Stories of King Arthur and His Knights | Page 3

laughed quite out of existence.
The order of knighthood was given only after years of training and
discipline. From his seventh year to his fourteenth the nobleman's son
was a page at the court or in the castle of his patron, learning the
principles of religion, obedience, and gallantry. At fourteen, as a squire,
the boy began a severer course of training, in order to become skilled in
horsemanship, and to gain strength and courage, as well as the
refinements and graces necessary in the company of knights and ladies.
Finally, at twenty-one, his training was complete, and with elaborate
and solemn formality the squire was made a knight. Then, after a strict
oath to be loyal, courteous, and brave, the armour was buckled on, and
the proud young chevalier rode out into the world, strong for good or ill
in limb, strong in impenetrable armour, strong in a social custom that
lifted him above the common people about him.
When rightly exercised chivalry was a great blessing to the people of
its time. It offered high ideals of pure-minded, warm-hearted, courtly,
courageous Christian manhood. It did much to arouse thought, to
quicken sympathy, to purify morals, to make men truly brave and loyal.
Of course this ideal of character was not in the days of chivalry--ideals
are not often now--very fully realised. The Mediaeval, like the Modern,
abused his power of muscle, of sword, of rank. His liberty as a
knight-errant sometimes descended into the licence of a highwayman;
his pride in the opportunity for helpfulness grew to be the braggadocio
of a bully; his freedom of personal choice became the insolence of
lawlessness; his pretended purity and justice proved wanton
selfishness.

Because of these abuses that crept into the system, it is well for the
world that gunpowder at last came, to break through the knight's coat of
mail, to teach the nobility respect for common men, roughly to end this
age of so much superficial politeness and savage bravery, and to bring
in a more democratic social order.
The books of any age are for us a record of how the people of that age
thought, how they lived, and what kind of men and women they tried to
be. The old romances of chivalry give us clear pictures of the knights
and ladies of the Middle Ages, and we shall lose the delight and the
profit they may give us, if we think only of the defects of chivalry, and
close our eyes to the really worthy motives of those far-off times, and
so miss seeing what chivalry was able to do, while it lasted, to make
men and women better and happier.
Before reading the Arthur stories themselves it is well to know
something about the way they have been built up, as one writer after
another has taken the material left by predecessors, and has worked into
it fresh conceptions of things brave and true. First there was the old
Latin chronicle of Nennius, the earliest trace of Arthurian fact or fancy,
with a single paragraph given to Arthur and his twelve great battles.
This chronicle itself may have been based on yet earlier Welsh stories,
which had been passed on, perhaps for centuries, by oral tradition from
father to son, and gradually woven together into some legendary
history of Oldest England in the local language of Brittany, across the
English Channel. This original book is referred to by later writers, but
was long ago lost. Geoffrey of Monmouth says it was the source of his
material for his "Historia Britonum." Geoffrey's history, in Latin prose,
written some time about the middle of the twelfth century, remains as
the earliest definite record of the legends connected with King Arthur.
Only a little later Geoffrey's Latin history was translated by Wace and
others into Norman French, and here the Arthur material first appeared
in verse form. Then, still later in the twelfth century, Walter Map
worked the same stories over into French prose, and at the same time
put so much of his own knowledge and imagination with them, that we
may almost say that he was the maker of the Arthur romances.

Soon after the year twelve hundred,--a half century after Geoffrey of
Monmouth first set our English ancestors to thinking about the
legendary old hero of the times of the Anglo-Saxon
conquest--Layamon, parish priest of Ernly, in Worcestershire, gave to
the English language (as distinct from the earlier Anglo-Saxon) his
poem "Brut." This was a translation and enlargement of Wace's old
French poem having Arthur as hero. So these stories of King Arthur, of
Welsh or Celtic origin, came through the Latin, and then through
French verse and prose, into our own speech, and so began their career
down the centuries of our more modern