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DeWayfarer The original Arthur story was English but drawn on French sources.
830BCE is about 400 years after the end of the Roman occupation, so far too early for the Mediaeval setting of the Arthur stories. The later embellishments (e.g. Lancelot, the Holy Grail, modern Hollywoodisms and "New Age" notions about Tintagel and Glastonbury) are just grotesque.
It's feasible, just, that Malory's sources were by French writers who had seen some later edition of the
Historia Brittonum; but who promoted the hypothetical Arthur from a warrior-leader to a king? And king of what, exactly? Not of Wales, nor of England, which developed via assorted mini-kingdoms into a more cohesive Saxon entirety eventually ended by the Normans' take-over.
The reliability of the HB is itself questionable, even without Malory's imaginative re-workings of third-hand tales hundreds of years after the
Historia was written.
The era did see plenty of strife, including between the Britons and Saxons; but if we want to understand it properly we do need reject fiction written centuries later.
Those times used to be called "The Dark Ages" thanks to blending the collapse of the rather romanticised Roman Empire, with the paucity of real records of the time. Historians now realise the era had more going for it than we thought; but we need Saxon and other contemporary histories and church records, not Mediaeval novels, to know it properly.
