Joyous Gard, Launcelot’s favourite castle, is sometimes identified with Berwick. Malory tells us that ‘some men say it was Anwick, and some men say it was Bamborow.’ Bamborow, or Bamborough, is in Northumberland, sixteen miles southeast of Berwick. The castle, founded in the middle of the sixth century, which is the supposed time of Arthur’s reign, stands on a high rock projecting into the North Sea. It now contains a granary, hospital, and other endowments made for the poor in 1715 by Lord Crewe, bishop of Durham. Did he think of his predecessor Launcelot, and his doles of ‘flesh, fish, wine and ale, and twelve pence to any man and woman, come who would?’
The names of some other places in this book are given in the Glossary.
The Sangreal.
Let us turn to the Sangreal, or Holy Grail, the Quest of which forms so important a part of Malory’s book. The word ‘Grail’ means a dish, a drinking vessel, or a tureen, in the Romance language, and is probably derived from the Low Latin ‘gradalis’ or ‘grasalis’; and this from the Greek ‘crater’: and the old writers describe it sometimes as a shallow vessel for holding food, and sometimes as a cup[[12]]. The legend of the Grail is traced back to Pagan times, where it appears as a miraculously food-producing vessel, of which we perhaps see a survival in the coming of the Sangreal to Launcelot and King Pelles, and at the feast of Pentecost which led to the Quest:—
‘Then there entered into the hall the holy Grail covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it. And there was all the hall full filled with good odours, and every knight had such meats and drinks as he best loved in this world: and when the holy Grail had been borne through the hall, then the holy vessel departed suddenly, that they wist not where it became.’
But in the Christian form into which the legend passed, the Grail became either the dish which held the paschal lamb at the Last Supper, the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea had received the Saviour’s blood, or the sacramental cup itself. Mr. Alfred Nutt has treated the whole subject with exhaustive learning in his ‘Studies of the Legend of the Holy Grail,’ and his article ‘Grail, the Holy’ in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia. But when I say that one only of the many stories of which Mr. Nutt gives an account is a poem of 60,000 verses, I shall not be expected to attempt any summary of his book. I shall content myself with the more popular account of the Sangreal, in its immediate relation to Malory’s Morte Darthur. According to the romances of Le S. Graal, Lancelot du Lac, Perceforest, and Morte Arthur, the Sangreal, or Holy Graal, was the dish which held the paschal lamb of the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea having gone into the house where the Supper had been eaten, took away the dish, and in it received the blood from the wounds of Jesus; and this dish, ‘with part of the blood of our Lord,’ he brought with him into England, and with it converted many heathens; and it was kept in a tower expressly built for it at Corbenicy. The romance of Merlin says that ‘this vessel was brought to this said knight [Joseph of Arimathea] by our Lord Jesu Christ while he was in prison xl. winter, him to comfort,’ but does not mention its earlier history.
When Caxton replied to the ‘noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England’ who urged him to print the history of Arthur, that many persons held the opinion that there was no such Arthur, ‘one in special’ insisted that this was mere blindness, since Arthur’s sepulchre was to be seen at Glastonbury, Gawaine’s skull at Dover, the Round Table at Winchester, as well as many other relics. And if this noble gentleman had only known it, he might have added that the Holy Grail itself was to be seen in the Cathedral Church of Genoa. There it is still shewn. It is an hexagonal dish, about seventeen inches across, and was long supposed to be a single emerald, which stone it resembles in colour and brilliancy. It is called ‘Sagro Catino,’ with a tradition which makes it to be the Holy Grail we have just described, and with the addition that it was brought to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. It was taken, on the capture of Caesarea, by the Genoese under Guglielmo Embriaco in 1101 A. D. Like the other plunder of Italian cities it was taken to Paris by Napoleon I, and restored after the peace of 1815, but was broken in pieces on the road from careless packing. It is now kept together by a wire frame: and when I saw it in the Cathedral treasury a few years since I was gravely told that it was broken in its return from the Paris ‘Exposition’ of Napoleon III[[13]].
Influence of the Book on English Letters and Life.
The influence of Sir Thomas Malory’s book upon English literature, and so upon English life, upon our thoughts, morals, and manners, has been great and important. I have spoken of its claims to be considered an Epic poem; but it is not the less true, that it is our first great work of English prose, the first in which the writing of prose was shown to be one of the fine arts for England. Malory’s style is often inartificial: he is not always able to master the huge masses of his materials, and fails to fuse and mould them into a perfect whole. But we must confess the like of Milton, whose grand periods of magnificent English are often followed by others which are confused and cumbrous in form, if not in thought. It has taken many workmen, through many generations, to make our prose writing what it is: but there is an infant beauty in Malory’s style which is full of promise of the perfect manly form that is to be. The passages which I have already quoted are instances of this inartificial beauty of style. The thoughts and images spontaneously utter themselves in words without any attempt at rhetorical balance and arrangement. Thus in the lament of Sir Ector over Sir Launcelot, Malory does not ask himself whether there is a logical connection between courtesy and bearing a shield, or between true friendship and bestriding a horse, as a modern writer would have done, and so brought those sentences into a more finished though more monotonous correspondence with the rest. The flow of feeling is true, direct, and simple, and that is enough. Dr. Sommer, in his notes on the language of ‘Le Morte Darthur,’ points to the indications, in grammar, spelling, and other usages of words, of its transitional place between the language of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare; while Southey says that it was composed in the best possible time for making it what it is: and Mr. J. A. Symonds (whom I am permitted to name) says:—‘The Morte Darthur was written at a lucky moment in our literary history, when the old Saxon fountain of speech was yet undefiled, and when printing had not introduced stereotyped forms or enforced the laws of a too scrupulous grammar; at the same time the language is truly English—rich in French and Latin words, as well as Saxon, and not so archaic as to be grotesque or repulsive[[14]].
And if in these things Malory was happy in the opportuneness of the times in which he wrote, not less was he so in that he lived in a day in which (as we see from Caxton’s Preface) men could still believe in the marvellous adventures of knight-errantry. A hundred years later, the spirit of chivalry had so departed from the old forms that Spenser could only use them as materials for allegory, while Cervantes, himself full of the old spirit, could only treat the belief in knight-errantry as the fantasy of a crazed though generous mind. But Malory was still able to embody the ideals of chivalry in actual and serious personages, and so to influence the national character and manners of his countrymen in the best way. His book is a possession for all times. The old stock is still putting out new leaves and fruits for ourselves.