Maél-was, a servant boy, was translated into old Romance French as the former, by the word Ancel, or Ancelot, otherwise L'Ancelot; Villemarqué quotes a mention of the ‘fable Ancelot et Tristan,’ from the romance of Ogier, to show that in earlier days Mael, or Ancelot, was mentioned without the article, which has since become incorporated with it, so that Lancelot has grown to be the accepted name, and so universally supposed to mean a lance, that the Welsh themselves, re-importing his history, called him Palladr, a shivered lance. Ancelot and Ancelin were certainly early chivalrous names, the latter perhaps confused with the Ansir or Æsir of the Teutons. Ancilée and Anselote are feminine names in the register of Cambrai, of the dates of 1169 and 1304; and as there most of the feminines are changed from those of men, it is evident that Ancil and Anselot must once have existed there, either named from the hero of romance, or translated from some Walloon Mael; and thence no doubt the Asselin, Ascelin of our old Norman barons, and the Atscelina Fossard, mentioned in a curious old tract on female names, as having lived in the North of England. It is curious that even romance does not profess that Launcelot was the true name of the knight, thus formed from the Cambrian chieftain, though Galahad is there said to have been his proper name, afterwards given to his worthier son. Launcelot was bestowed on him by Vivian, the Lady of the Lake, who stole him in infancy from his father, King Ban, and brought him up under her crystal waves, till he was eighteen, when, as Sir Lancelot du Lac, he appeared at King Arthur’s court, and became the principal figure there, foremost in every feat of chivalry, the flower of knighthood; but in the noble severity of the English romance, he was withheld from counsels of perfection, by his guilty love for Gwenever, and lying spell-bound in a dull trance when the holy vision of the Sanc-greal past by. Finally, he broke with King Arthur, and opened the way to Mordred’s fatal rebellion by his defection, too late repenting, and after Arthur’s fall becoming a hermit and a penitent.
His story was told with deep warning in England, but in Italy it was ‘Lancilotto’ that Francesca di Rimini looked back to as the tale that had been the spark to awaken fatal passion.
He has ever since been regarded as the type of penitence for misdirected love and chivalrous prowess, and in consequence Lancelot, and its contraction Lance, have never been entirely out of use in England, though not universal.
CHAPTER IV.
NAMES OF CYMRIC ROMANCE.
Section I.—The Round Table.
It is a very remarkable fact, that the grand cycle of our national romance and poetry, has been made to centre round the hero of a people whom we have subdued, and were holding in our power with difficulty, at the very time that minstrels were singing the adventures of the leader who had for the longest time kept our forces in check.
Many a patriot has fought as boldly as Arthur, many a nation has held out as bravely as the remains of the Britons; but as the “battle is not to the strong,” so renown is not to the most able; and it was to a very peculiar concatenation of circumstances that the Britons owed it that their struggles in Somerset, Cornwall, and Strathclyde should have been magnified into victories over Rome and half Europe, and themselves metamorphosed from wild Cymry, with a little Roman polish and discipline, into ideal models of chivalry.
That they did fight there can be no doubt. If the dismal groans of the Britons were ever sent at all, it was but a small number who groaned. As to the Anglo-Saxons, they had been coming even before the Romans, and Carausius and his fleet held them in check for awhile; but there can be no doubt that they came in much greater numbers, and with more intent to settle, than in former times, in the decay of the empire. Moreover, the resistance evidently became more resolute and valid, as the tide flowed westward over the diagonally arranged strata of the island; the alluvial lands to the east have no traditions of battles, but at the chalk downs, the rounded hills have names and dim legends of fights and of camps, and cities begin to claim to be the scene of Arthur’s court.
Westward again, with the sandstone hill and smiling valley, the tales multiply spots where the court was held in perplexing multitude; river upon river puts forth its old Keltic name of Cam, the crooked, and calls itself the place of the last decisive fight. And when the moorland and mountain are actually reached, and the heather stretches wide over the granite moor, with the igneous peak of stone crowning the lofty crag, there the Briton is still free, and points to his rocky summits as his hero’s home.
To those fastnesses were the Cymry finally limited, if they would enjoy their native government; and though many remained as serfs, and some as clergy, in the open country, the national spirit was confined to those who dwelt in the strongholds of the West. There did their bards sing and tell tales, and compose Triads on the past glories of their race, with a natural tendency to magnify the exploits of their most able defender. At the same time, the Armoricans on the other side of the water, some of whom had, probably, according to their tradition, migrated from Britain, told their own legends, and sung their songs on the chief who had maintained the cause of their countrymen.