Monty Python And The Holy Grail: 5 Ways It Gets History Wrong (& 5 It Gets Right)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is among the funniest movies ever made. In general, comedy tends to age poorly, yet this movie from 1975 still is side-splittingly hilarious.

The movie follows King Arthur and his knights as they search for the Holy Grail. Beyond the jokes about the wind-speed velocity of coconut-laden swallows and just what constitutes a flesh wound, the film is actually surprisingly true to history. It far from perfect, but even medievalists can enjoy the amount of research put into making this film.

10 Wrong: Mixing up Time Periods

The historical events surrounding the original stories about King Arthur and his contemporaries take place in the Early Middle Ages after the Romans pulled out of Britain. It was a time of great upheaval and economic desperation, filled with warlords and invaders from across the sea. Later, Arthurian romances would become popular in the courts of the High and Late Medieval periods.

Holy Grail does not seem to distinguish between any of these time periods. Events and places described in the movie span almost a millennium of medieval history.

9 Right: Arthur’s Contemporaries

After a ridiculously fun credit sequence, Holy Grail opens with King Arthur approaching a castle, where one of the guards asks for him to identify himself. He proudly proclaims, “It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon from the castle of Camelot, King of the Britons, Defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England.”

These titles are not just him bloviating. The Britons were the people who lived on the isle now known as “Britain” and in nearby French Brittany. The Saxons invaded, and in Arthurian lore, were defeated by the king in a number of battles. A little later, Arthur says he traveled through the Kingdom of Mercia, a kingdom in central England. While the rest of the film does not respect medieval chronology, the early scenes get a lot right.

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8 Wrong: Lancelot

This may upset some people, Lancelot was never part of the original King Arthur stories. He was a much later addition. As such, any debates on the historicity of King Arthur have to consider him to be completely ahistorical.

Of course, there is plenty of doubt if any of these characters lived, and if so, what they were actually like, considering some of the contradictions and vagaries of the oldest surviving documents. That said, King Arthur, Merlin, and a number of Arthurian characters all very likely could have been real people. Just not Lancelot.

7 Right: “Defeater of the Saxons”

When Arthur boasts about being the “Defeater of the Saxons,” this is no small claim. The Saxons were one of three Germanic tribes who migrated to England (along with the Angles and the Jutes).

Arthur is said to have won numerous decisive victories against them, but ultimately, the Saxons took over Britain. Meanwhile, the Angles even got the island named for them: Anga-land. In modern Ang-lish, people just call it “England.”

6 Wrong:  Damsels in a Tower

The scene where Galahad encounters a multitude of beautiful women in Castle Anthrax plays into a few medieval cultural conventions, such as vows of chastity and maidens locked away in a tower. While some people certainly did live chaste lives, the truth is that outside of convents, this was more of an ideal than a reality.

Medieval documents abound with ribald references to sex. Sex workers, extramarital sex, and jokes about sex were commonplace. Sadly, the spanking and bondage practices referenced at the end of the Castle Anthrax scene are not well-documented (though there are some interesting writings from Italians nuns on the topic a few centuries later).

5 Right: Witch Trials

One of the most iconic scenes in Holy Grail is the witch trial. As a crowd of angry peasants parades a woman before Sir Bedevere, he leads the mob through a series of ridiculous thought-exercises to determine if the woman is in fact a witch as they claim. In the end, the crowd conclude she is a witch and burn her to death.

The persecution of women for witchcraft can be traced back to ancient times and continued through the medieval period. In fact, a pandemic of witch burnings swept across Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, considered to be one of the worst femicides in history in which tens of thousands of women were murdered.

4 Wrong: Coconuts

There are three important things to understand about coconuts. First, they do not functionally work as a substitute for a horse, especially when trying to travel across long distances. Second, they are, in fact, tropical, and therefore not native to England. Third, the air-speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow is not something that medieval guardsmen ever discussed.

Tragically, the film gets all of these points wrong (though the second one it at least admits being wrong about).

3 Right: Chivalry

These days, a man might hold a door open for a woman, insisting “chivalry’s not dead.” Until that man is willing to do single combat against another man in full-plate or ride a horse from Europe to Jerusalem, he should probably stop saying such things.

The codes of chivalry evolved as a lot through the medieval period and were often more of an idea to be lived up to than a practical reality of how knights lived. Still, the solemn oaths, heroic quests, and even Galahad’s attempted chastity in the film are aspects of chivalry. Then again, so is the duel with the Black Knight.

2 Wrong: Giants

This should probably be pretty straightforward, but knights did not actually slay giants. At no point in medieval history was there some massive infestation of twenty-foot-tall men roaming around Europe that the knights had to put down with their lances.

Of course, numerous cultures have references to giant humanoid beings. And the scene in Holy Grail where the three-headed giant is arguing with itself is hilarious. However, if there was a three-headed historian around somewhere, all of the heads would agree giants did not exist in the Middle Ages.

1 Right: Pas D’armes

Pas d’armes (or “the passage of arms” in English) was a medieval practice in which a knight would choose to defend a location that received high foot traffic (such as a bridge) and challenge any other knights that approached to single combat. The other knight would either accept to fight or would have to pass through in shame.

When the Black Knight stands by a bridge and says “none shall pass,” this is an example of pas d’armes. Hopefully, it goes without saying that this practice did not usually involve a knight fighting after losing a limb.

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