The Pendragon Society was founded  in 1959 at Winchester by Jess Foster. According to legend it was at Winchester that a great dragon appeared in the sky and caused Merlin to prophesy the birth of Arthur.

For this reason the founding members chose the Golden Wyvern on a blue field as its badge and symbol, the Wyvern being the badge of Wessex. Geoffrey of Monmouth tell us Uther Pendragon had two golden dragons made, one to be kept in Winchester Cathedral, the other as a battle standard (Historia, Vill,17). Today the Welsh Dragon has taken its place alongside the Wyvern as a Society logo, the Editor, Secretary and Treasurer all live in Wales and our Chairman was born there.

Jess ran the society until her death in 1979 at Bristol where she had moved in 1964 and from where she  built up an international membership. The Bristol group, her ‘task force’, held numerous events and functions and were involved in the five year excavations at  Cadbury hillfort . Later a group of Bristol based members began the annual digs at the site of a Dark Age church at Llanellen on the Gower peninsula in South Wales, eventually hiving off to become a parallel group, The Field Club, later the Llanellen Research Committee.

After Cadbury the Pendragons began to take an interest in straight paths, dragon lore, standing stones, cathedrals and Cathars, Templars, mazes, terrestrial zodiacs, Celtic Christianity and perpetual choirs - on the Mythical Quest for the Ancient Wisdom, but never once did Jess lose focus on the centrality of Arthur as the basis of the Society’s existence. A shrewd and wise lady, her voice still speaks to us through the back issues of the journal. She wrote, “all the years we have been at Cadbury we have been asking ourselves WHERE? The only difference now is that we have begun to ask ourselves WHY?’ She described these extensions as a new contemporary interest in The Matter of Britain also as Merlin Studies. The Society had let in poetry alongside Gradgrind ‘facts’.

Some critics of Pendragon’s widening interests at that time have wrongly thought this meant we had become Glastonbury-type ‘hippies’ and ‘freaks’, not allowing that rational, educated minds look for meaning in more ways than one. Our members have always been able to blow away the froth to see if anything of substance remains; the Arthurian romances are full of such mythical elements themselves. Jess saw the two aspects as the Archaeology of Facts and the Archaeology of Ideas. We still allow into our thinking the ‘compelling sense of something else’, Geoffrey Ashe’s splendid phrase, and our magazine still reflects that openness to ideas; we may not always agree with the basis of an article but we defend the right of the author to say it. 

A final quotation from our Founder’s pen: ‘It seems reasonable to assume that the interests of our readers are diversified, we hope that everyone finds something in the magazine to stimulate speculation, to encourage research and to suggest a new horizon’.