Geoffrey's window is a very fascinating place to be—possibly the most interesting window the world has ever seen. It is not just one lifetime which has found that window interesting, but more lifetimes than we can count comfortably. Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote his Morte d'Arthur in 1469, fairly lived in that window; so did Shakespeare when he wrote "King Lear" in 1605, and even the modern poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," composed a series of poems called "Idylls of the King," which return for their sources through Malory to Geoffrey at his window.
There is one story, however, which Geoffrey did not see as he looked out of his golden window—the story of the famous kitchen boy, or "Gareth and Linet." This tale is found in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which was not completed until 1469, many years after the writing of Geoffrey's Chronicle in 1147. Clear and sunshiny is the English of this wonderful book of Malory's, and nowhere in the world can more beautiful, exciting, and marvelous stories be found than between the covers of the Morte d'Arthur. The Morte d'Arthur was written about twenty years after the invention of printing by Coster and Gutenberg. Sixteen years after the completion of the book by Malory, Caxton printed it in black letter in English. There is only one perfect copy of this book by Caxton, the first of the English printers, and that is in Brooklyn, New York. In the preface which Caxton wrote for the Morte d'Arthur, he says that in this book will be found "many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness and chivalries.... Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you good fame and renown." Certainly that is what the kitchen boy did, and it brought him to good fame.
It was one day when King Arthur was holding a Round Table court at Kynke Kenadonne by the sea. And they were at their meat, three hundred and fifty knights, when there came into the hall two men well clad and fine-looking. And, as the old story says, there leaned upon their shoulders "the goodliest young man and the fairest that ever they all saw, and he was large and long and broad in the shoulders, and well visaged, and the fairest and the largest-handed that ever man saw, but he fared as if he might not go or bear himself—"
KNIGHT IN ARMOR
MS. Roy. 2 A. xxii
Late Thirteenth Century
The two men supported the young man up to the high dais upon which Arthur was feasting. When the young man that was being helped forward was seen there was silence. Then the young man stretched up straight and besought Arthur that he would give him three gifts.
"The first gift I will ask now," he said, "but the other two gifts I will ask this day twelve months wheresoever you hold your high feast."