The romances connected with King Arthur and his knights went on steadily growing in number until the fifteenth century; of them, some have survived to the present day, but undoubtedly many have been lost.  Then, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the most famous of all the Arthurian stories was given to the world in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.  By good luck, the great printer who made it one of his first works, has left an account of the circumstances that led to its production.  In the reign of Edward IV., William Caxton set up his printing-press (the first in England) in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.  There he was visited, as he himself relates, by “many noble and divers gentlemen” demanding why he had not printed the “noble history of the Saint Grail and of the most-renowned Christian King ...  Arthur.”  To please them, and because he himself loved chivalry, Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory’s story, in which all that is best in the many Arthurian romances is woven into one grand narrative.

Since then, in our own days, the story of Arthur and his knights has been told in beautiful verse by Lord Tennyson; but for the originals of some of his poems it would be useless to look in Malory.  The story of Geraint and Enid, Tennyson derived from a very interesting collection of translations of ancient Welsh stories made by Lady Charlotte Guest, and by her called Mabinogion,[1] although not all Welsh scholars would consider the name quite accurate.

[Footnote 1:  Meaning the apprentices of the bards.]

And now it is time to say something about the stories themselves.  The Arthur of history was engaged in a life-long struggle with an enemy that threatened to rob his people of home, of country, and of freedom; in the stories, the king and his knights, like Richard Coeur-de-Lion, sought adventure for adventure’s sake, or, as in the case of Sir Peredur, took fantastic vows for the love of a lady.  The Knights of the Round Table are sheathed from head to foot in plate armour, although the real Arthur’s warriors probably had only shirts of mail and shields with which to ward off the blows of the enemy.  They live in moated castles instead of in halls of wood, and they are more often engaged in tournaments than in struggles with the heathen.  In fact, those who wrote the stories represented their heroes as living such lives as they themselves led.  Just in the same way, Dutch painters used to represent the shepherds in the Bible story as Dutch peasants; just so David Garrick, the great actor of the eighteenth century, used to act the part of a Roman in his own full-bottomed wig and wide-skirted coat.

It must not be forgotten that, in those far-away days when there were few who could even read or write, there was little that, in their ignorance, people were not prepared to believe.  Stories of marvels and magic that would deceive no one now, were then eagerly accepted as truth.  Those were the days when philosophers expected to discover the Elixir of Life; when doctors consulted the stars in treating their patients; when a noble of the royal blood, such as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, could fall into disgrace because his wife was accused of trying to compass the king’s death by melting a wax image of him before a slow fire.