The sign at left marks the spot believed by many to be the tomb of King Arthur. In the year 1190 some monks in the cemetery of Glastonbury Abbey dug up a hollowed tree trunk that served as the coffin for a very large man, whom the excavators believed to be Arthur. Shortly afterwards they also dug up he grave of a woman believed to be Guinevere. Their bones were moved to chests that were placed in the sepulcher of the abbey church, where they lay for nearly a hundred years. Edward I, who reigned from 1272 to 1307, took a strong interest in Glastonbury: no doubt he sensed that the he could advance his political aims in Wales and Scotland by identifying himself with Arthur. In 1278 he visited the abbey and, in an act called "the translation," he carried the bones of Arthur, with Queen Eleanor carrying those of Guinevere, to a spot before the main altar where they have lain ever since.

In the days of Arthur (assuming, of course, that there was an actual person behind the legends), it would have been unthinkable for him to be considered the king of the English, the very people he was fighting. Neverheless, the appropriation of Arthur by Edward became a permanent part of English tradition. The archeologist C.A. Raleigh Radford has dryly commented on the irony:

Edward I had, in 1278, just completed his first successful offensive against Llywelyn ap Gruffyddd of north Wales. The translation should probably be seen as a deliberate act of policy. Twenty four years later, Edward I based his claim to the Scottish overlordship on the rights of King Arthur to the whole island [of Britain] as recorded in the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In 1278, he was using the same weapon against the Welsh. Arthur, the champion of the British people against the heathen English invaders, had been received into the Valhalla of his enemies and was henceforth an English worthy. (pp. 109-110)

C.A. Raleigh Radford. "Glastonbury Abbey." In The Quest for Arhtur's Britain, ed. by Geoffrey Ashe, Leslie Alcock, C.A. Raleigh Radford, and Philip Rahtz. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987.