But if a man with a carbon-steel sword had been in charge of the whacking, sundry chunks of armor and the enclosed meaty portions would likely be strewn about the field like medieval confetti. That's how monarchies get started, you see. I can tell you that this is no mean feat, having only done it a time or two myself, and the deed was even less likely in a day when the average warrior was barely five feet tall and weighed less than would most of today's moderately well-fed ninth graders. It just might be that Arthur unintentionally interned for his Kingship as a blacksmith, working for the Romans during their occupation of Britain. The legions didn't leave Arthur with nothing, however, he was one of the very few left behind that knew how to make Roman-style steel and since medieval boys will be medieval boys, he would almost by default be the first to make steel into swords.
Steel is made from iron ore which is, of course, a stone.
As you can imagine, the vagaries of oral history have done the rest. These lucky guys used their tremendous armament advantage to chutney their more metallurgically challenged opponents and so they became the knights of post-Roman Britain and Arthur, of course, became King. Arthur's trick of drawing the sword from the stone was simply a technological innovation used to political advantage. I n our more enlightened century, the independent operator has been effectively shut out of any opportunity to transform proprietary technology into military domination, but a winking nod and a dismissive glance at antitrust regulations still allows commercial market domination by the clever few. Long-suffering Macintosh users have watched for years as software developers fled their platform for the cold steel security of the Windows market strength.