The Knights of the Round Table: Stories of King Arthur and the Holy Grail

by William Henry Frost

Instead of going from Winchester straight back to London, we took a little run across to Salisbury. It was not so much that we wanted to see Salisbury, though it is a pretty place and has a fine cathedral, but I wanted to go to Stonehenge. To look at Stonehenge, I think, brings one nearer to the history and the legend of ancient Britain than anything else that I have ever seen. And if Stonehenge were nothing at all it would still be worth going to, for the ride to it from Salisbury is one of the prettiest in all England. There is no such remarkable scenery, perhaps, as is to be found in many another place, but on that day when we rode out there the fields were fairly blazing with flowers, red and yellow and purple, and the little gardens were almost too full of them to hold them all without spilling. It was just a free, open, country ride, with everything around looking peaceful and sweet and beautiful and happy.

And when you take that ride, if you trust to a driver who knows the way and where you ought to go, he will bring you soon to Old Sarum. It is a hill, with a thick double wall of earth and a ditch around it, and it was a Roman town once. Perhaps it was a British town or stronghold before that. It reminded us a little of Cadbury Castle, but it is a good deal bigger. It had a cathedral in it once, but for some reason or other the people began to get tired of living in it and moved down and made the town of Salisbury, and there a new cathedral was built, and Old Sarum came to be nothing at all any more but a great hilltop, with its walls and its ditch around it.

From Old Sarum we went on to Amesbury. I told the driver that I wanted to stay there for a little while. I think he meant to make a little stay, whether I had mentioned it or not, for he got ready to do it with less explanation than it usually takes to get a driver to do anything he is not used to. He stopped at the little hotel and gave the horse a drink, and we gave him enough to get something to drink for himself. Then we walked on toward the church and told him to follow us in a little while.

We had walked about in the churchyard for only a minute when we saw a man coming toward us. He proved to be the vicar, who had seen us and was coming to show us the church. He did show it to us and told us a great many interesting things about it which I cannot remember well enough to repeat them here. But I do remember that it was so old that I decided that there must have been a church here in King Arthur's time, and that perhaps some part of this very one was standing then.

"But where is the old abbey?" I asked. "Are there not some ruins of that left?"

We were outside the church now and were looking about at the fields and the trees. "Oh, no," the vicar said, "there is nothing left of the abbey now. It was very near where that large house is now. That is the house of Sir Edmund Antrobus. We can come nearer and look at it, if you like." So we went nearer and looked at it, and it was a handsome house, and then we went and stood on a little bridge across the Avon. It was a shady place and the water was clear, so that we could see the trout swimming in it, and we looked down the river under a green arch of trees that grew on the sides of the stream and sent their branches to meet above it. "I should like you to remember this place," I said, "because Queen Guinevere lived here for a long time. It is not time yet for me to tell you how or why, but I will tell you when the time comes, and till then I want you to remember how the place looks. Remember these fields and this river and these trees. I don't know, of course, whether they looked the same then, but they may have been not so very different. So think of Queen Guinevere sometimes standing on a bridge, just as we are now, or on the bank of the river, and looking down into just such clear water and up at just such cool, green, spreading trees. Remember that she lived over there where Sir Edmund Antrobus lives now, and that she walked many a morning, it is likely, across these very fields, to a church that stood where the church is now. That is all. Remember it till we come to the story about it."

By the time we came out to the road the driver was waiting for us and wondering what we had found to keep us so long. We got into the carriage and went on again, and nothing happened till we got to Stonehenge. Now I know that you don't want me to describe Stonehenge to you. If you want to know a great deal more than you do about it, you can find it in a good many big and learned books. What I wish I could do would be to make you see it, and I cannot do that. It is not much to tell about, but it is a wonderful thing to see. It seems to me to mean so much, standing there, so lonely, in the middle of Salisbury Plain—that great circle of half-smoothed stones—grand, sad, silent, older than history—a solid, real, noble thing, left to us from a time out of which we have little else but fairy tales. It was a huge circle of stones once, square pillars set on end and big blocks laid across them. Now many of them are lying on the ground, where they fell so long ago that some of them are half buried in it. Some way off from the circle is another tall stone, that they say the devil once threw at a monk. He was such a good man that the devil could not hurt him, but it struck his foot and took the print of his heel, and the print is there now, to prove the story. In the morning of the day of the summer when the sun goes highest in the sky, people come here to see it rise. I have never been here then, but they say that on that morning, if you stand over across the circle and look through one of the great stone gateways, you will see the sun rise exactly over the point of this stone that the devil threw at the monk.

"I am sorry," I said, "that I cannot tell you the history of Stonehenge, but I can tell you the story of it, if you care to hear it."

To be sure Helen cared to hear it.

"We shall have to go back, then," I said, "to a time long before King Arthur was born. Lud was the King of England. It was for him that London was named. Perhaps the two names do not sound very much alike to you, but you know names will get a good deal twisted, the best you can do. Lud had a brother named Levelys, who had gone over to France and married a princess and had become King of France. And about that time King Lud and his people began to have a great deal of trouble. There were three things that troubled them especially. The first was a race of people called the Coranians. I don't know where these Coranians came from or what they did to make themselves so troublesome, but there is no doubt that, for some reason or other, they did not get on well with Lud's people. And the worst of it was that there seemed to be no way to get rid of them. The reason was that they had such good ears. For they could hear anything that was said anywhere on the island, no matter how softly it was spoken, if the wind was the right way. And so no plan against them could ever be talked over without their finding out all about it.