The Lost Land of King Arthur

It is absolutely impossible to reconcile the many conflicting accounts of how King Arthur’s Round Table was obtained. One report is that it was made by Merlin for Uther Pendragon; that Uther gave it to King Leodegraunce of Cameliard; and that Leodegraunce gave it as a wedding gift to Arthur when he married his daughter, Guinevere. Malory confirmed this in his Book of the Round Table and the Three Quests, when he put these words into the mouth of the king—“I love Guinevere, the King’s daughter, Leodegraunce, of the land of Cameliard, which holdeth in his house the Table Round, that ye told he had of my father, Uther.” And Leodegraunce, when he heard of the projected marriage, said: “He hath lands enough, he needeth none; but I shall send him a gift that shall please him much more, for I shall give him the Table Round, the which Uther Pendragon gave me; and, when it is full complete, there is a hundred knights and fifty; and as for a hundred good knights, I have myself, but I lack fifty, for so many have been slain in my days.” King Arthur received the Table Round and the hundred knights, “which,” he said, “please me more than right great wishes.”

In the Book of Sir Galahad we find that King Arthur “would wit how many had taken the quest of the Sancgreal, and to account them he prayed them all. Then found they by tale an hundred and fifty, and all were knights of the Round Table.” But obviously this Round Table which seated a hundred and fifty knights and left a space for the Holy Grail, was not the special Round Table for King Arthur and the favoured twelve knights of his selection; though it may have been the Round Table which in the Book of Sir Percivale we are told Merlin made “in token of the roundness of the world: for by the Round Table is the world signified by right. For all the world, Christian and heathen, resort unto the Round Table, and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table, they think them more blessed, and more in worship, than if they had gotten half the world.” So said the Queen of the Waste Lands to Sir Percivale. Yet in regard to this great institution there exists the bolder idea of its astronomical derivation, and considering to what extent astrology has entered into the Arthurian story the theory that the Round Table was suggested by the movement round the Pole of the Great Bear—“the seven clear stars of Arthur’s Table Round”—must not be overlooked. Each age of chivalry has had some such institution, and the Round Table continued to exist in this country until the time of the Third Edward. Yet the actual era remains unverified

“When first the question roseAbout the founding of a Table Round,That was to be, for love of God and menAnd noble deeds, the flower of all the world.”

Nor were the repeated efforts of English monarchs to keep alive the institution conspicuously successful. The original standard could not be maintained, and the tendency of these later times when the romances were being enriched and elaborated, when Arthur and his knights were regarded as models, and when tournaments were held in imitation of the ancient jousts, was in reality a downward tendency. The ideal which men strove to realise did not correspond with the spirit of the former age. “People had become more worldly,” writes Ten Brink, “and were generally anxious to protect the real interest of life from the unwarrantable interference of romantic aspirations. The spirit of chivalry no longer formed a fundamental element, but only an ornament of life—an ornament, indeed, which was made much of, and was looked upon with a sentiment partaking of enthusiasm. But now chivalry was no longer the simple outflow of a dominant idea, but rather the product of a pleasant self-conscious reflection. Minds ideally constituted strove to fill the traditional moulds and formulas with a really ethical substance, and by trying in their own way to transpose these ancient poems into action, developed a really tender and humane disposition. The majority of people rejoiced merely in the splendour, and in the festive, dignified existence that raised them above the commonplace and distinguished them from the vulgar crowd. But in every case there was the intermixture of an incongruous element.” The lapse to Quixotism was inevitable, and with the lashings of the follies of the undiscriminating imitator of the knights of chivalry, the old custom passed away in derision. Cervantes did well and did evil by his destructive satire: in cutting away the parasite, the false and foolish chivalry which had fastened itself upon the wise and the true, he cut also to the roots of the goodly tree which deserved to fall more nobly, if fall it must. Renan reminds us that it was not Arthur the King who has been adopted by all peoples, but Arthur who charmed the world as the head of an order of equality in which all sat at the same table, and in which a man’s worth depended upon his valour and his natural gifts. The fate of an unknown peninsula mattered nothing to the world—“what enchanted it was the ideal court presided over by Guinevere, where around the monarchical unity the flower of heroes was gathered together, where ladies, as chaste as they were beautiful, loved according to the laws of chivalry, and where the time was passed in listening to stories, and learning civility and beautiful manners.”

The fashion set by Cervantes was followed in later times by John Hookham Frere, whose projected National Work comprising the “most interesting particulars relating to King Arthur and his Round Table” is a brilliant jeu d’esprit; and by Mr. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) whose Yankee at the Court of King Arthur scarcely ranks either among his witty or his memorable productions. The greater number of modern writers, having neither the provocation nor the excuse of Cervantes, have selected for treatment the worthier and purer side of chivalry,20 but their idealisation had led to confusion also. Such sober history as exists proves conclusively that the knights of the most chivalrous age lacked those attributes upon which so much stress has been laid, to the glory of poetry but to the obscuring of fact. It is not within my scope, however, to dwell longer upon this subject, but to call attention to the Round Table either as its reputed existence or as the use of its name may be regarded as an indication of the extent of King Arthur’s realm. But here, perhaps, we reach the most doubtful ground of all. Wherever we step we touch a crumbling footway or find ourselves utterly lost in a region of superstitions. The advance along this illusive track would therefore be unprofitable, but that it enables us to perceive how Arthurian traditions permeate the land, how tenaciously the supposititious links with him and his age are cherished, and how the crudest facts are turned to account in order that some claim may be popularly justified to association with his fame.

Of the multitude of places in Britain claiming to possess King Arthur’s Round Table, the ancient capital of Winchester ranks first. Caxton in his famous Prologue provides a list of proofs of Arthur’s actual existence—“In the castel of Dover ye may see Gauwayne’s skulle, and Cradok’s mantel; at Wynchester, the rounde table; in other places, Launcelottes sworde, and many other thynges.” Tradition ascribes the foundation of Winchester Castle to King Arthur in the year 523, and the large oaken table there hanging in the Chapel of St. Stephen, carved with the figure of the king and the names of the knights, is affirmed to be the identical board at which he and his knights assembled. King Henry VIII exhibited it as such to the Emperor Charles, but alas for romance! the researches of modern antiquaries have caused it to be ascribed to the time of Stephen, thus disposing once and for all of Drayton’s proud contention—

“And so great Arthur’s seat ould Winchester prefers,Whose ould round table yet she vaunteth to be hers,”

and equally falsifying Warton’s declaration—

“High hung remains, the pride of former years,Old Arthur’s board: on the capacious roundSome British pen has sketched the names renown’d,In marks obscure of his immortal peers.”

The great antiquity of Winchester would make its possession of such a relic, if genuine, quite possible. The ancient capital of England was possessed by the Romans, who erected the massive walls and temples of which it justly boasts. Some authorities declare that the first Christian church was erected in Winchester about the year 169, three centuries or more before King Arthur’s time, and that it was converted into a temple of Dagon, or Woden, by the Saxons late in the fifth century. Portion of Winchester was called by the Romans “Gwent,” or the Hollow, and this name being confused with the Gwent in Monmouthshire probably led to the transference of the scenes of the Arthurian legend to the famous capital. This class of error, as has been already pointed out, has not been infrequently met with in old chronicles. It was owing to some such confusion of ideas in the mind of King Henry VII that he named his son, born in Winchester Castle, after the Arthur of romance. Winchester, in fact, plays no mean part in the Arthurian drama. It was at times confused with Camelot, and given as the alternative name of that place. But there is no substance in the claim that the Round Table now to be seen in Winchester is really Arthurian. Even Defoe in his eighteenth-century chronicle of a journey from London to Land’s End talks contemptuously of the pretence to pass off the relic as “a piece of antiquity to the tune of twelve hundred years,” and he threw absolute discredit upon the whole story.

Caerleon-on-Usk, the historic capital of King Arthur’s realm, claims (as we have related) also to possess the Round Table, but in this instance the visitor is taken to a field, still bearing the name of the Round Table Field, in which a circular cavity probably marks the site of a Roman encampment. The local legend is that beneath this field King Arthur and his knights sleep entranced, and await the summons to come forth and save England from peril. On the top of Cadbury Hill, Somerset, at a spot known as Cadbury Camp, a vast artificial circle, which is doubtless also of Roman origin, is designated the Round Table; and about half a mile from Penrith in Scotland a circular intrenchment, eighty-seven feet in diameter, is popularly known by the same name. Scott mentions “Penrith’s Table Round” in his Bridal of Triermain, and one of Lockhart’s notes explains that the circle within the ditch is about one hundred and sixty paces in circumference, with openings, or approaches, directly opposite each other. “As the ditch is on the inner side it could not be intended for the purpose of defence, and it has been reasonably conjectured that the enclosure was designed for the solemn exercise of feats of chivalry, and the embankment around for the convenience of spectators.” This Scotch reference has a significance of its own, but, standing alone, and combated by other claims, it cannot be deemed of very high importance.

Sir Walter Scott quotes the lines of the poet David Lindsay—

“Adew, fair Snawdon, with thy towris hie,Thy chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round,”

which removes the relic, natural or artificial, to North Wales; but Anglesey also claims that what others call a Roman camp overlooking Redwharf Bay is the “Burdd Arthur,” or Arthur’s Round Table. Leland’s Itinerary contains the announcement that near Denbigh “there is, in the Paroch of Llansannen in the Side of a Stony Hille, a Place wher there be twenty-four Holes or Places in a Roundel for Men to sitte in, but sum lesse, and some bigger, cutte out of the mayne Rock by Mannes Hand; and there Children and Young Men cumming to seke their Catelle use to sitte and play. Sum caulle it the Rounde Table. Kiddes use their communely to play and skip from Sete to Sete.” No conclusion can be drawn, and no satisfaction can be gained, from this medley of conflicting claims: we learn only that the tradition was widely diffused and that either in a spirit of contention to claim possession of the relic, or with the desire to ensure the survival of the recollection by symbols, the name came to be indiscriminately bestowed upon artificial imitations or natural resemblances of the original. George Borrow, however, favoured the Welsh localities as truly Arthurian.

If we turn to the question of the number of the knights supposed to range themselves at the Table Round we find similar diversity both of record and opinion, and equal preposterousness in rival claims. The Table at Winchester had “sieges” for twenty-five, including the king. The Table mentioned by Malory had “sieges” for one hundred and fifty: one hundred were sent by Leodegraunce, Merlin found twenty-eight more, King Arthur chose Sir Gawaine and Sir Tor, and the remaining twenty were left for those who proved themselves worthy. Yet the old frontispiece to Malory’s History showed only thirty knights seated at the Table; Scott, in his Triermain, mentions only sixteen; and the old ballad on Arthur specifies the number of “good and able knights” as fifty. To leave such details, let it suffice to learn from Malory that “by the noble fellowship of the Table Round was King Arthur borne up”; or let us agree with Drayton, for the sake of poetical justice, that Arthur’s and Charlemagne’s knights were of exactly the same number—

“Who bear the bow were knights in Arthur’s reign,Twelve they, and twelve the knights of Charlemagne.”

Among the many remarkable traditions concerning the Round Table is that which survives in Wales that Arthur assembled his followers on the heights of the Brecknockshire Beacons, and there made known his design to establish a knighthood and to found a Table Round. On the summit of Pen-y-Van may yet be seen huge stones and rock fragments which the superstitious regard as the broken relics of the Table, to the real existence of which far more attention has been given than to its allegorical significance. The Round Table is, in fact, purely symbolical throughout the romance, an idea conveyed by the customary means of a simple figure, a parable. It is illustrative of the equality and the unity of the order of chivalry, and of the singleness of purpose and ambition of the Arthurian warriors and adventure-seekers. The breaking up of the Table Round is the sign of the falling away in allegiance of the knights and of the approaching disintegration of Arthur’s kingdom. When the fellowship of the knights is strongest and the complement is complete, the king is at the height of his power; when there are vacant seats at the Table, there are indications of a decline; when only a remnant of the knights meets once more at the monarch’s call, the kingdom is half-lost; when the fellowship is broken and the Round Table has disappeared, the end of Arthur’s reign is come, and his power is shattered for ever. “We all understand,” said Sir Lancelot, “in this realm will be now no quiet, but ever strife and debate, now the fellowship of the Round Table is broken; for by the noble fellowship of the Round Table was King Arthur upborne, and by their nobleness the King and all his realm was in quiet and in rest.”

By the deftness of the chroniclers the symbolism of the Round Table becomes slightly intermixed with the symbolism of the Grail quest, Sir Galahad, the perfect knight who could sit in the Siege Perilous, being the only knight who could be blessed with the vision of the Holy Grail. It was those alone of the fellowship of the Round Table who entered upon the quest, and it was the one pure hero, the man of most worship, who achieved that quest. Two seats in the Round Table were left vacant by Merlin. One was filled by King Pellinore when he had proved his worthiness; “but in the Siege Perilous,” said Merlin, “there shall no man sit therein but one, and if there be any so hardy to do it he shall be destroyed, and he that shall sit there shall have no fellow.” The double prophecy was fulfilled. The unworthy knight who attempted to occupy the siege was carried away in a flame that burst forth instantaneously, and Merlin’s own fate is by some ascribed to his inadvertence in sitting in that mysterious chair, strangely carven and lettered. But for Galahad there was no such fear. Long did the Siege Perilous remain vacant, for while Arthur and his knights were building up the kingdom Lancelot’s son was unborn. But at the assembling of the fellowship one Whitsuntide a hermit predicted to the king that that same year one should be born who would sit in the Siege Perilous and win the Sangreal. Henceforth the two ideas are found constantly united. At Camelot all the seats at the Table were found newly written with gold letters, and upon the Siege Perilous were the mystic words: “Four hundred winters and fifty-four accomplished after the passion of our Lord Jesu Christ ought this Siege to be fulfilled.” The knights were filled with wonderment, and they awaited the coming of the worshipful man who could sit there and not be harmed. Only miracles were wrought that day; the air and sky were full of omens, and Lancelot said: “I will that ye wit that this same day will the adventures of the Sangreal begin.” “A good old man, and an ancient,” clothed in white, entered the palace, bringing with him a young knight without arms. No one knew whence they came, but they listened in awe to the reverend stranger, who declared that the youth by his side was the long-expected knight, of the king’s lineage, of the kindred of Saint Joseph, destined to sit in the Siege Perilous and to achieve the Grail quest. It was Galahad, Sir Lancelot’s own son, having for his mother Elaine, the daughter of King Pelles, who was “cousin nigh unto Joseph of Arimathie,” and the possessor of the Holy Vessel. In the mysterious seat the young knight sat unfearing, and the knights beholding this whispered to each other, “This is he by whom the Sangreal shall be achieved.” It was the virgin knight who could alone draw out the sword from the stone, and who again proved himself the greatest, after which he began with religious ardour his appointed task.

Galahad’s story was a late addendum to the Arthurian legend, and it is very difficult to suppose that he was an historic figure. Yet his prototype is said to have existed in the person of Catwg the wise (Cadog), the second principal of Llancarfan College, where he was the successor of the renowned Bishop Dubois. In his youth Catwg had been a soldier, later he joined the Christian Church, and the neophyte had the advantage of receiving personal instruction from the aged master, the foremost divine of Arthur’s time. But the suggestion that Cadog was Galahad is scarcely open to serious consideration, and Walter Map, the first to relate the history of the virgin knight, was not likely to have had any such prototype in his mind. His conception seems to have been mainly poetic. The story is crowded with mysteries, superstitions, and idealisms. Galahad is scarcely human in any of his attributes, and he is so invested with marvels that we may safely set him down as an imaginary type or the most shadowy of traditional figures.

In discussing the real Arthur, as distinct from the Arthur of romance, we have to bear in mind that he was primarily the warrior, the representative of a cause which necessitated the constant display of his power in battle. As such he was first celebrated by the bards, and it was around the warrior and chief that the romance grew. From being simply a military leader, he became a type of hero about whom gathered many legends, and in course of time he was made the central figure in all the stories of marvellous adventure current in the early days. That there was an Arthur leading a forlorn hope, chief of a people slow to yield and hard to subdue, need scarcely be questioned. He is the original hero, the last and greatest of a conquered race; he is the giant-figure standing behind the mythical Arthur of fable and romance. Born when his land was attacked by the invader and his people were fearing extinction, he valorously met the foe, and for a while stemmed the victorious current of the Saxon and the Roman arms. Defeated at last, he became, as was inevitable, a type of hero—a later Odin, a demi-god—and in the romances and songs we read rather of aims than accomplishments, of desires than of deeds. More and more as time cast its glamour about him, King Arthur became the embodiment of a national aspiration, and the vanquished race revenged its defeat in songs of defiance, songs which vaunted of victory and were matched to triumphant strains, songs which relieved the thought of present disaster and recalled only the olden triumphs or prompted dreams of future glory. These songs took their rise in prophecies and sprang forth into golden promise of power and success. Speedily the ideal replaced the real. Poet after poet, chronicler after chronicler, added attributes to the hero; and ultimately from one strong man waging desperate war against outnumbering foes, the Arthur of romance was evolved, the Arthur whose conquests were an unbroken series and whose territory was limitless, the Arthur with his invincible knighthood, the Arthur who could never die, but who, in Merlin’s words, “like the dawn will arise from his mysterious retreat.” The legends supply one more proof that a nation with a voice, with the power of utterance, is invincible in spirit; captive and conquered though it may be, it remains unsubdued and free in impulse and thought. We can conceive how bold and defiant the spirit of the Cymri remained when in the eyes of the race the defeated king was still visible as the master of all kings, and the vanquished people could boast that he who fell under the Roman yoke—

“Swept the dust of ruin’d RomeFrom off the threshold of the realm, and crushedThe Idolaters, and made the people free.”

To this race Caerleon and Camelot became cities of magic splendour and magnificence, and the courts and camps of Arthur surpassed in strength and riches the luxurious home of Cæsar. The land was strewn with relics of Arthur’s power; the downs and plains were the scenes of his momentous victories; the hills were his chairs and footstools; the old encampments were the scenes of famous tourneys; the dark woods suggested the scenes of strange adventures for the knights; the holy wells, the rivers, and the places where Nature was brightest and most beautiful, were all associated with leading events and enterprises in the history of the king and his noble retinue. Particularly did the Cymri insist upon the successive and overwhelming defeats by Arthur of the Saxons, their traditional and most hated foe. And in their vauntings they gave Arthur the mastery of half Europe, claimed that the Roman Emperor became his vassal, and that upon his head the Pope himself placed a crown.

Arthur fought twelve great battles against the Saxons, the dates varying from 457 to 604.21 Either names have been mixed, or the chroniclers have monstrously departed from fact, or else we must conclude that the British warrior was actually king of the greater part of England, Wales, and Scotland, for his victories extend from Cornwall to Lincoln, and from Caerleon in Wales to the Scotch Lowlands. The twelfth and greatest of his victories was at Mount Badon, where “in one bout,” we are told, “Arthur vanquished eight hundred and forty-one,” and “no man overthrew them but himself alone.” The identity of Mount Badon, where “our good Arthur broke once more the Pagan” has long been a matter of dispute. It has been contended that Bath was none other than Mons Badonicus, and that the actual battlefield was a spot known as Banner Down; but the claim has almost entirely been abandoned now that so much evidence is forthcoming in favour of another site. Bath seems to have been fixed upon as a likely place not only on account of its veritable antiquity and its early occupation by the Romans, but because it appeared to be a sort of translation or corruption of the word Badon. But this is an etymological blunder, for, as has been pointed out, a sixth century word cannot be elucidated in this free manner with the help of a word which had no existence until the tenth century. The authorities are now fairly well agreed that Badon must be identified with Badbury Rings, but again a difficulty arises, for there are two places called Badbury, not very far from each other, one in Wiltshire and the other in Dorset. There is also a Caer Badon in Berkshire which at least two historians have favoured as the scene of Arthur’s crucial contest with Cerdic. Our knowledge of the battle comes from the Welsh bards who celebrated it in vaunting songs, and from Gildas and Bede, but none of them assists us to establish where Badon was, or, for the matter of that, at what date the battle was fought. Lady Charlotte Guest reminds us that Gildas, who bore the name of Badonicus from being born in the year in which the battle was fought,22 described Badon as being at the mouth of the Severn, but this passage has been declared an interpolation. Mr. Freeman, Mr. Stokes, and other modern historians give their vote for Badbury in Dorset, but without mentioning their reasons. The Badbury in Wiltshire seems to me to be the more likely place if for no other reason than that King Arthur is often mentioned as travelling through that county, and as being in the vicinity of Salisbury and Stonehenge, whereas Dorset seems to have been outside the sphere of his visits and operations. The Wiltshire Badbury is only a few miles from the gigantic and mysterious megalithic structure which had actually been attributed by Geoffrey of Monmouth and others to Aurelius Ambrosius, or Arthur. One tradition ran that it was a monument erected by the Britons on the spot where the massacre of the British nobles took place by order of Hengist. But in the light of science we learn that Stonehenge was an antiquity in the time of the Celts, and that its origin must have been as much a mystery to the contemporaries of King Arthur as it is to us of to-day. Stonehenge is not mentioned by the old chroniclers, but, remarkable to say, neither is Badon; but Salisbury is the subject of Merlin’s fateful prophecy of Arthur’s doom in the battle with Mordred. Mr. Joseph Ritson went exhaustively into the subject of Mons Badonicus, and after citing all that was recorded of it by Archbishop Usher, Matthew of Westminster, Gildas, Geoffrey, Sir John Prise, and many others, he still left the issue uncertain. What alone seems to be established is that the battle was a decisive triumph for the British against the Saxons under Cerdic, and that Arthur personally performed prodigies of valour. Tennyson has represented him charging at the head of his knights, and standing high on a heap of the slain watching the flying foe; and Drayton has sung—