As one of the chief objects of the Early English Text Society is to
print every Early English Text relating to Arthur, the Committee have
decided that this short sketch of the British hero's life shall form one
of the first issue of the Society's publications. The six hundred and
forty-two English lines here printed occur in an incomplete Latin
Chronicle of the Kings of Britain, bound up with many other valuable
pieces in a MS. belonging to the Marquis of Bath. The old chronicler has
dealt with Uther Pendragon, and Brounsteele (Excalibur), and is
narrating Arthur's deeds, when, as if feeling that Latin prose was no
fit vehicle for telling of Arthur, king of men, he breaks out into
English verse,
"Herkeneþ, þat loueþ hono_ur_,
Of kyng Arthour & hys labo_ur_."
The story he tells is an abstract, with omissions, of the earlier
version of Geoffry of Monmouth, before the love of Guinevere for
Lancelot was introduced by the French-writing English romancers of the
Lionheart's time (so far as I know), into the Arthur tales. The fact of
Mordred's being Arthur's son, begotten by him on his sister, King Lot's
wife, is also omitted; so that the story is just that of a British king
founding the Round Table, conquering Scotland, Ireland, Gothland, and
divers parts of France, killing a giant from Spain, beating Lucius the
Emperor of Rome, and returning home to lose his own life, after the
battle in which the traitor whom he had trusted, and who has seized his
queen and his land, was slain.
"He that will more look,
Read on the French book,"
says our verse-writer: and to that the modern reader must still be
referred, or to the translations of parts of it, which we hope to print
or reprint, and that most pleasantly jumbled abstract of its parts by
Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, which has long been the delight of many a
reader,--though despised by the stern old Ascham, whose Scholemaster was
to turn it out of the land.--There the glory of the Holy Grail will be
revealed to him; there the Knight of God made known; there the only true
lovers in the world will tell their loves and kiss their kisses before
him; and the Fates which of old enforced the penalty of sin will show
that their arm is not shortened, and that though the brave and guilty
king fights well and gathers all the glory of the world around him, yet
still the sword is over his head, and, for the evil that he has done,
his life and vain imaginings must pass away in dust and confusion.
Of the language of the Poem there is little to say: its dialect is
Southern, as shown by the verbal plural _th_, the _vyve_ for five, _zyx_
for six, _ych_ for I, _har_ (their), _ham_ (them), for _her_, _hem_;
_hulle_, _dude_, _ȝut_, for hill, did, yet, the infinitive in _y_
(_rekeny_), etc. Of its poetical merits, every reader will judge for
himself; but that it has power in some parts I hope few will deny.
Arthur's answer to Lucius, and two lines in the duel with Frollo,
"There was no word y-spoke,
But eche had other by the throte,"
are to be noted. Parts of the MS. have very much faded since it was
written some ten or twenty years before 1450, so that a few of the words
are queried in the print. The MS. contains a few metrical points and
stops, which I have here printed between parentheses (). The expansions
of the contractions are printed in italics, but the ordinary doubt whether
the final lined _n_ or _u_--for they are often undistinguishable--is
to be printed n_e_, n_ne_, or u_n_, exists here too.
I am indebted to Mr. Sims, of the Manuscript Department of the British
Museum, for pointing out the Poem to me, and to the Marquis of Bath for
his kind permission to copy it for printing.
_3, Old Square, Lincoln's Inn,_
_London, W.C., August 30, 1864._