Spenser transferred romantic fiction into the region of allegory, and gave to English literature the immortal “Faery Queen.”  In our own day the “Idyls” of Tennyson have made the legends of Arthur a part of our common thought, and the Knights of the Round Table familiar in almost every household.  The romances of chivalry fall naturally into three general classes:  those relating to Charlemagne and his peers; those relating to classical and mythological heroes; and, finally, the tales connected with King Arthur.  The strong similarity which exists in the character and incidents of these three classes makes an acquaintance with one of them sufficient for the purpose of this work.  The “Morte d’Arthur” and the romances of which it forms a compendium will therefore be chiefly considered, as being the most interesting in their bearing on English fiction.

In the early part of the twelfth century, Walter Mapes, Archdeacon of Oxford, while travelling in France, became possessed of a book written in the British or Armoric language, which treated of the history of kings of Britain, and was undoubtedly even at that time of considerable antiquity.  Little is known concerning this curious work.  It related the fabulous martial deeds of British kings, of whose existence there is no previous record, their victories over giants and dragons, and the various supernatural influences to which they were subject.  Hence comes the story of King Lear and of Jack the Giant-Killer, and here are first met the characters of King Arthur and the enchanter Merlin.  This book having been translated into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, at once attained a great popularity and reputation; and for several centuries was universally accepted as true history.  A number of metrical romances soon appeared to gratify the taste which Geoffrey’s chronicle had excited, and in the first half of the thirteenth century the same stories began to be written in prose.  From this time until the middle of the fifteenth century most of what we now call romantic fiction was produced, although many imitations and translations appeared in England for more than a century afterward.  The exact dates of the different romances and the names of their authors cannot be positively established, as the early copies were undated, and the names prefixed to them are believed to be fictitious.  During this period were given to the world, among many others, the romances of Merlin the Enchanter, of Launcelot du Lac, of Meliadus, of his son Tristram, of Gyron le Courtoys, of Perceval le Gallois, and, finally, that of the Saint Greal, in which the whole body of knights-errant are represented, probably by some monkish writer, in the search for the Holy Cup which had held the blood of Christ.  At last Sir Thomas Malory, a London knight, well read in chivalric literature, combined these tales in the volume he called the “Morte d’Arthur,” an excellent specimen of a chivalric romance, which was printed by Caxton in 1485, and has since appeared in many editions down to the present day.