the inscription come out in a different order. Twenty-odd years on, he is reporting from memory.
19 April 1278 Edward I and Eleanor of Castile have the Glastonbury tomb opened at dusk, seal the bones in two chests with their own seals, and order the new tomb set before the high altar with the heads and knee-joints left visible outside 'for the devotion of the people'. Adam of Domerham dates the opening to a Tuesday; 19 April 1278 was indeed a Tuesday in the Julian calendar.
1469-1470 Malory's colophon dates the finished book to 'the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth' - March 1469 to March 1470. His anvil is steel and a foot high where the French is iron and half a foot; his gold letters are on the sword, not the stone; and the promise becomes 'rightwise king born of all England' instead of king 'by the election of Jesus Christ'.
31 July 1485 William Caxton prints Le Morte Darthur 'in the abbey, Westminster, the last day of July the year of our Lord MCCCCLXXXV'. This is the text in which every later English retelling is rooted - including the passage in Book I chapter IX where Malory calls the stone-sword Excalibur, sixteen chapters before the Lady of the Lake hands Excalibur over.
1859-1885 Tennyson publishes the Idylls of the King and leaves the episode out. The collected poems name Arthur 255 times, Merlin 58 and Excalibur 14, and do not contain the word 'anvil' once. The Victorian revival that made Arthur a household story in Britain did it without the sword in the stone.
1938 T. H. White publishes the novel The Sword in the Stone. The title of this very page is his: no medieval text calls the story that.
2001 An examination of the Montesiepi sword coordinated by the chemist Luigi Garlaschelli, of the University of Pavia, reports a composition and a blade typology consistent with the late twelfth century. The underlying report is not one I have been able to read; press accounts of it establish a date, not a hand.
24 February 2006 The photograph that illustrated this page until August 2026 is taken. Its own file description reads 'Hong Kong China Disneyland sword in the stone', and Wikimedia Commons files it under 'Fantasyland at Hong Kong Disneyland' and 'The Sword in the Stone (1963 film)'. It is a theme-park prop photographed some 9,800 km from the map pin, and it reached us because an automated image search matched the page title. The image was withdrawn on 16 August 2026, when this record was rewritten; the entry is kept because how it got here is part of the story.

Is there a rational explanation for The Sword in the Stone?

No one has ever claimed the sword in the stone happened, so the useful sceptical question is a different one: why did this page put it at 51.1441, -2.7142, which is Glastonbury Abbey? Neither of the texts that tell the story puts it anywhere near. The French says only a minster with an open space in front of it. Malory says "the greatest church of London", and then declines to name it: "whether it were Paul's or not the French book maketh no mention." A narrator who refuses to identify the church is not describing a site. Glastonbury's Arthurian claim is a different story altogether, and unlike the sword it has a documented paper trail — which is what makes it worth reading closely, because the trail shows how a proof gets made. The abbey's own chronicler, Adam of Domerham, writing around 1290, records the disaster first: "De incendio Glastoniae". In the summer, on St Urban's day, 25 May, fire consumed the whole monastery except a chamber with its chapel and the bell tower, taking the relics, the treasure "tam in auro et argento, quam in pannis, sericis, libris" — gold, silver, cloths, silks and books. Then he records what the abbot did about Arthur: "quadam die locum cortinis circumdans, fodere praecepit" — one day he surrounded the place with curtains and ordered them to dig. The abbey's house chronicle states plainly that the excavation was screened from view. Gerald of Wales, writing within a few years of the event, adds the part that matters most. The monks knew what they would find before they started. King Henry II had told them, "sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo" — as he had heard it from an ancient British bard: the body lay between the two stone pyramids, at least sixteen feet down, "non in lapideo tumulo sed in quercu cavata", not in a stone tomb but in a hollowed oak, and the lettered cross would be turned face-down against the stone. Every one of those particulars was then found. Henry II had died in July 1189, before the digging; the man who supplied the specification could not be asked about it. And the witnesses do not agree about a single physical feature of the proof. Ralph of Coggeshall, entering the find in his Chronicon Anglicanum under the year 1191, says the discovery was an accident: the monks were digging a grave for a brother who had badly wanted to lie in that spot, and came upon "quoddam vetustissimo sarcophago" — a very ancient stone coffin — with the lead cross "superposita", laid on top of it. Gerald says the dig was directed, the coffin was a hollowed oak, and the cross was fixed to the under side with the letters turned inward, and he supplies a reason for the concealment: to keep Arthur hidden from the Saxons. Accidental or directed; stone or wood; cross above or cross beneath. Two accounts, a couple of years apart, and nothing in common but the result. The wording on the cross moved too. Gerald reports it as "Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus cum Wenneuereia uxore sua secunda in insula Auallonia" — with Guinevere, his second wife. Coggeshall's version has no queen in it at all: "Hic jacet inclitus rex Arturius, in insula Avallonis sepultus." Adam of Domerham, giving the reading in his own narrative, also leaves her out — and then copies Gerald's fuller version verbatim a few pages later, with her back in. The abbey's own chronicle carries both. Gerald is not stable even against himself. In the De principis instructione he writes of the cross "quam nos quoque vidimus, namque tractavimus" — which we too saw, for indeed we handled it. Retelling the episode around 1216 in the Speculum Ecclesiae, he says the cross was drawn out of the stone and shown to him by Abbot Henry, that "prospeximus, et literas has legimus", we looked at it and read these letters — and the clauses of the inscription come out in a different order. Twenty-odd years on he is reporting from memory, not from a copy. What the abbey got for it is a matter of record. On 19 April 1278 — a Tuesday in the Julian calendar, which is the day Adam of Domerham gives — Edward I and Eleanor of Castile had the tomb opened at dusk, sealed the bones in two chests with their own seals, and had the new tomb placed before the high altar with the heads and knee-joints left visible outside, "propter populi devocionem", for the devotion of the people. A shrine designed to be looked at. Finally, the line this page used to end on. "No stone or sword survives" reads like an archaeological result, and it is not one: in the oldest surviving telling the stone's disappearance is the ending. There was never an object to lose. Objects do compete, though. In the round chapel at Montesiepi, in Chiusdino near Siena, a blade stands through the rock at the hermitage of Galgano Guidotti, who was born about 1148 and died on 3 December 1181. A 2001 examination coordinated by the chemist Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia reported a composition and a blade typology consistent with the late twelfth century; I have only press accounts of it, not the underlying report, and none of them establishes whose hand set the sword there. What the date does establish is chronology: Galgano was dead some twenty years before Robert de Boron wrote. The Tuscan object is older than the earliest surviving text of the British story.

Can you visit The Sword in the Stone?

There is no site. That is the honest first line of any practical note about this legend, and it is the reason the map pin on this page should be read as a convenience rather than a location. The French romance puts the stone in front of an unnamed minster; Malory puts it in "the greatest church of London" and then refuses to say which one. No church, ruin or museum anywhere holds the sword or the stone of this story, and any place that says otherwise is selling something. The pin sits on Glastonbury Abbey, Magdalene Street, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 9EL — which is the site of a different Arthurian claim, the 1191 grave and the 1278 tomb described above. The ruins are run by a registered charity (no. 1129263) and are open to the public. At the time of writing the grounds open daily from 10:00 to 18:00 with last entry at 17:15, and under-16s go free; I was not able to confirm the adult admission price from the abbey's own visitor page, so check it before travelling. The abbey presents itself openly as Arthur's burial place; how the spot is marked on the ground I have not verified in person. What is certain is that the church is a roofless ruin: the tomb Edward I set before the high altar in 1278 is not standing there today. St Paul's Cathedral, London is the only building either text so much as gestures at, and the gesture is a shrug. It is worth knowing that the church Malory could have had in mind was Old St Paul's, the medieval cathedral that burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666; the building on the site today is Christopher Wren's replacement. There is nothing Arthurian to see. The Rotonda di Montesiepi, at Chiusdino in the province of Siena, is the one place where you can actually look at a sword set in rock. It is a small round twelfth-century chapel above the ruined abbey of San Galgano, it is free-standing countryside and it is nothing to do with Arthur — it is the hermitage of Galgano Guidotti, who died there in 1181. Check current opening arrangements locally; the site is rural and the two buildings, chapel and abbey, keep separate hours.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-16 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

The Sword in the Stone

Where does the legend of The Sword in the Stone come from?

What is the legend of The Sword in the Stone?

What is the history of The Sword in the Stone?

Timeline: the documented record of The Sword in the Stone

Is there a rational explanation for The Sword in the Stone?

Can you visit The Sword in the Stone?

Sources consulted

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The Sword in the Stone

Where does the legend of The Sword in the Stone come from?

What is the legend of The Sword in the Stone?

What is the history of The Sword in the Stone?

Timeline: the documented record of The Sword in the Stone

Is there a rational explanation for The Sword in the Stone?

Can you visit The Sword in the Stone?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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