King Arthur

by Christopher Hibbert

  One of the most magnificent of all medieval tournaments was held at Windsor Castle in 1344 by Edward III, who ordered it to celebrate two resounding victories against England’s traditional enemies, France and Scotland. After three days of jousting and feasting, the king assembled his guests. Dressed in velvet robes and wearing the crown of England, he placed his hand on the Bible and “took a corporeal oath that he would begin a Round Table in the same manner and condition as the Lord Arthur, formerly King of England, appointed it, namely to the number of 300 knights . . . and he would cherish it and maintain it according to his power.” Edward selected his knights, binding them to himself, to each other, and to the service of the weak and oppressed, with solemn oaths; then, says the chronicler, the kettledrums and trumpets sounded “all together, and the guests hastened to a feast; which feast was complete with richness of fare, variety of dishes, and overflowing abundance of drinks; the delight was unutterable, the comfort inestimable, the enjoyment unalloyed, the hilarity without care.”

  Several days later, in the courtyard of the castle’s Upper Ward, work began on a great stone hall for the Round Table, where the knights of the fellowship could hold their feasts. Soon afterward, it had to be suspended, for the king went to war with France once more and could not afford the double expense. He returned to Windsor in 1347, triumphant after his crushing victory over the French at Crécy and his capture of the port of Calais, the key to the English Channel. The unfinished hall for the knights of the Round Table still stood in the Upper Ward to remind him of his intentions. Edward, a man of great ambition, took his obligations as a knight and as a leader of knights more seriously than his responsibility as sovereign. He soon was considering an enterprise “more particular and more select,” the revival of his idea for a fellowship of knights that would be the envy of Europe.

  So it was that the Round Table of King Arthur became the original inspiration of the Order of the Garter. This order, which took its name from the badges worn by the knights who competed in a tournament held at Windsor in 1348, was to become, and still remains, in the twenty-first century, the most noble and respected order of knighthood in Europe.

  By the time the order was founded, however, the ideals of chivalry were dying. Battles no longer were won by brave knights fighting each other with sword and lance. Edward III’s victory at Crécy had proved that a quantity of low-born English longbowmen, posted advantageously, could gain a victory over a knightly army twice the size, despite its superior armor and aristocratic birth. At Agincourt in northern France in 1415, the lesson was underscored when a French army of 50,000 clashed with an English force of 13,000. Thousands of French knights, the glory of the chivalry of King Charles VI, refused to allow what they perceived as inferior troops and the new, despised artillery a place in the front line. Dismounted, in a dense metal wedge, unable to move in the muddy fields, they were at the mercy of the English archers and men-at-arms. The Englishmen, free to maneuver, simply pushed the French knights to the ground in their heavy armor and dispatched them with their own swords and battle-axes.

  Within another half-century, England was to be torn asunder by civil war as the brutal Wars of the Roses convulsed the country. The Middle Ages were drawing to a close; new ideas, new ways of life, new inventions were being introduced. In 1476, William Caxton set up the first printing press in England and began to print books that previously had been available only in laboriously copied manuscript: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, translations from the classics, an encyclopedia of philosophy.

  On July 31, 1485, Caxton published his sixty-second title from the sign of the Red Pale in the London parish of Westminster. Within a month, the first Tudor king of England would ascend the throne; a new era was about to begin. The book Caxton printed that July, though, was the most renowned of all medieval romances, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur - a book that looked back to the glories and heroic achievements of a more chivalrous age, already forgotten and idealized.

  Caxton called it a “noble and joyous book,” but Le Morte d’Arthur is also full of a sense of doom that foreshadows the “dolorous death and departing out of this world” of its great hero and his valiant knights. Its author was a prisoner when he wrote it, a prisoner who longed for the day of his deliverance. He was probably Sir Thomas Malory, a Warwickshire gentleman who once served in Parliament. Later, however, he apparently turned to a life of crime. Accusations of rape, robbery, cattle thieving, extortion, and attempted murder are recorded against him, and he was imprisoned for years in Newgate Prison in London. It seems unusual that such a lawless character should write a book full of knightly adventures and noble deeds, but the fact that Malory was accused of these crimes does not necessarily mean that he was guilty of them. There is no record of a trial or of sentence being passed upon him.

  Some historians, however, believe Le Morte d’Arthur was written by Thomas Malory of Studley and Hutton in Yorkshire while he was a prisoner of war in France. It also is possible that its author was yet another Thomas Malory, whose identity remains unknown. All that can be said with certainty is that Le Morte d’Arthur is the only medieval romance that has held the imagination of more than five centuries of readers, down to the present day. Skillfully, painstakingly, the prisoner-knight gathered its threads from the countless existing Arthurian romances – English, French, some in verse, others in prose - and this is the story he told.

  In the days when Uther Pendragon was king of all England, there lived in Cornwall a mighty duke, the Duke of Tintagel, who had a beautiful wife named Ygrayne. The king fell in love with Ygrayne, and one day when she was a guest in the royal palace, he took her aside and asked her to sleep with him. But Ygrayne refused him. She then told her husband what the king had proposed, and begged him to take her from the palace that night and to ride with her to their castle.

  They secretly departed, and when they had gone, the king, in his anger and desire for Ygrayne, fell sick. His knights believed that only one man could cure him of his distress - the wizard Merlin. Merlin was sent for, and when he came to the king, he announced that he could, indeed, make him better and even could arrange an assignation for him with Ygrayne, but there was one condition: “The first night that you shall lie by Ygrayne you shall get a child on her, and when that child is born, then you must deliver it to me for me to nourish and look after.”

  The king agreed, and then Merlin said to him, “Now make you ready. This night you shall lie with Ygrayne in the castle of Tintagel, and you shall be made by magic to look like the duke, her husband.” Thus, in the guise of the duke, the king rode to Tintagel and was welcomed by Ygrayne to her bed. In due time, the baby was born, as Merlin had foretold, and in accordance with the promise King Uther had made, the child was wrapped in cloth of gold and handed over to the care of the wizard. Merlin, in turn, entrusted him to Sir Ector, a trustworthy knight and the lord of fine estates in England and Wales. Sir Ector’s wife fed him at her breast, and they called a priest to christen him, and the name they gave him was Arthur.

  The years passed, King Uther died, and England stood in danger of civil war because the great barons could not agree on who should succeed him. On Merlin’s advice, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent for all the quarreling lords and gentlemen-at-arms to come to London at Christmas and pray to Jesus to show them who had the right to be king. The lords and gentlemen came to London and went to the greatest church there before daybreak to pray and hear Mass. After they had knelt down, there suddenly appeared in the churchyard a large square stone. A blacksmith’s anvil was fixed in the marble. And a large sword was implanted in the steel, and the following was written around it in letters of gold: WHOSO PULLETH OUT THIS SWORD OF THIS STONE AND ANVIL IS RIGHTWISE KING BORN OF ALL ENGLAND.

  The people marveled, but not one of the lords who struggled with all their might to pull the sword from the anvil could move it.

  “The man who can pluck out the sword is not here,” the archbishop pronounced. “But do not doubt that
God will make him known.”

  It had been arranged that, on New Year’s Day, the lords and knights would ride into the fields outside the city to compete in a tournament, and it happened that two of the knights attending the tournament were the good Sir Ector and his son Kay, who recently had been knighted and was eager to prove his valor. With them was Kay’s foster brother, Arthur, acting as his squire. As they rode to the tourney ground, Kay suddenly realized he had left his sword in his father’s London lodgings, and he sent Arthur back to fetch it. But when Arthur arrived, he found the door locked, for the servants had left to see the tournament. Arthur said to himself, “I will ride to the churchyard and take the sword with me that sticks in the stone, for my brother, Sir Kay, shall not be without a sword this day.”

  As Malory tells it: “So whan he cam to the chircheyard, sir Arthur alight and tayed his hors to the style, and so he wente to the tente and found no knyghtes there, for they were atte justyng. And so he handled the swerd by the handels, and lightly and fiersly pulled it out of the stone, and took his hors and rode his way untyll he came to his broder sir Kay and delyverd hym the swerd.”

  As soon as he saw the sword, Sir Ector understood what Arthur had done and immediately rode with him back to London, where he told him to place the sword back in the anvil and pull it out again. Arthur did so, and although all the lords thereafter tried to do as he did, none could move the sword but Arthur. After that, the people cried out, “We will have Arthur for our king. We will have no more delay. It is God’s will that he shall be our king, and we will kill any man who holds against it.”

  Then they knelt before him, rich and poor alike. Malory continues: “And Arthur foryaf [forgave] hem and took the swerd bitwene both his handes and offred it upon the aulter where the Archebisshop was, and so was he made knyghte of [by] the best man that was there. And so anon was the coronacyon made, and ther was he sworne unto his lordes and the comyns [common people] for to be a true kyng, to stand with true justyce fro thens forth the dayes of this lyf.”

  Now that he was king, Arthur set out at the head of his knights to fight against the evil barons who were oppressing his people and against the rebel lords who would not accept his right to the crown. Among these rebel lords was King Lot of Lothian and Orkney, who refused to recognize as king a beardless boy who was not of royal blood. While Arthur was at war in Wales, Lot’s wife, Morgause, came to his headquarters in the city of Caerleon, pretending to bring him a message, but her intent was to spy on him.

  Queen Morgause was the daughter of Ygrayne and the Duke of Tintagel, meaning she was Arthur’s half-sister. But Arthur did not know this, and when Morgause came to him with her four young sons - Agravaine, Gaheris, Gareth, and Gawain - she was so beautiful, richly dressed, and desirable, Arthur “cast great love unto her and desired to lie by her.” And so they were agreed, and he begat upon his sister a child, and the name of the child was Mordred.

  Soon after their encounter, King Arthur was riding with Merlin beside a lake. He had broken his sword in the fighting, but Merlin told him to ignore his concerns – “hereby is a sword that shall be yours if I can.” Then in the middle of the lake, an arm appeared out of the water. In its hand was a shining sword. Catching sight of a young woman walking by the lake, he said to her, “Damsel, what sword is that yonder that the arm holds above the water? I would it were mine, for I have no sword.”

  “Sir Arthur,” replied the damsel, “that sword is mine, and you shall have it. Go into yonder barge and row yourself to the sword and take it and the scabbard with you.” Arthur did as she instructed, and he called the sword Excalibur, which means “cut steel.”

  Armed with Excalibur, Arthur sailed across the Channel to fight the Roman Emperor Lucius, who had demanded a tribute that the English were not prepared to pay. Along the way, he stopped to save the people of Normandy from the giant of Mont-St.-Michel, whom he found gnawing on the roasted limbs of newborn children. “There was never devil in hell more horriblier made” than this giant, who was thirty feet tall and the foulest sight that anyone had ever seen. He snatched up an iron club and swiped at Arthur so hard his crown fell off. But Arthur grappled with him, “and so they weltered and tumbled over the crags and bushes” until they finally rolled down the mount to the seashore. There, Arthur plunged a dagger into the giant’s ribs and killed him.

  Then Arthur marched south into the province of Champagne, and in a great battle there, he overwhelmed the Emperor Lucius and killed him with his own hands. With his army, he traveled onward over the mountains into Italy, overcoming all enemies, Saracens, and monsters as he marched and was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope. On his return to England, he was met by his court, who escorted him in triumph to Camelot.

  King Arthur’s knights had long been pressing him to take a wife. When the king sought Merlin’s advice, the magician asked him if there was any woman he loved more than another.

  “Yea,” said King Arthur, “I love Guinevere, daughter of King Leodegrance of Cameliard who holds in his house the Round Table that was given to him by my father, King Uther; and Guinevere is the fairest damsel that I know or could ever find.” But Merlin, who had the gift of seeing into the future, warned Arthur against Guinevere. He insisted that she would not be faithful to her husband but fall in love with his noblest knight, and that this knight, Sir Lancelot, would fall in love with her. Arthur paid no attention; he was determined to marry Guinevere. So Merlin went to King Leodegrance of Cameliard to tell him of Arthur’s desire.

  “That is the best tidings that ever I heard,” said King Leodegrance, who esteemed Arthur as a most noble and worthy king. “I shall send him a gift that shall please him, for I shall give him the Round Table which Uther, his father, gave me. There are places at it for 150 knights, and I shall fill 100 of those places myself by sending him a hundred good knights.”

  “Now, Merlin,” said King Arthur when he heard this news, “go and find me 50 knights of the most courage and renown in all this land.” And Merlin went forth, but he brought only twenty-eight knights back to Camelot because he could find no more who were worthy to sit at the Round Table. One of them was Arthur’s nephew Gawain, who was to be knighted on the day of the wedding. And Guinevere and King Arthur were married in the church of St. Stephen at Camelot.

  The Archbishop of Canterbury then was sent for to bless the seats of the Round Table while all the knights were in their places. After they had risen and gone to pay homage to King Arthur, the seat of each chair was engraved in golden letters with the name of the knight to whom the place belonged, except for two seats, which had no names. Merlin told the king that no knight should sit in those places but those who were worthiest. Each knight was given money and land, and was charged by Arthur never to commit murder, robbery, or any evil deed; grant mercy to those who requested it; and, upon pain of death, help ladies in distress.

  All the knights promised to obey these laws, and all of them were brave and noble men. Yet one stood out above all the others due to his nobility and courage - Sir Lancelot of the Lake, son of the King of Benwick. As Merlin had foretold, he performed many chivalrous acts for Queen Guinevere, “whom he loved above all other ladies all the days of his life.” And the queen fell in love with him.

  But King Arthur did not know of their affection for one another, and he and Lancelot and Lancelot’s son, Galahad, and Tristan, Gawain, Gareth, Percival, Bors, and Bedivere and all the other members of the noble fellowship undertook many adventures and quests. They sought to slay the Questing Beast. They laid siege to castles. They took part in dangerous battles and exciting tournaments. They strove to gain the love of ladies, and above all, they endeavored to find the Holy Grail, the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper. It had mysteriously appeared one evening at Camelot, covered in white silk, and after filling the hall where the king and his knights sat with brilliant light and sweet perfumes, it disappeared. Nearly all the knights joined in the quest for the Holy Grail, to the sorrow both of Arthur, who feare
d they would never return to the Round Table, and Guinevere, who grieved to see them - in particular, Lancelot - depart from Camelot. Although Lancelot tried with all his strength of body and mind, although he did penances, humbled himself, and wore a hairshirt for more than a year, he never could do more than glimpse the Holy Grail from a distance, for no knight could complete the quest who was not free from sin. Only Galahad, Percival, and Bors were pure enough to be worthy, and after they successfully found the Grail, the sacred vessel was borne up to heaven and never seen again.

  However hard Lancelot had tried to forget his passion for the queen, he found that he could not banish her from his thoughts. Soon after his return from the Grail quest, they were meeting secretly once more. “So they loved together more hotter than they did before and had many such secret trysts together that many in the court of Camelot spoke of it.” Loudest in their talk against the queen and Lancelot were Gawain’s brother, Agravaine, and his half-brother, Mordred, the king’s son. One day in the king’s chamber, Agravaine said openly, “I marvel that we all be not ashamed both to see and to know how Lancelot lies daily and nightly by the queen. Fall whatsoever fall may, I will disclose it to the king.”

  True to his threat, Agravaine, accompanied by Mordred, went to the king and told him what people were whispering about the queen and Lancelot and urged him to set a trap to catch them. “My lord,” said Agravaine, “you shall ride to-morrow a-hunting, and doubt you not, Lancelot will not go with you. And so when it draws toward night, send word to the queen that you will stay out all night, and send for your cooks. And then upon pain of death that night, we shall take him with the queen, and we shall bring him to you, alive or dead.”