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Don’t believe everything you learned at school.
Photo montage: George Marks/Retrofile/Getty/Creative Commons
Gladiators didn't kill each other as often as you might think. The most prized fighters were worth a lot of money as trained entertainers and many lived very long lives. A grave found at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey in 2007 found the remains of 67 men aged between 20 and 30 - many had sustained serious wounds but they had healed over time, suggesting they had been prized individuals with access to medical care.
Universal Pictures
OK, someone called Arthur lived in England around the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD. He's mentioned in the 9th century Historia Brittonum as having taken part in a big bloody battle at Mount Badon, and in the Annalaes Cambriae (written 500 years later). But the 6th century writer Gildas wrote an account of that battle that doesn't mention Arthur at all and he's absent from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is the fullest guide to what was going on then.
All the stuff about being a king, ruling at Camelot, Lancelot, Merlin, Excalibur, ladies in lakes... that's all a mixture of folklore, medieval literature and poetry, most notably from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who put together a history of all the kings of England in 1136 that starts with "Albion" being founded by, er, Trojans.
None of this stopped the 2004 film King Arthur focusing on "the history and politics of the period during which Arthur ruled".
Touchstone Pictures
Did King Alfred the Great of Wessex really burn the cakes? There's no real evidence he did. The cake (or bread, as it was originally) story comes from 12th century sources written at least 200 years after Alfred.
The legend goes that, on the run from Viking hordes in Somerset, Alfred takes refuge with a peasant woman who asked him to look after some cakes while they cooked. Alf took his eye off them and they burned - which is either evidence of him caring so much about his kingdom or evidence he was an idiot, depending on whose side you were on.
But historian Charles Plummer calls the cake story "utterly inconsistent with the genuine history of (Alfred's) reign."
commons.wikimedia.org / Creative Commons
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