TO A.D. 1196]

THE KING ARTHUR MYTH

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formed; against the vices of the court of Rome; even against that vice in the kings of England which caused their people to be oppressed by unjust game-laws. Under this head King Henry II. is himself the subject of a warning anecdote.

The cycle of

17. But Map's great work was that which justified his friend Geoffrey in demanding of him "something as a philosopher and poet." He it was who first gave a soul to the KING ARTHUR legends, and from whom we date the beginning of a spiritual har mony between the life of the English people and the forms given to the national hero by our poets. The Latin races have made no such use of Charlemagne or Roland as we shall find the English to have made of the King Arthur myth. the Charlemagne romances offers a wide field for study, bright with life and colour derived from the active genius of the trouvères. But these tales remain what those of the Arthurian cycle were before the genius of Walter Map had harmonised them with the spirit of his country. The Normans had brought a song of Roland to the battle-field of Hastings, and it was during the reign of our Henry I., that in 1122, Pope Calixtus II. officially authenticated the Latin "Life of Charlemagne and Roland," which was said to have been written by one of Charlemagne's companions, Turpin, who was Archbishop of Rheims in the eighth century. This book, which became a source of Charlemagne romance, and earned the title of "Le Magnanime Mensonge," may possibly have been invented by the order of the pope who guaranteed the authorship of Turpin. Its object was to increase the number of the pilgrims to the shrine of St. James of Compostella. Thenceforth, the Charlemagne romances multiplied, and side by side with them sprang up stories of Arthur, a hero popular among the Bretons, for whom the hills of Wales and Cornwall were a playground of romance. The trouvères of northern France, who catered for energetic men, ill satisfied with the mere love music of the southern troubadours, had tales, no doubt, of Arthur, Merlin, and Lancelot, . which had been partly founded upon Cymric traditions. Thus L'Ancelot, a diminutive form of Ancel (ancilla) a servant, might be a translation of the Cymric Mael, which also means a servant; and there is Cymric tradition of a Mael, king of the native tribes in the year 560, famous for strength and crimes of unchaste violence; the Meluas who carried off Guinever, wife of his uncle Arthur, and with whom Arthur made disgraceful peace. The old tales were tales of animal strength, courage,

and passion. The spiritual life was added to them when Walter Map placed in the midst of them the Holy Graal, type of the heavenly mysteries.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle had suddenly made King Arthur famous in England. Wace's romance version had quickened the interest in his adventures, and then it seems to have occurred to Walter Map, or to have been suggested to him, to arrange and harmonise, and put a Christian soul into the entire body of Arthurian romance. For this purpose he would associate it with the legend of the Holy Graal, and that legend itself became the first piece in the series of prose romances, now produced and written to be read aloud, forming the groundwork on which metrical romances afterwards were based. These French prose romances seem to have been translated from Latin originals; and Robert de Borron, to whom it is ascribed, may rather have been translator than author of (1) the first of the series, The Romance of the Holy Graal, sometimes also called The Romance of Joseph of Arimathea, which was written at least twenty years later than Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle. It is professedly told by a hermit, to whom in the year 717, appeared, in England, a vision of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Graal. The hermit set down in Latin what was then revealed to him, and his Latin Robert de Borron said that he proposed to set forth in French. The Graal, according to its legend, was the Holy Dish (low Latin, gradale) which contained the paschal lamb at the Last Supper. After the supper it was taken by a Jew to Pilate, who gave it to Joseph of Arimathea. It was used by Joseph of Arimathea at the taking down of our Lord from the cross, to receive the gore from his wounds; and thus it became doubly sacred. When the Jews imprisoned Joseph, the Holy Graal, placed miraculously in his hands, kept him from pain and hunger for two-and-forty years. Released by Vespasian, Joseph quitted Jerusalem and went with the Graal through France into Britain, where it was carefully deposited in the treasury of one of the kings of the island, called. the Fisherman King. The Latin adaptation of this legend to the purpose it was to serve, in the addition of the Graal as a type of the mystery of godliness to the mere animal life of the King Arthur romances, we may suppose to have been the work of Walter Map; Robert de Borron putting into French not that only, but also the next part of the series, (2) the romance of Merlin. Then followed (3) the romance of Lancelot of the

TO A.D. 1139] QUEST OF THE GRAAL. MORT ARTUS

63

Lake, ascribed always and only to Walter Map. In it, while developing the Arthur legend, Map idealised that bright animal life which it had been the only object of preceding stories to express. The romance is rich in delicate poetical invention. Lancelot is the bright pattern of a knight according to the flesh, cleared in one respect of many scattered offences, which are concentrated in a single blot, represented always as a dark blot on his character, the unlawful love for Guinevere. Next in the series comes (4) the Romance of the Quest of the Holy Graal, written also indisputably by Walter Map. From Lancelot, who had been painted as the ornament of an unspiritual chivalry, Map caused a son to spring, Sir Galahad, the spiritual knight, whose dress of flame-colour mystically typified the Holy Spirit that came down in tongues of fire. The son and namesake of Joseph of Arimathea, Bishop Joseph, to whom the holy dish was bequeathed, first instituted the order of the Round Table. The initiated at their festivals sat as apostle knights, with the Holy Ghost in their midst, leaving one seat vacant as that which the Lord had occupied, and which was reserved for the pure Galahad. Whatever impure man sat there the earth swallowed. It was called, therefore, the Seat Perilous. When men became sinful, the Holy Graal, visible only to pure eyes, disappeared. On its recovery (on the recovered purity of its people) depended the honour and peace of England; but only Sir Galahad—who at the appointed time was brought to the knights by a mysterious old man clothed in white-only the unstained Sir Galahad succeeded in the quest. Throughout the "Quest of the Graal," Map knitted the threads of Arthurian romance into the form which it was his high purpose to give them, and made what had become the most popular tales of his time in England, an expression of the English earnestness that seeks to find the right, and do it for the love of God. All their old charm is left, intensified in the romance of Lancelot ; but all is now for the first time shaped into a legend of man's spiritual battle, and a lesson on the search, through a pure life alone, for the full revelation of God's glory upon earth. After this, it remained only to complete the series of the romances by adding (5) the Mort Artus, the Death of Arthur; this also was written by Walter Map, and as a distinct romance, although combined in the printed editions with his Lancelot. The spiritual significance thus given by Walter Map to King Arthur, as the romance hero of the English, he is so far from having lost among us, that we shall find great phases in

the history of English thought distinctly illustrated by modifications in the treatment of the myth.

18. Meanwhile, the demand for Arthurian romances grew; and when Map's work was done another Englishman, Luces de Gast, living near Salisbury, wrote, probably towards the close of Henry II.'s reign, the first part of Tristan, or Tristram The second part was added by Helie de Borron. Popular as it became, this romance is, in spirit and execution, of inferior quality. Sir Tristram and the fair Isoude are but coarse doubles of Map's Lancelot and Guinevere.

A Frenchman, Chrestien of Troyes, who began writing before the close of Henry II.'s reign, was, in Arthurian romance, the ablest of the contemporaries and immediate followers of Walter Map. He began, about the year 1180, with the romance of "Erec and Enid," and produced metrical versions of Map's Lancelot and Graal romances. He wrote also the romance of Percival le Gallois.

Not long afterwards a German poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, fastened upon the Graal story in the true spirit of Map's work. Taking the sight of the Graal as the symbol of nearness to God, he painted in his romance of "Parzival" the soul of a man striving heavenward, erring, straying, yielding to despair, repenting, and in deep humility at last attaining its desire. The Graal, thus become famous, was said to be made of one emerald lost from the crown of Lucifer as he was falling out of heaven. Is it a sign of the improvement of the world that a hexagonal dish of greenish glass, called emerald, which is said to be the Graal itself, is now visible to all eyes in the treasury of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo at Genoa?

19. In the earlier part of Henry II.'s reign, Ailred of Rievaulx wrote a Rule of Nuns, thirty-three Homilies, and other books, including a chronicle which described Stephen's Battle of the Standard. Ailred was born in the north of England, and educated with the King of Scotland's son, but he left the Scottish court to become a Cistercian monk in Rievaulx Abbey. In 1146 he became Abbot of Rievaulx, and he died, aged fifty. seven, in 1166. Five-and-twenty years afterwards he was canonised as a saint, for he was so holy that he forbade nuns to teach little girls, because they could not do so without carnally patting and fondling them.

Thomas of Ely also wrote, early in Henry II.'s reign, a History of the Church of Ely.

TO A.D. 1189]

GLANVILLE.

JOSEPH OF EXETER

65 20. In the latter part of this reign Ralph Glanville wrote his Latin treatise Upon the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England (Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglia), which was completed towards the close of Henry's reign, and is the first treatise on English law. Ralph, or Ranulph de Glanville, famous as a lawyer and a soldier, was appointed, in 1180, Chief Justiciary of England under Henry II. He distinguished himself by valour in repelling the invasion of William King of Scotland, who was taken prisoner while besieging Alnwick Castle. After the death of Henry II., Richard I. is said to have extorted from Glanville £15,000 towards the expenses of the crusade in which he accompanied his new master. He was killed at the siege of Acre, in 1190. Glanville's authorship of the book attributed to him has been questioned, but is not open to much doubt. He says that the confusion of our laws made it impossible to give a general view of the whole laws and customs of the land; he sought rather to give a practical sketch of forms of procedure in the king's courts, and of the principles of law most frequently arising; discussing only incidentally the first principles upon which law is based.

21. Latin, poems also were produced in the closing years of Henry II.'s reign by Joseph of Exeter and Alexander Neckam Joseph of Exeter, or Josephus Iscanus, dedicated to Archbishop Baldwin a Latin poem, in six books, On the Trojan War, founded on Dares Phrygius, and finished when Henry II. was preparing for the crusade that Baldwin preached. He wrote also an Antiocheis, of which there remains only a fragment. Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem on the Trojan war was written about the same time as the French metrical romance, the "Geste de Troie," by that Benoit de St. Maure who supplanted Wace in the favour of King Henry II. Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, and Wace's romance version of it, called the “Brut," had brought Troy stories, as well as King Arthur stories, into fashion among us. For we had now been taught that the British were descended from the Trojans. After his escape from Troy with his son Ascanius and their followers, his establishment in Italy and marriage with Lavinia the daughter of King Turnus, Æneas died. Ascanius, the son of Æneas, had a son, named Silvius, who secretly loved Lavinia's niece. To this couple a son was born, of whom it was foretold that he should slay his father and his mother, and be driven from the land. The son was called Brutus; was the Brut who gave his name to Britain.

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