The World of Camelot

by Michael Foss

  In the chapel of Glastonbury the queen had a dirge. Then she was wrapped in waxed cloth of Rennes, from top to toe, in thirtyfold. And after she was put in a web of lead, and then in a coffin of marble. They carried her unto the earth, and then Sir Lancelot swooned and lay long still, until the hermit waked him and said, ‘You are to blame, for you displease God with such manner of sorrow.’

  ‘Truly,’ Lancelot replied, ‘I trust I do not displease God, for He knows my intent. My sorrow was not for any rejoicing of sin, but it may never have an end. When I remember her beauty and her noblesse, that was both with her king and with her, and when I saw his corpse and her corpse so lie together, truly my heart would not serve to sustain my careworn body. And when I remember how by my default and pride they were both laid full low, those two peerless Christian people, then my heart sank so that I might not sustain myself.’

  Thus Sir Lancelot spoke, and ever after he ate but little meat, nor drank, till he was dead. Neither his bishop nor his fellows might make him eat, so that he waxed a cubit shorter than he was, and the people knew him not. For he sickened more and more, and dried and dwindled away. And ever he lay grovelling on the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere.

  Within six weeks after, Sir Lancelot fell so sick that he lay in his bed. In weak and dreary voice he said to the hermit, ‘Sir bishop, I pray you give me all the rites of a Christian man.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the hermit, ‘you shall not need it. It is but heaviness of your blood. Tomorrow you shall be well mended, by the grace of God.’

  ‘Fair lords,’ Lancelot replied wearily, ‘know well that my careworn body will into the earth. I have warning of it more than now I will say. Therefore give me my rites.’

  So he took the sacrament and was anointed, and had all that a Christian man ought to have. Then he prayed all his fellows that they might bear his body to Joyous Gard. Some men say it was Alnwick, and some say it was Bamburgh.

  Then, with weeping and wringing of hands, all his fellows went to their beds in one chamber. After midnight, against the day, the bishop began a great laughter as he lay in his bed asleep. Therewith the fellowship awoke and cried to him, ‘Good bishop, what ails you?’

  ‘Jesu mercy,’ said he, ‘why did you awake me? I was never in my life so merry and so well at ease. Truly, here was Sir Lancelot with me, with more angels than ever I saw men in one day. I saw the angels heave up Sir Lancelot into Heaven, and the gates of Heaven opened against him.

  ‘It is but the disturbance of dreams,’ said Sir Bors, ‘for I doubt not Sir Lancelot ails nothing but good.’

  ‘It may well be,’ said the bishop. ‘Go to his bed, and then shall you prove the truth.’

  So his fellows came to his bed, and they found him stark dead. He lay as he had smiled, and had the sweetest savour about him that ever they felt.

  On the morn, the bishop did the Mass of requiem. Then Sir Lancelot was put in the horse bier and all his fellowship went with his corpse for fifteen days until they came to Joyous Gard. There they laid him in the choir, and sang and read over him and about him. And ever his face was laid open and naked, that all the people might behold him.

  Right so, as they were at their service, unto Joyous Gard there came Sir Ector de Maris, that had seven years sought all the realm for his brother Sir Lancelot. When Sir Ector heard such noise and saw light in the choir of Joyous Gard, he alighted and beheld that men did sing and weep. And all these good men knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them, for they were in religious habit.

  Then Sir Bors went unto Sir Ector and took him by the hand, and said most gently, ‘Sir, look there. It is your brother Sir Lancelot that lies dead.’

  Sir Ector beheld his brother’s face. Then he threw his shield, sword and helm from him. And hardly any tongue can tell the doleful complaints he made for his brother.

  ‘Ah, Lancelot,’ he cried, ‘you were head of all Christian knights, and I daresay you were never matched by hand of earthly knight. And you were the most courteous knight that ever bore shield. And you were the truest friend of your lover that ever bestrode horse. And you were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman.

  And you were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And you were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights. And you were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And you were the sternest knight to your mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’

  Thus he finished, and there was weeping and dolour out of measure. And they kept Sir Lancelot’s corpse aloft full fifteen days, for all folk to see. Then they put him in the earth, the most noble knight of the world, dead and gone.

  Knighthood’s End

  The long mental journey was over, and he was tired. He wrote slowly in laborious longhand:

  Here is the end of the whole book of King Arthur, and of his noble knights of the Round Table. And here is the end of the death of Arthur. I pray you all, pray for my soul. For this book was ended the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth, by Sir Thomas Malory, knight.

  As he turned the last leaf of the manuscript face down, he wondered about that phrase ‘the whole book’. Perhaps there was more to be said, things he could not quite comprehend? Certainly the story was obscure, rich and complicated, stretching back into the childhood of many peoples. With honest endeavour he had scoured all the texts he could find from several nations. But in all of them there was a sense of the incomplete, something left unsaid about the death of Arthur. It seemed as if it were a necessary mystery. Three queens had led King Arthur away to death: one was his sister, the sorceress Morgan le Fay; the second was the Queen of Northgales; and the third was the Queen of the Waste Lands. All these were queens of enchantment. They bore the body of the dying king to their ship, and sailed from the shores of storytelling onto the insubstantial waters of myth.

  Yet, as Malory knew well, many throughout England believed that King Arthur was not dead. God had translated him into another place, and he would come again when faith and nation needed him. He was here, hidden in our world, awaiting the call. Even his supposed tomb, the sombre sign of his passing, was said to carry this hopeful message: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam Rexque futurus. That is to say, ‘Here lies Arthur, the once and future King’.

  In his cell in the year 1469, watching autumnal evening light strain through the bars of his window, Malory sighed. His task, now finished, had served its purpose. His spirit had been beguiled while the prison took a toll on his body. But the more he had written, the more keenly he felt the mismatch between the old chivalry and the new practices of men and nations. The history of King Arthur was nothing if not a celebration of love, and of honour in war. But love nowadays! A question of lust and financial calculation. ‘So it fares,’ Malory lamented to himself. ‘Men cannot love seven nights but they must have all their desires. Soon hot, soon cold. There’s no stability. The old love was not like this. That was love, truth and faithfulness, and thus it was in King Arthur’s days.’

  As for noble deeds of arms and honour in war, in 1453 the flower of English knighthood, those who gloried in their descent from the fellowship of the Round Table, finally limped home from the hundred years of the French Wars with their tails between their legs after untold many acts of squalor and outrage. Two years later, in England, these same knights further disgraced themselves in the Wars of the Roses. Fraternal knights cut one another’s throats for the small advantage of a Lancastrian nod or a Yorkist smile. Knights became murderers, left mouldering on rotting biers by the aloof and disgusted folk of the land.

  Malory sighed again. The sigh turned into a cough that he could not quiet until it had left him gasping and wretched. He saw, as his contemporaries so often saw, the skull beneath the skin. This world he lived in was no chivalrous land, no Arthurian realm of Logris, still less the holy country of Sarras. In the course of his reading, he had come across these lines in some old German volume:

  The world is fair to look on, white
and green and red,

  But inly it is black of hue, and dismal as the dead.

  That, he thought, was the very truth.

  In 1471 Sir Thomas Malory, knight and prisoner of Newgate, was carried off by a pulmonary collapse. He was buried just down the road, in the chapel of St Francis at Greyfriars. On the tomb of this indicted rapist, cattle-stealer, robber and all-round bandit was written the legend: ‘Sir Thomas Malory, Valiant Knight’.

  Index

  Abelleus (1)

  Accolon of Gaul, Sir (1), (2)

  Agravaine, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Agwisance of Ireland, King (1), (2), (3)

  Alexander the Great (1)

  Almesbury (1), (2)

  Alnwick (1)

  Andred, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Aries the cowherd (1)

  Arthur, King

  conception (1)

  named King by his father (1)

  raised as son of Sir Ector (1)

  pulls sword from the stone (1)

  crowned King (1)

  fights King Lot and others (1)

  war against the eleven kings (1)

  makes love to Morgause (1)

  dream of griffins and serpents (1)

  learns details of his birth (1)

  first sees Guenevere (1)

  kills children born on May Day (1)

  befriends Balin le Savage (1), (2)

  barons disbelieve his heritage (1)

  counselled by Merlin (1)

  declares love for Guenevere (1)

  preparations for marriage (1)

  marries Guenevere (1)

  attempt to poison (1)

  trapped on ship (1)

  fights Accolon (1)

  loses Excalibur’s scabbard (1)

  admires Queen Isoud (1)

  sword in the floating stone (1)

  Guenevere accused of poisoning (1)

  war with Lancelot (1)

  hears accusations against Guenevere (1)

  fights Lancelot’s knights (1)

  saved by Lancelot (1)

  parts from Lancelot (1)

  betrayed by Sir Mordred (1)

  evil said of him (1)

  killed by Sir Mordred (1)

  death (1)

  Astlabor, King (1)

  Astolat (1), (2)

  Astolat, Fair Maiden of (1), (2), (3)

  Bagdemagus, King (1), (2), (3)

  Balan (1), (2), (3)

  Balin le Savage (1), (2)

  Bamburgh (1)

  Ban of Benwick, King (1), (2)

  Barham Down (1)

  Barking Beast (1)

  Baudwin, Sir (1)

  Bayonne (1), (2)

  Beaumains, Sir (1)

  Beaune (1), (2)

  Bedevere, Sir (1)

  Beale Isoud, La see Isoud, Queen

  Belleus, Sir (1)

  Benwick (1), (2), (3)

  Bernard, Sir (1), (2)

  black hound (1)

  Black Knight of the Black Glade (1)

  Blamor, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Bleoberis, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Bliant (1)

  Bliant, Castle of (1)

  Bors of Gaul, King (1)

  Bors, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11)

  Bragwaine, Dame (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Brandiles, Sir (1)

  Brastias, Sir (1)

  Brisen, Dame (1), (2)

  Brittany (1), (2), (3)

  Buckingham, Duke of (1)

  Caerleon (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Camelot (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9)

  candle and bridle (1)

  Canterbury (1), (2)

  Canterbury, Bishop of (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Carados (1)

  Carbonek, Castle of (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Cardiff (1)

  Carlisle (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Carlisle, Bishop of (1)

  Case, Castle of (1)

  Castle Dangerous (1)

  Castle Perilous (1)

  Chapel Perilous (1)

  chess (1)

  Chevaler Mal Fet, Le (1)

  cloak of beards (1)

  Colgrevaunce of Gore, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Colombe (1)

  Combe, Abbey of (1)

  Corbin, Bridge of (1)

  Corbin, Castle of (1)

  Corbin, City of (1)

  Cornish knights, cowardice (1)

  Cornwall (1), (2), (3)

  Cornwall, Duke of (1)

  Damas, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Darras, Sir (1)

  Dinadan, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Dinas, Sir (1), (2), (3)

  Dolorous Gard (1)

  dolorous lady (1)

  Dolorous Stroke (1), (2), (3)

  Dolorous Tower (1), (2)

  Dover (1), (2)

  Dover, Castle of (1)

  dwarf (1), (2), (3)

  Ector de Maris, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14)

  Edward IV, King (1)

  Elaine (daughter of King Pelles) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Elaine (daughter of King Pellinore) (1), (2)

  Elaine (Fair Maiden of Astolat) (1), (2), (3)

  eleven kings (1)

  Elizabeth, Queen (1)

  Epinogrus, Sir (1), (2)

  Evelake, King (1), (2)

  Excalibur (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Felelolie (1)

  Florence, Sir (1)

  Gaheris, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)

  Galahad’s Well (1)

  Galahad, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)

  Galleron, Sir (1)

  Gareth of Orkney, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Garlon (1), (2)

  Garnish of the Mount (1)

  Gawain, Sir

  meets Sir Pelleas and Lady Ettard (1)

  quest for the Holy Grail (1)

  revenge against Lancelot (1)

  also: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19), (20)

  Gilbert the Bastard, Sir (1)

  Glastonbury (1), (2)

  Goothe castle (1)

  Gouvernail (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Great Britain (1)

  Grey Friars library (1)

  Griflet (1)

  Gringamore, Sir (1)

  Guenevere, Queen

  first seen by Arthur (1)

  marries Arthur (1)

  and court of high ladies (1)

  holds Lancelot in great favour (1)

  enchanted love for Lancelot (1)

  banishes Lancelot (1)

  spends twenty thousand pounds to find Lancelot (1)

  writes of Tristram (1)

  loved by Lancelot (1)

  and Lancelot (1)

  banishes Lancelot (1)

  accused of poisoning (1)

  Lancelot fights for (1)

  threatened with death by fire (1)

  estrangement from Lancelot (1)

  captured by Sir Meliagaunt (1)

  tryst with Lancelot (1)

  accused of infidelity (1)

  trapped by Sir Agravaine (1)

  rescued by Lancelot (1)

  to marry Sir Mordred (1)

  seizes Tower of London (1)

  becomes nun (1)

  farewell to Lancelot (1)

  death (1)

  Guildford (1)

  harp (1)

  Haut Prince (1)

  Hector (1)

  Hellawes the sorceress (1)

  Herlews, Sir (1)

  Hermel, Duke (1)

  Holy Ghost (1)

  Holy Grail, Quest for (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Holy Grail, The (1), (2), (3)

  Howel, King (1)

  hundred years war (1)

  Igraine, Queen, mother of Arthur (1), (2)

  invisible knight (1), (2)

  Ironside,
Sir (1)

  Isoud la Blanch Mains (1)

  Isoud, Queen (La Beale Isoud) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Joseph of Arimathea (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Joseph, son of Joseph (1)

  Joyous Gard (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9)

  Joyous Isle (1), (2)

  Kay, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Kehydius, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Kinkenadon (1)

  kitchen knight (1)

  Knight of Two Swords (1)

  knight on a black horse (1), (2)

  knight with a white shield (1)

  knights of the Round Table (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Ladina (1)

  Lady of the Lake (1), (2)

  Lady of the Rule (1)

  Lambeth (1)

  Lamorak de Gales, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11)

  Lancelot du Lake, Sir

  strange adventures (1)

  and Guenevere (1)

  war against Arthur (1)

  against Sir Mordred (1)

  also: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12)

  Lanceor (1)

  Lavaine, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Leodegrance of Camelard, King (1), (2)

  Lile of Avelion (1)

  lion and serpent (1)

  Lionel, Sir (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)

  Logris (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Logris, Sir Meleot de (1), (2)

  Lonazep (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  London (1), (2), (3)

  Loris (1)

  Lot of Lothian and Orkney, King (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Lovel, Sir (1)

  Lucan the Butler, Sir (1), (2)

  Lucas, Newgate jailer (1)

  Lynet (1), (2), (3)

  Lyonesse, Dame (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Mador, Sir (1), (2)

  Maidens, Castle of (1), (2)

  Malory, Sir Thomas (1), (2)

  Marhaus, Sir (1), (2)

  Mark of Cornwall, King (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)

  May month (1), (2)

  Maying (1)

  Meliagaunt, Sir (1)

  Meliodas, King (1), (2)

  Meliot of Logris, Sir (1)

  Merlin

  meets King Uther (1)

  custody of Arthur as a baby (1)