In 1344 Edward III decided to establish a fellowship of the Round Table, which pledge was modified four years later into the Order of the Garter. So the recipients of this honour have to thank an Oxford cleric named Geoffrey for their advancement. Henry V wrote to the Abbot of Glastonbury, in 1421, demanding that the remains of Joseph of Arimathea should also be miraculously recovered; but the king died before any exhumation could take place, and the site of Joseph’s supposed burial has never been revealed.
Then in 1486 Henry VII named his first son Arthur as a way both of reuniting the English nation after the dynastic “Wars of the Roses” and of affirming his own legitimacy as sovereign. There were jousts and banquets in medieval style, while the image of a young King Arthur was delineated on the walls of Richmond Palace. The “image of King Arthur riding a golden triumphal chariot through the sphere of the sun . . . was to have enormous significance for the development of the Tudor Arthurian myth.” 13 In fact the only two prospective heirs to the throne of England who were given the name of Arthur both died young. Would the myth of Arthur have survived so long without the untimely deaths of his later avatars?
In the year before the christening of Henry VII’s heir, the young Prince Arthur, a yet more splendid addition to the Arthurian legend emerged in the shape of Malory’s prose epic in eight books, under the title of Le Morte Darthur.
Little is known of Thomas Malory himself; he was a soldier of an old Warwickshire family and was present at the siege of Calais in 1436. He inherited an estate at Newbold Revell but quickly lapsed into a career of violence, theft and extortion. He broke out of several prisons, on one occasion swimming across the moat, and he fought with Warwick against Edward IV. He died on 14 March 1471 in or near Newgate prison, in which gaol he is likely to have written the entire epic of Arthur, which closes “Praye for me while I am on lyve that God sende me good delyveraunce.” It is fortunate that we do not expect our greatest authors to live virtuous lives, since this thief, blackmailer and ruffian has produced what his editor has called “the one work of real poetic value in the whole field of modern Arthurian fiction.” 14 “ ‘What?’ seyde Sir Launcelot. ‘Is he a theff and a knyht? And a ravyssher of women? He doth shame unto the Order of Knyghthode and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pyte that he lyvyth.’ ” These words must be the finest evidence for an embarrassed author in the entire history of English literature.
Thomas Malory first began the enterprise by adapting an alliterative Morte Arthur which, at a later date, Caxton considerably modified; that strange archaising mode did not fit naturally with the printer’s idea of “standard ” English. Then Malory turned to the vast corpus of French romances, together with some English additions, and radically shortened their rambling theses on courtly love and other speculative matters; he cut the theology, while at the same time condensing certain of the stories. He introduced these stories one after the other as if they were organic accretions of some total design, in the manner of an English cathedral of the same period. Malory is also of a decidedly pragmatic turn. As an Arthurian scholar has put it, “he exalts the practical over the ethereal and spiritual”;15 this will be seen to be a characteristically English response. Malory’s brevity is in fact an essential engine of the plot which turns upon sudden crises and arbitrary adventures; there are dramatic speeches rather than interior monologues, incidents rather than characters. This sensibility, deriving in part from the fierce reticence of the Saxons, runs very deeply through the English imagination.
The prose of Le Morte Darthur has the simplicity and vividness derived from great originals, while at moments of violence and high drama Malory reaches out for the alliterative tradition once more. The prose indeed generally registers that vernacular straightforwardness which Professor Chambers traced from Beowulf to the works of Sir Thomas More.
Sir Dynadan is dressed in “a womans garmente,” one of the earliest examples of that English taste for cross-dressing, “and when quene Gwenyver sawe sir Dynadan ibrought in so amonge them all, then she lowghe [laughed] that she fell downe; and so dede all that there was.” There are other examples of this colloquial register—“And there he lay lyke a fole grennynge and wolde nat speke”—which remains half the strength of written English prose.
There are certain principal themes in Le Morte Darthur, not the least of them being that great reverence for a distant past which is so much a part of national literature. But there are also certain key words which define this heroic world, among them “sothe,” “custom,” “aventure,” “worship,” “body,” “hole,” “felyship,” “marvayles,” “secretness,” all of them creating a charmed landscape of confrontation and of peril. The narrator makes mistakes, loses his sources, or refuses to endorse a certain section of the narrative; these are characteristically English manoeuvres, brought most delicately to life by Geoffrey Chaucer in his role as the embarrassed narrator. Malory is not an expert on “psychological individuality, and realistic time-schemes,” let alone causality,16 but many later English novelists have suffered from these minor failings. The slightly surrealistic air of his prose is suggestive in another sense, however, because it contributes to “the strangeness of Arthur’s kingdom.”17 It consorts, too, with the dominant note of the book, that “haunting elegiac tone or undertone . . . its sad suggestions of the vanity and transience of all things, of the passing away of pomp and splendour, of the falls of princes.”18 It reflects the mysterious and arbitrary workings of providence, doom foretold and prophetic dream. It has always been noticed that Sir Lancelot is the real hero of Malory’s narrative, but the central brooding figure is that of Arthur, the once and future king whose connection with the Holy Grail was to excite the attention of Blake and Tennyson, Scott and Rossetti, Steinbeck and Eliot.
In Malory’s account, “The Day of Destiny,” Arthur’s sword is thrown into a lake. “And there cam an arme and an honde above the watir, and toke hit and cleyght hit, and shoke hit thryse and braundysshed, and then vanysshed with the swerde into the watir.” When Arthur is told of this he replies, “Alas, help me hens, for I drede me I have tarryed over longe.” He is placed in a barge, with fair ladies in black hoods; all of them “wepte and shryked.” As he is guided away Sir Bedyvere cries out to him, “A, my lorde Arthur, what shall becom of me, now ye go frome me, and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes?” “Comforte thyselff,” said the king, “and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the vale of Avylon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!” Arthur never was heard of again, in this life, and Malory adds a final paragraph:
Yet som men say in many partys of Inglonde that kynge Arthur ys nat dede, but had by the wyll of oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tombe thys: Hic Jacet Arthurus, Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus.
Here is “the peace that passes all understanding.” Yet in this account of dolorous departing, we seem to have mislaid the actual British warrior-king who fought against the English. What is the spell of this enchantment thrown over a thousand years of English literature and English art? It lies in its unknowability; the probability that Arthur was British rather than Anglo-Saxon serves only to emphasise his otherness. He is the other who is being continually sought, even if the encounter may destroy you. He represents blood kinship and tribal fealty for the heterogeneous and muddled race of the English; he represents sanctified leadership, uniting England and the Holy Grail. Yet at the same time he is an image of transience and of loss, the unendurable loss of one who just slipped away. He is the shadow on the page. John Milton invoked “Arturumque sub terris bella moventum,” Arthur under the earth fomenting wars, and Dryden wished to compose an epic concerning “King Arthur, conquering the Saxons.” Both of them are images of ferocious national identity,
not untouched by melancholy and decay.
His memory was kept alive in folk-tale or oral tradition, and in the early eighteenth century it was recorded that “King Arthur’s story in English” was “often sold by the ballad-singers, with the like Authentic Records of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Southampton.” 19 Arthur slept in popular superstition, therefore, and he was not dead.
He was recovered for literary purposes in the nineteenth century, after suffering more than two centuries of relative neglect. He was restored in Tennyson’s early Arthurian poems, composed in the 1830s and 1840s, and in that poet’s Idylls of the King; Hallam Tennyson has written of his father that “what he called ‘the greatest of all poetical subjects’ perpetually haunted him.” William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere, and Swinburne composed Tristram of Lyonesse. There were scores of other revisions and redactions of Arthurian material, and they are still being issued. It was Tennyson, however, who “created a taste for Arthurian poetry unprecedented since the Middle Ages.”20 He began with “The Lady of Shalott” and ended with Idylls of the King, which “occupied the poet for more than fifty years and came closer than any other work of the age to being an epic and a national poem.”21 The advantage of English historicism is that it allows contemporary events and preoccupations to be observed in the context of a transcendent past; so the reader of Idylls of the King may draw conclusions about Victorian attitudes to women and nineteenth-century science. Medievalism did not preclude modernity, but actively encouraged it, with the unspoken assumption that “the Victorian world may profit from the patterns of the past.”22 Thus Hallam Tennyson noted of his father’s Arthurian poems that he “infused into them a spirit of modern thought and an ethical significance” which revived an entire literary tradition.
This is the true significance of Arthur: by not dying, by being perpetually reborn, he represents the idea of the English imagination. By creating a national epic, Tennyson also reasserted the power and efficacy of English literature itself. That epic, envisaged by Milton and Wordsworth alike, embodied the realisation “that the Arthurian legend was more than legend, was in fact the great national fount of myth and symbol.” 23 Tennyson had discovered Arthur in childhood. “The vision of an ideal Arthur as I have drawn him,” he wrote, “had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted upon Malory.” So in tracing that king’s doleful life he was returning to his own beginnings, and in the conflation of mood and memory he was also touching upon the source of national literature itself.
Tennyson told Caroline Fox that he believed Arthur to have been an “historical personage,”24 yet it is the music of Tennyson that lingers, that swelling cadence which is the movement of the language itself; it is a solemn music which always seems to anticipate its own dying fall, and so is consonant with the theme of Arthur and of Avalon. Yet, somehow, it exists too outside the rhythm of human time in a perpetual exequy to its own nature. Merlin, the great riddler, understood this:
For an ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever
That is what is meant by the suspension of meaning in the English epic of Arthur, which itself allows so many allusions and changing identifications. As Tennyson said of certain interpretations of his Arthurian characters, “They are right, and they are not right. They mean that and they do not.” Yet the meaning lies in the melody itself, in the music of transmission and inheritance which has no ultimate meaning except its survival through time. It is the search for pattern—pattern for its own sake—and for sacred order. That is why Arthur has survived.
It has been said that “Wilfred Owen saw the remnants of Arthur’s knights” in the carnage of the Western Front and heard the music “in the screaming funnel of a hospital barge.”25
And that long lamentation made him wise How unto Avalon, in agony, Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed
These lines were influenced by Tennyson’s “The Passing of Arthur” where is evinced
. . . an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land
The lamentation was taken up by T. S. Eliot, too, who so wished to unite himself with the English tradition that his poetry clustered around the music of Malory. “Therefore men calle hit—the londys of the two marchys—the Waste Londe, for that dolerous stroke.”
The Piety of England
CHAPTER 17
Faith of Our Fathers
In “the Tale of the Sankgreal,” as related by Thomas Malory, Sir Gala-had witnesses the miracle of transubstantiation during the holy communion of the Catholic Mass. The bishop took up a wafer “which was made in lyknesse of brede. And at the lyfftyng up there cam a figoure in lyknesse of a chylde, and the vysage was as rede and as bryght os ony fyre, and smote hymselff into the brede, that all they saw hit that the brede was fourmed of a fleyshely man. And than he put hit into the holy vessell agayne.” It is a strange scene, as the wafer of bread is transformed into a child and man before being dipped into the chalice, but it is fully consistent with the belief of Malory’s contemporaries that in the miracle of the Mass the Word does indeed become flesh. There are many stories, or legends, of the eucharist turning into a burning babe, just as the miraculous properties of the consecrated host were endlessly attested. It is at the heart of Catholic England and, as a matter of instinctive practice and natural belief, at the center of the culture which Catholic England manifested. The material world was relished with as much fullness as spiritual truths were venerated. It has been said of London customs of the fourteenth century that “the drinking bouts and rough games had once been religious ceremonies in themselves: and the two ideas were still confused in the popular imagination.” 1 The remark is of the utmost significance for any understanding of medieval England.
From the reports of foreign observers it becomes clear that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English were notable for their piety; they rivalled the Romans in their love of ceremony, and the Spanish in their devotion to the Virgin. The bells of the London churches deafened those who were unfamiliar with them, and a continental observer noted of the citizens that “they all attend Mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public, the women carrying large rosaries in their hands.” This was the dispensation and condition of England until the time of Henry VIII, and it is open to question whether the legacy of the last five hundred years will outweigh or outlast a previous tradition of fifteen hundred years.
We may begin by saying that England then was at the center of Catholic Europe. It was a shared civilisation of ceremony and spectacle, of drama, of ritual and display; life was only the beginning, not the end, of existence and thus could be celebrated or scorned as one station along the holy way. It was a world in which irony and parody of all kinds flourished, where excremental truth and holy vision were considered fundamentally compatible, where Aquinas could mount towards heaven with his divine dialectic and Rabelais stoop towards the earth with his gargantuan corporeality. It was a world of symbolic ceremony, with the processions of Palm Sunday, the rending of the veil in Holy Week and the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. Doves were released at Pentecost in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Resurrection dramatised on Easter Day in Lichfield Cathedral. It was a world also deeply imbued with symbolic numerology; this lies behind the preoccupation with form and ritual, as well as the fascination with pattern. There were the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of the Virgin, the five wits of the human self and the five principal social virtues of fraunchise, felawship, cleanness, cortaysye and pite. This concern for pattern is embodied in the form of the pentangle, otherwise known as “David’s Foot” and created by the wooden swords of early folk-dancers with the cry of “A Nut! A Nut!” or a Knott—
. . . the English call it, In all the land, I hear, the Endless Knot2
There are seven sins, seven sacraments, and seven works of mercy, all of them part of the passage of humankind through
earthly existence; the importance of allegory may here be glimpsed, with the allegorical “reading” of texts and illuminations as a fundamental prerequisite for the understanding of Piers the Plowman, Pearl or the “General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales. We might suggest in turn that the history plays of Shakespeare, and the symbolic fictions of Charles Dickens, owe something to this now buried or disregarded tradition.
The day itself was the medium of ritual. The canonical hours of the Church—with the “Great Hours” of Lauds and Vespers mingled with the “Little Hours” of Prime, Tierce, Sext, None and Compline—materially altered the shape of time in medieval discourse. The hours were connected with the narrative of Christ’s Passion, with Sext representing the Crucifixion and entombment, but there was also a farther litany of time with the hours of the Virgin as intercessor and intermediary for mankind. The sequence of hours then represents the passage of sacred events which are beyond the claims of time; linear duration is replaced by cyclical commemoration so that the elusive present moment is always hallowed by the presence of spiritual truth. Thus the drama of the medieval period is at once eternal and starkly contemporary, the shepherds both local men and emblems of wandering mankind. When in one of the nativity plays a sheep, stolen from a field near Bethlehem, is disguised as an infant child in a cradle, the allusion to Christ as the Lamb of God might seem crude and even shocking; but, for the Yorkshire audience of “The Second Shepherd’s Play” in 1440, it would have seemed natural if decidedly comic. There was no aversion to things of the flesh but, rather, an understanding of them as tokens of the divine order. A prayer at the end of the Mass celebrates the fact that God blesses “oure brede & oure ayl,” where the bread of holy communion is seen to be equivalent to the bread upon the table of kitchen or tavern.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 15
