§1. The Authorship and Matter of the Book.Origin of the Book. We owe this our English Epic of Le Morte Darthur to Sir Thomas Malory, and to William Caxton the first English printer. Caxton’s Preface shows (what indeed would have been certain from his appeal to the ‘Knights of England’ at the end of ‘The Order of Chivalry’) that however strongly he, ‘William Caxton, simple person,’ may have been urged to undertake the work by ‘divers gentlemen of this realm of England,’ he was not less moved by his own love and reverence for ‘the noble acts of chivalry,’ and his deep sense of his duty and responsibility in printing what he believed would be for the instruction and profit of his readers, ‘of whatever estate or degree.’ But to Sir Thomas Malory he gives all the honour of having provided him with the copy which he printed. And ever since, for more than four hundred years, successive generations have approved the fitness of Caxton’s choice. For it is Malory’s book, and not the older forms of King Arthur’s story which we still read for enjoyment, and for the illustration of which scholars edit those earlier books. Only a true poem, the offspring of genius, could have so held, and be still holding its ground, age after age. It may be said that it is chiefly with boys, and with men who have formed the taste by their boyish reading, that the book is so popular. But is not this so with the Iliad too? Men of mature intellect and taste read and re-read the Iliad with ever new discoveries, appreciation, and enjoyment; but it may be questioned whether there are many, or even any, of them who did not begin those studies at school, and learn to love Homer before they knew that he was worthy of their love. And they who have given most of such reading, in youth and in manhood, to Malory’s Morte Darthur will be the most able and ready to recognise its claim to the character of an Epic poem. Malory a Poet. Malory wrote in prose, but he had ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ of the poet, though ‘wanting the accomplishment of verse’; and, great as that want is, we may apply Milton’s test of ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate,’ and we shall find no right to these names more real than is Malory’s. Every incident, the description ‘Truly, said Sir Launcelot, I trust I do not displease God, for He knoweth mine intent, for my sorrow was not, nor is not, for any rejoicing of sin, but my sorrow may never have end. For when I remember of her beauty, and of her noblesse, that was both with her king and with her; so when I saw his corpse and her corpse so lie together, truly mine heart would not serve to sustain my careful body. Also when I remember me, how by my default, mine orgule, and my pride, that they were both laid full low, that were peerless that ever was living of christian people, wit you well, said Sir Launcelot, this remembered, of their kindness and mine unkindness, sank so to my heart, that I might not sustain myself.’ And again:— ‘Ah, Launcelot, he said, thou were head of all christian knights; and now I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights; and thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest ‘Alas, sir [said] Bors, that I was born, That ever I should see this indeed, The beste knight his life hath lorn, That ever in stoure [fight] bestrode a steed, Jesu, that crowned was with thorn, In heaven his soul foster and feed Humour is akin to passion; and it may not be out of place to notice here Malory’s vein of humour, as shown, for instance, in the way in which he tells the adventures of La Cote Male Taile, and of Beaumains; the pranks of the braver knights with Dinadan and Dagonet; the story of Arthur’s wedding feast, when a lady who ‘cried and made great dole,’ was forcibly carried out of the hall by a strange knight, and Arthur ‘was glad, for she made such a noise,’ and was thereupon rebuked by Merlin for thinking so lightly of his royal and knightly duties; or that of the usurper Mordred and the Bishop of Canterbury, when after each had defied the other, the bishop ‘did the curse in the most orgulous wise that might be done,’ and then retired to live ‘in poverty and holy prayers, for well he understood that mischievous war was at hand.’ The Book Epic in Plan. In the Drama the action is present, actually unwinding itself and going on before our eyes. The Epic is the story of the past, a cycle of events completed, while through the one and the other may be traced a thread of destiny and providence, leading either to a happy triumph over circumstances, or to a tragic doom, which, too, is in the end, a triumph also. Thomas Hughes, the early Elizabethan dramatist, in his ‘Misfortunes of Arthur,’ concentrated and deepened the horror of such a tragedy by transferring the guilt of Launcelot to Mordred the son of Arthur and his unknown sister. He would better have recognised and followed the finer art of Malory. For though the motive of Malory’s epic is less gross and exaggerated than that of Hughes’s drama, the thread of guilt and doom which runs from first to last through the former is not less real than in the latter. The crime of Uther Pendragon, with which the story opens, leads to the concealment of Arthur’s parentage from himself, and this to his illicit love for her whom he does not know to be his sister, and so to the birth of Mordred. Then comes the prophetic doom:—‘Ye have done of late a thing that God is displeased with you: and your sister shall have a child that shall destroy you and all the knights of your realm.’ Arthur tries in vain to prevent the fulfilment of this doom by the only cruel deed of his life: and then—after another warning of the woe which his marriage with Nor are the marks of harmony and unity less plain in the several characters than in the events of the story. Arthur is a true knight, sharing the characteristics of his nobler knights, yet he differs from them all in showing also that he is, and feels himself to be, a king; as when—with an imperiousness which reminds us of Froissart’s story of Edward III refusing to listen to Sir Walter of Manny’s remonstrances on behalf of the burgesses of Calais—he tells Sir Launcelot that he ‘takes no force whom he grieves,’ or insists on his entering the lists against a tired knight whom he is not willing to see victorious over the whole field; or as when he sadly regrets that he cannot do battle for his wife, though he believes her innocent, but must be a rightful judge according to the laws. There are many others of the Round Table who are ‘very perfect gentle knights, yet we feel that Launcelot stands distinct among them all in the pre-eminence of his knightliness, notwithstanding his one great sin. Thus, to take one of many instances, who but Launcelot would have borne the taunts and the violence of Gawaine with his humble patience and ever-renewed efforts for a reconciliation, when he was leaving the realm, and when he was besieged in Joyous Gard. Modern critics of great Malory’s use of the Old Romances. It has been too commonly assumed that, because Caxton says that Sir Thomas Malory took his work ‘out of certain books of French and reduced it into English,’ he was a mere compiler and translator. But the book itself shows that he was its author—its ‘maker,’ as he would have called it. Notwithstanding his occasionally inartificial manner of connecting the materials drawn from the old romances, there is an epic unity and harmony, ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end,’ which, if they Twenty-three years ago, I ventured to assert Malory’s claim to epic genius: and now this claim may be farther tested, and as I think, established, by help of the learned researches of Dr. Sommer. Of these I shall state some details, in speaking of the text and its several editions, here giving the result so far as it bears on the present point. We may now see how Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ was fused into its actual form out of crude materials of ten times its bulk, and that while he often translated or transcribed the French or English romances as they lay before him, on the other hand he not only re-wrote, in order to bring into its present shape the whole story, but also varied both the order and the substance of the incidents that so he might give them that epic character, and that beauty in the details, which his book shows throughout. Malory was no doubt a ‘finder’ as well as a ‘maker,’ but so, I repeat, was Shakespeare, and so was every other great poet. But the quarry and the building are not the same thing, though the one supplies the rough stones with which the other is raised up. We see that there is much that is rude and inartificial in Malory’s art. He has built a great, rambling, mediÆval castle, the walls of which enclose rude and even ruinous work of earlier times, and not a Greek Parthenon nor even an Italian palace of the Renaissance. Still, it is a grand pile, and tells everywhere of the genius of its builder. And I ask, as Carlyle once asked me, Who built St. Paul’s? Was it Wren, or the hodman who carried up the bricks? But while supporting my conclusions as to Malory’s art by the evidence of Dr. Sommer’s facts, it is right to add that the conclusions are my own rather than those of this learned critic. His estimate of Malory’s genius in the choice and treatment of his materials falls far short of mine: and I can believe that Malory may have judged rightly, for his own purpose, when he did not take that form of a legend which was in itself the most beautiful. Malory’s History and Geography. The most recent critics are disposed to prefer Hume’s and Gibbon’s belief to Milton’s scepticism as to the actual existence of Arthur. But upon this question ‘Apart from place, withholding time, But flattering the golden prime’ of the great hero of English romance. We cannot bring within any limits of history the events which here succeed each other, when the Lords and Commons of England, after the death of King Uther at St. Alban’s, assembled at the greatest church of London, guided by the joint policy of the magician Merlin and the Christian bishop of Canterbury, and elected Arthur to the throne; when Arthur made Carlion, or Camelot, or both, his head-quarters in a war against Cornwall, Wales, and the North, in which he was victorious by help of the king of France; when he met the demand for tribute by the Roman emperor Lucius with a counter-claim to the empire for himself as the real representative of Constantine, held a parliament at York to make the necessary arrangements, crossed the sea from Sandwich to Barflete in Flanders, met the united forces of the Romans and Saracens in Burgundy, slew the emperor in a great battle, together with his allies, the Sowdan of Syria, the king of Egypt, and the king of Ethiopia, sent their bodies to the Senate and PodestÀ of Rome as the only tribute he would pay, and then followed over the mountains through Lombardy and Tuscany to Rome, where he was crowned emperor by the Pope, ‘sojourned there a time, established all his lands from Rome unto France, and gave lands and realms unto his servants and knights,’ and so returned home to England, where he seems thenceforth to have devoted himself wholly to his duties as the head of Christian knighthood. With the exception just mentioned, the geography is fanciful enough; and we need the magic of Merlin, or of some conjuror-poet like him of Horace, to set us with the required disregard of time successively in Carleon, Carlisle, Winchester, London, St. Alban’s, and Camelot. The story opens within a night’s ride of the castle of Tintagil. Thence we pass to St. Alban’s, to London, and to Carlion. This last is, no doubt, Caerleon-upon-Usk; but it seems through this, as in other romances, to be interchangeable in the author’s mind with Carlisle, or (as written in its Anglo-Norman form) Cardoile, which latter in ‘The nearest neighbouring flood to Arthur’s ancient seat, Which made the Britaines name thro’ all the world so great. Like Camelot what place was ever yet renown’d? Where, as at Caerleon, oft he kept the Table Round, Most famous for the sports at Pentecost so long, From whence all knightly deeds and brave atchievements sprong These old legendary traditions, pleasant to hear or to know of, have been collected by another Somersetshire antiquarian, the late Rev. J. H. Bennett, Legend tells that Glastonbury—founded by Joseph of Arimathea, and his burial-place, though his body was vainly sought in Edward III’s reign—possesses the coffin of Arthur. It is said that Henry II found the bodies of Arthur and Guenever there, and that Guenever had yellow hair. Their skulls were afterwards taken for relics by Edward Longshanks and Eleanor. Almesbury, where Guenever died a nun, is a town in Wiltshire, seven and a half miles from Salisbury, where may still be seen the ruins of its celebrated abbey. The name was originally Ambrosebury, then Ambresbury, and lastly Amesbury, as it is now spelt. The ruins of the castle of Tintagil, too, may still be seen in Cornwall. Joyous Gard, Launcelot’s favourite castle, is sometimes identified with Berwick. Malory tells us that ‘some men say it was Anwick, and some men say it was Bamborow.’ Bamborow, or Bamborough, is in Northumberland, sixteen miles southeast of Berwick. The castle, founded in the middle of the sixth century, which is the supposed time of Arthur’s reign, stands on a high rock projecting into the North Sea. It now contains a granary, hospital, and other endowments made for the poor in 1715 by Lord Crewe, bishop of Durham. Did he think of his predecessor Launcelot, and his doles of ‘flesh, fish, wine and ale, and twelve pence to any man and woman, come who would?’ The names of some other places in this book are given in the Glossary. The Sangreal. Let us turn to the Sangreal, or Holy Grail, the Quest of which forms so important a part of Malory’s book. The word ‘Grail’ means a dish, a drinking vessel, ‘Then there entered into the hall the holy Grail covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it. And there was all the hall full filled with good odours, and every knight had such meats and drinks as he best loved in this world: and when the holy Grail had been borne through the hall, then the holy vessel departed suddenly, that they wist not where it became.’ But in the Christian form into which the legend passed, the Grail became either the dish which held the paschal lamb at the Last Supper, the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea had received the Saviour’s blood, or the sacramental cup itself. Mr. Alfred Nutt has treated the whole subject with exhaustive learning in his ‘Studies of the Legend of the Holy Grail,’ and his article ‘Grail, the Holy’ in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia. But when I say that one only of the many stories of which Mr. Nutt gives an account is a poem of 60,000 verses, I shall not be expected to attempt any summary of his book. I shall content myself with the more popular account of the Sangreal, in its immediate relation to Malory’s Morte Darthur. According to the romances of Le S. Graal, Lancelot du Lac, Perceforest, and Morte Arthur, the Sangreal, or Holy Graal, was the dish which held the paschal lamb of the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea having gone into the house where the Supper had been eaten, took away the dish, and in it received the blood from the wounds of Jesus; and this dish, ‘with part of the blood of our Lord,’ he brought with him into England, and with it converted many heathens; and it was kept in a tower expressly built for it at Corbenicy. The romance of Merlin says that ‘this vessel was brought to this said knight [Joseph of Arimathea] by our Lord Jesu Christ while he was in prison xl. winter, him to comfort,’ but does not mention its earlier history. When Caxton replied to the ‘noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England’ who urged him to print the history of Arthur, that many persons held the opinion that there was no such Arthur, ‘one in special’ insisted that this was mere blindness, since Arthur’s sepulchre was to be seen at Glastonbury, Gawaine’s skull at Dover, the Round Table at Winchester, as well as many other relics. And if this noble gentleman had only known it, he might have added that the Holy Grail itself was to be seen in the Cathedral Church of Genoa. There it is still shewn. It is an hexagonal dish, about seventeen inches across, and was long Influence of the Book on English Letters and Life. The influence of Sir Thomas Malory’s book upon English literature, and so upon English life, upon our thoughts, morals, and manners, has been great and important. I have spoken of its claims to be considered an Epic poem; but it is not the less true, that it is our first great work of English prose, the first in which the writing of prose was shown to be one of the fine arts for England. Malory’s style is often inartificial: he is not always able to master the huge masses of his materials, and fails to fuse and mould them into a perfect whole. But we must confess the like of Milton, whose grand periods of magnificent English are often followed by others which are confused and cumbrous in form, if not in thought. It has taken many workmen, through many generations, to make our prose writing what it is: but there is an infant beauty in Malory’s style which is full of promise of the perfect manly form that is to be. The passages which I have already quoted are instances of this inartificial beauty of style. The thoughts and images spontaneously utter themselves in words without any attempt at rhetorical balance and arrangement. Thus in the lament of Sir Ector over Sir Launcelot, Malory does not ask himself whether there is a logical connection between courtesy and bearing a shield, or between true friendship and bestriding a horse, as a modern writer would have done, and so brought those sentences into a more finished though more monotonous correspondence with the rest. The flow of feeling is true, direct, and simple, and that is enough. Dr. Sommer, in his notes on the language of ‘Le Morte Darthur,’ points to the indications, in grammar, spelling, and other usages of words, of its transitional place between the language of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare; while Southey says that it was composed in the best possible time for making it what it is: and Mr. J. A. Symonds (whom I am permitted to name) says:—‘The Morte Darthur was written at a lucky moment in our literary history, when the old Saxon fountain of speech was yet And if in these things Malory was happy in the opportuneness of the times in which he wrote, not less was he so in that he lived in a day in which (as we see from Caxton’s Preface) men could still believe in the marvellous adventures of knight-errantry. A hundred years later, the spirit of chivalry had so departed from the old forms that Spenser could only use them as materials for allegory, while Cervantes, himself full of the old spirit, could only treat the belief in knight-errantry as the fantasy of a crazed though generous mind. But Malory was still able to embody the ideals of chivalry in actual and serious personages, and so to influence the national character and manners of his countrymen in the best way. His book is a possession for all times. The old stock is still putting out new leaves and fruits for ourselves. The Morality of the Book. In morals as well as in language (though more obscurely, since the subject of morals is so much more complicated than that of philology), we may find signs of a transition from the times of Chaucer to those of Shakespeare, and of progress no less than transition. The suppression of the Lollards—hated alike by the Church and the feudal lords, the War of the Roses, and the licentiousness of the court and courtiers, must, in the days of Edward IV, in which Malory wrote, have cut the moral and social life of the country down to its roots. Yet even in Malory’s book there are signs of the new moral life which was coming, and which in the days of the Reformation reached a power and expansion never before known. It would be absurd to pretend that Malory had greatly advanced in morality from the position of Chaucer and his age towards that of the Elizabethan period. Roger Ascham, indeed, while admitting that ‘ten Morte Arthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England,’ protests against the demoralising effect of the literature of which he takes this book as the example, ‘the whole pleasure of which,’ he says, ‘standeth in two special points—in open manslaughter and bold bawdray. In which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel, and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts ‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse’— and recognise a real though only half truth in Ascham’s strictures. But he greatly over-states the evil, while he altogether omits to recognise the good ‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bridal bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave.’ If Morte Arthur does not deserve the unqualified denunciation of the learned Ascham, it cannot be denied that it exhibits a picture of a society far lower than our own in morals, and depicts it with far less repugnance to its evil elements, on the part either of the author or his personages, than any good man would now feel. Still—with the exception of stories like those of the birth of Arthur and Galahad, which show not only another state of manners from our own, but also a really different standard of morals from any which we should now hold up—the writer does for the most part endeavour, though often in but an imperfect and confused manner, to distinguish between vice and virtue, and honestly to reprobate the former; and thus shows that his object is to recognize and support the nobler elements of the social state in which he lived, and to carry them towards new triumphs over the evil. And even where, as in the story of Tristram, there is palliation rather than reprobation of what Sir Walter Scott justly calls ‘the extreme ingratitude and profligacy of the hero,’ still the fact that such palliation, by representing King Mark as the most worthless of men, was thought necessary in the later, though not in the earlier, romance on the same subject, shows an upward progress in morals; while a real effort to distinguish virtue from vice is to be seen in the story of Launcelot, with his sincere though weak struggles against temptation, and his final penitence under the punishment of the woes which his guilt has brought on all dear to him as well as to himself. Or if we look at the picture which Chaucer’s works give us of the co-existence in one mind—and that one of the noblest of its age—of the most virtuous Christian refinement and the most brutish animal coarseness, and then see how in the pages of Malory, inferior as we must hold him to be to Chaucer, the brutish vice has dwindled to half its former size, and is far more clearly seen to be vice, while the virtue, if not more elevated in itself, is more avowedly triumphant over the evil, we find the same upward progress. And I cannot doubt that it was helped on by this book, and that notwithstanding Ascham’s condemnation of Morte Arthur, Caxton was right in believing that he was serving God and his countrymen by printing it; and that he justly estimated its probable effect when he says, ‘Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommÉe.... All is written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue, by which we may come and attain to good fame and renommÉ in this life, and after this short and transitory life to come unto everlasting bliss in heaven; the which He grant us that reigneth in heaven, the blessed Trinity. Amen.’ It can hardly be doubted that Spenser, while drawing largely from Geoffrey of Monmouth, was acquainted with Malory’s story of Arthur, if not with the earlier romances also. We might have known this with certainty, if Spenser had completed his great design which he sketched in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to the first three books of the Faerie Queene, and after labouring ‘to pourtrait in Arthur before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve Morall Vertues,’ he might have been ‘perhaps encouraged to frame the other part of Politick Vertues in his person, after that he came to be King.’ He farther identifies his hero as the son of the Lady Igraine, and the infant charge of Merlin, and his description of the Redcross Knight and his claim to the adventure of Una, must forcibly recall Malory’s story of Beaumains and the lady Linet, notwithstanding the differences between the two. Beyond this, there is the evidence of general literary probability. Spenser’s ideals of knighthood and knight-errantry are so much in harmony with those of Malory, while they rise into a far higher moral life, that it does not seem unreasonable to suppose a relation between the two, and to believe that we owe to Malory the transmission from the earlier romances of all that was worth preserving in these to the generation which could give birth to the Faerie Queene. And while Spenser strove to carry forward the national life of his countrymen by presenting the noblest ideals of chivalry under the old forms of romance, Shakespeare was embodying them in the new forms destined thenceforth to take the place of the old, and showing us in a Ferdinand, a Prince Henry, or a Hamlet, the ideals of the Gentleman, while the Sydneys and the Raleighs were presenting the counterpart in actual life. Ben Jonson, too, though he makes fun of ‘the whole sum of Errant Knighthood’ in his Execration upon Vulcan, elsewhere describes the old training of pages and squires in chivalry, as ‘the noblest way of breeding up our youth in all the blazon of a gentleman.’ Of Milton’s debt to Malory there is no less probability. He no doubt knew the other legends of Arthur, but Malory’s book must surely have had some part in taking that hold on his imagination, and exercising that influence in the formation of his character and life, of which he himself tells us. In his poem addressed to Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, the friend of Tasso, and of himself when he visited Naples, he says:— ‘O mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum; Phoebaeos decorasse viros qui tam bene nÔrit, Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem; Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos Heroas, et (O modo spiritus adsit) Frangam Saxonicas Britonem sub Marte phalanges.’—Mansus 78 The like hope and purpose of writing an Epic poem of British story is to be found in the Epitaphium Damonis. And in his defence of his life in the ‘Apology for Smectymnuus,’ he says:— ‘Next, (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown over all christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expence of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befel him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn; and if I found in the story afterward, any of them, by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet, as that which is attributed to Homer, to have written indecent things of the gods; only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to stir him up both by his counsel and his arms, to secure and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living; I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation of virtue.’ In a word, not the fears of Ascham but the hopes of Caxton were now fulfilled in Milton’s study of the old romances. And though it were idle and mistaken to wish that the poet had finally chosen the Death of Arthur rather than Paradise Lost, the lovers of the story of the Round Table may be forgiven if they wish it were possible to call up him who left untold that story as it would have been seen in the light of his genius. Sir Thomas Malory. Of Sir Thomas Malory himself we know nothing more than can be inferred by probable conjecture from his book. The Biographia Britannica (article ‘Caxton’) says:— ‘If this Sir Thomas Malory was a Welshman, as Leland and others after him assert, he was probably a Welsh Priest; as appears not only by the legendary vein which runs through all the stories he has thus extracted and wove together, but by his conclusion of the work itself, in these words: “Pray for me, whyle I am on lyve, that God sende me good delyveraunce; and when I am deed, I praye you all, praye for my soule; for this booke was ended the 9th yeer of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth, by Syr Thomas Maleore, Knyght, as Jesu helpe him for his grete myght, as he is the servaunte of Jesu, bothe day and nyght.”’ But no references are given as to where this supposed assertion by ‘Leland and others’ is to be found; in fact, it is not to be found in any of Leland’s writings. And the origin of the statement remained an unexplained puzzle, until Dr. Sommer has now apparently discovered the key to it in a passage which he quotes from Bale’s Illustrium Maioris BritanniÆ Scriptorum, &c., first edition, folio 208. In this passage, Bale, after praising Thomas Mailorius and his history of King Arthur, goes on to say, ‘Est Mailoria in finibus CambriÆ regio,’ on the authority of Leland William Caxton. Of William Caxton we know more. A native of Kent, he became an apprentice, freeman, and livery man of the London Guild of Mercers, and was for many years resident in the English factory at Bruges, which was under their chief authority, though it represented and controlled all English trading interests in the Low Countries. Such factories were the usual, and indeed essential means of carrying on trade with foreign nations in the Middle Ages. Thus charters were granted by Henry IV and his successors to ‘Merchant Adventurers’ trading in Flanders, which, in giving them a corporate character, enabled them to treat with the authorities of the country more effectually than would have been possible to private individuals, and also to exercise needful control over, and give protection to, their own countrymen in the place. Though these Merchant Adventurers included many of the City Guilds, the majority were Mercers, and the factory at Bruges, while called ‘the English Nation,’ and its house ‘the English House,’ was practically under the management of the London Mercers’ Guild. Mr. Blades has given an engraving from Flandria Illustrata of the ‘Domus Anglorum’ at Bruges as it was in Caxton’s time; and he thus describes the mode of life of its inhabitants:— ‘A great similarity prevailed in the internal management of all foreign guilds, arising from the fact that foreigners were regarded by the natives with jealousy and suspicion. The laws which governed the Esterlings in London, who lived in a strongly-built enclosure, called the Steel Yard, the site of which is now occupied by the City station of the South Eastern Railway Company, were much the same as those under which the English Nation lived in Bruges and other cities. The foreign merchant had, in Caxton’s time, to brave a large amount of popular dislike, and to put up with great restraints on his liberty. Not only did he trade under harassing restrictions, but he resigned all hopes of domestic ties and family life. As in a monastery, each member had his own dormitory, To this house of the English in Bruges Caxton went to live in the year 1441, being then probably about twenty years of age. In 1462 he was acting as ‘Governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries,’ and certainly in full possession of that office and title two or three years later. And in 1465 he was appointed by Edward IV one of two envoys with the title of Ambassadors, to negociate a renewal of the existing treaty of trade with the Duke of Burgundy. We do not know at what time he began to combine his literary studies or his acquaintance with the new art of printing with the prosecution of his official duties: but he tells us that in 1471, at the request of Margaret, sister of Edward IV and wife of the Duke of Burgundy, he completed his translation of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye which he had begun, but laid aside unfinished some time before. And then, in order to meet the desire of many friends to have copies of this translation, he printed such copies for their use. He was now in the service of Margaret, and married; and about the year 1476, after thirty-five years’ residence abroad, he returned to England, there to introduce the Printing Press, and to make himself famous to all ages by so doing. Caxton was not only a printer, but a translator, an editor, and the publisher of the books which he printed in unfailing succession, during the remaining fifteen years of his life. He was the first of that honourable order of publishers who from his day to our own still share with authors the gratitude of men for that inestimable boon, the Printed Book. There are still publishers among us who, like Caxton, are themselves authors and editors of no unimportant ability: and not only to them, but also to those who aspire only to be the publishers of other men’s books, do we owe—what even the art of printing could have done little towards giving us—that broad spreading ‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why he in that year suspended printing the Fayts of Arms until he had finished a new undertaking, The Arte and Crafte to Die Well.’ The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the growth and progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and directed in certain epochs of our history by great men who have yet themselves been made what they are by those very laws. Among such laws are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold aspect of self-sacrifice and of self-assertion. And not least among the men who have given to the spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of duty and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. §2. The Text, and its several Editions.The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E. Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at the sale of the Osterley library in 1885 The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde, the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of Contents. This edition, which has numerous In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of ‘The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaute knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij. ¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.’ And on the title-page, above the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that on the title-page of Southey’s edition is a bad copy. A copy of this edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one with a title which the annotator has seen. A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British Museum. The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in 1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East’s folio, Mr. Wright concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton; but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton’s, we find the variations almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words, there are a number of more or less considerable variations and additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole; and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without farther reference to his ‘copy,’ but in the others from a desire to improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls ‘a more eloquent and ornated style and phrase.’ No new edition seems to have been published till 1816, when two independent editions appeared, one in two, and the other in three 24mo volumes. Both are modernised for popular use, and are probably the volumes through which most of my own generation made their first acquaintance with King Arthur and his knights; but neither has any merit as to its editing. In 1817 Messrs. Longmans and Co. published an edition in two volumes quarto, When at page 113 of volume i. the editor introduces the words ‘certayne cause’ to complete the sense, he is careful to call attention, in a foot-note, to the fact that these words are not in the original, but taken from the ‘second edition,’ by which I presume he means that of 1498. But when he subsequently supplies seventeen pages which were also not in his original, he gives no hint of the fact; and his reticence was so successful that for fifty years the interpolations passed as genuine among learned critics, who quoted from them passages wholly spurious as Caxton’s genuine text. It was only in 1867 that, in collating Earl Spencer’s copy with the edition of Southey, I discovered that these passages—to which my attention was directed by Messrs. Longman’s note above mentioned—did not correspond with Caxton’s text, as represented by Whittaker’s restorations: and on afterwards collating them with the Osterley text itself I found the like result. It remained to trace them to their real sources. This was not so easy as might be supposed, for though it was evident that Mr. Upcott must have had recourse to one or other of the existing editions, the interpolated passages in fact agree exactly with none of them. But a careful collation of the last four chapters of the book (which include more than half the interpolations, and may be taken as a fair specimen of the whole) with the old texts, leaves no doubt that, with the exception of the first In 1858 and 1866 Mr. Wright published successive editions reprinted from that of 1634. His learned introduction and notes are of considerable interest; but nothing can justify the reprinting the most corrupt of all the old editions when the first and best was within reach, though perhaps at greater cost. In 1889, 1890, and 1891, Dr. H. Oskar Sommer edited, and Mr. Nutt published, in three volumes, what will henceforth be the best, if not quite the best possible, edition of Caxton’s original text, for the scholar and the student. It would be hard to over-rate the industry, the learning, and the munificent public spirit of these worthy representatives of Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. The first volume gives the text of the Althorp copy, page for page, line for line, word for word, and letter for letter, with no change but that of Roman for black letter type. It is, indeed, too scrupulously exact, for it reproduces the mistakes in Whittaker’s fac-simile pages which now form part of the Althorp copy, only correcting these by collations with the Osterley original, given in the second volume. Whittaker has no more authority than any other mere copyist; and the direct correction of his mistakes would have made Dr. Sommer’s reprint a perfect representation of the original while making a reprint of the collations unnecessary. Besides these collations, and others of the second edition of Wynkyn de Worde with the text of Caxton, Dr. Sommer’s second volume contains a complete bibliography of the original text and all its after editions; an Index of names of persons and places; a Glossary, or indeed dictionary, of words, whether obsolete or still in use; and an Essay on the language of the book. In the third volume, after a graceful essay by Mr. Andrew Lang on the literary merits of Malory, Dr. Sommer gives us a series—an original and very important series—of ‘Studies on the Sources’; and he prints from MSS. in the British Museum the only two of those ‘sources’ which had not been so made accessible already, either by ancient or modern editors. Into this hitherto chaotic mass of mediÆval romances, French and English, prose or verse, Dr. Sommer has now first brought light and order. With an almost inconceivable amount of thoughtful and learned labour, he has collated the various manuscripts with the printed editions and with Malory’s book, in a detail which, great as it is, represents, as he tells us, a still more minute investigation of which he only gives the main results. With the exception of the story of Beaumains, which is an enlarged narration of that of La Cote Male Taile, and subject to the changes made by Malory’s own genius, all the adventures and incidents of Malory’s Morte Darthur are now shown to be found in one or more of these ‘sources,’ often translated literally from French, or transferred word for word from the English, yet still oftener so compressed and fused into a new shape that the finished work is but a tenth of the bulk of the original matter. Dr. Sommer arranges these sources into the four groups of the Merlin, the Lancelot, the Tristan, and the Prophecies of Merlin, and shows the relations of each group to the corresponding portions of Malory. He thinks, with M. Gaston Paris, that Malory had a now lost form of the ‘Lancelot,’ comparable to the ‘Suite de There is no title-page, as I have already mentioned, to the Caxton, that which is given by several bibliographers being only an extract, not very critically selected, from Caxton’s preface. But it is stated in Caxton’s colophon that the book was ‘entytled le morte Darthur,’ and he explains that it was so ‘entitled’ notwithstanding it treated of Arthur’s birth, life, and acts as well as death, and also of the adventures of his knights of the Round Table. And the concluding words of Malory, ‘Here is the end of the death of Arthur,’ taken with their context, point to the same title. It was indeed before Malory’s time, and has been ever since, the traditional title of this story. We have Mort Artus and Morte Arthure in the earlier times; Ascham, in Henry VIII’s reign, calls this book La Morte d’Arthure; Tyrwhitt, Mort d’Arthur; and Walter Scott and Southey, Morte Arthur, which last probably many of us are familiar with as the old name which we heard from our own fathers. §3. An Essay on Chivalry.St. Augustine replied to the enquiry, What is time? by saying, ‘I know when you do not ask me:’ and a like answer suggests itself to us if we try to find an adequate reply to the question, What is Chivalry? For chivalry is one of those words, like love, duty, patriotism, loyalty, which make us feel their meaning, and the reality of what they mean, though their ideal and comprehensive character hinders us from readily putting it into the forms of a definition. When the alchemist in the Eastern tale compounds, with all the resources of his art, the universal solvent before the expectant eyes of his pupil, the pupil, seeing the mysterious fluid lie quietly in the crucible, exclaims, with not unreasonable doubt, ‘O Sage, be not deceived: how can that which dissolves all things be itself contained in a ladle?’ And how shall chivalry, sparkling and flashing everywhere as it runs through that great complicated tissue of human life which we call modern civilisation,—how shall chivalry, the humaniser of society, be brought within the limits of a definition? Chivalry, indeed, exists for us in spirit rather than in outward and visible form. It no longer comes to us with the outward symbols of war-horse, and armour, and noble birth, and strength of arm, and high-flown protestations of love and gallantry; yet we never fail to know and feel its presence, silent and unobtrusive as it now is: we recognise the lady and the gentleman not less surely now than they did in old times; and we acknowledge their rights and their power over us now no less than then. And if the spirit of chivalry does live among us still, we may read its past history by its present light, and say in Spenser’s words,— ‘By infusion sweete Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive, I follow still the footing of thy feete, That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.’ Let us then look back to those times when chivalry had an outward, visible form, and was embodied in its own proper institutions, with orders, and statutes, and courts of its own jurisdiction, and rituals, and customs, like those of other great social institutions and members of the body politic. The deluge of the Teutonic nations which broke up the old Roman civilisation threatened for some centuries to overwhelm Europe with mere barbarism. We know now that the germs of a far higher and better civilisation were everywhere ready to burst into life as soon as the fury of that deluge had spent itself; but for a long period the evil seemed mightier than the good. From time to time the But man differs from the brutes in this, that while he can fall lower than they, he can also rise higher, and that even the passions and the impulses which he has in common with them may be subdued, and refined, and modified, till they become the servants and instruments of his human life, and the means by which all that is properly spiritual in his being may be reflected and symbolised upon this earth in outward, visible form. The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the conquest of them, to new and higher life. And so it was in the Middle Ages. The Church was, no doubt, the great civiliser of the nations: still, whatever aid the State derived from the Church, it then, no less than now, had a position and processes of its own, by which it did its own work of civilisation too. And its first great work for controlling the universal anarchy of which I have spoken was the extension and firm establishment of that half-patriarchal, half-military organisation which we call the Feudal System. Every man who was not rich and powerful enough to be a lord became—willingly or unwillingly—a vassal; and all men, from the king downwards, were bound to each other for reciprocal service and protection—a service and protection partly military, but partly patriarchal, since they were rendered not by men strangers to each other except for what Mr. Carlyle calls ‘the nexus of cash payment,’ but united by ties of family, and neighbourhood, and clanship, and by the interests and sympathies that grow out of these. But the protector of his own vassals easily became the invader of the rights and ravager of the possessions of his neighbour and his vassals; and so the old evils of anarchy and violence grew afresh out of the remedy which had been devised to meet them. The ‘monarchies sank into impotence; petty, lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot,’ says a learned historian of this period, ‘and all attempts after scientific instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe, merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It is a sign of the prevailing feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years of our Æra were drawing to their close, the people in every country in Europe The palliatives with which men tried to meet the evils of the times indicate the greatness of the evils, but also the moral feeling which was the promise of better things. Such was the so-called ‘Peace of the King,’ by which private wars were not to be entered on till forty days after the committal of the alleged crime which was to be avenged; and the ‘Truce of God,’ by which all these acts of private hostility were suspended from Thursday to Monday in each week. And at the Council of Cleremont, held by Urban II in November, 1095, a severe censure was pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God was confirmed; women and priests were placed under the safeguard of the Church; and a protection of three years was extended to husbandmen and merchants, the defenceless victims of military rapine. We are reminded of the law of Moses, which provided Cities of Refuge for the man who accidentally and without malice killed his neighbour, but who could not look for protection from the vengeance of the family of the slain man except within those special safeguards. In each case there is the same unreasoning rage of the half-civilised man brought face to face with the demands of religion and civil law: and each is obliged to yield something to the other till the better cause has had time to prepare and strengthen itself for a more complete triumph. Chivalry, then, was the offspring of the same spirit which dictated the Peace of the King, the Truce of God, and the decrees of the Council of Cleremont. Chivalry has another name—Knighthood—and the two are wanted to express all that we mean by either In those days society was essentially military. In this our own time the main offices, interests, and occupations of the great body politic are non-military, and the army is but a small portion of the nation, specially trained for a minor, though indispensable, function therein. Peace, for its own sake, and for the sake of the objects which can only be obtained by the arts and with the opportunities of peace, is the end and aim of every civilised nation now; and war is only an occasional means to secure that end. But in the Middle Ages war was, or seemed to be, the chief end of life to the greater part of every nation, and especially to all who possessed rank, and wealth, and power, and were in fact the leaders of the nation. And therefore chivalry, the spirit which was to humanise those warriors, needed to be warlike too, and thus to sympathise with those to whom it addressed itself. Much, too, of its special form it no doubt owed to that wonderful race of heroes, the Normans. The romantic love of adventure; the religious and the martial enthusiasm; the desire to revenge injuries, and to win wealth and power; the delight in arms and horses, in the luxury of dress, and in the exercises of hunting and hawking; the eloquence and sagacity in council; the patience with which when need was they could endure the inclemency of every climate, and the toil and abstinence of a military life; and the gentleness, the affability and the gallantry, which were the characteristics of the Norman race; these must have been more or less impressed on men’s minds wherever the Norman sway or influence extended, from England to Sicily, and must have reproduced something of themselves in the social habits and manners of the times. When we read the description of William of the Iron Arm, the first Norman count of Apulia, so strong, so brave, so affable, so generous, and so sage above other men—a lion in battle, a lamb in society, and an angel in council—we are reminded of the heroes of chivalry in the days of its greatest refinement, the Black Prince, Sir John Chandos, and Sir Walter of Manny, as they still live in the pages of Froissart; or their counterparts in romance, King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England. The Normans, the latest of the Northern races who descended, full of wild life, from their mountains and forests, upon the comparatively civilised plains of Europe, may have brought a newer and fresher feeling for those old manners and customs which Tacitus describes as characterising the Germans of his time, and which are with so much probability connected with the chivalry of the Middle Ages. In ancient Germany, and in Scandinavia, it was the custom for each youth, when he was of an age to bear arms, to be presented with a sword, a shield, and a lance, by his father, or some near relation, in an assembly of the chiefs of the nation; and In ancient Germany, too, women were held in a peculiar reverence, beyond what was known in the other—and otherwise more civilized—nations of antiquity; and the presence of women in the hour of battle with their husbands, brothers, and fathers, was regarded by those warriors as an incentive to courage, and a pledge of victory, which (as they boasted) their Roman foes were unable to appeal to for themselves. And this old Teutonic reverence for women conspired with the new Christian reverence for the Virgin Mary as the type and representative at once of her sex and of the Church, to supply the purer and nobler elements of the gallantry which forms so large a part, not only of the romance, but of the actual history, of chivalry. But Christianity exercised not only an indirect, but also a direct and avowed action upon the forms of chivalry, as they attained to their full proportions. Knighthood was certainly a feature and distinction of society before the days of Charlemagne, who in permitting the governor of Friesland to make knights by girding them with a sword, and giving them a blow, adds ‘as is the custom.’ But no ritual of the Church as yet consecrated that custom. Charlemagne girt the sword on his son Louis the Good without religious ceremonies; and a century later the Saxon king of England, Edward the Elder, clothed Athelstan in a soldier’s dress of scarlet, and girded him with a girdle ornamented with precious stones and a sword with sheath of gold, but without religious rites. But in the next century, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, we read that Hereward, a noble Anglo-Saxon youth, was knighted by the Abbot of Peterborough, with confession, absolution, and prayer that he might be a true knight. And this the historian describes as the custom of the English, as indeed it was, or soon became, that of all Europe; the Normans resisting the innovation longest, but at last adopting it with their wonted ardour. The candidate for knighthood confessed his sins on the eve of his consecration (for such it now was), and passed the night in prayer and fasting in the church: the godfathers, the bath, the white garment, and the tonsure (sometimes limited indeed to a single lock) were the symbols of the new and holy state of life to which he was now called: next morning he heard mass, offered his sword on the altar, where it was blessed by the priest; and he was created a knight—either by the priest of highest rank present, or by some knight, who, in virtue of his knighthood, was qualified to confer the sacred office he had himself received—in the name of God, of St. George, and of Saint Michael the Archangel. He swore, and received the holy communion in confirmation of his oath, to fulfil the duties of his profession; to speak the truth; to maintain the right; to protect women, the poor, and the distressed; to practise courtesy; to pursue the infidels; to despise the allurements of ease and safety, and to maintain his honour in every perilous adventure. Thus, as has been justly observed, all the humanities of chivalry were sanctioned by legal and ecclesiastical power: it was intended that they should be spread over the whole face of Christendom, in order to check the barbarism and ferocity of the times. While the form of chivalry was martial, its objects became to a great extent religious and social: from a mere military array chivalry obtained the name of the Order, the Holy Order, and a character of seriousness and solemnity was given to it; and it was accounted an honourable office above all offices, orders, and acts of the world, except the order of priesthood. The education for knighthood usually began at a still earlier age than that mentioned in the Canons of Cleremont. The castles of the princes and nobles were the schools of those days, at least for the youth of their own class. Every feudal lord had his court, to which he drew the sons and daughters of the poorer gentry of his domains; and if he were a knight distinguished for his merits, his castle was also frequented by the children of men of equal rank and reputation with himself: for the prudent and careful father would often have some brother in arms whom he thought better fitted than himself to educate his children in the accomplishments and duties of his station. So, long after, Ben Jonson, looking back on those old times, and picturing them in their ideal aspect, says, that then And that this method of education ‘By a line Of institution from our ancestors, Hath been deriv’d down to us, and receiv’d In a succession, for the noblest way Of breeding up our youth in letters, arms, Fair mien, discourses, civil exercises, And all the blazon of a gentleman. Where can he learn to vault, to ride, to fence, To move his body gracefuller, to speak His language purer, or to tune his mind Or manners more to the harmony of nature, Than in these nurseries of nobility?’ The boy of gentle birth, when he thus began his education, was called by the And not the least important of the youth’s duties were those towards the ladies of the house in which he lived. He was to wait on them rather as attending a sort of superior beings to whom adoration and obsequious service were due, than as ministering to the convenience of human creatures like himself. The most modest demeanour, the most profound respect, were to be observed in the presence of these fair idols. And as not only the youths, but the maidens—the damoiselles no less than the damoiseaux—were sent to the courts of the barons and their ladies for education, it would often happen that this veneration in which the boy was so early trained towards the ladies of maturer years, would find an object in some young maiden whose more suitable age might lead him, as he grew up, from mere boyish regard to that passionate and abiding devotion which was the duty of every true knight to his lady, and by the strength of which he held that all his power for good was to be maintained. Here is a description of the beginning of the loves of Amadis and Oriana, which is as charming as it is simple; and which, though we find it in the pages of a romance, we cannot doubt is a picture of actual life and manners. ‘Oriana,’ says the old book, ‘was about ten years old, the fairest creature that ever was seen; wherefore she was called the one “without a peer”.... The child of the sea (that is, Amadis) was now twelve years old, but in stature and size he seemed fifteen, and he served the queen; but, now that Oriana was there, the queen gave her the child of the sea, that he should serve her, and Oriana said that “it pleased her;” and that word which she said, the child kept in his heart, so that he never lost it from his memory, and in all his life he was never weary of serving Such was the beginning of the loves of Amadis and Oriana, so famous in romance, and so generally held by knights and ladies to be a model for themselves. Constancy, such as that of Amadis, was a virtue of the true lover which those times of long inevitable separations and absences demanded in forms hardly known in our days; and in proportion was it insisted upon, and held in honour. So Spenser says: ‘Young knight whatever, that dost arms profess, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of fickleness, In choice and change of thy dear loved dame; Lest thou of her believe too lightly blame, And rash misweening do thy heart remove; For unto knight there is no greater shame, Than lightness and inconstancy in love.’ The peerless Amadis passed with more than ordinary rapidity to the rank of knighthood. The youth more usually remained an esquire—the next step to that of page—till he was twenty. He attended the knight to whose person he was attached, dressed and undressed him, trained his horses, kept his arms bright and burnished, and did the honours of the household to the strangers who visited it; so that Spenser takes the squire as the type of such courtesy. Here is Chaucer’s description of the squire: ‘With him there was his son, a youngÉ squire, A lover and a lusty bachelor, With lockÉs curl’d as they were laid in press; Of twenty years of age he was, I guess. Of his statÚre he was of even length, And wonderly deliver, and great of strength; And he had been some time in chevachie (military expeditions), In Flanders, in Artois, and Picardie, And borne him well, as of so little space, In hope to standen in his lady’s grace. Embroider’d was he, as it were a mead All full of freshÉ flowers, white and red; Singing he was, or fluting, all the day; He was as fresh as is the month of May; Short was his gown, with sleevÉs long and wide: Well could he sit on horse, and fairÉ ride; He couldÉ songÉs make, and well indite, Just, and eke dance, and well pourtray and write: So hot he lovÉd, that by nightertale He slept no more than doth the nightingale. Courteous he was; slowly and serviceable; And carv’d before his father at the table.’ I have already spoken of the religious rites with which the esquire was admitted into the order of knighthood, and of the solemn and noble engagements into which he then entered. He had next to ‘win his spurs,’ as it was called; a phrase happily illustrated in the story of Edward III and the Black Prince, which Froissart thus relates:— ‘This battle between Broy and Cressy, this Saturday, was right cruel and fell, and many a feat of arms done that day came not to my knowledge.... In the morning, the day of the battle, certain Frenchmen and Almagnes perforce opened the archers of the prince’s battle (division as we should now say), and came and fought with the men of arms, hand to hand. Then the second battle of the Englishmen came to succour the prince’s battle, the which was time, for they had as then much ado. And they with the prince sent a messenger to the king, who was on a little windmill hill: then the knight said to the king, “Sir, the earl of Warwick, and the earl of Oxford, Sir Reynold Cobham, and other, such as lie about the prince your son, are fiercely fought withal, and are sore handled, wherefore they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them, for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they shall have much ado.” Then the king said, “Is my son dead, or hurt, or on the earth felled?” “No, sir,” quoth the knight, “but he is hardly matched, wherefore he hath need of your aid.” “Well,” said the king, “return to him, and to them that sent you hither, and say to them, that they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive: and also say to them, that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for, if God be pleased, I will this day’s work be his, and the honour thereof, and to them that be about him.” Then the knight returned again to them, and showed the king’s words, the which greatly encouraged them, and repented in that they had sent to the king as they did.’ Brave knights, to be ‘greatly encouraged’ by such stern though manly words. We are reminded of the not less brave and knightly demeanour of Sir Colin Halket and his men at Waterloo, when the Duke of Wellington rode up and asked how they were, and the general replied that two-thirds of the brigade were down, and the remainder so exhausted that the relief of fresh troops, for however short a time, was most desirable. But when the duke said that no relief was possible, that all depended on them, the answer which the officer made for himself and his men was, ‘Enough, my lord, we stand here till the last man falls.’ Thenceforth the knight’s career depended, he would not have said on himself, but on God and his lady: and if we may judge by the ordinary language of the Lord Tennyson has, I may assume, made every one familiar with the retirement of queen Guenever to the nunnery of Almesbury, and with the death of Arthur; and I venture for the completion of this sketch to show, though from the present volume, how the old story which the poet chiefly follows relates the death and draws the character of Launcelot. Launcelot, when he heard of those events, went to Almesbury, and after taking leave of the queen, resolved to follow her example; and became a hermit and penitent, taking up his abode in a forest where was an hermitage and a chapel that stood between two cliffs; and there he served God day and night with prayers and fastings. Thus he, and other knights who followed his example, ‘endured great penance six years, and then Sir Launcelot took the habit of priesthood, and a twelvemonth he sang mass.’ At the end of that time a vision directed him to take the body of queen Guenever, now dead at Almesbury, and bury her with king Arthur at Glastonbury. Then the story goes on:—‘And when she was put in the earth Sir Launcelot swooned and lay long still, while the hermit came out and awaked him, and said, Ye be to blame, for ye displease God Let me compare with this Chaucer’s description of the knight of his times:— ‘A knight there was, and that a worthy That from the timÉ that he first began To riden out, he loved chivalry, Truth and honÓur, freedom and courtesy. Full worthy was he in his lordÉs war, And thereto had he ridden, no man farre, As well in Christendom as in Heatheness, And ever honoured for his worthiness. At Alisandre he was when it was won: Full oftentime he had the board begun Aboven allÉ natiÓns in Prusse In Lethowe had he reysÉd No Christian man so oft, of his degree: In Gernade at the siege eke had he be Of Algesir, and ridden in Belmarie: At LeyÉs was he, and at Satalie, When they were won; and in the GreatÉ Sea At many a noble army had he be. At mortal battles had he been fifteen, And foughten for our faith at Tramissene In listÉs thriÉs, and aye slain his foe. This ilkÉ worthy knight had been also SometimÉ with the lord of Palathie Against another heathen in Turkey; And evermore he had a sovereign prise And though that he was worthy he was wise, And of his port as meek as is a maid. He never yet no villainy ne said In all his life unto no manner wight: He was a very perfect gentle knight.’ In an age when all men, not of the clergy, were divided between the two classes of freemen or gentlemen, and serfs or villains, and the villains were in habits and in human culture little better than the domestic animals of which they shared the labours, the knight almost inevitably belonged to the class of free, or gentle, birth. Still, in theory always, and to a great extent in practice, it was not his birth, but his personal merit, which qualified him for knighthood. The personal merit would oftener exist, and still oftener come to light, where it had the advantages and aids of education and general social culture. But if it was recognised in the villain, or man of no rights of birth, he might be, and often was, knighted, and was thereby immediately enfranchised, and accounted a gentleman, in law no less than in name. Thus Froissart tells us of Sir Robert Sale, the governor of Norwich, that ‘he was no gentleman born, but he had the grace to be reputed sage and valiant in arms, and for his valiantness King Edward made him knight.’ He was governor during the popular insurrection of which Wat Tyler and Jack Straw were the London leaders; and he was invited to put himself at the head of one of the risings by men who urged upon him—‘Sir Robert, ye are a knight and a man greatly beloved in this country, and renowned a valiant man; and though ye be thus, yet we know you well: ye be no gentleman born, but son to a villain, such as we be: therefore come you with us, and be our master, and we shall make you so great a lord that one quarter of England shall be under your obeisance.’ He refused, and they killed ‘But understand in thine intent, That this is not mine intendement, To clepen no wight in no age Only gentle for his lineage; But whoso that is virtuous, And in his port nought outrageous, Though he be not gentle born, Thou may’st well see this in soth, That he is gentle because he doth As longeth to a gentleman; Of them none other deem I can: For certainly, withouten drede, A churl is deemed by his deed, Of high or low, as you may see, Or of what kindred that he be.’ Akin to this recognition of gentleness of mind and manners, as that which made a gentleman, was the sense of brotherhood among knights and gentlemen, which led them to trust in each other’s honour, even when they were fighting under the banners of hostile kings. The chronicles are full of the instances of such consideration of the English and French knights for each other in the wars between the two nations; and it is not without probability that to these and suchlike manifestations of the spirit of chivalry have been traced the courtesy and humanity which characterise modern warfare in a degree unknown to the ancients. Much indeed of barbarism and cruelty there was in the usages of war in the best times of chivalry, even of the knights among themselves, and still more when they came, with passions infuriated by resistance, upon the people of lower rank than themselves. Edward III of England, and the knights whom he gathered round him, are held alike by contemporary historians and romance writers, and by those of modern times, to have best exhibited the characteristics of chivalry in its day of greatest refinement as well as splendour; yet no one can read the chronicles of even the admiring Froissart without seeing how much savage passion and cruelty was often mingled with their better dispositions: though we do see also that the cruelty was not because, but in spite of their chivalry. Froissart laments bitterly the iniquity of the massacre by the Black Prince of the people of Limoges, men, women, and children, more than three thousand. And when Edward III, before him, intended, as would seem, to have treated the town of Calais in like manner, not only did the French knights who had offered to surrender declare that they would ‘endure as much pain as knights ever did, rather than the poorest lad in the town should have any more evil than the greatest of us all’—showing that they It needed a stronger influence than that of Sir Walter of Manny to save their lives: and this brings me to speak of the Lady of the mediÆval times; the Lady, who was the counterpart of the Knight, and without whom he could never have existed. Here, indeed, I meet a difficulty which reminds me of what Coleridge says of the female characters of Shakspeare, that their truth to nature, and therefore their beauty, consists in the absence of strongly marked features. It is impossible to read the poems, romances, or chronicles of the mediÆval times, without feeling all through how important a part the lady plays everywhere; and yet it is far from easy to draw her from her retirement and bring distinctly before ourselves what she did, and get a picture of her as definite as we can do of the knight. Still I must try to trace the outlines of such a picture of one lady:—Philippa, queen of Edward III, whom Froissart calls ‘the most gentle queen, most liberal, and most courteous that ever was queen in her days;’ and who was the very type and representative of the lady, in the highest and best sense, in an age in which the ladies—such as the princess Blanche, the good queen Ann, the countess of Salisbury, Jane de Montfort, and the wife of Charles de Blois—were renowned for their gentle or their heroic characters. When Isabel, queen of Edward II, visited Hainault with her son, afterwards Edward III, we are told that William, earl of Hainault, ‘had four fair daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Jane, and Isabel: among whom the young Edward set most his love and company on Philippa; and also the young lady in all honour was more conversant with him than any of her sisters.’ Queen Isabel had come to ask for aid against her enemies, and Froissart gives an account of the discussion between the earl and his council, who objected on prudential grounds to interfering with the quarrels of the English, and the earl’s brother, Sir John Hainault, who maintained that ‘all knights ought to aid to their powers all ladies and damsels chased out of their own countries, being without counsel or comfort.’ The earl finally yielded, saying, ‘My fair brother, God forbid that your good purpose should be broken or let. Therefore, in the name of God, I give you leave; and kissed him, Her marriage with Edward, then only fifteen years old, was agreed on, and sanctioned by the Pope. I am sorry to say that the chronicler gives no account of the lady’s bridal outfit The next glimpse we get of the queen is when she appears, accompanied with three hundred ladies and damsels ‘of noble lineage, and apparelled accordingly, at the yearly feast at Windsor, in honour of the order and brotherhood of the Knights of the Blue Garter, there established on St. George’s day.’ Again, when the king of Scots had advanced to Newcastle, while king Edward lay before Calais, we see the queen arriving to meet the English army, and going from division to division, ‘desiring them to do their devoir’—duty was then, as now, the English soldier’s word—‘to defend the honour of her lord the king of England, and, in the name of God, every man to be of good heart and courage; promising them that to her power she would remember them as well or better as though her lord the king were there personally. Then the queen departed from them, recommending them to God and St. George.’ She does not seem, like some of the ladies of that generation, to have considered the field to be her place while the battle was going on; but after it was won she returned, and with her council made all necessary arrangements and plans. Shortly after she joined her husband while he lay before Calais, ‘bringing many ladies and damsels with her, as well to accompany her, as to see their husbands, fathers, brethren, and other friends that lay at siege there before Calais, and had done a long time.’ And I think we may attribute it as well And lastly, as a counterpart to the picture I have already given of the death of the knight of romance, here is the account of the death of her who was the lady of the brightest day of historical chivalry:— ‘In the mean season there fell in England a heavy case and a common: howbeit it was right piteous for the king, his children, and all his realm; for the good queen of England—that so many good deeds had done in her time, and so many knights succoured, and ladies and damosels comforted, and had so largely departed of her goods to her people, and naturally loved always the nation of Haynault, the country where she was born—she fell sick in the castle of Windsor, the which sickness continued on her so long, that there was no remedy but death; and the good lady, when she knew that there was no remedy but death, she desired to speak with the king her husband, and when he was before her, she put out of her bed her right hand, and took the king by his right hand, who was right sorrowful at his heart. Then she said, “Sir, we have in peace, joy, and great prosperity, used all our time together: sir, now I pray you at our departing, that ye will grant me three desires.” The king, right sorrowfully weeping, said, “Madam, desire what ye will, I grant it.” The three requests of the dying woman were—that the king should pay all that she owed to any man; that he should fulfil all the promises she had made to the churches where she had “had her devotion,” and that “it might please him to take none other sepulture, whensoever it should please God to call him out of this transitory life, but beside her in Westminster.” The king, all weeping, said, “Madam, I grant all your desire.” Then the good lady and queen made on her the sign of the cross, and commended the king her husband to God, and her youngest son Thomas, who was there beside her; and anon after she yielded up the spirit, which I believe surely the holy angels received with great joy up to heaven; for in all her life she did neither in thought nor deed thing to lose her soul, as far as any creature could know. Thus the good queen of England died in the year of our Lord 1369, in the vigil of our Lady, in the midst of August.’ We have all pictured to ourselves, again and again, how the lady sat in her bower with her embroidery and her missal or romance, and saw from her lattice Perhaps too we have listened in fancy to the proceedings of the so-called Courts of Parliaments of Love, in which the ladies were wont to hear questions of gallantry gravely argued on both sides by poets pleading in verse, and then to give their judgments according to the logical and metaphysical rules which the schoolmen applied to theological enquiries. But I can now but remind my reader that such things were; and must hasten forward, leaving ungathered flowers that would make many a wreath and nosegay. The golden age of chivalry was the period from about the middle of the eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century. We may say with Gibbon, that the Crusades were at once a cause and an effect of chivalry. In the Crusades the spirit of knighthood, with all its characteristic features, actuated vast bodies of men of every rank and nation, and found a foe believed by all Christendom to be to it what the individual robber and plunderer was to the knight errant who went forth in his own country to defend or rescue the widow and orphan and their possessions, or the traveller along the road which passed the castle of some powerful though unworthy baron. The chivalry at home was kept alive, and raised to its highest energy, both in man and woman, by the chivalry in the Holy Land. It is in this period that the chief institutions of chivalry took their rise, or reached their full form; while their ruder features were gradually softened with the increasing refinement of the times, till they presented that aspect with which we find them in the days of Edward III and the Black Prince, as drawn by Froissart or Chaucer, or in the romances which were then written or remodelled out of older materials, and which show that even in the estimation of other nations the English court then afforded the pattern of knighthood for Christendom. Thenceforward the outward forms of chivalry began to decay; very gradually indeed, and not without apparent resuscitations from time to time. But no real revival was possible; for the immortal spirit was seeking new habitations for itself, ‘The knight’s bones are dust, And his good sword rust: His soul is with the saints, I trust:’— but he has left to us an imperishable and a rich inheritance, won for us by him. To him we owe our Manners—all that world of existence implied in the names Lady and Gentleman. Through the Middle Ages it was ‘Our Lady,’ the Virgin mother who embodied and represented to all men and women, from the prince to the peasant, their ideals of womanhood and ladyhood. In modern times St. Paul has been held to be the model of a gentleman; in whose acts and writings are found all the principles, maxims, and spirit of a character entirely chivalrous, in the amplest sense of the term: while one of our old dramatists has ventured, in words of touching tenderness and reverence, to point to a yet higher realisation of that ideal;— ‘The best of men That e’er wore earth about him, was a sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed.’ And it was the transference of these Christian ethics, into the practice of common daily, worldly life, in rude, half-barbarous times, which we owe to the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; a transference effected slowly, and with much mixture of evil with the good: nor is the work nearly completed yet; but the worth of it can hardly be overrated. This is not indeed all, but there is much truth in the old motto, ‘Manners makyth man.’ Manners, like laws, create a region and atmosphere of virtue within But manners are good, not only as affording a fairer field for the exercise of the higher virtues, but good in themselves. They are a real part of the beauty and grace of our human life. Courtesy, and self-possession, and deference and respect for others; modesty and gentleness towards all men, and recognition in all of the true gold of humanity, whether it bear the guinea stamp or no; love of truth and honour; and not only readiness, but eagerness to help the weak, and defend their cause against the strong; and all these irradiated and glorified, as often as may be, by that sentiment which ‘——gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices;’— these are the things which make the lady and the gentleman. And if it should seem as though the chivalry of our own times is reduced to something less noble than that of old, when men risked life, and things dearer than life, in defending the weak and attacking the oppressor in his strongholds—when the hardness of the actual fight against evil-doers was not exaggerated in the romances which pictured the knights contending with dragons and enchanters and giants—we must remember that our nineteenth century world is yet far from cleared of the monstrous powers of evil, which still oppress and devour the weak; and that a battle, not really less resolute, nor, if need be, less desperate, than those of old, is still carried on by those who, under the modest guise of common life, are fighting in the true spirit of chivalry—uniting the most adventurous enthusiasm with the most patient endurance, and both with the gentlest service of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed; and, what is most worthy of admiration, the service of the morally poor, and weak, and oppressed, who, but for such deliverers, must remain in a house of bondage darker than can be built or barred by earthly hands. But whether we are content with the chivalry of manners, or aspire to a place in the brotherhood of the chivalry of action, our principles, our maxims, and our examples have come down to us as an inheritance from the past:—an inheritance common to all who care to claim it; and won for us by the old knights, fighting in the name of God and of their ladies |