Howard Wiseman’s self-described “quasi-history” of dark age Britain, Then Arthur Fought: The Matter of Britain, is an account of the historical material — matières, as the original French classification of medieval heroic tales goes — that has been, over the centuries, reconfigured as romance, legend, and myth in the popular imagination. “Matter,” though, is doing more work here than meets the eye. Taken as a subject, “matter” is perhaps a problem; a question that needs answering, or one that, at least, warrants investigation. This polysemous title offers anyone hoping to look at issues of contemporary Britain through a mythic lens a lot of freedom to do so.
Peter Treherne’s debut feature, Matter of Britain takes advantage of this freedom by adapting the Holy Grail myth with a cast of hundreds from his home village of Mayfield, East Sussex. The communal nature of the collaboration imparts a political robustness to the film that might otherwise not exist had Treherne cast professional actors and dropped them in this rural, often bleak and alienating landscape near the Southern coast of England. The film unfolds in 12 chapters, during which we meet the story’s main players, including Sirs Lancelot, Galahad, and Percival, and King Evelake, as well as watch, in vérité documentary style, the members of the Mayfield community go about their daily lives.
But Matter is remarkable not just because we see the villagers tending to their work of rounding cattle, shearing sheep, and tending crops, and rather because we see them in direct relation to their portrayals of knights on the quest for the Holy Grail and various other medieval figures like kings, temptresses, and soothsayers. Through this juxtaposition, Treherne elevates the villagers and their work to the same mythical register as the Arthurian legend they’re adapting as a community. A deer hunter’s solo outing takes on an assassin’s meditative calm. Cattle rumble like a storm, great beasts whose breath condenses on the air as if from a furnace. All about you is a feeling of bone-deep saturation. Treherne gives the land a sense of austere grandiosity, a knowing presence. The result contributes a new layer of “matter” to Britain’s mythical history.
In a text accessible on his website, Treherne analyzes a number of medieval paintings which take agricultural labor and laborers as their main subject. Just as he argues of those paintings, Treherne’s eye in Matter of Britain is neither explicitly repressive nor sympathetic. Rather, he portrays the villagers as plain workers caught in a Sisyphean struggle against nature. He also doesn’t name capitalism, austerity, climate change, or any other repressive force that pushes against the life of a farmer, but instead relies on the proximity of the Holy Grail myth to impart extranarrative political heft. Such ambiguity makes one’s first impressions of the film hard to articulate.
The Holy Grail, which promises eternal life to whomever finds it and cannot be seen by sinners, is an explicitly religious myth. As such, Treherne pays as close, if not more, attention to the rhythms of the village’s spiritual life. Church attendance, like the film’s production, is a communal affair disinterested in the individual; steeped in the same regimented, ritualistic, endurance-based choreography as a battle Sir Lancelot stumbles across on his quest for the Grail. Treherne extends this idea by taking a disinterest in the notion of heroes. Percival, Lancelot, and Galahad have their individual roles, but in Treherne’s hands, they are not vaunted. Case in point, Lancelot dies in that battle, collapsing among the ruins and contorted bodies only for those bodies to rise up and walk away.
These heroes, then, often set amongst the village in their bizarre medieval garb, are nevertheless of its people. A woman in modern clothes whispers the story of King Evelake to a chainmailed Percival sat next to her in a church pew, further blurring the lines between myth and life. Percival’s deflated realization that he is not meant to find the Grail positions him within a whole community of people whose own fates are also not meant to be mythologized but, just in being, inescapably are. Just as we know Percival, so should we know the people of Mayfield.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2026.
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