The Round Table

The Round Table is not in Geoffrey of Monmouth. It appears first in 1155, in Wace's Roman de Brut, the Norman verse retelling of Geoffrey's history, where Wace says simply that Arthur had the Round Table made, of which the Bretons tell many a fable, so that his barons should sit round it and all be equal, none able to boast that he was placed higher than his peer. The first English account, Layamon's Brut, written about two generations later, tells how it came to be made. At a great feast a quarrel over precedence broke out among the Britons: loaves and wine-cups flew, then fists and knives, and noble blood was spilled over who should sit nearest the king. Then a craftsman offered to build Arthur a table that would seat sixteen hundred knights and more, yet be so cunningly made that the king could carry it with him on his journeys. The giant's furniture of Layamon dwindles in later tellings, but the reason for it never changes: the table was invented to end the oldest war at any court, the war over rank.

Robert de Boron and the Vulgate romances gave the table a pedigree and a destiny. In the Merlin continuations there have been three tables in the history of the world: the table of the Last Supper, the table that Joseph of Arimathea made for the Holy Grail, with its empty seat for the traitor Judas, and Arthur's Round Table, the third and last, made by Merlin in their pattern. Merlin raised it for Uther Pendragon; after Uther's death it passed to King Leodegrance of Cameliard, and when Arthur married Guinevere, Leodegrance's daughter, the table came to him as her dowry, with a hundred knights to fill its seats. The empty place of Judas became the Siege Perilous, the seat reserved for the knight who would achieve the Holy Grail, and any other man who dared to sit in it was destroyed. Year by year the seats filled, and the names of those who sat in them appeared by enchantment in letters of gold.

The table made a new kind of order. A rectangular table ranks its sitters from head to foot; a circle has no head, and at Arthur's table a poor knight of proved worth might sit beside a king's son and be his equal in honour. Malory gives the fellowship its charter in the oath sworn each year at the high feast of Pentecost, when the knights of the Round Table renewed their vows: never to do outrage or murder, always to flee treason, to give mercy to any who asked it, upon pain of forfeiting their honour and the fellowship for ever; never to fight in a wrongful quarrel, for love or for the goods of the world; and to stand by every lady, damsel and gentlewoman in distress. The number of seats shifts from text to text, shrinking from Layamon's sixteen hundred to Malory's hundred and forty, but the idea does not: the fellowship of the Round Table was the highest company a knight could keep, and to be of it was to be written into the age.

Yet the equal table kept its inequalities, and the paradox is the point. The table has no head, but the king still presides; all seats are equal, but one seat is forbidden to all but one man; all knights are brothers, yet the world knows Lancelot is first among them, and says so. The Round Table never promised equality of rank or of deeds; it promised equality of honour, that no knight's seat would shame him, that merit and not birth would measure a man in Arthur's hall. It even kept its own reserved chair. The Siege Perilous stood empty for years as a silent sermon that the circle had a centre it could not supply itself, waiting for the knight who would complete it. When Galahad came to Camelot at Pentecost and his name appeared upon the forbidden seat, the table was full at last, and the age turned.

For the fullness was the beginning of the end. The Grail appeared that same Pentecost and drew the fellowship out upon the quest, from which many never returned. The table that had been filled by enchantment was thinned by it. Lancelot's greatness, which had been the table's glory, became its fault-line when his love for the queen was forced into the open; the company split into those who stood with him and those who stood with Gawain's outraged kin, and no circle can hold a civil war. At Camlann the fellowship died with the king, and the Round Table ends where it began, as furniture: in the last books we hear no more of it, as if without the knights it was only oak.

The medieval world loved the idea enough to stage it. Round-table feasts, at which knights sat equal and jousted in Arthurian costume, were the fashion of the 13th and 14th centuries; Edward I held them to celebrate his conquests, and Edward III, planning an Arthurian order of three hundred knights, founded instead the Order of the Garter, the oldest order of chivalry in the world. And one table survives. In the Great Hall of Winchester Castle hangs an enormous disc of oak, five and a half metres across and more than a tonne in weight, made in the late 13th century, very likely for one of Edward I's round-table revels. Henry VIII had it painted in 1522 for the visit of the Emperor Charles V: a Tudor rose at its centre, King Arthur enthroned above with Henry's own face, and the names of twenty-four knights, from Galahad and Lancelot to Mordred, ringing the rim in Tudor green and white. Malory had written that Camelot was Winchester, and Winchester still keeps the table to prove it.

The idea has outlasted the furniture. We speak of round-table talks when rivals must meet with no head of the table to fight over, and every committee seated in a circle owes something to Merlin's design. T.H. White made the table the centrepiece of his Arthur's education, the invention by which the young king hoped to turn the violence of his age from Might makes Right into Might for Right, and its failure the measure of the tragedy. The table endures because it is the simplest picture ever drawn of a just fellowship: a circle of proven equals, sworn to mercy, bound to the defenceless, with one seat left empty for the best that is yet to come.