More than seven centuries had passed since the departure from Britain of the Roman legions when in the mid-years of the twelfth century, probably about 1136, there appeared a work entitled Historia Regum Britanniae, by Geoffrey of Monmouth (who incidentally makes a momentary appearance in my father’s work The Notion Club Papers, published in Sauron Defeated, pp.192, 216). Of this History of the Kings of Britain it was said (by Sir Edmund Chambers, in 1927) that ‘no work of imagination, save the Aeneid, has done more to shape the legend of a people.’ He used the word ‘imagination’ advisedly. It is said that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book was the source of the ‘historical’ (as opposed to the ‘romance’) tradition of King Arthur, but the word is very misleading unless it is understood to mean that Geoffrey’s work, while full of marvels and extravagances embedded in a totally unhistorical structure, was nonetheless in ‘the mode of history’ (a narrative chronicle of events in Latin, soberly told), but not by any means of its substance: hence ‘pseudo-historical’ is a term that is applied to it.
In this work the history of the Britons was followed through more than nineteen hundred years, and the life of King Arthur constitutes no more than a quarter of its length. ‘One of the world’s most brazen and successful frauds’, it was called by the eminent scholar R.S. Loomis (The Development of Arthurian Romance, 1963). Yet he wrote also in the same place:
The more one studies the History of the Kings of Britain and the methods of its composition, the more one is astonished at the author’s impudence, and the more one is impressed with his cleverness, his art. Written in a polished but not ornate style, displaying sufficient harmony with learned authorities and accepted traditions, free from the wilder extravagances of the conteurs, founded ostensibly on a very ancient manuscript, no wonder Geoffrey’s magnum opus disarmed scepticism and was welcomed by the learned world.
Its success and its long acceptance was a literary phenomenon of the most extraordinary nature. Of my father’s own estimation of the work I have no knowledge. No doubt he would have accepted the judgement of his friend R.W. Chambers, who wrote of it that it was ‘one of the most influential books ever written in this country’. He might well have been in sympathy with C.S. Lewis when he roundly condemned the Arthurian part of the work, in a posthumously published essay The Genesis of a Medieval Book (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966):
Geoffrey is of course important for the historians of the Arthurian Legend; but since the interest of those historians has seldom lain chiefly in literature, they have not always remembered to tell us that he is an author of mediocre talent and no taste. In the Arthurian parts of his work the lion’s share falls to the insufferable rigmarole of Merlin’s prophecies and to the foreign conquests of Arthur. These latter are, of course, at once the least historical and the least mythical thing about Arthur. If there was a real Arthur he did not conquer Rome. If the story has roots in Celtic paganism, this campaign is not one of them. It is fiction. And what fiction! We can suspend our disbelief in an occasional giant or enchantress. They have friends in our subconscious and in our earliest memories; imagination can easily suppose that the real world has room for them. But vast military operations scrawled over the whole map of Europe and excluded by all the history we know are a different matter. We cannot suspend our disbelief. We don’t even want to. The annals of senseless and monotonously successful aggression are dreary enough reading even when true; when blatantly, stupidly false, they are unendurable.
But from the first lines of The Fall of Arthur it is seen that my father was departing radically from the story of Arthur’s last campaign overseas as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his successors. I give here a very condensed account of Geoffrey’s narrative, without any discussion of such literary and traditional sources as he drew upon, since my object here is primarily to observe how The Fall of Arthur stands in relation to the heroic, ‘chronicle’ tradition initiated by him.
In his story, Arthur, on the death of his father Uther Pendragon crowned King of Britain at the age of fifteen, at once embarked on a campaign to subdue the hated and hateful Saxons, and after a number of battles the last was fought in Somerset, at Bath. Arthur bore his shield Prydwen, on which was painted an image of the Virgin Mary, his sword Caliburn which was forged in the isle of Avalon, and on his head was set a golden helmet with a crest carved in the form of a dragon. In this battle Arthur drove into the Saxon ranks, and slew with a single blow every man that he struck with Caliburn, until no less than four hundred and seventy Saxons lay dead from his hand alone.
The Saxons having fled into hiding in forests, caves and mountains, Arthur turned to the crushing of the invading Picts and Scots; and ‘when he had restored the whole of the country of Britain to its ancient dignity’ he married Guinevere, ‘born of a noble Roman family’, most beautiful of all the women of Britain. In the following year he conquered Ireland and Iceland, and the kings of Gotland and the Orkneys accepted his overlordship without a blow struck. After the passage of twelve more years Norway and Denmark were savagely put by the Britons to fire and sword and subdued to the rule of King Arthur; and all the regions of Gaul were subjected to him.
As Geoffrey of Monmouth represented him, he was now a very mighty monarch, unbeaten in battle, a name of awe throughout Europe, his knights and his household the model and pattern of chivalry and courtly life; and returning from Gaul he held in the city of Caerleon-upon-Usk in Glamorgan a high court and festival of extraordinary magnificence, from which no ruler of renown in the western lands and isles was absent. But before it ended there appeared envoys from Rome bearing a letter to Arthur from the Emperor Lucius Hiberius. In this letter Lucius demanded that Arthur should himself come to Rome to submit to judgement and punishment for the wrongs he had committed in the withholding of the tribute owing from Britain, and the seizure of lands that were tributary to the Empire; and if he did not come then Rome would move against him.
To this Arthur replied that he would indeed come to Rome, but in order to exact from the Romans the penalty that they had demanded of him. Then Lucius commanded the kings of the East to prepare their armies and to accompany him to the conquest of Britain; and the number of men in this mighty force of arms was precisely four hundred thousand and one hundred and sixty. Against them King Arthur raised a great host, and he placed the defence of Britain in his absence in the hands of his nephew Mordred and of Guinevere the Queen.
Condensing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative still further, and letting C.S. Lewis’s words stand in place of a précis, the end of the ‘Roman War’ was a great victory for the Britons and the death of the Emperor Lucius; and Arthur was already in the Alps on his way to Rome when word reached him that Mordred had usurped the crown and was living adulterously with Guinevere. Here Geoffrey of Monmouth fell suddenly silent: of this matter he will say nothing, he wrote. He was as good as his word; and after the landing of King Arthur at Richborough on the coast of Kent he moved rapidly through battles with Mordred, in which Mordred and Gawain were slain and Arthur mortally wounded. Of Guinevere he said nothing save that in despair she fled to Caerleon and there became a nun; and of Arthur only that he was borne to the Isle of Avalon for the treating of his wounds. Of Sir Lancelot there is no mention at all in the Historia Regum Britanniae.
This was the story in the ‘chronicle’ or ‘pseudo-historical’ tradition of King Arthur deriving from Geoffrey of Monmouth: in the Roman de Brut of the Norman poet Wace which appeared at the time of Geoffrey’s death (1155), and in the next generation the very long poem named Brut1 composed near the beginning of the thirteenth century by the Englishman Laȝamon, priest of the parish of Ernleye (Arley Regis) on the Severn in Worcestershire, following Wace but independently.
*
It was also the story in a work of some importance, as will be seen later, in the narrative of The Fall of Arthur. This is a remarkable poem of the fourteenth century ‘alliterative revival’ commonly known as the alliterative Morte Arthure. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (1975) I cited my father’s words concerning
the ancient English measure which had descended from antiquity, that kind of verse which is now called ‘alliterative’. It aimed at quite different effects from those achieved by the rhymed and syllable-counting metres derived from France and Italy; it seemed harsh and stiff and rugged to those unaccustomed to it. And quite apart from the (from a London point of view) dialectal character of the language, this ‘alliterative’ verse included in its diction a number of special verse words, never used in ordinary talk or prose, that were ‘dark’ to those outside the tradition.
In short, this poet [the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] adhered to what is now known as the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century, the attempt to use the old native metre and style long rusticated for high and serious writing; and he paid the penalty for its failure, for alliterative verse was not in the event revived. The tides of time, of taste, of language, not to mention political power, trade and wealth, were against it.
The alliterative Morte Arthure is a long poem of over 4000 lines, of very uncertain date but commonly ascribed to the latter part of the fourteenth century, and known only from a manuscript, made by Robert Thornton, in the library of Lincoln Cathedral.2 The sources of the unknown poet have been much debated, but for this purpose it is sufficient to say that in its narrative structure it derives from the Historia Regum Britanniae tradition. It begins with the great feast held by King Arthur to which came the envoys sent by ‘Sir Lucius Iberius, the Emperour of Rome’, and for much of its length it is devoted to description of Arthur’s war against the Romans and their allies. It is indeed a ‘heroic’ poem, a chanson de geste, a poem of war (if by no means exclusively), of battlefields and ferocious encounters, the horrors of the sword seen with stark clarity – scenes of the Hundred Years War. A brief passage may illustrate this. Whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth told that Lucius was slain by a knight unknown, in this poem he dies at Arthur’s hand, and the King’s prowess is thus described:
The emperour thane egerly at Arthure he strykez,
Awkwarde on the umbrere, and egerly hym hittez!
The nakyde swerd at the nese noyes hym sare,
The blode of [the] bolde kynge over the breste rynnys,
Beblede al the brode schelde and the bryghte mayles!
Oure bolde kynge bowes the blonke by the bryghte brydylle,
With his burlyche brande a buffette hym reches,
Thourghe the brene and the breste with his bryghte wapyne,
O-slante doune fro the slote he slyttes at ones!
Thus endys the emperour of Arthure hondes …3
After the death of the Emperor in the last great battle of the war against the Romans the alliterative Morte Arthure extends for many hundreds of lines in accounts of further aggressive campaigns led by Arthur, not found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, until we find the King north of Rome in the vale of Viterbo ‘among the vines’, and ‘was never meriere men made on this erthe’.
To Arthur in this very agreeable place there came envoys from Rome to sue for peace, among them the ‘konyngeste cardynalle that to the courte lengede’ [belonged], who brought a proposal that the Pope should crown him in Rome as sovereign and lord. King Arthur now gloried in the splendour of his success, and saying that Rome is now ours, and that he will be crowned there at Christmas, he took himself, being weary from lack of sleep, to bed.
But be ane aftyre mydnyghte alle his mode changede;
He mett in the morne-while fulle mervaylous dremes!
And when his dredefulle drem was drefene to the ende,
The kynge dares for dowte, dye as he scholde;
Sendes aftyre phylosophers, and his affraye telles.4
I have said that the alliterative Morte Arthure is a heroic poem celebrating Arthur, above all a poem of battles; but when it is far advanced one becomes aware that it was only with Arthur’s dream amid the vineyards of the valley of Viterbo that the author’s large design was to be fulfilled. That dream, as he described it to his ‘philosophers’ when he awoke in fear, was an elaborate and ornate vision of the Wheel of Fortune, on which are set eight of the ‘Nine Worthies’ or ‘Nine Heroes’, the great rulers and conquerors of history: of this I give here a very abbreviated account.
He dreamed that he was alone and lost in a forest full of wolves and wild boars, and lions that lapped up the blood of his faithful knights; but fleeing away he found himself in a mountain meadow, ‘the meryeste of medillerthe that men myghte beholde’, and saw descending out of the clouds a goddess in magnificent garments, the embodiment of Fortune, bearing in her hands a wheel made of gold and silver which she whirled about in her white hands. Arthur saw that there was ‘a chayere of chalke-whytte silver’ at the top of Fortune’s Wheel, from which six kings had fallen and now clung with broken crowns to the outer circle of the wheel, each in turn lamenting that he had fallen from such heights of greatness and power; and two kings were climbing up to claim the high seat at the summit of the wheel. The lady Fortune now raised Arthur to that seat, telling him that it was through her that he had won all his honour in war, that she had chosen him to sit in the high chair, and treating him as ‘soverayne in erthe’. But suddenly ‘at midday’ her manner changed towards him, saying ‘Thow has lyffede in delytte and lordchippes inewe’ [enough], and ‘abowte scho whirles the whele, and whirles me undire’, so that all his body was crushed; and he awoke.
The philosopher who interpreted his dream told him in hard words that he was at the high point of his fortune, and now must fall from it.
Thow has schedde myche blode, and schalkes distroyede,
Sakeles, in cirquytrie, in sere kynges landis;
Schryfe the of thy schame, and schape for thyne ende!
Thow has a schewynge, sir kynge, take kepe yif the lyke,
For thow sall fersely falle within fyve wynters!5
And having expounded at length the meaning of what King Arthur had seen in his sleep, the learned man declared that the wild beasts in the wood were wicked men that had entered his land to harass his people, and warned him that within ten days he would hear tidings that some mischief had befallen in Britain since his departure. He called on the king to repent his unjust deeds, to ‘amend his mood’ (that is, to change his disposition) and meekly ask for mercy ere misfortune befall him.
Then Arthur arose and having dressed (seven lines are devoted to a close description of his magnificent attire) set off to walk alone; and at sunrise he met with a man in the humble clothes (to which as many lines are devoted) that marked him as a pilgrim, on his way to Rome. Accosting him Arthur learned that he was Sir Cradoc, and known to him as ‘a knight of his chamber, the keeper of Caerleon’. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story it is not told how Arthur heard of the treachery of Mordred, but in the poem it was the express purpose of Sir Cradoc’s journey (and it was Sir Cradoc who brought the news in The Fall of Arthur, I.145). He told that Mordred had crowned himself King of Britain, taken castles, prepared a great fleet lying off Southampton, brought in Danes and Saxons, Picts and Saracens to rule the realm, and worst of all his deeds had wedded Guinevere and begotten a child.
From this point the narrative of the alliterative Morte Arthur continues for some eight hundred lines. To this, and its relation to The Fall of Arthur, I will return (see here).
*
It is a notable feature of English Arthurian history that Sir Thomas Malory’s fifth book (in Caxton’s numbering), The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself, was very closely based on the alliterative Morte Arthure (and on no other source): he had the manuscript before him as he made his very judicious prose rendering (but he had access to a manuscript more authentic in detail than that at Lincoln written by Robert Thornton).
Professor Eugène Vinaver, in his great edition (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, three volumes, 1947), showed that this tale was actually the first that Malory wrote, and he argued that ‘contrary to the generally accepted view, he first became familiar with the Arthurian legend not through “French books” but through an English poem, the alliterative Morte Arthure’ (Vinaver, I, xli).
With well over a thousand lines of the alliterative Morte Arthure still to go, Malory nevertheless abruptly abandoned it, at the point where Arthur, encamped near Viterbo, received the Roman envoys who came seeking peace, with the offer of coronation by the Pope. From here Malory sped rapidly to the end of his tale. Arthur was duly crowned as Emperor, and soon afterwards he returned to Britain. He landed at Sandwich on the coast of Kent, and ‘whan quene Guenyvere herde of his commynge she mette with hym at London’. At the beginning of the tale Malory omitted all reference to Arthur’s appointment of his nephew Mordred as regent in his absence; and now at its end he rejected the entire story of Mordred’s treachery, Guinevere’s adultery, and Arthur’s downfall. With it of course went the dream of the Wheel of Fortune. When he wrote this tale Malory had no interest in the representation of the tale of King Arthur as the tragedy of an overweening hero.
It will be seen that in the first canto of The Fall of Arthur my father was preserving the essential narrative idea of the ‘chronicle’ or ‘pseudo-historical’ tradition, the great expedition of King Arthur eastwards over the sea. But his poem enters at once in medias res, without any introductory setting or immediate motive:
Arthur eastward in arms purposed
his war to wage on the wild marches,
for
So fate fell-woven forward drave him.
The great feast, going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, held at Caerleon to celebrate Arthur’s victories, is absent, and with it the coming of the Roman envoys with the menacing letter from the Emperor, which provided the motive for the last campaign of the King of the Britons. In The Fall of Arthur there is no trace of this conception. So far from being the zenith of his life’s attainment as the conqueror who beat down the Roman armies and had Rome’s emissaries begging for peace, his purpose was to ‘ward off ruin from the Roman realm’ (I.4).
The aims and extent of the campaign are in fact somewhat obscure. At first it is clear that Arthur’s intent was to assail the Saxon pirates in their own lairs, and it seems reasonable to suppose therefore that ‘the Roman realm’ which he will defend against them must surely be the realm of Roman Britain; but a larger horizon seems to me to be suggested by the references to Mirkwood (I.68, 132). I cannot say whether my father intended a more precise meaning in his use of this ancient legendary name for a dark boundary forest separating peoples, but since Arthur’s host marched ‘from the mouths of the Rhine / o’er many kingdoms’ (I.43), and rode ‘ever east and onward’ (I.62), and since the forest of Mirkwood lay ‘on the houseless hills ever higher mounting / vast, unvanquished’ (I.70–1) it seems that they were now far to the east of the regions of Saxon settlement; and this is strongly borne out by Sir Cradoc’s words (I.153–4): ‘While war ye wage on the wild peoples / in the homeless East …’
It is also remarkable that in the hundred lines of the first Canto of the poem from the beginning of Arthur’s expedition at line 39 to the coming of Sir Cradoc with his evil tidings there is (beside ‘Foes before them, flames behind them’, I.61) only one reference to the destruction of heathen habitations by the invading host (I.41–3):
Halls and temples of the heathen kings
his might assailed marching in conquest
from the mouths of the Rhine o’er many kingdoms.
My father seems intent rather on conveying a hostile and wintry world of storms and ice, of ‘ravens croaking among ruinous rocks’, unpeopled save by ‘phantom foes with fell voices’ and wolves howling, a menacing world in which (I.134–6)
Fear clutched their souls,
waiting watchful in a world of shadow
for woe they knew not, no word speaking.
Moreover, this sense of vast impending danger accompanies the assertions of the poet that the declared purpose of Arthur is a matter of the gravest consequence, a great heroic gamble against fate:
Thus the tides of time to turn backward
and the heathen to humble, his hope urged him (I.5–6)
– echoed in lines I.176–9, after receiving the news of Mordred’s treachery:
Now from hope’s summit headlong falling
his heart foreboded that his house was doomed,
the ancient world to its end falling
and the tides of time turned against him.
So also, Gawain leading the host ‘as in last sortie from leaguered city’ is
defence and fortress of a falling world. (I.55)
And later (II.147–9) Mordred knows that
Time is changing;
the West waning, a wind rising
in the waxing East. The world falters.
It is surely the fall of Rome and Roman Christendom that they see approaching in ‘the tides of time’.
But however these aspects of The Fall of Arthur are interpreted, it is clear that Arthur’s great expedition to the Continent, while as equally without root in history as the assault on Roman power of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his successors, is set more nearly within the historical circumstances from which the Arthurian legend arose: the struggle of the Britons in the fifth century against the Germanic invaders. In The Fall of Arthur the mark of the enemy is that he is heathen. This is the fate of the Frisian sea-captain who brought to Mordred the news of Arthur’s return to Britain (II.89–93):
Radbod the red, rover fearless,
heathen-hearted to hate faithful,
died as his doom was. Dark was the morning.
To sea they cast him, of his soul recked not
that walks in the waters, wandering homeless.
He ‘passed to hell’ (II.67). Thus the heathen barbarians are dispatched to inevitable perdition in the metre that the barbarians brought to the conquered lands. Wild blow the winds of war in Britain! says Sir Cradoc, when telling King Arthur (I.160) of the heathen dragon ships driving in on the unguarded shores; and five centuries later Torhthelm, in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, repeats his words with reference to the Norsemen:
So the last is fallen of the line of earls,
from Saxon lords long-descended,
who sailed the seas, as songs tell us,
from Angel in the east, with eager swords
upon war’s anvil the Welsh smiting.
Realms here they won and royal kingdoms,
and in olden days this isle conquered.
And now from the North need comes again:
wild blows the wind of war to Britain!
A distinctive feature of the first canto of The Fall of Arthur concerns Mordred, who at the very outset of the narrative is portrayed as in his ‘malice’ sustaining King Arthur in his resolve to carry war into the lands of the barbarous peoples, for a hidden purpose lay beneath his words (I.27–9):
And Britain the blessed, thy broad kingdom,
I will hold unharmed till thy home-coming.
Faithful hast thou found me.
Where Geoffrey of Monmouth devoted no more than a single sentence to the matter (‘He made over the task of defending Britain to his nephew Mordred and his Queen Guinevere’), in the alliterative Morte Arthure the king is remarkably long-winded in his exposition of the burden – and Mordred begs (unsuccessfully) to be excused from it and to be allowed to accompany Arthur to the war. There is no hint of what is to come. In The Fall of Arthur it is said that Sir Gawain had no inkling of ‘guile or treason’ in Mordred’s ‘bold counsel’, for (I.36–8)
With these words my father introduced an element into the narrative that sets it altogether apart from works in the ‘chronicle’ tradition. A few lines later (I.44–5) it is said that Lancelot and other knights were not with Arthur in his campaign, and later in the first Canto, after he had heard the news of Mordred’s treason from Sir Cradoc, King Arthur consulted with Sir Gawain (I.180) and told him how greatly he missed Sir Lancelot and ‘the mighty swords of Ban’s kindred’, and thought it the wisest course to send to Lancelot’s people and ask their aid. From this Sir Gawain sternly dissented.
None of this is comprehensible as it stands, and it may well be that my father anticipated some familiarity on the reader’s part with the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. The causes of the estrangement between Arthur and Lancelot do indeed appear in the third canto of the poem, but in a very oblique fashion.
It would lie far outside my intention here to enter into any account of the ‘strains’ or ‘streams’ of mediaeval Arthurian legend, the ‘pseudo-historical’ or ‘chronicle’ tradition on the one hand, and the vast ‘romantic’ development of the ‘Matter of Britain’ in French prose and poetry. I am concerned solely to indicate the characteristics of my father’s treatment of the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere.
I have noticed already that in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae there is no mention whatever of Sir Lancelot. In the alliterative Morte Arthure he does appear several times, but in almost every case he is named merely as one among the chief knights of the Round Table.6 Of his appearance in Malory’s Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself (see here) Professor Vinaver observed:
Malory’s account gives the impression that Lancelot is nothing but a warrior, and that all his great qualities of mind and heart are to be placed for ever in the service of his king. No reader [of Malory’s Tale] would gather from it that Lancelot had been from the very beginning a courtly hero, that he had first appeared in medieval romance as a champion of courtoisie, and that it was as the protagonist of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte de la Charette7 that he had won his world-wide fame. It was because Lancelot had only been known as a courtly knight that he had had so few attractions for earlier English writers: they had found little in him to support and illustrate their epic treatment of Arthurian romance. The author of the [alliterative] Morte Arthure, no doubt for this very reason, had relegated Lancelot to comparative insignificance. Malory’s attitude was at first much the same: his mind, like that of his English predecessors, dwelled on problems of human heroism, not on the subtle issues of courtly behaviour. And in order to restore Lancelot to fame he made him into a genuine epic hero, more akin to the Gawain of the Morte Arthure than to Chrétien’s ‘knight of the cart’. We do not know how much of the French tradition was directly accessible to him when he wrote his Tale of Arthur and Lucius. What is certain is that he was then primarily an epic writer, unwilling and perhaps even unable to follow the romanticized knight-errantry and understand its fascination. The great adventure of the French books had not yet begun.
Of Lancelot in The Fall of Arthur, introduced in so allusive a way, it can be said at once that he is no fantastic figure out of ‘romanticized knight-errantry’; and the source of the story that he was introducing is not doubtful. In the French romance in prose entitled the Mort Artu, the theme of the adulterous love of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere was combined with that of the treason of Mordred and the fall of King Arthur. The Mort Artu was the source for an English poem of the fourteenth century named Le Morte Arthur, commonly referred to as the stanzaic Morte Arthur (to distinguish it from the alliterative Morte Arthure), a long poem of nearly 4000 lines composed in eight-line stanzas. Sir Thomas Malory made use of both the Mort Artu and the English poem, closely consulting and comparing them to provide the narrative structure on which he founded his last book, The Morte Arthur properly so called.8
*
I shall here recount Malory’s narrative in brief, but before doing so I will cite a few stanzas of the English poem from the beginning of the final tragedy to give some indication of its manner and form.
A tyme befelle, sothe to sayne,
The knyghtis stode in chambyr and spake,
Both Gaheriet, and syr Gawayne,
And Mordreite, that mykelle couthe of wrake;
‘Allas,’ than sayde syr Agrawayne,
‘How fals men schalle we us make,
And how longe shalle we hele and layne
The treson of Launcelote du Lake!
Wele we wote, wythouten wene,
The kynge Arthur oure eme sholde be,
And Launcelote lyes by the quene;
Ageyne the kynge trator is he,
And that wote alle the curte bydene,
And iche day it here and see:
To the kynge we shulde it mene,
Yif ye wille do by the counselle of me.’
‘Wele wote we,’ sayd sir Gawayne,
‘That we are of the kyngis kynne,
And Launcelot is so mykylle of mayne,
That suche wordys were better blynne;
Welle wote thou, brothyr Agrawayne,
Thereof shulde we bot harmys wynne;
Yit were it better to hele and layne,
Than werre and wrake thus to begynne.9
The first scene, the matter of these stanzas, is thus introduced by Malory:
hit befelle in the moneth of May a grete angur and unhappy [disastrous] that stynted nat tylle the floure of chyvalry of the worlde was destroyed and slayne. And all was longe uppon [due to] two unhappy [pernicious] knyghtis whych were named sir Aggravayne and sir Mordred, that were brethirn unto sir Gawayne. For thys sir Aggravayne and sir Mordred had ever a prevy hate unto the quene, dame Gwenyver, and to sir Launcelot; and dayly and nyghtly they ever wacched uppon sir Launcelot.
It happened that Gawain and his brothers Agravain, Gareth, and Gaheris (the sons of Arthur’s sister Morgause and king Lot of Lothian), and also Mordred (who in the tradition followed by Malory was the son by unwitting incest of Arthur and Morgause10), met together in King Arthur’s chamber. Agravain declared that it was known to everyone ‘how sir Launcelot lyeth dayly and nyghtly by the quene’, and that he intended to inform on Lancelot to the king. To this Gawain, being himself devoted to Lancelot, most illustrious of the knights of the Round Table, was profoundly opposed, foreseeing the likelihood of disastrous strife, as were his brothers Gareth and Gaheris also; and after blunt words they left the chamber as King Arthur entered, demanding to know what was toward. And when Agravain told him, he was greatly troubled, for although he had a suspicion of the truth he had no wish to pursue the matter against so great a man as Lancelot. He said therefore that he would do nothing without the proof that could only be had if Lancelot were taken in the act.
To this end Agravain proposed the setting of a trap. The king should ride out hunting on the next day, and he should send word to the queen that he would not return that night. Then Agravain and Mordred and twelve other knights would go to her chamber and bring back Lancelot alive or dead. But this did not befall. When Lancelot was with the queen the fourteen knights came to the door and with high words Agravain and Mordred called him out as a traitor; but Lancelot was wholly without armour and weapons, and he and the queen were in great distress. Then Lancelot unbarred the chamber-door and opened it only so far as to let one man pass through; and when Sir Colgrevance did so and struck at him with his sword Lancelot felled him with a single blow. Then he put on the dead man’s armour, and striding out among the other knights he slew without hurt to himself all of them, including two sons of Gawain and his brother Agravain, save Mordred, who was wounded and fled away.
When the king learned of all this from Mordred he foresaw that the fellowship of the Round Table was broken for ever, for many knights would hold with Lancelot; but Guinevere must ‘have the law’, and he commanded that the queen be taken to the fire and there to be burnt. Gawain ardently urged Arthur to be less hasty in passing this judgement, pleading the possibility that Lancelot had gone to the queen in all innocence, but the king was adamant. He said that if he laid hands on Lancelot he should die as shameful a death, and why should this trouble Sir Gawain since he had slain his brother and his sons? To this Gawain replied that he had warned them of their peril, and that they had brought about their own deaths. But the king was unmoved, and ordered Gawain with his brothers Gareth and Gaheris to put on their armour and bring the queen to the fire. Gawain refused the command of King Arthur. Then let Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris be present, said the king. They were unable to refuse, but said that they would go to the burning greatly against their will, and that they would wear no armour. Then Gawain wept bitterly, and said ‘Alas, that ever I shulde endure to se this wofull day!’
Now Lancelot with a great number of armed knights, who supported him and his determination to rescue the queen if she were condemned, were waiting in a wood at no great distance, and when it was reported that the queen was about to die they raced to the place of the burning and a fierce battle arose. Lancelot hewing to right and left at all who withstood him smote two men who were ‘unarmed and unwares’ and ‘he saw them nat’; but they were Gawain’s brothers Gareth and Gaheris, and Gawain had extraordinary devotion to Gareth, as did Gareth to Lancelot.
Lancelot went to Guinevere where she stood, and setting her on his horse he rode with her to his castle of Joyous Garde, and they remained there. King Arthur fell into an extremity of grief at these events. He ordered that no one should tell Gawain:
‘for I am sure,’ seyde the kynge, ‘whan he hyryth telle that sir Gareth is dede he wyll go nygh oute of hys mynde’. ‘Merci Jesu,’ seyde the kynge, ‘why slew he sir Gaherys and sir Gareth? For I dare sey, as for sir Gareth, he loved sir Launcelot of all men erthly.’
The death of his brothers, said the king, will cause the greatest mortal war that ever was. For Gawain of course soon learned of it; and he was changed in a short space from Lancelot’s devoted friend to his implacable foe. In the words of the stanzaic Morte Arthur he cried out:
Betwixte me and Launcelote du Lake
Nys man in erthe, for sothe to sayne,
Shall trewes sette and pees make
Er outher of vs haue other slayne.
Or as he said to the king in Malory’s tale: ‘For I promyse unto God, for the deth of my brothir Sir Gareth, I shall seke sir Launcelot thorowoute seven kynges realmys, but I shall sle hym, other ellis he shall sle me.’
To which King Arthur replied: ‘Sir, ye shall nat nede to seke hym so far, for as I here say, sir Launcelot woll abyde me and us all wythin the castell of Joyous Garde.’
Then the king with Sir Gawain at the head of a great host laid siege to Joyous Garde. Much time passed before Sir Lancelot would issue from the castle with his knights, but at last he appeared on the walls and spoke to Arthur and Gawain below, replying to their verbal assault in conciliatory words, seeking to avoid conflict of arms with them, and most especially with the king. He spoke of the many dangers that he had rescued them from, asserted his wholly unwitting slaying of Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris, the perfect innocence of Guinevere, and the rightness of his rescue of her from the burning. But all this was to no avail, and a great battle arose at Joyous Garde, in which Lancelot went so far in his refusal to return the attempted blows of King Arthur, who was ‘ever about sir Launcelot to have slain him’, that he raised him up when he had been unhorsed by Sir Bors de Ganis and set him on his horse again.
After two days of fierce fighting, in which Gawain was wounded, the hosts separated, that of Sir Lancelot being now in the ascendant; and at this time there came to King Arthur an envoy from Rome bearing an edict of the Pope, charging him that on pain of an interdict on all England he must receive back the queen and come to an accord with Sir Lancelot.
Lancelot did all in his power to further the Papal demand. He brought back Guinevere to the king; but against the coldly implacable hatred of Gawain he could not prevail. The end of it was banishment, and he departed from the court in bitterness, saying, in Malory’s tale:
Most nobelyst Crysten realme, whom I have loved aboven all other realmys! And in the I have gotyn a grete parte of my worshyp [honour], and now that I shall departe in thys wyse, truly me repentis that ever I cam in thys realme, that I shulde be thus shamefully banysshyd, undeserved and causeles! But fortune is so varyaunte, and the wheele so mutable, that there ys no constaunte abydynge.
But Gawain said:
Wyte thou well we shall sone com aftir, and breke the strengyst castell that thou hast, uppon thy hede!
In the stanzaic Morte Arthur Lancelot asked that he should be safe from pursuit in his own lands in France, but:
Syr Gawayne than sayd, ‘naye,
By hym that made sonne and mone,
Dight the as welle as euyr thou may,
For we shalle after come fulle sone.’
Then Lancelot said farewell to Guinevere and he kissed her, and then he said ‘all opynly’:
‘Now lat se whatsomever he be in thys place that dare say the queen ys nat trew unto my lorde Arthur, lat se who woll speke and [if] he dare speke.’ And therewith he brought the quene to the kynge, and than sir Launcelot toke hys leve and departed. …
And so he toke his way to Joyous Garde, and than ever afftir he called hit the ‘Dolerous Garde’. And thus departed sir Launcelot frome the courte for ever.
Then he gathered many knights about him and they took ship for France.
Sir Lancelot was the son of King Ban, who ruled over a city and a realm in France named, both in the stanzaic Morte Arthur and in Malory, Benwick; in the Mort Artu it is Benoic. Some of the Knights of the Round Table were close kin of Lancelot, among them Sir Ector de Maris (his brother), Sir Lionel, Sir Bors de Ganis, and Sir Blamore de Ganis (these knights are named in The Fall of Arthur, I.44–5, and again in III.131–2). Thus the destination of these exiles was Benwick; but where it was thought to be has not, to my knowledge, been discovered. Malory said at this point in his tale that they ‘sayled unto Benwyke: som men calle hit Bayan and some men calle hit Beawme, where the wyne of Beawme ys.’ But no such identification is made elsewhere; and since Benwick is clearly a port, it cannot be Beaune, which is many hundreds of miles from the Atlantic; while if Bayan is Bayonne, that is very far to the south.
But wherever Benwick was, it was not long before King Arthur and Sir Gawain, the leading spirit in the enterprise, carried out his threat. The king ‘made sir Mordred chyeff ruler of all Ingelonde, and also he put the quene undir hys governunace’, and with a great host they crossed the sea, and began to burn and lay waste Sir Lancelot’s lands. Still striving for peace, despite the opinion among his knights that ‘youre curtesy woll shende [ruin] us all’, Lancelot sent to King Arthur, but again received the response, that the king ‘wolde acccord with sir Launcelot, but sir Gawayne woll nat suffir hym’. Then at the gate of the besieged town of Benwick Gawain appeared and cried out a challenge to the defenders. Sir Bors and then Sir Lionel rode against him, but both were badly worsted and hurt, and so it went on until at last and reluctantly Lancelot took up the challenge.
In all the accounts of this war Sir Gawain is credited with the possession of a very singular ‘grace’, a faculty whereby his strength greatly increased towards noon and then again declined. When Lancelot perceived that this was so he dodged to and fro and avoided Gawain’s thrusts for a long time until his miraculous strength began to wane, whereupon Lancelot fell on him and gave him a great wound. (Incidentally the Mort Artu tells the story that during the time of Gawain’s recovery Arthur left the siege of Benwick and conducted his Roman campaign, in which the Emperor Lucius was slain; Malory of course ignored this, since he had already told the story in his tale of Arthur and the Emperor Lucius, see here.) But when Gawain was able to fight again all was repeated a second time with the same outcome, for Lancelot struck him in the place of the former wound. And even yet Gawain’s hatred was unappeased, but as he prepared for a third attempt news came from England that led Arthur to raise the siege of Benwick and return. That news was that Mordred had claimed to have received letters telling that Arthur had been slain in battle by Lancelot; that he had ‘made a parlemente’, and had had himself crowned king at Canterbury; and that he had declared that he would wed Guinevere, naming the day and preparing the bridal feast.
To Mordred Guinevere masked her intention, but fled to London and took refuge from him in the Tower; and though he attacked it he could not take it, and there she remained. But now Arthur with a great navy was approaching Dover, and there was Mordred awaiting him.
*
Thus it had been brought about that while King Arthur’s seaborne campaign remained the precedent history had entirely changed. It was the love of Lancelot and Guinevere that in a long chain of causation brought the king’s departure from England (not ‘Britain’) to pass: from the intrusion of Agravain and Mordred to the death by burning imposed on Guinevere, from which Lancelot rescued her, but at the cost of his slaying of Gareth and Gaheris, whereby Gawain’s love of Lancelot is changed to insane hatred, to the banishment of Lancelot, and so to the expedition of vengeance against him in his lands in France. Congruence between the distinct traditions, exemplified by the alliterative Morte Arthure and the stanzaic Morte Arthur, is only reached when news reaches Arthur overseas of Mordred’s usurpation of the kingdom.
It will be seen that in many features the third canto of The Fall of Arthur is much at variance, largely by omission, with Malory’s Tale of the Death of Arthur (as also with the stanzaic Morte Arthur). There is no suggestion that Lancelot’s killing of Gawain’s brothers was the crucial moment in the development of the tragedy; and it is certainly the case that what is vital to the story in the old versions, the relentless hatred felt for Lancelot by Gawain, his former devoted friend, is absent. In Canto III Gawain appears only (lines 29 ff.) in a portrait, expressly juxtaposed, to his advantage, with that of Lancelot which precedes it, and again in a reference (III.177) to his glory while Lancelot in Benwick ‘over leagues of sea / looked and pondered alone musing / doubtful-hearted’. But he plays no part in the narrative until the sea-battle on Arthur’s return. It is true that in Canto I Gawain, speaking ‘grave and slowly’, opposes Arthur’s desire to call upon Lancelot and his people for aid against Mordred (I.190.); but it seems that Gawain’s dissent arose from doubt of the loyalty of ‘Ban’s kindred’, and the measured tone of his words is far removed from the implacable anger of the Gawain of the old books.
In The Fall of Arthur the narrative of events following Guinevere’s rescue from the fire is reduced to the words ‘far he bore her; / fear fell on men, none would follow after’ (III.83–4); and the entire story of the siege of Joyous Garde by Arthur and Gawain, the fierce fighting there, the intensity of Lancelot’s chivalric loyalty to the king, the intervention of the Pope – all this has gone.
The conception, in the retrospective view of Canto III, of the breaking of the fellowship of the Round Table and the complexity of Lancelot’s loves and loyalties is thus rendered far simpler. With the absence of Gawain a dimension is removed. The gulf that opened between King Arthur and Sir Lancelot becomes more sharply defined, and is found to be impossible of resolution. This is clearly stated more than once:
He his lord betrayed to love yielding,
and love forsaking lord regained not;
faith was refused him who had faith broken,
by leagues of sea from love sundered.
(III.15–18, repeated without the third line in III.140–2.)
The rescue of Guinevere from the stake remains crucial in The Fall of Arthur, but not on account of the slaying of Gareth and Gaheris: rather it is on account of the reckless violence of Lancelot’s irruption on the scene, which was followed by a Túrin-like subsidence after a great rage, and led to a far-reaching penitence of spirit and attempt to undo the havoc he had caused, an agonizing recognition of guilt.
His pride he repented, his prowess cursing
that friends had felled, faith had broken. (III.90–1)
Above all, ‘Strong oaths they broke’ (III.62): he must restore Guinevere to the king, seeking his mercy towards her and his own reacceptance.
Neither in the stanzaic Morte Arthur nor in Malory’s tale is there any reference to Guinevere’s thoughts or wishes in the matter. Very different is her treatment in The Fall of Arthur, where her desires are analyzed, and where she finds this new Lancelot an unwelcome stranger whose disturbance of mind she cannot comprehend: ‘Strange she deemed him, / by a sudden sickness from his self altered’ (III.95–6). The same words are used of Lancelot: ‘Strange he deemed her / from her self altered’. But Lancelot’s loss was far greater than Guinevere’s; for ‘Though in wrath she left him, no ruth showing, / proud and scornful, dear he loved her’ (III.166–8). ‘In the courts of Camelot she was queen again, / great and glorious’ (III.113–14); while Lancelot as petitioner was by King Arthur rejected utterly, and banished to his dark reflections in another land. But the king, sad at heart, knew that he had lost the best of all his knights and many with him; and while he lamented this to Gawain when the news of Mordred’s treason reached them (I.180), Lancelot in Benwick, hearing rumours of approaching war, turned over in his mind conflicting thoughts of Arthur and Guinevere (III.143).
With the absence of Gawain, the invasion of Benwick which he inspired in vengeance against Lancelot also disappeared in The Fall of Arthur. We do not see Arthur again until Canto IV, when Mordred on the sea-cliffs hears the cry of ‘A sail, a sail on the sea shining!’ (IV.117). But before the ‘Lancelot story’ enters in retrospective form in Canto III there is the wholly original Canto II, in which is told how the dying captain of a ship wrecked on the coast, a heathen sea-rover named Radbod in the pay of Mordred, reported to him that Sir Cradoc (as told in Canto I) had slipped out of Britain and followed the trail of King Arthur to warn him of the designs of Mordred against him; already Arthur was hastening back to Britain. With his last breath Radbod gave Mordred a tense account of the feverish preparations of warriors and ships (II.76–89).
But the most remarkable aspect of Canto II of The Fall of Arthur is the emergence of Mordred as a fully imagined figure in the approaching calamity.
In Canto I no more has been told of him than that his vigorous support of Arthur’s eastward campaign veiled a secret and evil purpose which is now revealed. Guinevere has not been named. Of his association with the queen Geoffrey of Monmouth had said only (see here) that after his victory over the Romans news reached King Arthur that she was living adulterously with Mordred. In the alliterative Morte Arthure (see here) Sir Cradoc told the king that ‘worst of all Mordred’s deeds he had wedded Guinevere and begotten a child’. In Malory’s version of the story (see here) the news that reached Arthur at Benwick was that Mordred had declared that he would wed Guinevere. In full Malory’s text reads:
And so he made redy for the feste, and a day prefyxte that they shulde be wedded; wherefore quene Gwenyver was passyng hevy. But she durst nat discover her harte, but spake fayre, and aggreed to sir Mordredys wylle. And anone she desyred of sir Mordred to go to London to byghe [buy] all maner thynges that longed to the brydale. And bycause of her fayre speche sir Mordred trusted her and gaff her leve; and so whan she cam to London she toke the Towre of London, and suddeynly in all haste possyble she stuffed hit with all maner of vytayle, and wel garnysshed hit with men, and so kepte hit.
In Canto I of The Fall of Arthur Sir Cradoc says nothing of Guinevere; but in Canto II before Radbod the ship’s captain had delivered his tidings Mordred is seen looking out from a high window indifferent to the storm in which the ship foundered (II.18–31), for his mind was wholly absorbed in his desire for Guinevere; and when he had heard what Radbod had to tell, and had sent ‘messengers speeding / northward and eastward the news bearing’, he set out for Camelot. Guinevere heard the quick steps of this deeply sinister man as he came up the stair to her bower. At that fateful meeting Mordred offered her a choice that was no choice, between ‘slave or lady, wife or captive’ (II.154–5). Guinevere asked for time, but he would grant her little enough: ‘twixt bride and bond / brief be the choosing!’ She decided on immediate flight - but not to the Tower of London. She stole away in a dark cloak; and we see next the lights of Camelot fading behind her as she fled westward with a few companions, making for the castle of King Leodogrance, her father.
Canto II ends with her thoughts of Lancelot: would he return? Canto IV begins with a bright morning on the borders of Wales, when the riders sent out by Mordred to hunt her down lose all trace of her.
The queen they hunted with cold hatred,
till their hope failed them amid houseless stones,
halting hungry-eyed under the hills’ menace
at the walls of Wales.
Then follows the news of their failure delivered to Mordred by his squire Ivor, together with some advice out of season that enraged his master, as he stood in his camp on the coastal cliffs above Romeril (Romney in Kent), gazing at the empty sea: fearful lest Guinevere had sent a messenger to Lancelot, ‘love recalling /and his aid asking in her evil day’ (IV.96). At last the sails of Arthur’s navy were seen.
Here one may look back to see how to this point my father had treated, and transformed, the narrative tradition that came to be known in later times in England from Malory’s last tale, The Death of Arthur.
He preserved the ‘chronicle’ tradition of Arthur’s eastern campaign overseas, but totally changed its nature and purpose. Arthur defends ‘Rome’, he does not assault it.
He retained the treason and usurpation of Mordred and his desire for Guinevere, but in a greatly developed portrait.
He introduced (in a retrospect) the ‘romance’ legend of Lancelot and Guinevere (entirely unknown to the ‘chronicle’ tradition), but greatly simplified the complex motives, deriving from the French Mort Artu, and found in the English stanzaic Morte Arthur and in Malory’s last tale, by excising Gawain’s part. He preserved the sentence of burning passed on Guinevere and her rescue by Lancelot; but his banishment now arose as punishment for his relationship with the queen, and not from Gawain’s hatred of him for his slaying of Gareth. Lancelot is banished to Benwick, but Guinevere is restored to Arthur’s favour.
The attack on Benwick by Arthur and Gawain was entirely excised, and the news of Mordred’s treason reached Arthur not at Benwick but in the distant east.
*
I will now sketch the concluding narrative of Malory’s last tale, taking it up from where I left it (see here) with Arthur’s ships approaching Dover and Mordred awaiting him. Malory was now quite largely drawing on the English poem, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, for the detail of the narrative.
Arthur’s host fought their way up from the beaches and with much bloodshed routed Mordred’s people. But Sir Gawain was found, lying in a boat, ‘more than halff dede’; and speaking to King Arthur he declared that through his pride and stubbornness he had caused his own death, for now he had been smitten in the place of the old wound that Lancelot gave him at Benwick; and that it was through him that Arthur suffered this grievous misfortune:
for had that noble knyght, Sir Launcelot, ben with you, as he was and wolde have ben, thys unhappy warre had never ben begunne ..... And now ye shall mysse sir Launcelot. But alas that I wolde nat acccorde with hym!
And before he died he called for paper and pen to write a letter to Lancelot beseeching him to return in haste to aid King Arthur against Mordred.
Gawain was buried in the chapel in Dover Castle. But Mordred retreated to Barham Down in Kent, a few miles from Canterbury, and there Arthur came upon him: this battle ended with Mordred’s flight to Canterbury. Arthur then withdrew westward to Salisbury Plain, and the two hosts prepared for a further encounter. But Sir Gawain appeared to Arthur in a dream, saying that he had been sent by God to warn him against further fighting until a month had passed, by which time Sir Lancelot would come from France with all his knights. A treaty was then negotiated with Mordred to this end, but broken by a mistaken fear of treachery; and there followed the third and most savage battle lasting all day till nightfall, and ending with King Arthur and Sir Bedivere and Sir Lucan on the one hand, and Mordred on the other, standing amid vast numbers of slain men. But the king caught sight of Mordred ‘leanyng uppon his swerde amonge a grete hepe of dede men’; and racing towards each other Arthur ran Mordred through with his spear. Then Mordred knew that he had got his death wound, but with his last strength ‘he smote hys fadir, kynge Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet’, and with that Mordred ‘daysshed downe starke dede to the erthe’.
Then Sir Bedivere and Sir Lucan, themselves severely wounded, carried the king to ‘a lytyll chapell nat farre from the see’. Hearing a great clamour from the battlefield, for robbers had come to pillage the slain, the two knights thought it best to carry the king further off, but as they did so Sir Lucan fell dead from his wounds. Then Arthur ordered Bedivere to take his sword Excalibur, to cast it into ‘yondir watirs syde’, and returning tell him what he had seen. Twice Bedivere went to the water, and each time he feigned that he had done what he was bidden; but each time King Arthur told him in anger that he lied. For a third time Bedivere went ‘unto the watirs syde’, and returning told truthfully that he had hurled the sword as far as he could, whereupon an arm had risen from the water, caught the sword and brandished it, and then drew it down and disappeared.
Then, as the king commanded, Bedivere carried him on his back to the water’s edge, where ‘faste by the banke hoved [waited] a lytyll barge with many fayre ladyes in hit, and amonge them all was a quene’, she being Arthur’s sister, Morgan la Fée. Then Bedivere laid Arthur in the barge, and Morgan said (following the words in the stanzaic Morte Arthur) ‘A, my dere brother! Why have ye taryed so longe from me? Alas, thys wounde on youre hede hath caught overmuch coulde!’ But as the barge departed Bedivere cried out to the king asking what should become of him; and he answered:
Comforte thyselff, and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!
Next day, in his wandering Bedivere came upon ‘a chapell and an ermytage’ where there was a newly dug grave, concerning which the hermit told him that ‘a number of ladies’ had come at midnight and brought the body to him for burial (on this matter see here). Then Bedivere remained at the hermitage, which was ‘besydes Glassyngbyry’ (Glastonbury in Somerset), and lived with the hermit ‘in prayers and fastynges and grete abstynaunce’. But when Guinevere learned of all that had happened she ‘stole away’ and came to Amysbyry (Amesbury in Wiltshire), and there became a nun:
and never creature coude make her myry, but ever she lyved in fastynge, prayers, and almes-dedis, that all maner of people mervayled how vertuously she was chaunged.
When Lancelot in Benwick learned of what had come to pass in England, and had received Gawain’s letter, in great haste he made ready a host and crossed the sea to Dover. There he found that he was too late. He visited in great grief the tomb of Gawain in the chapel of Dover Castle, and then he rode away westwards until he came to the convent where Guinevere had become a nun. When she saw him again she fell into a swoon, but recovering she said to the assembled nuns, in the presence of Lancelot:
Thorow thys same man and me hath all thys warre be wrought, and the deth of the moste nobelest knyghtes of the worlde; for thorow oure love that we have loved togydir ys my moste noble lorde slayne. Therefore, sir Launcelot, wyte thou well I am sette in suche a plyght to get my soule hele [healing, health].
In the words between them, which cannot be shortened or sketched, she remained adamant, refusing him when he said ‘I praye you kysse me, and never no more.’ And so they parted, ‘but there was never so harde an herted man but he wold have wepte to see the dolour that they made, for there was lamentacyon as they had be stungyn with sperys.’
After Lancelot left Amesbury he came upon the hermitage where Bedivere now lived, and he stayed there, and led the same manner of life. Other knights of the Round Table came to join them there; and after six years Lancelot became a priest. One night he had a vision, in which he was told that he must go to to Amesbury, where he would find Guinevere dead, and that she must be buried by the side of King Arthur. With his companions Lancelot went on foot ‘from Glastynburye to Almysburye, the whiche is lytel more than thirty myle’, but they took two days, for they were weak and feeble from their lives of penance and fasting. When they reached Amesbury they learned that Guinevere had died only half an hour before; and they were told that she had said of Lancelot that
‘hyder he cometh as faste as he may to fetche my cors, and besyde my lord kyng Arthur he shal berye me.’ Wherefore the quene sayd in heryng of them al, ‘I beseche Almyghty God that I may never have power to see syr Launcelot wyth my worldly eyen!’
And so Guinevere was carried back to the chapel near Glastonbury, and there she was buried.
Thereafter Lancelot would eat and drink so little that ‘he dryed and dwyned awaye’, and before long he died. After a journey of fifteen days his body was brought according to his wish to the castle of Joyous Garde, and was buried in the choir of the chapel there.
*
From the moment when the sails of Arthur’s fleet were seen from the coast my father turned away from the tradition embodied in English in the stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’s Tale of the Death of Arthur and turned to the alliterative Morte Arthure, whose narrative I left at the point where Arthur learned from Sir Cradoc of Mordred’s treachery and his wedding to Guinevere (see here).
In the stanzaic Morte Arthur and in Malory there was no confrontation at sea to Arthur on his return, but in the alliterative poem it was a part of Sir Cradoc’s ill news that Mordred had raised a fleet against him (see here):
Att Southamptone on the see es seuene skore [s]chippes,
frawghte fulle of ferse folke, owt of ferre landes.
The author conveys in a few lines the speed of the return of Arthur, who
Turnys thorowe Tuskayne, taries bot littill,
Lyghte noghte in Lumbarddye bot when the lyghte failede;
Merkes ouer the mowntaynes full mervaylous wayes …
‘and within fyftene dayes his flete es assemblede’ (in The Fall of Arthur, II.76–88, Radbod gives to Mordred a vivid account of Arthur’s preparations).
But now in the alliterative Morte Arthure the poet devoted some hundred lines to the evocation of a violent sea-battle that followed, to which there is nothing comparable in mediaeval English literature. There is a furious onset of words, conveying (one might say, as much by their form and conjunctions as by their meaning) the roar of the battle, the splitting of timbers, ships crashing together, trumpets blowing, arrows flying, masts falling …
It was from this poem that my father derived his portrayal of a great sea-battle off the coast of Kent on Arthur’s return. In earlier works of the ‘chronicle’ tradition there was fierce fighting when Arthur’s fleet came in, but it was a battle between invaders from the sea opposed by Mordred’s host defending the cliffs. In Laȝamon’s Brut (see here, here) this is made very plain, and that my father had the passage in mind when he wrote of the sea-battle is seen from the words in the Brut telling that Arthur ‘hehte [ordered] þat his scip-men brohten hine to Romerel’, whence he took the name Romeril (Romney in Kent, already referred to, see here).
In the sea-battle in The Fall of Arthur there are echoes no doubt of the alliterative Morte Arthure in such lines as (IV.180–2)
Beak met bulwark. Burst were timbers.
There was clang of iron and crash of axes;
sparked and splintered spears and helmets …
but there is no trace, naturally enough, of the triumphant, exultant tone of the old poem, where ‘our’ lords are seen laughing loudly at the foreigners in Mordred’s fleet who leap in terror into the sea (‘when ledys [men] of owtlonndys leppyn in waters, / All oure lordes one lowde laughen at ones’).
It is convenient here to give an account, in some parts more condensed than in others, of the conclusion of the alliterative Morte Arthure.
The battle of the ships was won, but ‘Yitt es the traytoure one londe with tryede knyghttes’, awaiting the attempt by the incomers to force a landing against them; and from this the king was prevented, for the tide had by now gone out, leaving great slushy pools. But Gawain took a galley [a large open boat] and with a small band of men came ashore, sinking to his waist in his golden garments (‘to the girdylle he gos in alle his gylte wedys’) and then racing across the sands, where they hurled thselves against the host of Mordred arrayed before them. Gawain struck down the King of Gothland, and then crying ‘Fy on the, felone, and thy false werkys!’ made for Mordred ‘among all his men, with the Montagues and other great lords’; but he and his band were surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered (‘We are beset by Saracens on all sides!’).
Gawain fell then into a crazed recklessness, as the poet repeatedly declares: ‘all his witte faylede’; ‘alls unwyse, wodewyse’ [as one reckless and mad]; ‘he fell in a fransye for fersenesse of herte’; ‘wode [mad] alls a wylde beste’. Finally in a hand-to-hand encounter with Mordred he was worsted, and fell dead from a blow that pierced his helmet. Mordred was questioned by King Frederic of Friesland, who saw Gawain’s deeds:
Qwat gome was he this with the gaye armes
With this gryffoune of golde, that es one growffe fallyn?11
And Mordred named him, and greatly praised him:
Had thow knawen hym, sir kynge, ‘in kythe thare he lengede,
His konynge, his knyghthode, his kyndly werkes,
His doyng, his doughtyness, his dedis of armes,
Thow wolde hafe dole for his dede the dayes of thy lyfe!’
Yit that traytour alls tite teris lete he falle,
Turnes hym furthe tite, and talkes no more,
Went wepand awaye, and weries the stowndys,
That ever his werdes ware wroght, siche wandrethe to wyrke.12
‘Repenting of all his grievous deeds’ he went away westwards, to Cornwall, and pitched his tents by the river named Tambire (Tamar). From there he sent a messenger to Guinevere at York, telling her of all that had taken place, and bidding her flee ‘with her children’ to Ireland; but she leaving York in the deepest despondency went to Caerleon, and there took the veil:
Askes thare the habite in the honoure of Criste,
and all for falsede, and frawde, and fere of hire loverde [lord]!
But Arthur seeing the madness of Gawain rushed from his ship with many knights, and searching the battlefield found his body ‘in his gaye armes, umbegrippede the girse, and on grouffe fallen’ (clutching the grass, fallen on his face). In an extremity of grief he uttered a passionate lament for Gawain (on this see here), whose body was taken to a monastery at Winchester. The king was advised to stay a while in Winchester to assemble his forces before pursuing Mordred, but Arthur would have none of it, expressing his hatred of Mordred in violent words, and vowing to ‘ever pursue the payganys that my pople distroyede’. He departed at once from Winchester and went west to Cornwall, where he came upon Mordred encamped in a forest. Challenged to battle, Mordred’s huge host, vastly outnumbering that of the king, emerged from the forest.
Then follows the battle of Camlan (but it is not named in the poem), a ferocious fight to the death of ‘the bolde Bretons’ [i.e. Britons] against such foes as ‘Peghttes and paynymes [Picts and pagans] with perilous wapyns’ and ‘ethyns [giants] of Argyle and Irische kynges’, told in some two hundred lines, with many individual encounters; many knights who fell are named, among them Marrac, Meneduc and Errac (who are named in The Fall of Arthur, I.48–9) – and Lancelot (on his presence and death at Camlan see here). The battle ends with the fight to the death of Mordred and Arthur, with a graphic description of each hideous sword-thrust. Though he had received his death-wound, Arthur wielding his sword Caliburn slashed off the sword-hand of Mordred and ran him through as he lay on the grass.
But the king still lived.
Thane they holde at his heste hally at ones
And graythes to Glasschenberye the gate at the gayneste;
Entres the Ile of Aveloyne, and Arthure he lyghttes,
Merkes to a manere there, for myghte he no forthire.13
A surgeon of Salerno examined his wounds, and Arthur saw that he would never be healed. On his death-bed he ordered that Mordred’s children should be killed and drowned (‘Latt no wykkyde wede waxe, ne wrythe [flourish] one this erthe’), and his last words were of Guinevere:
I foregyffe all greffe, for Cristez lufe of hevene!
Yife Waynor hafe wele wroghte, wele hir betydde!
King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, and with his burial the alliterative Morte Arthure ends.
Thus endis kyng Arthure, as auctors alegges,
That was of Ectores blude, the kynge sone of Troye,
And of Pyramous, the prynce, praysede in erthe;
Fro thethen broghte the Bretons alle his bolde eldyrs
Into Bretayne the brode, as the Bruytte tellys.14
At the victorious end of the sea-battle, with Arthur on his ship off Romeril, gazing at his own land in doubt of his best course, my father ceased to work on The Fall of Arthur: in my view, one of the most grievous of his many abandonments.
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