Castles and Space in Malory's "Morte Darthur" 184384527X, 9781843845270

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Molly A. Martin

Cover image: View of Alnwick Castle from the lake. Photo courtesy of Alnwick Castle. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Space

The book also traces the mutual development of space and identity in the text, looking at Malory’s Arthurian community in and around castle space, both as individuals and as a group; for example, it considers Arthur’s political success through his use of space, and shows how crucial Camelot and its hall are to the fellowship of knights. Overall, the volume suggests a better understanding of the community’s central organising body, the Round Table, and offers important rereadings of a number of episodes and characters.   MOLLY A. MARTIN is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Indianapolis.

Castles

Castles play an integral part in Malory’s Morte Darthur; Camelot, Tintagel, Joyous Gard, and Dover, for example, are the crucial backdrop to the action and both host and shape the story as it moves through them. But despite this, Malory’s castles have received limited scholarly attention. As the first monograph to look extensively at either castles or space in Malory, this book aims to fill that gap. It reads the Morte through its castles – their architecture, structural and symbolic significance, and geographical locations, together with their political, communal, ritual, domestic, and martial functions.

and i n M a l ory ’ s M o r t e D a r t h u r

Arthurian Studies SERIES EDITOR: Norris J. Lacy

Castles Space and

in Mal or y’s Mo rt e Dart hur

7

Molly A. Martin

ARTHURIAN STUDIES LXXXIX

CASTLES AND SPACE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR

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ARTHURIAN STUDIES ISSN 0261-9814 General Editor: Norris J. Lacy

Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

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CASTLES AND SPACE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR

Molly A. Martin

D. S. BREWER

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© Molly A. Martin 2019 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Molly A. Martin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2019 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 527 0 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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For Fuzzy, Ferguson, Barney

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Contents List of Plates

viii

Introduction: Into the Castle

1

1 Castles as Political Centers

23

2 Castles and Community Identity

59

3 Castles and Ritual

115

4 Castles and the Domestic Sphere

143

5 Castles as Prisons

189

6 Castles at War

227

Afterword: Beyond the Castle Gate

261

Bibliography

263

Acknowledgements

281

Index

283

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Plates 1 Warwick Castle (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

19

2 Tintagel Castle, reproduced by kind permission of English Heritage (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

31

3 Winchester Round Table, reproduced with permission of The Great Hall, Hampshire County Council (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

49

4 Carlisle Castle, reproduced by kind permission of English Heritage (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

97

5 Dover Castle, reproduced by kind permission of English Heritage (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

133

6 Bamburgh Castle, reproduced with permission of Bamburgh Castle (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

233

7 The Tower of London, © Historic Royal Palaces

244

8 Old Sarum, reproduced by kind permission of English Heritage (photograph by Barney T. Haney)

258

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Introduction: Into the Castle

This view of space as intrinsic to human activity is in contrast to our ‘educated error’ of seeing space as the background to objects, and so as the background to human behavior.1 Bill Hillier All history, it has been said, is local history. Certainly the history of individual castles can often help to explain the great political events, and much of the history of medieval England, not to speak of Wales, is locked up in its castles.2 R. Allen Brown

Castles litter the landscape of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, as they did – and still do – England itself. As such, these architectural and geographical landmarks serve as a constant reminder of the royal, noble, and chivalric settings of the Arthurian story. However, castles are much more than locations or settings, although that is a role they fill with more importance – and even panache – than one might expect. For example, Arthur’s conception occurs after a breach in castle security; Launcelot breaks into and falls out of castles at crucial junctures in his relationship with Queen Gwenyver; and the schism between Launcelot and his king plays out on and around the walls of Joyus Garde and Benwick. Castles also provide the starting and ending points for many quests, which help define the knights of Arthur’s Round Table. Thus, they are both the launchpads and the confirmations of knightly endeavors. Furthermore, they are seats of power – political, military, economic, and so forth. They are prisons and prizes and keepers of ritual. Just as important, they are homes for many in the text. In these several capacities, these architectural 1



Bill Hillier, ‘Spatial Analysis and Cultural Information: The Need for Theory as Method in Space Syntax,’ in Spatial Analysis and Social Spaces: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Interpretation of Prehistoric and Historic Built Environments, eds. Eleftheria Paliou, Undine Lieberwirth, and Silvia Polla (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 20 [19–47]. 2 R. Allen Brown, Allen Brown’s English Castles, new edition (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004 [1954]), p. 167.

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structures function as representations just as much as they occupy the space of and become the physical backdrop to the Morte. Castles operate as both physical and symbolic entities in Malory’s text, and they create meaning and identity – both individual and communal – through the literal and figurative forces they exert. Throughout the Morte, castles influence the characters who tread around and within their walls. As a physical, a symbolic, and a social space, the castle inflects the behaviors and identities that it frames. These social and structural functions even work in conjunction with each other at times to manipulate the identities and actions on the page, augmenting and even creating meaning. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka explain, ‘Not only did people create uses for space, but having done so, that space could influence the behavior of those who occupied it; defining space tended to prescribe the behavior within it.’3 This book consequently endeavors first and foremost to unpack those influences as they are manifest in Malory’s text. However, space is always more complex. While the space, both physical and social, influences its inhabitants, the characters and their actions likewise define and redefine the space’s meaning. There is thus a constant interplay between space and identity; this interplay ranges from subtle to quite obvious, but it always tells us much about the Morte and its construction of the Arthurian community and its ideology. Castles play a notable role in much medieval literature and are particularly visible in romances, where they participate in this relationship between architecture and identity to varying degrees. This is certainly true of the Arthurian corpus, including, of course, Malory’s sources. However, it is my contention that Malory’s emphasis on the presence and the physicality of castles at important junctures in the text – an emphasis evidenced by his alteration of those sources – brings to the forefront the paired influences of space and identity. While the Morte does usually share with its French and English sources the general settings of the stories, Malory’s text routinely directs attention more closely to the castles themselves. Malory locates several of the legendary castles in fixed geographical locations, and thus more specifically associates them with real castles in the English landscape. On several occasions, he focuses on specific physical and architectural features within his castles, pointing to particular places and how one accesses them. This sharpened focus 3

Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, ‘Introduction,’ in Medieval Practices of Space, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. x [ix–xviii].

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increases the impact that the castle, as building and as symbol, has on the construction of identity – again, both communal and individual – and action, as well as the correlative and reverse influence of characters on that space. That the castle figures prominently in both the history and the imagination of the English people probably goes without saying. However, in both cases, the ‘castle story,’ as Robert Liddiard and others have termed it, is quite complex.4 Indeed, the last few decades have even seen debate about just what constitutes a castle. Bodiam castle, which certainly passes the eye test, has stood at the center of this debate. Its apparent fortifications, deemed ineffective, have invited questions about the fitness of the label castle.5 Therefore, as R. Allen Brown rightly advises, a book about castles must begin with a definition.6 My goals and vantage point somewhat reconfigure this requirement – after all, if Malory calls it a castle, it’s a castle – but they do not negate it. It is important, and in some instances crucial, to be able to envision the castles, whether real or fictional, at least to some degree. An investigation of the mechanics of space within and around the castles of the text benefits immensely from an understanding of the physical presence of the castle, and a definition provides at least a foundation for that understanding. Brown’s own definition became a critical turning point in castle studies, though one that took time to be recognized, and one that he 4

See Robert Liddiard, Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066 to 1500 (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2005). For Liddiard, the castle story encompasses both the history of castles and the history of castle scholarship. 5 Colin Platt offers a brief summary of the arguments in The Castle in Medieval England and Wales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), pp. 114–15: Bodiam has been dismissed as a major fortress, and indeed many of its characteristics are indeed those of a well-planned fortified manor-house. Nevertheless, Sir Edward Dalyngrigge’s serious purpose at Bodiam is evident enough in the careful design of the castle’s approaches and the exceptional strength of its deeply machicolated gatehouses – the great twin-towered gatehouse at the centre of the northern front and the postern tower symmetrically placed on the south. Charles Coulson pushes the idea even further, arguing, ‘The “true castle” is so elusive essentially because, as now conceived, it scarcely ever existed. That Edward Dallingridge’s castle of Bodiam (1385–c. 1391) was true to its cultured age is only to be expected. That it also conformed, as many castles variously did, to a longrunning image making them more not less, “castles” – in the proper, contemporary sense – may be less obvious.’ Coulson, ‘Fourteenth-Century Castles in Context: Apotheosis or Decline?’ in Fourteenth Century England I, ed. Nigel Saul (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 136 [133–52]. See also Coulson, ‘Some Analysis of the Castle Bodiam, East Sussex,’ in Medieval Knighthood IV: Papers from the Fifth Strawberry Hill Conference, eds. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), pp. 59–104. 6 Brown, Allen Brown’s English Castles, p. 1.

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was perhaps not anticipating. Because he does provide a scholarly pivot, I will begin with Brown and then work both backward and forward. Brown begins by claiming that ‘the castle is basically a fortified residence, a residential fortress. It is this duality – residence and fortress, domestic and military – which goes far to distinguish the castle from other known types of fortification in the West.’7 In this view, the domestic function creates the distinction from previous military structures; and the military accoutrements, such as towers and walls, crenellations and machicolations, differentiate the castle from other later homes. Brown cites one further way to distinguish the decidedly medieval castle, noting that it is the residence of a lord, through which it assumes a ‘private as opposed to public or communal nature.’8 Both of Brown’s key additions to scholarly considerations of castles, the attention to the domestic and the private functions, figure heavily in my own reading of Malory’s Morte. Indeed, Malory’s castles, like so many in medieval literature, routinely (if uncomfortably) encompass the dualities that Brown proposes, as they combine – synchronically and diachronically – the public and private, the military and the residential. Brown’s work marks a small shift away from the earlier school of castle studies, which focused almost exclusively on the military capabilities of various architectural features.9 Evidence for this earlier trend in the field abounds, but two scholars certainly stand out: EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century and Sidney Toy in the twentieth. Both are heavily invested in the military architecture of the castles, largely in opposition to the religious architecture of churches, a topic that long dominated studies of medieval architecture. Viollet-leDuc openly endeavors to write a ‘history of the art of fortification,’ and thus compares military strategies and weapons on the one hand, and architectural features on the other.10 His is a tale of offense versus defense. Indeed, the original title of his work, Essai sur l’architecture militaire au Moyen-âge (An Essay on the Military Architecture of the Middle Ages), does not even name the castle, although the bulk of his book focuses on castle 7

Brown, Allen Brown’s English Castles, p. 1. Brown, Allen Brown’s English Castles, p. 3. 9 A complementary strand of castle studies prominent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century delves into the origins of the structures. See, for example, Ella S. Armitage, The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (London: John Murray, 1912). Debate about the origins of castles, and specifically castles in England, has continued, but is not central to this discussion. 10 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Castles and Warfare in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Macdermott (Mineola and New York: Dover Publications, 2005), p. 1; originally published as Essai sur l’architecture militaire au Moyen-âge (Paris: Bance, 1854). 8

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type fortifications. Eight decades later, Toy continues this traditional approach to castles. In the preface to his book on castles, he explains that the object of this work is to trace the development of the art of fortifications throughout Europe and the Levant generally from the period of the earliest historical examples down to the sixteenth century of our era; noting in their order, the salient features of the military works themselves as well as the siege operations employed against them.11

As promised, the book investigates that relationship between offensive and defensive technologies and architecture. Toy does hint at features of castles that are not explicitly connected to fortification – decorative and otherwise – but interprets these as part of the overall military message. Speaking of Castle Rising, in Norfolk, for example, he states, ‘A noticeable feature of this keep is the extent of its external ornament, unusually great for a military building. But the ornament is so disposed, especially in respect to the long vertical mouldings of the buttresses, as rather to increase than detract from the impression of strength and dignity.’12 Thus even decorative elements are marshalled as evidence for the primacy of military function. Moreover, this thinking encapsulates the state of the study of medieval architecture up to the middle of the twentieth century. Ornamentation was perceived as limited to – or at least was of interest only in – religious constructions. Castles invited an examination of military capability only. Other aspects of architecture, such as domestic functions, received almost no attention. Perhaps unintentionally, though, Toy is here scratching at the surface of the symbolic properties of castle architecture. This idea will later become central to the field, but is here still a whisper. Toy proceeds to detail the development of castles in reaction to changing defensive needs and tactics. The line of thought heralded by Viollet-le-Duc and Toy lingers even after the middle of the twentieth century.13 The fitness of fortifications maintained a premier position in the assessment and definition of castles. 11

Sidney Toy, Castles: Their Construction and History (New York: Dover Publications, 1985), p. xiv; originally published as Castles: A Short History of Fortifications from 1600 B.C. to A.D. 1600 (London: William Heinemann, 1939). The title change, which obfuscates the text’s stated focus on fortification, seems to reflect shifts in the field to be detailed below. 12 Toy, Castles, p. 76. 13 To this pair, I would add A. Hamilton Thompson, whose work Viollet-le-Duc and Toy straddle. See A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Castle: An Account of its Development as a Military Structure (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), originally published as Military Architecture in England in the Middle Ages (London: Oxford University Press, 1912). Again, the subsequent retitling of the book plays into the surge in castle studies.

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D. J. Cathcart King, writing three decades after the field had begun its movement to a more balanced look at castles, privileges military over domestic functions. He explains that a castle is a ‘fortified habitation,’ and explicitly rejects the word ‘residence’ because it ‘suggest[s] a gracious and comfortable dwelling, at least by the standards of its time, whereas very many castles by no means qualify for that character.’14 He also points out that owners did not necessarily regularly live in their castles. King further explains that ‘a building without defences, or without defences which could not have been held against a serious attack’ is not a castle.15 Though rhetorically pointing out what a castle is not, King here highlights what it is: a structure defined by the quality of its military fortifications. Despite this continued attention to the military features of castle architecture – one that Brown, too, follows even after his important hints about the residential and private nature of the castle – other aspects and roles began to creep into the conversation.16 Notions of the importance of castles’ multiplicity incited a growth in scholarship that looks beyond the narrow focus on military aspects of the castle. Critics across fields have expanded the areas of inquiry into castles to include more readily the domestic, economic, and political roles, for example. Less than a decade after Brown’s important work, P. A. Faulkner pushes the boundaries of castle scholarship, citing the balance between different functions: ‘The form taken at any particular time is bound to be a compromise between these two issues [military and domestic functions], which will not only vary in relative importance but will each one vary as techniques in their respective fields develop.’17 More recently, John Goodall has seen the dual functions as a confluence, describing the castle as ‘the residence of a lord made imposing through the architectural trappings of fortification.’18 14

D. J. Cathcart King, The Castle in England and Wales: An Interpretive History (London and New York: Routledge, 1991 [1988]), p. 1; italics are original. 15 King, The Castle in England and Wales, p. 1. 16 For example, Brown, in Allen Brown’s English Castles, p. 123, states that The military role of the castle is the most obvious, the most romantic, and basically the most important. Though the castle was always a residence no less than a fortress, and though from these two fundamental rôles others subsidiary followed, it was military necessity which first called the castle into being, whether at the time of its origin in ninth- or tenth-century France or whether in the England of the Norman Conquest, and military necessity which caused precisely this fusion of the lordly residence and the stronghold which is the peculiar characteristic of the castle. 17 P. A. Faulkner, ‘Castle Planning in the Fourteenth Century,’ The Archaeological Journal 120 (1963): 215 [215–35]. 18 John Goodall, The English Castle, 1066–1650, published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 6.

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Faulkner’s approach is especially relevant to my own look at Malory’s castles, as the text evidences compromises and variable importance from both physical and social standpoints. Specific episodes and incidents draw Malory’s – and our – attention to the castle in particular ways. Goodall’s recalibration helps us see not only the fragmentation, but also the clustering of castle functions. My sense is that both military and residential functions are always at stake to one degree or another in the Arthurian castles we encounter in the Morte. Redefining the castle as both more comprehensive and more widely complicit in (noble) life throughout the Middle Ages opens the door for a look at the symbolic resonance of castles. Charles Coulson in particular has led this branch of study. Indeed, Coulson’s understanding of the castle encompasses its multiplicity while highlighting its ability to represent a cultural ideology: Although needing also to be in varying measure defensible, according to local and personal circumstances, the social purposes of the fortresses almost always comprehended and transcended their military functions. Castles were seldom, if ever, in their own day purely functional fortifications; certainly, they were often homes as well (which in fact imported an extra set of governing criteria), but, above all else, their builder sought to evoke in some manner the mouers of chivalry, the lifestyle of the great, and the legends of the past.19

This amounts to Coulson’s definition of the castle as a structure most valuable because of its symbolic and social possibilities. Indeed, elsewhere he denounces the attention to defensibility as the one and only characteristic used to stamp a building as a castle,20 and aligns specific defense architecture with symbolic meaning, showing that ‘crenellation conferred status’ and provided a ‘cloak of visible privilege.’21 Liddiard rightly adds to this idea that the use of crenellation, etc., employs a 19

Charles Coulson, ‘Structured Symbolism in Medieval Castle Architecture,’ Journal of the British Archaeological Association 132 (1979): 73–74 [73–90]. 20 See Coulson, Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Coulson argues that a castle that is ‘militarily insignificant’ is not ‘socially negligible’ (p. 35). He further explains ‘The fact that fortification was occasionally vindicated by violence does not mean that war determined castle-design’ (p. 49). 21 Coulson, ‘Hierarchism in Conventual Crenellation: An Essay in the Sociology and Metaphysics of Medieval Fortification,’ Medieval Archaeology 26 (1992): 86 [69–100]. This claim is especially important considering the regular return to crenellations (alongside other modes of fortification) and licenses to crenellate as proof of the primacy of military function. For a good overview on licenses to crenellate, see Philip Davis, ‘English Licenses to Crenellate: 1199–1567,’ The Castle Studies Group Journal 20 (2006–7): 226–45.

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‘military vocabulary,’ meaning that the symbol only works because of the reference to ‘real military power.’22 Goodall echoes and elaborates on Coulson’s and Liddiard’s claims: ‘Because medieval and early modern society had a fighting class of noblemen and knights, so the architectural celebration of war evoked their prestige and power. In effect, castles were at once understood as symbolic, magnificent, powerful and prestigious buildings, each quality reinforcing the other.’23 The key takeaway from Goodall here is that the real and symbolic function work together on both the literal and metaphorical planes. It is this most recent ‘definition’ of the castle that I will use as the foundation for my own exploration of castles and space in Malory. This new(ish) approach to castle studies has reawakened ideas about the state of the castle across the Middle Ages. Long-held notions about the decline of the castle in the wake of technological advancements in weaponry, changing military tactics, and even shifts in social life have come under review largely because we now see the importance of the castle’s multifaceted role from its very inception. The narrative of the castle and its role in society now follows the precepts set forth by Coulson, Liddiard, Goodall, and others of their strain. The castle is always the site of varied functions and meanings. It always houses, protects, and projects a noble ideology. And it is always a form of built space witnessing a range of activities and people and imbued with meaning based on its use – and, indeed, even the possibility of use. As such, the castle collects, reflects, and refracts a host of identities. Thus are the castles in Malory: when the action occurs at or around a castle, the full range of meaning and purpose is at stake, though in each moment certain attributes and functions are more prevalent. It is these various functions and emphases which guide – and organize – my study. An examination of castles in the Morte thus demands that we consider residential, political, and social functions and meanings in addition to and in conjunction with military roles because they are all prevalent in the text and essential to our understanding of the relationship between castle space and identity, both individual and communal. Indeed, although Arthur’s reign is bookended by wars – wars that often do play out in and around castles and certainly call for closer inspection of the role of the castle – large swathes of the text are free of full-scale battle. Yes, there are quests and tournaments and some hand-to-hand combats, both in the shadows of castles and further afield, 22 23

Liddiard, Castles in Context, p. 152. Goodall, The English Castle, p. 3.

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but war itself is peripheral. Of course, at the same time, this periphery is never too far away. The audience knows (more or less) that schism and destruction linger on the horizons past and future. Consequently, the military symbolism of the castle exists side-by-side with its other uses and ideas throughout the text. Matthew Johnson further nuances this idea, suggesting that a castle’s meaning ‘necessarily … differed between observers,’ and that the resultant ‘diversity’ or ‘fragmentation’ of these meanings must be considered.24 In the text – or any text – then, we can discern this multiplicity in many ways. Castles function differently at different times, although I certainly do not argue that these are discrete functions; castle space can and does perform multiply and simultaneously, too, thus presenting overlapping and interacting fragments. Their meaning and influence also fluctuate depending on which character – or which reader – we consider. Even from one internal observer’s perspective, the castle structure fragments encounters between and among characters. A lady standing in a window provides just such a variable example. In addition to the quantitative effect of spatial distance imposed by the castles as women are perched in windows and men look from below, there is a qualitative effect. The women’s image is imbued with layers of signification from the castle: she is enclosed by the window and the structure around it; she becomes part of the larger visual image, or it becomes part of her own image; she is both connected to and separate from the castle. Her relationship to the castle – owner, visitor, captive, etc. – likewise affects how we read her and the castle in that moment. If critical attention then shifts to the knight below, perhaps being observed by the woman, the castle – even as a backdrop – frames and constructs his identity in another manner altogether. Gwenyver and Launcelot at Mellyagaunt’s castle, an episode that will be discussed at length below in Chapter Five, exemplifies the phenomenon of fragmentation. Gwenyver watches at a window for Launcelot’s appearance, initially as a somewhat helpless prisoner. By the time he enters the castle, she has in fact wrested control from her captor; Launcelot’s impending and then actual presence has made possible this transfer of power, and his arrival cements it, but without this information, Launcelot assesses the situation to be much more precarious (848.15 ff.).25 Dell Upton speaks of this fragmentation as a basic tenet of architecture: 24

Matthew Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate: From Medieval to Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 89; italics are original. 25 All Malory references and quotations come from the first volume of Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), and are cited parenthetically by page and line number in the text.

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‘One of architecture’s most important tasks is to sort out its users, setting them spatially and psychologically into the desired relationships with one another. For that reason, it is never possible to speak of “the” experience of a building: every building is a fragmented space.’26 The influences are, of course, even more complex, as they work both ways. The identities and meanings of both castle and character are at stake. Furthermore, the castle takes on new and different meanings throughout the many episodes – even this simple and general example manifests itself differently depending on which lady stands in the window, what she sees, whose castle she is in, and so forth. Isode’s position in Adtherpe’s castle window after she has escaped from Palomydes, with whom she is forced to travel, offers just such a comparison. In this instance, Isode very openly wields power over her own safety, over Palomydes, and over the castle, whose gates she orders shut to bar his entrance (337.32–338.2). These two episodes put prominent women – queens, even – in castle windows in perilous situations, but the relationships between the spaces and the individuals, as well as the social practices that both create meaning and react to that meaning, are decidedly different. Through even these brief looks at these two scenes, we can see fragmentation both synchronically and diachronically. The castle thus exerts myriad influences on Arthur and company throughout, and is likewise variously affected by the actions and actors traversing its spaces. At the microcosmic level – the level of much of the analysis and discussion that will follow – these individual and differing meanings take precedence. My aim is to explore the difference and to highlight Malory’s valuation of that difference. However, it is also my hope that each of these explorations of castles and space in the text provides a piece in the mosaic, from which a holistic sense of Malory’s treatment of castles and space may emerge. My examination of both the pieces and the whole, the fragments and the clusters, of castles in Malory is perhaps made much easier by the fact, as stated earlier, that I do not need to determine whether a building does or does not deserve the appellation ‘castle.’ I simply take Malory’s word for it, and thus can begin with the extraction of meaning of the castle space. This is not an architectural or archaeological study, but one that invites what those fields have to say about castles into a discussion of the imagined castles in Malory’s Arthurian world. As such, I can sidestep the deeply embedded disciplinary concerns that Andrzey Piotrowski 26

Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 24–25.

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warns about: the threat of ‘epistemological vulnerab[ility]’ that emerges ‘when buildings are approached as spaces of representation.’27 I am aided considerably in this endeavor by employing not only the rich critical history of castle studies, but also that of space theory, which provides methodologies for unpacking the relationships between people and space. In this way, I hope to complicate these thoughts about castles – as they pertain to Malory – with important ideas about space, in an effort to clarify how these castles participate in constructing identities. Theories of space have proliferated over the last few decades, and they can help us parse the impact of the castle from a social and physical standpoint. Henri Lefebvre’s foundational work, The Production of Space, underpins the ideas about social space that guide my project. Lefebvre notes that ‘l’espace physique n’ait aucune “réalité” sans l’énergie qui se déploie’ [‘physical space has no “reality” without the energy that is deployed within it’].28 This energy, with its changing nature – it depends, of course, upon the agents of that energy – determines and defines the space. It creates meaning for the space. Lefebvre later adds that ‘space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships – and this despite the fact that space is not a thing, but rather a set of relations between things.’29 The relationship between characters and objects thus affects space. Lefebvre’s ideas – and, to be sure, he is not alone or truly the first to broach this topic, but is particularly influential – gained considerable traction in the decades following his landmark work. Michel de Certeau, for example, explains that space ‘is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities’ – an idea that he simplifies: ‘space is a practiced place.’30 Gillian Rose similarly elaborates on the nature of the construction of space: ‘I want to argue that space is a doing, that space does not pre-exist its doing,

27

Andrzej Piotrowski, ‘Architecture and the Iconoclastic Controversy,’ in Medieval Practices of Space, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 122 [101–27]. 28 Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974), p. 20 [The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]), p. 13]. I quote the French here to highlight Lefebvre’s choice of the term ‘espace’ [‘space’] (vs. the French ‘lieu’ [‘place’]), which will be discussed below. 29 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 82–83. 30 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117; italics original.

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and that its doing is the articulation of relational performances.’31 Doreen Massey also stretches Lefebvre’s thoughts, pointing out that space is not only ‘the product of interrelations as constituted through interactions,’ but also ‘the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality,’ and ‘always under construction.’32 Massey’s additions to space theory are especially important for my own investigation of castle space, because they parallel both the developments in castle studies and the ‘realities’ of Malory’s text. The dynamic nature of space – it changes in response to its inhabitants and their actions – and its very variability complicate the investigation of space, but in ways that do not vex but rather enlighten. Space becomes more complex because each episode, each act, each moment, each participant, and each observer can create a new meaning for it.33 Space’s responsiveness to what it enfolds affords us help in determining what is going on – and, more important, why – both in the spaces around us and in the narrative spaces of literary texts. Social space is thus always at work, and my goal is to use that work to illuminate the Arthurian world in the Morte. However, this is not a unilateral relationship. As much as social space is a product, it is also a producer, as Edward Soja has argued. Indeed, Soja tells us that ‘produced space’ is ‘both outcome/embodiment/product and medium/presupposition/producer.’34 Soja sees this as a possible source of contradiction and, perhaps because of that contradiction, it is something that any investigation of space – real space, imagined space, literary space – must grapple with in order to understand fully how that space works. Kristin Ross vivifies this idea in her reading of Rimbaud’s ‘Rêvé pour l’hiver.’ Ross sees in the lover’s call to ‘search’ [‘Cherche’] ‘an invitation to conceive of space not as a static reality, but as active, generative, to experience space as created by interaction, as something that our bodies reactivate, and that through this reactivation, in turn

31

Gillian Rose, ‘Performing Space,’ in Human Geography Today, eds. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 248 [247–59]. 32 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 9. See also Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 116. 33 See Barbara Bender, ‘Place and Landscape,’ in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), p. 303 [303–14]; and Linda McDowell, ‘Spatialising Feminism: Geographic Perspectives,’ in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 29 [28–44]. 34 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 129.

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modifies and transforms us.’35 This very embodiment emphasizes how crucial this bilateral relationship is to understanding ourselves and others in (social) space. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp outline some implications of this duality: ‘The spaces in which social practices occur affect the nature of those practices, who is “in place,” who is “out of place” and even who is allowed to be there at all.’36 Once constructed, then, social space exerts its influence on who belongs. Moreover, it puts pressure on how to belong, how to behave. Social space tells us what it wants from us. Edward Casey rightly claims that ‘The power a place such as a room possesses determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location, but how I am together with others.’37 Space, defined by the acts and identities of its past and its present, tells us what to do with clues subtle and overt, helpful and oppressive.38 This duality makes space so dynamic – and so important to a comprehensive understanding of societies real and fictional. The constant interplay between the production of social space on the one hand and the influences exerted by that space on the other provides insight into the construction of the Arthurian community, its ideology, and its individual members. This insight often confirms things we already know about Malory’s text. For example, Uther’s secret entry into the Duke of Cornwall’s space results in a crucial shift in the political landscape, as I will show in Chapter One. My sense is that we will understand how this happens more clearly if we look at how space functions in this moment. The Duke’s castle is both architecturally and symbolically emblematic of his rule over land and wife, and breaching its codes of entry forces a reconstruction of that space. What and how Tyntagil Castle means in the text pivots as it becomes part of Uther’s power machine. Perhaps more important to my study, however, are the moments when the examination of space leads to new and different ways to read the Morte. Launcelot’s anti-battle stance from atop the castle walls at both Joyus Garde and 35

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 35. 36 Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp, ‘Introduction,’ in Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, eds. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 3 [1–11]. 37 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 23. 38 Amos Rapoport speaks of the ‘cues’ in settings that tell or remind entrants how to act, and importantly connects this process not to individuals, but to cultural systems, in ‘Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings,’ in Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Study, ed. Susan Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 12 [9–20].

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Benwick offers just such an example. In these episodes, Launcelot is fighting against not only his own identity as it has been constructed throughout the text, but also against understandings of the castle spaces that he inhabits. Likewise, Gwenyver’s taking of the Tower of London in reaction to Mordred’s plan to marry her forces us to rethink space and gender identity in important ways. And it is not just in battle that this occurs, of course. The very arrival of the Round Table enacts a crucial shift in the political and social space of Arthur’s court. In each of these cases, and the others that will follow throughout this book, the examination of spatial relationships helps us discover and untangle Malory’s text in important ways. As David Harvey argues, ‘what goes on in a place cannot be understood outside of the space relations that support that place any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places.’39 Thus far, I have been proceeding with my use of the terms ‘space’ and ‘social space’ as if that use is entirely unproblematic. I actually do not find it particularly problematic, but it is disingenuous not to clarify why it does not trouble me. Since the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and then the humanities in the last few decades, scholars have been forced to decide between the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ – these terms mark a point of distinction that occurs variably along disciplinary, national, and temporal lines.40 Many theorists of different stripes posit a crucial distinction between place and space, and use the terms accordingly. At times, ‘space’ is reserved for mathematical – particularly Cartesian or Euclidean – space. Emerging from this dialogue are the definitions and distinctions provided by Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan separates the two in a number of ways, first and foremost as abstract (space) and less abstract (place): ‘What begins as space becomes places as we get to know it better and endow it with value.’41 Thus, for Tuan, place (implicitly unlike his notion of ‘space’) ‘can acquire deep meaning for the adult through the steady accretion of sentiment over the years.’42 Place is thus space made familiar.43 Place becomes a pause, whereas space is movement (including

39

David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity,’ in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds. Jon Bird et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 15 [3–29]. 40 And even these lines are blurry, particularly within and among geographers (in geography’s various branches). 41 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 6. 42 Tuan, Space and Place, p. 33. 43 Tuan, Space and Place, p. 73.

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the movement between places).44 In this configuration, this pause allows – through the vehicle of time – a space to become known. Time provides the connective tissue between space and society. I push against this idea, and I do so for several reasons. First of all, I follow Lefebvre, who chooses ‘espace’ [‘space’], and others who likewise refer to ‘social space.’45 I find this most accurately reflects what I am discussing, both in general and with regard to castle studies. Because I am fusing the two areas of study, it seems that ‘space’ crosses over between the two critical traditions more fluidly. The physical dimension – the walls, the doors, the stone, the furniture, the decorative elements (this last admittedly not especially prevalent in Malory) – is always present, always necessary, and the importance of both the physical and social aspects and the combination of the two push me to use the term ‘space’ over ‘place.’ Indeed, even the physical space plays a key role and is constructed – socially – by its inhabitants. Lefebvre begins his own explanation of the concept of social space with a comment on the meaninglessness of physical space without social practice. Staying attuned to the architectural factors – essential, I believe, to understanding castle space – then seems to recommend or even require the term ‘space.’ John C. Barrett explains, ‘Inhabited architecture facilitates the orientation of the body’s movement, it directs progress from one place to another, it enables activities to be assigned to particular places, it orientates and focuses the attention of practitioners. Architecture is therefore used in the structuring of timespace.’46 Along these same lines, Akkelies van Ness stresses the role of physical, architectural space in the bilateral social production of space and identity: ‘How a society organizes its activities, privately as well as publicly, causes an impact on its built environment’s spatial set-up. Conversely, a built environment affects how individuals behave in urban space in terms of the possibilities for social control, opportunity for economic activities, and social interaction.’47 Architects and builders 44

Tuan, Space and Place, p. 138. There are, of course, many whose choice of terms align them with Tuan. For example, Casey, cited above, makes use of the distinction. 46 John C. Barrett, ‘Defining Domestic Space in the Bronze Age of Southern Britain,’ in Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space, eds. Michael Parker Pearson and Colin Richards (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 91 [87–97]. 47 Akkelies van Ness, ‘Measuring Spatial Visibility, Adjacency, Permeability and Degrees of Street Life in Pompeii,’ in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space, eds. Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 101 [100–14]. For an excellent overview of work on space theory and the built environment up to 1990, see Denise L. Lawrence and Setha M. Low, ‘The Built Environment and Spatial Form,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 453–505. 45

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participate in shaping the social identity of space, but – and this is crucial to my own grafting of castle and space studies – their work can often be overwritten and the space reconstructed through use, perhaps much to their chagrin.48 I therefore use ‘space’ because it encompasses the physical (in particular, the architectural) and social in ways that ‘place’ does not. This very notion emerges from Kevin Fisher’s definition of ‘place-making’: ‘the creation of meaningful contexts for social interaction through a combination of architectural design and ritual performance.’49 And while we must not forget that the physical and social are distinct,50 Edward Soja rightly argues that we can never entirely extricate social and psychological space from physical space.51 This notion will emerge in some of my analyses in this book – indeed it motivates many of them. Perhaps most important, though there are quibbles about the terminology, ‘social space’ and ‘place’ end up greatly overlapping in their use.52 Much of this theoretical material was produced with a tight focus on the (real) world around us. It aims to understand people and their spaces – or spaces and their people. However, as Bertrand Westphal argues, ‘the linkages between literature and geography’ are readily apparent, and thus spatiological understanding can help us parse literary works,

48

A personal example illumines this idea. My own father designed an addition to our home that included a bedroom that I occupied in my high-school years. It is a big and beautiful room, comprising two overlapping square sections, the larger of which was intended for a bed (as signaled by the ceiling fan), and the smaller of which was designed to house a desk and reading chair, or perhaps a bureau. After about a year in the room, I decided that I preferred the bed in the smaller square so that I could have more space for lounging. My father was beside himself, maybe not quite articulating, but certainly feeling, how the spaces in the room had new and unintended meanings. When I went off to college, he and my mother occupied the room and promptly put it back in order. This highlights Rowan Moore’s ideas that ‘buildings are always incomplete. Or rather, they are completed only by the lives for which they are the setting.’ Rowan Moore, Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture (New York: Harper Design, 2013), p. 85. For a discussion of fixed (walls, etc.), semi-fixed (furniture, etc.), and non-fixed (people, etc.) features and their roles in constructing the meaning of space, see Rapoport, ‘Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings,’ p. 13. 49 Kevin D. Fisher, ‘Elite Place-Making and Social Interaction in the Late Cypriot Bronze Age,’ Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 22.2 (2009): 184 [183–209]. 50 See, for example, David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, new edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988 [1973]), p. 35. 51 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 121. 52 See Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 12.

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too.53 Westphal terms this ‘geocriticism,’ which he says ‘places place at the center of the debate.’54 Geocriticism invites readers to examine the ways in which texts construct their places (cities, towns, neighborhoods) and vice versa. Westphal intentionally distinguishes this model from work like that of Gaston Bachelard, who investigates domestic spaces, and insists on keeping geography at the core of geocriticism.55 However, Robert Tally’s definition of ‘geocrititcism’ does seem to allow the theory to extend to the domestic: [it] is a way of looking at the spaces of literature, broadly conceived to include not only those places that readers and writers experience by means of texts but also the experience of space and place within ourselves. That is, geocriticism can examine how the ways in which we are situated in space determine the nature and quality of our existence.56

This final piece, understanding ‘the nature and quality of our existence,’ undergirds my own exploration of the role of space in constructing the Arthurian world and its people. Because space – especially built space – has thus far received limited attention in Malory studies, the text is ripe for this type of reading. Space studies is an important field, but one not yet fully explored by medievalists in general and barely broached by Arthurian and Malory scholars. Much attention to place in the literature of King Arthur has had a geographic and cartographic focus,57 and we have only recently begun 53

Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 [2007, French original]), p. 33. Westphal points to Lefebvre’s influence early in his book (p. 7). 54 Westphal, Geocriticism, p. 112. 55 Westphal, Geocriticism, p. 119. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958, French original]). 56 Robert T. Tally, Jr., ‘Introduction: On Geocriticism,’ in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 8 [1–9]. 57 Some examples include Dorsey Armstrong and Kenneth Hodges, Mapping Malory: Regional Identities and National Geographies in Le Morte Darthur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Meg Roland, ‘The Rudderless Boat: Fluid Time and Passionate Geography in (Hardyng’s) Chronicle and (Malory’s) Romance,’ Arthuriana 22.4 (2012): 77–93; Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton, ‘Arthurian Geography,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 218–34; Cory Rushton, ‘Malory’s Idea of the City,’ in Studies in the Role of Cities in Arthurian Literature and in the Value of Arthurian Literature for Civic Identity: When Arthuriana Meets Civic Spheres, eds. Cora Dietl and Claudia Lauer (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), pp. 95–116; P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory and Cardiff,’ Arthuriana 16.2 (2006): 45–48; Frank Brandsma, ‘Hot Pursuit?: Interlace and the Suggestion of Spatial Proximity in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain and in the Old French Prose Lancelot,’ Arthuriana 14.1 (2004): 3–14.

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to receive scholarly considerations of the architectural and social space in articles or individual chapters.58 Across medieval literary studies broadly, castles have received considerable allegorical treatment, but little else.59 There is thus a gap in the existing scholarship, and I hope that this book starts to fill that void. These notions of space are – at times subtly and occasionally overtly – at play in Malory’s work, and the Morte Darthur evidences a keen awareness of the multiple uses and meanings of castles and space in his own day and in the Arthurian world that his text inhabits. If Harvey is to be believed – and I think that he should be – we can neither understand the goings on of the text without analyzing its spatial context, nor truly know those spaces without connecting them to the action.60 Moreover, the castle’s prominent position across the pages of the Morte – a prominence that is often more keenly felt when Malory’s work is placed beside his sources – indicates to me that Malory cared about castles. If we follow P. J. C. Field’s lead in identifying the author as the Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, then it is not too hard to imagine the

58

In addition to my own article [Molly Martin, ‘Castles and the Architecture of Gender in Malory’s “The Knight of the Cart,”’ Arthuriana 22.2 (2012): 37–51], social space as an interpretive lens can be seen in, Nicolay Ostrau, ‘Enclosures of Love: Locating Emotions in the Arthurian Romances Yvain/Iwein,’ in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, eds. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2012), pp. 175–84; and Megan G. Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance,’ in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, eds. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 39–53. Chapter four in Ruth Lexton, Contested Language in Malory’s Morte Darthur: The Politics of Romance in Fifteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), also deals with the social role of space, but does not theorize it explicitly. Likewise, Dhira Mahoney touches upon social ideas of space without using that terminology, in ‘Symbolic Uses of Space in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ in Reviewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, eds. K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 95–106. 59 See, for example, Abigail Wheatley, The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press, 2004). Two chapters in Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe, eds., The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1984) do broach Malorian castles: Muriel Whitaker, ‘Otherworld Castles in Middle English Arthurian Romance,’ pp. 27–45; Barry Gaines, ‘Malory’s Castles in Text and Illustration,’ pp. 215–28. Susan E. Murray discusses the symbolic links between castles and women in her ‘Women and Castles in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory,’ Arthuriana 13.1 (2003): 17–41. For a (more practical, vs. allegorical) look at castles across Malory, see chapter two, ‘Castles, Courts, and Courtesy,’ in Muriel Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), pp. 31–51. 60 Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again,’ p. 15.

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Plate 1: Warwick Castle

early prickings of a fascination with the life of the castle.61 This Malory grows into knighthood in the shadow of and (in his service to Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, and then Henry Beauchamp, 14th Earl and 1st Duke of Warwick) even at Warwick Castle, whose monstrous and monumental presence cannot help but leave an indelible mark on one’s consciousness (Plate 1).62 This biographical connection entices, even teases, and perhaps as a consequence draws my own interest to the topic. However, it is not one that will surface much in my text. What follows is an exploration of spaces in and around Malory’s castles in an effort to understand the text’s engagement and investment with the material, physical, and structural world of King Arthur and his court. I see this 61

See P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993). 62 Warwick is perhaps especially intriguing as an early exemplar for Malory because it is a castle whose ongoing construction into the late fourteenth century – not much before Malory’s own time – evidences a continued and concerted interest in not only the appearance of military defense, but also actual physical strength. See, for example, Brown, Allen Brown’s English Castles, pp. 103–104. These additions might be even more meaningful. M. W. Thompson says of these building projects: ‘one feels indeed that an exuberance has taken the work well beyond the functional requirements of defence,’ in The Decline of the Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 75.

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investment as much deeper than what Muriel Whitaker seems to imply in saying that ‘Malory’s usual practice, however, is to refer only to those parts of the castle architecture that are relevant to the action.’63 This book offers an in-depth look at castles in several key functions in the Morte. Although each chapter focuses closely on a particular castle function, there is nothing discrete about the social spaces of the castle. At any moment the castle can be functioning as a political and communal space, or as a prison and a domestic space, for example. This overlapping will bleed onto my own pages, as the text interweaves the functions even within these thematically focused chapters. Moreover, some episodes will echo throughout the book, their refrain emphasizing this very multiplicity. Chapter One examines the role of castles as political centers. It focuses extensively on Camelot in order to show how governance is both centralized within and represented by the castle itself. As Arthur’s – and others’ – political power shifts, castles receive varied narrative treatment, and they affect inhabitants and visitors in changing ways. Chapter Two builds on the first chapter, and turns to the castle as a participant in creating communal identity. The significance of the castle as a social space (and a place for social life) is manifest in its role in creating the Round Table community. We can trace the relationship between knights’ location within the castle and their status among the band of knights. Balyn’s peripheral placement, for example, consistently reflects his marginal status. Chapter Three attends to ritual space, focusing on both secular and sacred rites and their roles in creating a unified community. Thus, it furthers the previous chapter’s conversation by thinking about how rituals interact with the Round Table, its ideologies, and its spaces. The Pentecost celebrations in particular emerge as foundational to the community and our understanding of it. Chapter Four shifts to the domestic function of Malory’s castles. This chapter pays significant attention to the ways in which everyday life reshapes the castle – or tries to. The chapter investigates a broad range of domestic activity, particularly acts of love, nourishment, and healing, and finds a dissonance between the domestic and castle space, each closing in uncomfortably on the other. Chapter Five looks at castles as prisons. King Arthur and many of his knights experience captivity over the course of the text – as Malory himself did – and this often forces the reader (as well as the other characters) to re-evaluate the spaces and people. When Gwenyver and 63

Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure, p. 35.

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then Launcelot are imprisoned in Mellyagaunt’s castle, for example, the castle and its significance metamorphose several times depending on the fastness of the imprisonment; likewise, the identities of the main figures in the episode respond to their changing physical and social environment. Chapter Six examines the castle in times of war. There are several key battles played out in and around castles. The Tower of London houses Gwenyver as she fights off the treasonous Mordred. Dover Castle proves a pivotal property in the final showdown between Mordred and King Arthur. Launcelot’s two castles, Joyus Garde in England and Benwick in France, are besieged and defended after the schism in the Round Table that divides Launcelot from his king. During both of those long campaigns, Launcelot’s status hangs in the balance as he tries to avoid coming to blows with his king and desperately attempts to reconstruct his own identity. His physical placement in, on, and around the castle figures heavily in both instances. Keith Basso tells us that ‘[t]he experience of sensing a place … is both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic. As places animate the ideas of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed.’64 This idea of interanimation lies at the heart of my examination of Malory’s castles. I return now to the quotations that opened this introduction in order to make them speak to each other, across time and disciplines. Indeed, I sense they are saying the same things, and in doing so they affirm Basso’s idea. As Brown maps English and Welsh history across its castles, he creates meaning for the acts, the people, and the spaces. He is dragging those castle spaces out of the background and making them part of the stories. This is my goal, too. The chapters that follow draw the many castle spaces into sharper focus in order to uncover the interanimation at work and to understand the role and meaning of space in the story.

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Keith H. Basso, ‘Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape,’ in Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research P, 1996), pp. 55 [53–90].

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Castles as Political Centers An Associated Press article from November 2013 titled ‘National Restaurant Chains Exotic in Alaska’ details the excitement surrounding the arrival of an Olive Garden in Anchorage, Alaska.1 The article quotes a writer for the local newspaper, who enthused, ‘It’s like, “Oh, we’re actually a city now.” … People have always been wanting to feel we’re legitimate, we’re really a place. Somehow having an Olive Garden, for some people, makes it seem like that.’2 The title of the article implies that for the locals, this and other similar chains being built in the city and state are exotic. Paradoxically, however, these restaurants make Alaska decidedly less exotic in its own eyes. The Olive Garden – like the other chain establishments in town – creates a link between Alaska and the continental U.S., between the periphery (marked geographically and socially) and the core. These ties homogenize and ‘Americanize’ Alaska, which has been a state for over fifty years (since 1959). The phrase ‘we’re really a place’ echoes the terminology used by human geographers, among others, to highlight the ways in which meaning can distinguish places. Cresswell, for example, explains that ‘When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place.’3 I certainly do not want to imply that the quoted journalist, Julia O’Malley, is conversant in spatial theory (or that she is not); her phrasing does, however, imply a more general awareness of the ways in which we make sense of environments. O’Malley’s excitement and, especially, how she frames that excitement provide a useful framework for understanding both the impact of a restaurant chain’s arrival in a place that considers itself somewhat far-flung and the importance of castles in the socio-political milieu of Malory’s Morte Darthur – and medieval England in general. 1





The Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant chain in the United States (and select other locations, among them Canada, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates). The restaurants have a faux Tuscan theme – some tile work, aged plastering, murals, plastic plants, wine bottles, etc. – and heaping plates of food, including the ‘Never Ending Pasta Bowl.’ 2 Mark Thiessen, ‘National Restaurant Chains Exotic in Alaska,’ http://www. seattletimes.com/nation-world/national-restaurant-chains-expand-in-alaska-1/ [22 November 2013; accessed 16 June 2015]. 3 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, p. 10.

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Indeed, the idea that a building can legitimize a community and unify it with a larger socio-political unit resonates with the ways in which the castle functioned in Norman and post-Norman England, even into Malory’s own time. Although evidence indicates that fortified structures in England do predate William of Normandy’s arrival in 1066, there is no doubt that the castle is and was intimately connected to his reign and his subjugation of the land. In fact, the opening line of ‘The Rime of King William,’ found in the Peterborough Chronicle entry marking the death of William of Normandy, is ‘Castelas he let wyrcean’ [‘Castles he had made’].4 The century and a half after the Conquest saw a massive castlebuilding project aimed at asserting and maintaining power. These castles and those erected throughout the rest of the Middle Ages became seats of royal and seigniorial power, and have in the last few decades been shown to be deeply invested in symbolizing that power. This symbolization of power is at least as important as any actual military defense, if not more so, although much of that power derives from the various military accoutrements of the castle, the architectural features that assist in – or appear to assist in – defense.5 This coincides with Susan Kees and Victor Raharijoana’s argument that space is ‘the touchstone for the personalized experiences and the shared symbols and metaphors we use to understand our world,’ and the ‘primary medium for mnemonic markings of a cultural order and of key social symbols as well as for the somatic and emotional reinforcement of social certainties and fears.’6 The castle – built, won, owned, and even imagined – is just such a space. The cultural order is created by the castle’s presence, and power is wielded (symbolically as much as literally, of course) through its ownership. Indeed, it is this signification of power, this creation of a political order, that makes castles so important in Malory’s opening sections. For Malory’s Arthur, the castle becomes a particularly powerful manifestation of authority as he builds, cements, and expands his empire and his ideological reach. His power is concretized in these castles. Conversely, others’ lost or contested power is also often tied to castles. Thus, my first goal in this chapter is to trace the deep connections between castles as a symbol and Arthur’s growing political power. This 4

The poem can be found in full in The Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154, ed. Cecily Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 13–14. 5 See Coulson, ‘Hierarchism in Conventual Crenellation’; Liddiard, Castles in Context. 6 Susan Kees and Victor Raharijoana, ‘Domestic Space and the Tenacity of Tradition among Some Betsileo of Madagascar,’ in Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, ed. Susan Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 21 [21–33].

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entails looking not only at Camelot and other properties specifically owned and inhabited by Arthur, but also inspecting the broader trend that correlates castle ownership with a successful political regime. In doing so, I keep in mind Terence McCarthy’s claim that in the opening two sections of the Morte, ‘rightful kingship and its nature are Malory’s key themes.’7 Thus, most of my attention pinpoints early moments that link castles and Arthur’s kingship. As a second goal, I aim to unpack the political relations as they inhabit those castle spaces, to see the construction of social space that both determines and is determined by Arthur’s wielding of power. The opening episode of the Morte suggests a template for the management of castle space in the service of wielding political power. Both the actions in and around castles and the resultant reactions tell us how space can be used as a symbol of power – and also how to defy and even reject that power. As is common, Malory distills his source material to create a more compact version of the story of Arthur’s conception.8 In doing so, he trims a series of hosted parties at Uther’s castle – parties that include some detailed description of gift-giving as a cover for and an integral part of his courting of Ygerne9 – to a single event. Indeed, in just a few lines, Malory’s Uther has fallen deeply in love. Igrayne’s discomfort in the face of Uther’s ‘grete chere oute of mesure’ (1.12–13) and the illicit love it betrays leads her to recommend an early and surreptitious exit: ‘Wherefor, husband, I conceille yow that we departe from hens sodenly, that we maye ryde all nyghte unto oure own castell’ (1.16–18). This rare instance of Malory’s Igrayne voicing her opinion and exhibiting agency convinces her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, to depart. This act disrupts the implicit rules of the king’s space. Uther’s political power seems to depend on specific spatial control. Having extended the invitation to Cornwall and his wife, it is expected that they will come and that they will stay through any planned celebration or gathering. Leaving without warning under cover of night – though, from our perspective, a reasonable attempt to protect Igrayne’s bodily integrity – undercuts royal power, a point made evident by Uther’s immediate response. Uther is twice ‘wonderly wroth(e)’ (1.22, 2.3), first at the news of their hasty exit and then upon their declining his second invitation. 7

Terence McCarthy, An Introduction to Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 160. Placing Malory alongside his sources can be very illuminating, and it is important to note that it is not just the apparent changes that he makes – and I use the word ‘apparent’ deliberately as a nod toward an understanding that we do not know the specific versions or manuscripts that Malory used (or have his autograph copy of the Morte) – but also what he keeps. These, too, are choices that create this text. 9 Throughout, I will use the ‘Ygerne’ for the French version and ‘Igrayne’ for Malory’s character.

8



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It is important to keep in mind that Igrayne’s two key roles here – first as unwitting and unwilling attraction, and then as faithful wife enforcing her own safety and the safety of her marriage – both affect spatial relations, though much more quietly than what we find in the French source, the Merlin. In the French version, the king directs considerable movement of both people and objects within his space in order to make known and perhaps test his love for Ygerne, who in turn treads very carefully and presents her husband with the information and her desire to leave after much consideration. In her first role, Malory’s Igrayne disrupts Uther’s space with her beauty, and, in fact, Anna Caughey reads this moment as ‘represent[ing] the threatening intrusion of instability, sexuality and the feminine into Malory’s carefully constructed masculine sphere.’10 Igrayne’s second role defies the expectations of that space. Her decision-making ability and her influence over her husband are apparent, and these attributes resist a reading of Igrayne as a mere pawn with a restricted and specifically female position.11 Uther’s later rape of Igrayne serves to reinscribe her within a limited gender role, both spatially and physically, as body and chamber are violated. These dual violations will eventually serve to quench Uther’s lust, but he directs his initial anger following the untimely departure at Cornwall himself. Uther signals the dangers of not complying with the expectations of his castle with more than anger. He also plans to ‘fetche hym oute of the byggyst castell that he hath’ (2.5–6). This threat he levies on Cornwall. Igrayne is not mentioned. While parts of the threat mirror the source material (both versions, for example, highlight a key period of forty days), Malory appears to add the reference to the size of the castle. By focusing his siege on the Duke in his ‘byggyst’ castle, and thus presumably aiming to win and assume ownership of that castle, Uther will make a significant statement about the power hierarchy in his kingdom.12 Because Cornwall establishes himself at Castle Terrabyl and his wife in the assumed safety 10

Anna Caughey, ‘Virginity, Sexuality, Repression and Return in “The Tale of the Sankgreal,”’ in Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur, eds. David Clark and Kate McClune, Arthurian Literature XXVIII (2011): 159 [155–79]. 11 Rosemary Morris argues that Malory’s Igrayne is not the ‘pathetic victim’ of her predecessors, but rather a ‘self-sufficient lady,’ in ‘Uther and Igerne: A Study in Uncourtly Love,’ Arthurian Literature IV (1985): 88 [72–90]. 12 As Dorsey Armstrong has illustrated, this episode both splits and imbricates the male-male power structures and male-female desires in the creation of the chivalric community. Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), pp. 45–47. Donald Hoffman earlier argued that the combination of lust (for Igrayne) and jealousy (of Cornwall) make this scene ‘the initiating crime of Uther’s dynasty.’ Donald Hoffman, ‘Malory’s Tragic Merlin,’ Quondam et Futurus 1.2 (1991): 23 [15–31].

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of Tyntagil, he provides Uther with two avenues for asserting control of castle spaces. Uther’s infiltration of Tyntagil proves particularly interesting in terms of spatial relations. Through his disguise as the Duke of Cornwall – he is thus assuming the role of the castle’s proprietor – Uther circumvents the key architectural features (as well as the staff, knightly and otherwise) designed to control access. A castle could have any number of barriers between outside and inside, some built and some natural to the land. A quick and incomplete survey of castles turns up moats and other waterways crossed only by bridges (both permanent and movable), hills and steep slopes, walls (at times several layers of walls), battlements, gatehouses, portcullises, barbicans, and assorted towers as possible obstacles controlling the flow of traffic. Many of these individual elements could be further fortified or constructed so as to allow surveillance and strengthen defense. As Liddiard tells us, these various features function on several levels; they are not only physical barriers: Before gaining entry to the castle itself, some kind of symbolic boundary was crossed. This might be a river or a moat and, given that the medium of water was used to separate different orders of men in the medieval period, this movement was of some significance. On other occasions, the castle gate marks the cultural boundary between the castle and the outside world.13

Uther’s boundary crossing, at once both open and stealthy, elides the aggression of a forced entry by means of his disguise and thus puts him symbolically in the proprietary role. He enters without hindrance and thus ‘owns’ Tyntagil Castle by redefining the space in his favor. The space seems to belong both to him and to his disguise. The battle against Cornwall at Castle Terrabyl ten miles away serves to make this disguise a sort of reality. By virtue of the Duke’s death, Uther becomes the master of this space. He wins the right to enter and use the castle as his own.14 Tyntagil is no longer one of Cornwall’s ‘stronge castels’ (2.8); it no longer represents his own strength as owner, duke, or husband. Uther’s assertive redefining of Tyntagil continues as he moves through the castle without hindrance. Much like physical and symbolic boundaries between the castle and the rest of the world, there are 13 14

Liddiard, Castles in Context, p. 142. Patricia Clare Ingham has discussed the tenuous relationship between Uther’s English kingdom and Cornwall (the place), in Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 201ff. For a discussion of the larger role of the Cornish region in the text, see chapter one, ‘Mapping Malory’s Morte: The (Physical) Place and (Narrative) Space of Cornwall,’ in Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, pp. 19–43.

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expected patterns of movement across its rooms, as well as allowed and disallowed passages within. Graham Fairclough explains that Movement through a building to this day is rarely entirely open or uncontrolled, so the presence of guarded, interrupted or privileged access needs to be taken into account, particularly with direct access either from outside the building (i.e. unregulated and unmediated by other rooms) or between areas of especially widely differing status.15

Certainly we can see this in our own homes: a pizza delivery person might make it just to the door; friends might be invited further inside to gather in a living room or kitchen; the bedroom generally represents a more private and restricted area.16 On a castle floorplan, women’s spaces are usually especially protected, located further inside the walls and buildings and thus harder to reach.17 Lengthening the distances and increasing the number of gatekeeping mechanisms between the outside world and the women’s spaces – and even between the more public parts of the interior and women’s chambers – make those spaces both safer and more restrictive. The women’s chambers also become more valuable and meaningful as a result of their placement, as reaching them signals greater achievement, familiarity, or freedom of movement. Uther negotiates the path to Igrayne’s room seemingly easily with the help of Merlyn’s magic and his practical cunning. Although Malory does not narrate the events in detail, we do know that entry into the castle and Igrayne’s chambers occurred ‘as they devysed’ (3.27). This devising included not only disguise – an unexplained form of magic – but also Merlyn’s warning that Uther ‘make not many questions with her nor her men, but saye ye are diseased, and soo hye yow to bedde and ryse not on the morne tyll I come to yow’ (3.23–25). The French text includes considerably more detail about both the entrance and the movement toward Ygerne. Malory dispatches those details, thus making Uther’s passage into and through the castle easier, less fraught with barriers. The advice – to be quick and speak little, unlike the French Uther, who is told specifically to act in a cheerful manner like the Duke – results in the walls and guards being symbolically eliminated. 15

Graham Fairclough, ‘Meaningful Constructions – Spatial and Functional Analysis of Medieval Buildings,’ Antiquity 66 (1992): 353 [348–66]. 16 This is, of course, a gross over-generalization. Different types of homes (a studio apartment or a rented room within a house, for example) and differing cultural norms would affect who gets access to which parts of the home. 17 See Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma, and the Body,’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 58 [43–61]; Amanda Richardson, ‘Gender and Space in English Royal Palaces c. 1160–c. 1547: A Study in Access Analysis and Imagery,’ Medieval Archaeology 47.1 (2003): 131–65.

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Here again, Uther’s apparent familiarity with the various parts of the castle attest to his disguise. He uses the space as Cornwall would. As Barrett explains, ‘Inhabited architecture facilitates the orientation of the body’s movement, it directs progress from one place to another, it enables activities to be assigned to particular places, it orientates and focuses the attention of practitioners.’18 Tyntagil thus directs Uther toward Igrayne. His actions – entry into the castle, movement toward Igrayne’s chamber, and sex with Igrayne – all exemplify the appropriate practices and uses of the various spaces that he crosses through and into, but for the Duke himself, not for a visitor or intruder. Uther’s knowing use of space, then, much like his ability to bypass barriers of water, stone, metal, wood, flesh, etc., allows him easy entrance into the castle and proves that he has read the space and made it his own. The impermeable and immovable stones have been proven both porous and changeable. A quick comparison of the nature of the marriage between Uther and Igrayne with that of Cornwall and Igrayne – short-lived as both are in the pages of the Morte – reveals the nature of the redefined spaces. Because space is a product of the social practices and social relations, and in fact only has meaning with respect to those practices and relations, changes to Tyntagil necessarily parallel or react to this new marriage. Whereas the Duke and Igrayne’s relationship appears to be a partnership in which she is able to initiate conversation and provide advice, Uther behaves tyrannically over her as husband and king. He withholds his own role in her pregnancy for six months, a period during which we see that she first ‘mourned pryvely and held hir pees’ (4.4) because she does not know whom she slept with, and then is ‘sore abasshed to yeue ansuer’ (4.28) to Uther, her husband and king, about her child’s paternity because she does not have that answer. Uther thus not only rapes her, but also forces her to live with guilt over that rape. The relief and apparent legal legitimacy of the pregnancy that Uther’s admission provides obscures the sexual encounter’s ‘status as … rape,’ as Corrine Saunders astutely argues.19 This allows the power hierarchy of rape to become naturalized within the space of Tyntagil, and in the kingdom more generally. Shortly thereafter, of course, Uther takes away the child conceived during that rape and gives him to Merlyn – the child becoming a payment of sorts for the right and ability to rape. Malory does not even afford Igrayne a reaction to the loss of her child. Uther’s assertion of power over Cornwall and Igrayne – his consolidation of imperial and 18 19

Barrett, ‘Defining Domestic Space in the Bronze Age of Southern Britain,’ p. 91. Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 237–38.

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sexual desires – must be interpolated into the spaces in which it occurs. For now anyway, Tyntagil represents that triumph.20 Uther’s domination of this space mirrors and corrects his earlier inability to hold sway over the Duke and his wife. There is no reason to believe that Malory had a personal familiarity with the specific geographical or architectural features of the Tyntagil that he writes about. In this regard, Tyntagil differs from some later examples, such as Launcelot’s Joyus Garde being at either Alnwick or Bamburgh, in which Malory seems to be asserting his own knowledge of England and its castles. However, earlier versions of the story do evidence such knowledge, and Malory’s audience, from his contemporary readers to today, might add such an awareness to the reading process. A consideration of the topographical and even climatological defenses with which Tyntagil is imbued by virtue of its placement on a peninsula along the foreboding and forbidding coast of Cornwall heightens both the risk that Uther takes and the reward that he claims (Plate 2). There is, perhaps, a chance of overestimating the importance of this opening episode. Its chronological position need not mean that it casts a shadow – of meaning, of theme, of doom, of genre, etc. – on the whole Morte.21 Moreover, it should be noted that Arthur’s reign differs considerably from this snapshot of Uther’s in several key ways, not the least of which is the fact that we follow Arthur from his very first grasp at kingship through the development of his reign. Arthur’s early storyline thus provides an extended look at the process of constructing social space, the process of enmeshing behavioral norms and expectations into the fabric of the castle(s), and – especially – the process of defining political rule within and in relation to the built environment of the castle. What functions implicitly in Uther’s spaces, which are already established though under duress, develops explicitly in the early period of Arthur’s rule. Even without exaggerating the importance of the conception, though, we should see how crucial space is to the Arthurian project that Malory undertakes as he provides rather brief background information about the future king. Indeed, the notion that political authority must be centralized through and at castles – a notion that Uther’s desire for Cornwall’s ‘byggyst’ castle hints at – really comes to the surface in the 20

As Kenneth Hodges argues, with Trystram this site later represents a shift in the story ‘from the monarch as central unifying figure to knights who may resist that centralization,’ in Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 17. 21 It should, however, be noted that Malory chooses where to start his story. His various sources offer options much before and much after this point.

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Plate 2: Tintagel Castle

early days of Arthur’s rule. As in the relatively brief introductory episode detailing Arthur’s conception and Uther’s consolidation of power, two distinct threads of this discourse emerge. Malory attends to the collection and protection of castles, as well as to the specific use of castle space to wield that power. I begin my look at Arthur’s political use of castles and castle space by examining instances that crystallize the symbolic function of the castle

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as a marker of power. These several moments are part of larger episodes detailing the movement toward an Arthurian Empire both in Britain and on the path toward Rome. Much of the discussion details not Arthur’s gain of castles, but rather others’ loss or lack. These instances are a little less straightforward than the several castles that Arthur seems to collect (he goes to London, Camelot/Winchester, Caerleon, and so forth), and thus demand more parsing. Also, in each instance, Malory has changed his source text in ways that bring castles to the fore, adding them or reducing a larger discussion or list to just a castle. In the midst of the struggles between Arthur and a host of royal opponents, the Kynge of the Hondred Knyghtis (one of those combatants) has an ominous dream – one that proves telling both in the specific moment and in terms of the narrative more generally. As Malory tells it, this king ‘mette a wondir dreme too nyghtes before the batayle: that there blew a grete wynde and blew downe hir castels and hir townys, and aftir that com a watir and bare hit all away. And all that herde of that swevyn seyde hit was a tokyn of grete batayle’ (20.27–31). In the Vulgate Merlin, King Lot has this dream. However, in Lot’s dream, it is not castles and towns that are destroyed and washed away, but rather ‘lor maisons & le clochier de monstier’ [‘their houses and the church bell towers’].22 Malory’s version of the dream thus brings to the surface the narrowed focus on socio-political power manifest in castles. Indeed, the royal interest that the castle signifies replaces attention to general and clerical populations (houses, church bell towers). The placement of castles before towns in Malory’s text perhaps hints at his prioritization of the nobility and – more important for my purposes – his perceptive realization of the role of the castle in the Arthurian world and his own.23 A battle does ensue, and while Arthur and company do not immediately conquer the opposing kings and their castles, the Arthurian kingdom eventually does subsume their lands (and thus castles). The same issue seems to be at stake just before this, as Malory introduces King Ban of Benwic and King Bors of Gaule. Malory tells us, ‘And on these two kynges warrith a myghty man of men, the kynge Claudas, and stryveth with hem for a castel; and grete werre is betwixt them. But this Claudas is so myghty of goodes wherof he geteth good 22

The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, Edited from the Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. II: Lestoire de Merlin, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (Washington: The Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1908), p. 113.30. 23 As Lexton has shown, the commoners do play a significant role in Arthur’s accession to the throne. Their importance then diminishes, however. See Lexton, Contested Language, pp. 15–46.

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knyghtes that he putteth these two kynges moost parté to the werse’ (15.5–9). This certainly follows the spirit of the French source material, but (as is often the case) much reduces it. The French includes an extended explanation of how Ban had built a castle on a piece of land whose ownership was contested by Claudas. Ownership of the land is of primary importance. There is also more attention to the nature of the war between these two camps. Malory thus rewrites the strife in France to make a castle the pivotal feature. The cause of – and thus the prize in – the ‘grete were’ is a castle in this version. It might be easy to see this as part of Malory’s trend to cut material and nothing more, especially seeing that the nature of the dispute in France has little bearing on what is happening in Britain as Arthur tries to assert his authority. However, hacking away at the story’s details yet leaving the castle strikes me as meaningful – the passage could, after all, be limited to just a brief mention of war against this King Claudas. Putting the castle alone at the center of that dispute establishes the symbolic weight of castles for lordly and kingly authority. The next episode that I want to call attention to functions a little differently. When King Royns of North Wales enters the text at the beginning of the Balyn section, Malory seems to do the opposite with his source material. Here he takes castles out of the equation. In the French Suite du Merlin, a knight interrupts Arthur and company dining. He brings bad news: Rion and his troops are wreaking havoc, burning land, killing Arthur’s men, and capturing innumerable castles. Successful seizure of Arthur’s castles represents a true blow to his authority, both within the affected regions and beyond. The castles represent power, and thus the balance of power has already shifted significantly in the French version. Somewhat to the contrary, however, Malory’s messenger knight tells Arthur that Royns ‘had rered a grete numbir of peple, and were entred in the londe and brente and slew the kyngis trew lyege people’ (47.8–10). That is all. While Malory follows the first half of the French passage fairly closely, he leaves off any reference to captured castles. (He does a similar thing with the giant of Saint Michael’s Mount.) The effect is clear: while the danger to Arthur’s people and maybe to his kingship and court remains, his authority has not been tested at the level of the castle. His rule has not taken quite as big a hit. His power – like the unmentioned castles – is secure. In both versions, Arthur reacts to this news by calling his men to Camelot, importantly located in Winchester in the Morte. The descent of all the loyal men on the premier Arthurian space certainly functions as a powerful force – or has the potential to do so until this gathering pivots when the mysterious lady appears with a sword challenge.

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I will return to the centrality of Camelot in particular and its resultant political function later in the chapter, but first I want to look more at the use of castles and their spaces to signal political might. The next two castle references are paired, both because they are part of the same episode (or linked episodes) and because they create a contrast that again signals the relationship between castles and imperial authority. As Arthur and his companions travel from England to Rome – a move to counter Emperor Lucius’s request for tribute – they undertake a number of battles against Romans and assorted ‘Saracens.’ Arthur’s troops are ambushed as they deliver prisoners to Paris, and a tremendous battle ensues. The English enjoy an overwhelming victory, thanks in large part to Launcelot’s feats of arms. Malory tells us the fate of the opponent: ‘And thus were the Romaynes and the Sarezens slayne adowne clene, save a fewe were recovirde therby into a lytyll castell,’ while Launcelot and company return to the king for feasting and rejoicing (168.1–2). What interests me is this ‘lytyll castell.’ In the available Alliterative Morte Arthure text, there is no mention of ‘little,’ no diminutive building representing lessened authority. Because there is considerable evidence that Malory’s version of the English poem is not the one we have, it is important to note that differences are not necessarily his introductions. Regardless, the little castle allotted to the depleted Roman/Saracen forces differs markedly from later castles that Arthur’s troops prevent them from attaining. As the English forces move on, they again encounter the opponent (and again there was an attempt at craftiness on Lucius’s part): ‘But the kynge of theire commynge was prevely warned, and than into Sessoyne he dressid his peple and forstalled the Romaynes from the kyd castels and the walled townes’ (169.15–17). The Alliterative Morte mentions no ‘kyd castels’ or ‘walled townes’; rather, there is just a ‘cité’ (1979).24 According to Field, this results from reading ‘Sessoyne’ (as in the Alliterative Morte: ‘Sessoine’) as Saxony and transposing it to France, instead of the Sesia (Saussy), a city, as it appears earlier in Geoffrey of Monmouth.25 However, even without surety of the origin of this phrase ‘kyd castels’ – a phrase that Malory uses earlier in this section in the Morte, again not attested in the Alliterative Morte – we can see the stark difference between the ‘lytyll castell’ that the Romans and Saracens do have and these known 24

All quotations are from The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Valerie Krishna (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1976), and cited parenthetically by line number. It is important to note that there are four instances of ‘kydde castells’ (in various spellings) in the Alliterative Morte (at lines 654, 849, 3129, and 3673), and quite a few other uses of the word, both in and out of alliterating phrases. 25 P. J. C. Field in Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. Field, vol. 2, p. 138.

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or famous castles to which Arthur and company prevent their return.26 Preventing access to noteworthy castles (and maybe even marking them as their own territory), which would be a sure sign of power, aligns well with the overall mission that the English troops have undertaken on the Continent. They are in one sense meting out punishment in response to the Emperor’s outrageous demand for truage, but they are also asserting quite the opposite of what that truage implies. Arthur is establishing himself as head of this Continental empire, as he did with the insular kingdom in Britain. All of the occupied spaces, castle and otherwise, serve as visible and tangible reminders of the power wielded by King Arthur. In a very different context (analyzing the workings of a factory), René Lourau remarks that there is ‘[n]o institution without a space of legitimation.’27 This holds true for the empire that Arthur is building. He, too, needs a ‘space of legitimation,’ and the castle adroitly functions in that capacity. Castles legitimize him through their reigns over lands small and large, through their ideological hold on the subjects, and through their representation of military, political, and social power. The castle as a whole, symbolic entity gains much of its effective power via the political workings that occur within its walls. In the Morte, these prove as essential to the consolidation of empire under Arthur as his collection of castles. The governance that we see within the spaces of the castles – and we spend a good deal of time inside the most important castles – enacts the principles of social space in order to create a political hierarchy. A look at Arthur at work in his castles, in the halls most often, but elsewhere as well, evidences this use of space to assert his power through social practices. His exercise of power with and within his castle space manifests itself both in moments of peace and ones fraught with tension. The specific uses of space in the opening scenes of the Roman War episode illustrate the quantity and quality of Arthur’s political prowess. The episode begins with a short glimpse of Arthur’s royal power in peace before engaging tensions. Malory reduces attention on the communal aspects of this occasion; the Alliterative Morte Arthure, which is the source for this tale, devotes considerable time to both the festive time of year (Christmas and New Year) and to extensive details of the feast (both meal and service).28 By excising much of this material, Malory heightens the 26

Malory uses the phrase ‘kydde castell’ at 166.7. René Lourau, L’Analyseur Lip (Paris: Générale d’Éditions, 1974), p. 131. 28 Alliterative Morte, ed. Krishna, ll. 176ff. 27

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political ramifications of Arthur’s interactions with the Roman messengers and the resultant deliberations with his own gathered knights. This section of the text falls on the heels of Arthur’s consolidation of power through war, through the establishment of the Round Table, and through marriage. The opening scene evokes – if briefly – the sense of ‘peaceable power’ that Coulson considers synonymous with the castle.29 Indeed, the atmosphere is both relaxed and representative of Arthur’s political reach, a combination that neatly illustrates the type of power I think he wants to wield: Hyt befelle whan Kyng Arthur had wedded Quene Gwenyvere and fulfylled the Rounde Table, and so aftir his mervelous knyghtis and he had venquyshed the moste party of his enemyes, than sone aftir com sir Launcelot de Lake unto the courte, and Sir Trystrams come that tyme also. And than he rested and helde a royall feste and table rounde with his alyes of kynges, prynces, and noble knyghtes all of the Rounde Table.30 (145.2–9)

These opening words remind us that Arthur has successfully subjugated the British and other peoples and their kingdoms. Unlike his source, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Malory keeps these various kingdoms anonymous, which, as Whitaker argues, allows ‘the glory of achievement to fall entirely on Arthur’ and his own knights (perhaps particularly the two who are named).31 Editing out the long list of allies reduces narrative distraction from Arthur, and thus invites us to look more closely at his own acts and words. The term ‘venquyshed’ certainly alludes to the military prowess that has aligned those peoples under him. Keeping the recent wars on the surface of the text as this feast begins creates a narrative link between this space and the spaces of war. Arthur’s regime exists because of his success in war, because of his ability to install himself and his reign in the appropriate castles. However, more important here is Arthur’s ability to showcase his status by hosting a vast array of allies, both other royal parties and his own loyal knights, in his castle. This feast 29

Charles Coulson, ‘Peaceable Power in English Castles,’ Anglo-Norman Studies XXIII (2001): 61–95. 30 Field’s reading here represents a combination of the Winchester Manuscript (BL Add. MS 59678) and Caxton’s edition of 1485. The Winchester version (which does not include the final sentence quoted here) emphasizes the rise to power through warring; Caxton’s version only briefly mentions war, thus highlighting the collection of allies for a feast. 31 Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure, p. 15. Armstrong and Hodges have noted that the addition of Launcelot and Trystram keeps ‘[g]eographical concerns … front and center,’ in Mapping Malory, p. 115.

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thus provides the king an opportunity to display his hall, so important to the projection of power, as even these few details – namely the lengthy guest list – hint at its considerable size. Michael Thompson reminds us that although the hall is often used for social events and that those events are its very purpose, it ‘is not a communal building but belongs to an individual with authority.’32 In this capacity, the hall is ‘crucial … to social status in the Middle Ages.’33 Thompson charts the hall’s importance as a status symbol even after its use as a communal feasting place diminished sharply. For the king – Arthur and others, real and fictional – political authority is tied up in the social status that is achieved not only in having a large hall, but also in its function. The peaceable nature of this power and the celebratory gathering in the hall, however, last but these few lines before Arthur must prove his political might against the messengers from the Roman Emperor Lucius, whom Arthur immediately styles as an enemy. Arthur’s royal power manifests itself more forcefully in the exchange that follows, as he exhibits full control over his own men as well as those Emperor Lucius has sent with the demand for truage. Acquiescence, of course, would signal secondary status on both financial and political fronts. Arthur manages space well here, at first with his physical position. Malory tells us that as the feast gets underway, So hit befelle that there cam into his halle, he syttynge in his throne royall, twelve auncient men berynge eche of hem a braunche of olyff, in tokyn that they cam as embassatours and messyngers fro the Emperour Lucyus, whiche was called at that tyme Procurour of the Publyke Wele of Rome, whiche sayde messyngers after theire comyng into the presence of Kynge Arthur dyd to hym theire obeysaunce in makyng to hym reverence. (145.10–17)34

Malory’s redaction focuses attention on the relationship between this particular space – the castle hall – and King Arthur’s political standing in two key ways. First and foremost, Malory’s Arthur sits on a throne as 32

Michael Thompson, The Medieval Hall: The Basis of Secular Domestic Life, 600–1600 AD (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 4. 33 Thompson, The Medieval Hall, p. 175. 34 This is actually the second appearance of a set of twelve messengers from Rome seeking to restore the custom of truage to the emperor. See also 39.24–40.10. This much shorter earlier episode is light on details, particularly spatial ones. We see movement in and out of court, but no additional reference to space. Arthur does, however, show supreme control of the space directly around him and further afield, as he pushes the messengers out with his reply and asserts his claim to the larger geographical space under his sway.

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the messengers enter. The throne functions as a particularly effective cue for appropriate social practices within the hall.35 It both symbolizes and makes literal the hierarchies within the room and beyond. The behavior of the Roman ambassadors indicates that they understand the spatial cues: they show ‘obeysaunce’ to King Arthur before proceeding to deliver their message. This, like the addition of Arthur’s throne, is a telling change from the source. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the power structures are made more diffuse by the Roman contingent’s actions: So come in sodanly a senatour of Rome, Wyth sexten knyghtes in a soyte, sewande hym one. He saluʒed the souerayne and the sale aftyr, Ilke a kyng aftyre kyng, and mad his enclines; Gaynour in her degré he grette as hym lykyde, And syne agayne to þe gome he gaffe vp his nedys.

(80–85)

Reading Malory beside – or, better, through – this version shows more attention to King Arthur’s dominance over not only his own people, but also the visitors. Several key differences emerge in this passage, each of which elevates Arthur’s status in tandem with the throne on which Malory seats him. Malory’s ‘embassatours and messyngers’ do not initially bear the mark of rank that the leader in the Alliterative Morte’s version, a ‘senatour,’ does; only later does he use that appellation (at 146.7). Eliminating this political distinction widens the gap between the Roman leader (and his contingent) and Arthur. Moreover, in Malory the group becomes just that – a group. The ‘twelve auncient men’ all perform with synchronicity: they each carry an olive branch, and they seem to act and speak in unison. Their identities are thus locked into their group errand, making them a somewhat amorphous mass enclosed in Arthur’s space and subject to his political standing. While in the alliterative poem the messengers greet the hall, the queen, and the king himself, Malory’s ambassadors give only to King Arthur ‘theire obeysaunce in makyng to hym reverence.’ Perhaps responding to the spatial clues – the hall and the throne – these messengers establish Arthur’s preeminence with their own social practices as much as he does. This differs sharply from the Alliterative Morte’s senator, who addresses King Arthur in such a way as to draw himself as an equal, ‘[i]lke a kyng aftyre kyng.’ Malory rejects this possibility of equality. The actions fit the royal castle space, a reminder that we are highly attuned to the spatial clues around us. Space can tell us, as it tells these messengers, how to behave, instructing us at conscious and subconscious levels. 35

See Rapoport, ‘Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings,’ p. 12.

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Arthur heightens the aura of dominance that surrounds him once he has heard the ambassadors’ message, namely Emperor Lucius’s demand for truage in keeping with Arthur’s ancestors’ practice. Malory tells us, ‘Whan Kynge Arthure wyste what they mente he loked up with his gray yghen and angred at the messyngers passyng sore. Than were this messyngers aferde, and knelyd stylle and durste nat aryse, they were so aferde of his grymme countenaunce’ (145.25–28). While Arthur’s anger elicits a primarily bodily response, the messengers’ actions certainly indicate a vertical axis of power. The Roman cohort, again synchronized as a group, kneel out of fear. Thus, they place themselves physically lower than the king, using space to impart their message – and, it seems, protect their lives. Mary E. Dichmann has remarked on the ‘immobility’ of this scene in comparison with the source material, and the ways in which that immobility participates in ‘advanc[ing] Arthur’s civilization for perhaps five centuries, giving him the strength of chivalric self-possession to replace the fury of savagery.’36 Although Dichmann is right to note the difference between the two scenes – both Arthur and the messengers behave with more restraint in Malory’s version – there is not a total lack of movement.37 The ambassadors’ kneeling illustrates the nature of Arthur’s command of space and people. Kneeling, a much more subtle and dignified movement than the rushing to the earth seen in the Alliterative Morte, indicates an awareness of the prescribed behaviors in the space. Those prescriptions align with the type of political power that Arthur wields (or at least aims to wield) in Malory’s text. The acculturation of these particular behavioral norms coincides with Catherine Batt’s claim that the ‘King Arthur and Emperor Lucius’ section as a whole presents ‘[i]nvocation of the rule of law’ as ‘part of the text’s enclosing strategy.’38 Arthur’s verbal response to the Romans’ fear, in particular to one knight’s plea for their safety as servant messengers, explicitly invokes his hall and those within it. Arthur (styled as the ‘Conquerrour’ here) increases the possibility of fear, but deflects the source of that fear, saying, ‘Thou recrayed and coward knyghte, why feryst thou my countenaunce? There be in this halle, and they were sore aggreved, thou durste nat for a deukedom of londis loke in theire facis’ (146.3–6). Arthur alludes to the real source of fear, his collection of mighty knights (or his mighty 36

Mary E. Dichmann, ‘Characterization in Malory’s Tale of Arthur and Lucius,’ PMLA 65.5 (1950): 888 [877–95]. I follow Lexton’s lead in noting the restraint in Arthur (and add to that note the Roman messengers); see Lexton, Contested Language, p. 50. 37 See the Alliterative Morte, ed. Krishna, ll. 116–23. 38 Catherine Batt, Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 74.

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collection of knights), which is of course gathered here as a testament to and celebration of his power. Arthur’s words follow the source quite closely, but even small changes can speak volumes about Arthur’s royal dominion.39 Malory takes the Alliterative Morte’s ‘some segge in this sale’ (134) – a single knight who should inspire fear – and multiplies it, making a ‘they’ out of a ‘he.’ Arthur thus reminds his unwelcome guests that he has a group of fearsome knights loyal to his cause.40 This heightens the danger for the messengers, but it also obliquely reminds them and us of the size of the hall and Arthur’s own political reach. This reach certainly extends to his ownership – both literal and figurative – of the space enclosing this scene. Arthur’s next actions, particularly his treatment of both the messengers and his own Round Table knights, model his spatial management, as he moves himself and others across the castle floor to the appropriate spaces. By directing motion and placing the two groups in separate quarters, Malory’s Arthur attends to his own hierarchical position without sacrificing hospitability. Malory’s scene sharpens the focus on spatial hierarchies by broadening the apparent distances between the two groups. In the Alliterative Morte, promises of safety during Arthur’s deliberations over how exactly to respond to the Roman Emperor’s imposition are followed immediately by a shared feast, and a fairly decadent one at that. The group of messengers become guests and receive the treatment expected of that role: Now er they herberde in hey and in oste holden, Hastyly wyth hende men within thees heghe wallez; In chambyrs with chympnes þey chaungen þeire wedez, And sythyn the chauncelere þem fecchede with cheualrye noble. Sone þe Senatour was sett, as hym wele semyde; At þe Kyngez ownn borde twa knyghtes hym seruede, 39

The Alliterative Morte reads: Then carpys þe Conquerour crewell wordez: ‘Haa, crauaunde knyghte, a cowarde þe semez! Þare [is] some segge in this sale, and he ware sare greuede, Thow durste nought for all Lumberdye luke on hym ones.’ (132–35) In addition to the change discussed in the text, Malory also generalizes ‘Lumbardy’ to ‘deukedom.’ This could simply be an effort to make it more relatable to his imagined English audience. However, it also shifts the attention from land (or a land) to the power over that land. 40 The gathered knights’ reaction to Arthur’s declaration of the messengers’ safety supports Arthur’s claim: Than som of the yonge knyghtes, heryng this theire message, wolde have ronne on them to have slayne them, sayynge that hit was a rebuke to alle the knyghtes there beyng present to suffir them to saye so to the kynge. And anone the kynge commaunded none of them uppon payne of dethe to myssaye them ne do them ony harme. (146.27–32)

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Singulere, sothely, as Arthure hym seluyn, Richely on þe ryghte hannde at the Round Table, By resoun þat þe Romaynes whare so ryche holden, As of þe realeste blode þat reynede in erthe.

(166–75)

Here the poet emphasizes the nobility of these messengers in several ways, and this is, crucially, a trait shared by both groups. They are led to presumably pleasant chambers (with chimneys), left to change, and then escorted back to the hall for a feast.41 The senator, leader of the Roman contingent, receives especially good treatment, as evidenced by his placement at Arthur’s own table. The proximity invokes a sense of sameness and equality that dovetails with the senator’s own earlier greeting of Arthur ‘[i]lke a kyng aftyre kyng’ (83). Arthur thus mirrors this sense of equal standing. In contrast, while Malory’s Arthur treats his messengers well, assuring them of their safety while he and his men deliberate, he also seems to enforce a clear separation, which effectively demarcates a hierarchy that he will eventually extend beyond the confines of his castle walls through successful war. Arthur moves the Roman ambassadors out of his way: Than the noble kynge commaunded Sir Clegis to brynge them to theire lodgynge, and to ‘loke that thes men be seteled and served with the beste, that there be no deyntés spared uppon them, that nother chylde nor horse faught no thynge, for they ar full royall peple, and thoughe they have greved me and my courte, yet we muste remembir on oure worshyp.’ So they were led into chambyrs and served as rychely of deyntés that myght be gotyn. So the Romaynes had therof grete mervayle. (146.33–147.5)

Several details impress upon the Romans and readers alike Arthur’s political methodology, which – here at least – seems to be a fair-minded authority. Arthur specifically notes that these are royal guests, perhaps elevating them above where he has placed them thus far in their interactions, but that they are not equal to his other guests. While no expense will be spared on hosting them, Malory does not indicate that the two groups will share meals. Malory thus spatializes power differently from the alliterative poet. Indeed, Malory invites even deeper reading into the effects of this separation. The two groups are assigned to different parts of the castle, and thinking about just what these rooms mean indicates that there is 41

This feast appears to be the poet’s innovation; Geoffrey, Wace, and Laʒamon move directly to Arthur’s council in order to gauge his own knights’ stances on the matter.

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more than a simple separation at stake here. The Romans are sent to ‘chambyrs,’ here clearly rooms dedicated to the private, domestic functions of the castle. These chambers provide eating space, but are separate from the grand hall in which the action begins. Meanwhile, Arthur and his own knights move into what can be read here as a more charged area, a tower: ‘Than the kynge unto counsayle called his noble lordes and knyghtes, and within a towre they assembled, the most party of the Knyghtes of the Rounde Table. Than the kynge commaunded hem of theire best counceyle’ (147.6–9).42 Like the messengers, Arthur and his counsel move to a new space in the castle, one that is perhaps also more private than the hall. However, it is also a part of the castle that denotes martial strength – and thus political power, if we keep in mind that castle architecture uses a ‘military vocabulary’ to signal a more general sort of dominion.43 Castle towers are also perhaps the most emblematic part of a castle. Indeed, manuscript images often condense castles to little more than towers. Moving to a space so laden with military and concomitant political meaning resonates with the crucial nature of this moment: it is the decision to be an empire or to be part of another, to control or to be controlled. Both castle(s) and kingdom depend on Arthur’s choosing well – and successfully completing the journey – because they are constantly defining each other. The move to the tower signals a turn toward war and thus toward multiple military vocabularies in the narrative as well. During this conference of king and knights, the back-and-forth nature of the conversations and the manner of professing allegiance to the cause coincide, both explicitly and implicitly, with the spatialization of political power that is so overtly manifest in the beginning of the tale. This conversation proves to be anything but a debate. Everyone already agrees that war is the best course of action. Instead of an opportunity to weigh different options, this meeting becomes a vocal manifestation of allegiance to Arthur. The gathered knights clamor to provide the best support for Arthur’s cause. Cador sees a chance to replace the recent ‘many dayes rested’ with ‘warre and worshyp’ (147.11, 13). Arthur cites ‘the cronycles of this londe,’ which attest to his own ancestors’ military, political, and religious dominance over Rome and the Empire (147.18–19).44 A series of men from the corners of Britain

42

In the Alliterative Morte, Arthur and company also move to a tower, the ‘geauntes toure’ (245). 43 Liddiard, Castles in Context, p. 152. 44 In asserting religious dominance, Arthur notes that it was his ancestor, the English Constantyne, who found Christ’s cross.

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and beyond – Angwysshaunce of Scotland;45 the King of Little Brittany; the Duke of West Wales; Ewayne and Ider, who hold Ireland, Argyle, and the Outer Isles; Bawdwyn of Bretayne; and Launcelot, whose lands are in France – pledge their own loyal troops, often in large numbers, to support the cause, much as they do in the alliterative poem. Some even add their own complaints against Lucius, thus joining their own vengeances to the shared retribution for Arthur. It should be noted that Cador, too, represents one of the outer edges of Arthur’s realm; he hails from Cornwall, a place Armstrong and Hodges adroitly term a ‘vexed center/margin.’46 Much of this attests to the importance of geographic space, to which I shall return shortly, but the patterned movement of the conversation around the tower room manifests the space in ways that mimic the map of Arthur’s influence. This conversation cycles back and forth between Arthur and the others: Arthur speaks; Cador offers his thoughts; the king replies; the several knights representing various regions offer themselves and their men; Arthur thanks his supporters and turns his attentions to the Romans and their ‘proude message’ (149.5). Arthur unsurprisingly begins and ends the dialogue, but he also speaks twice in the midst of it. This is a repeated return to the central power. As the other voices move the discussion outward from the king toward themselves, their own lands, and to Rome, they also keep an eye focused on Arthur. The narration sometimes indicates that the speech is directed to him (so it is with Angwysshaunce, the King of Little Bretayne, Ewayne and Ider, Launcelot, Bawdwyn); at times the utterance directly addresses Arthur as ‘Sir’ (Cador, Angwysshaunce, the Duke of West Wales, Ewayne and Ider) or simply with a second person pronoun. Each of these reminds the reader of the relationship between King Arthur and his most powerful subjects and invites a consideration of Arthur’s brand of political rule in spatial terms because it brings the direction of spoken words to the forefront. The several speeches verbalize and locate the links between Arthur and these other places. The room thus becomes a microcosm of the lands under Arthur’s sway, with the various regions stretched across its floor and each region responding to and reflecting his sense of affront and his desire for justice (in his ideal conception, anyway). Tracking the conversation in this way calls to mind Jane Tibbets Schulenburg’s ideas about spatializing power. She argues that 45

This King Angwysshaunce of Scotland is perhaps a different person from the king of Ireland of the same name (and then later Angwysh), variably spelled. Here, Malory’s source has a King Aungers of Scotland (l. 288). 46 Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, p. 116. This notion of Cornwall is teased out in their first chapter, pp. 19–43.

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Space is neither inert nor neutral, nor is its organization, articulation, or the formulation of its boundaries a natural phenomenon. Rather, spatial constructions are the historical and cultural productions of an age. As metaphors and symbolic systems, they embody the most basic values and meaning of a culture. Operating as a mechanism for classification, spatial arrangements attempt to demarcate and reinforce the hierarchical ordering of society, to define and clarify social roles and relations, to maintain prevailing patterns of privilege and advantage, and to regulate social behavior. Spatial constructions are therefore fundamental statements of power, authority, and privilege, and over time they have been used to serve a wide variety of special interests.47

The ability to classify and hierarchize through the use of space plots points and angles of power, as is manifest in this call to arms. As Schulenburg intimates, the possibilities abound, and certainly studies of real-life uses of space and power illustrate both the positive and negative (as subjective as those appellations may be) ways to inscribe political and other power systems. Here, the centralized concentration is both distinct from and dependent upon its constellations. Looking even more closely at Malory’s narration of this session exhibits a further parallel between the structure of the conversation and the type of ruler Arthur is. The counsel begins when Arthur ‘commaunded hem of theire best counceyle’ (147.8–9), a phrasing that combines central authority (‘commaunded’) with a more democratic – if centripetal in their resounding chorus in favor of war – rule (‘counceyle’). Indeed, this duality is the mark of successful rule. Ruth Lexton’s definition helps clarify this: ‘At its most effective, counsel-taking worked with an active, decisive monarch to oil the mechanisms of kingship and enabled a king to provide a representative, unified policy to the polity.’48 Although Lexton notes that Arthur might not meet all codified expectations of presiding over counsel, she rightly claims that the Roman War episode is broadly one of success for Arthurian rule since Arthur’s goals of conquest are coextensive with the knights’ desire to win renown and reward. The support of the Round Table knights in Arthur’s war presents the picture of a cohesive and successful kingship that can defeat the military threat of the emperor Lucius.49 47

Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, ‘Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice,’ in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, eds. Sarah Stanbury and Virginia Chieffo Raguin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 185 [185–205]. 48 Lexton, Contested Language, p. 51. 49 Lexton, Contested Language, p. 55. As Lexton notes on p. 54, the Secretum Secretorum advises (among other things) that the leader should not disclose his own opinion and should offer rebuttals in the case of quick agreement among the voices. Arthur follows neither of these guidelines.

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Angwysshaunce’s words crystallize this sense of successful rule: Sir, thou oughte to be aboven all othir Crysten kynges, for of knyghthode and of noble counceyle that is allway in the is none lyke unto the. And Scotlonde had never scathe syne ye were crowned kynge, and whan the Romaynes raynede uppon us they raunsomed oure elders and raffte us of oure lyves, and put this londe to extorsions and taylis. (147.27–33)

According to Angwysshaunce, then, Arthur’s right to be the king above others – a spatial metaphor – depends upon the very rulership that he models in this episode, for it is his ‘knyghthode’ and his ‘noble counceyle,’ a combination of bodily and intellectual performance, that provide the first evidence. The latter part of Angwysshaunce’s defense of Arthur compares time under his kingship to that under Roman rule. With Arthur over them, the people of Scotland have not suffered at all; the Roman regime involved the hardships of death and financial strain. Indeed, the Roman taxation must seem very real in the face of the current demand for truage. However, as the narrative shifts to the counsel and then on to the war itself, geographical space comes to the fore, eclipsing architectural or built space for the balance of ‘King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius,’ though, as already noted, that geographical space is often marked by its castles. This shift to the geographical certainly makes sense on the cusp of a war spanning and changing borders of political power and influence. Perhaps surprisingly, the language of geographic space both unites Arthur’s Britain with Lucius’s Rome and sharply distinguishes them. Armstrong and Hodges explain that when Malory’s text is examined using a geographic sensibility, points plotted on a cartographic grid connect in interesting and unexpected ways, and links that might have seemed tenuous threads at best become strong cables that knot together the furthest reaches of Arthur’s kingdom into a pattern that commands our attention. Rome and Sarras, two legendary cities, may be distant from each other and from Camelot, yet historical, cultural, and religious entanglements mean they help define the Arthurian world.50

This tethering of Arthur’s immediate world and the lands that will become part of his imperial expanse over the course of this tale strengthens as the tale and the war that it details progress. The movement across the map toward Rome is a collection of spaces (and at times castles). It is important to keep in mind that the act of conquering functions bilaterally. As Arthur 50

Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, p. 101.

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adds to his empire – and thus his political aura – his own identity absorbs their meaning. Though much of the rest of the Morte returns to the British Isles, Arthur always bears the imprint of this Continental embrace, an embrace secured by his coronation in Rome.51 Indeed, even as Arthur relays the decision not to pay truage, not to subjugate his kingdom to Rome, he uses local geography to threaten and control the messengers. His rejection of Emperor Lucius’s demand is quickly followed by explicit instructions to the ambassadors regarding their travel out of England. They are given seven days to get from the court at Carlisle to Sandwich on the coast, and thus to exit Arthur’s lands. King Arthur further specifies that they should ‘go by Watlynge Strete and no way ellys,’ as their safe conduct is only guaranteed on this prescribed route (149.19–20). As little as a ‘spere-lengthe oute of the way’ jeopardizes their safety (149.23). By allowing the ambassadors only this constricted path, Arthur demonstrates the magnitude of his power, which is about to expand from its insular base to much of the Continent. Furthermore, Arthur styles the messengers as ‘alyauntis’ (149.22). Labeling these interlopers as foreigners, as alien to this land, pushes them rhetorically out of his lands, as his mapping does quite literally. Marking the Romans as the foreign other also reinforces Arthur’s supreme power over his lands. This attention to geographical space – a space that is of course marked by its castles – continues as the text charts the movement of Arthur’s and Lucius’s troops toward each other and the eventual arrival at Rome for the coronation, and culminates in the dispersal of collected lands to deserving knights. This act of generosity to his own loyal knights, his sharing of space and the castles that command that space, mirrors but reverses his treatment of the ambassadors, spreading the men across his newly acquired lands. However, this too displays his considerable authority and maps it in space. With each castle that Arthur collects or uses, both abroad and at home in England, his political persona becomes part of that space – and vice versa. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his premier castle, 51

Malory differs from the Alliterative Morte in marking Arthur’s ultimate victory with this coronation in Rome, a space laden with considerable political, religious, and symbolic resonance. However, Malory likely uses John Hardyng’s Chronicle as a source for this momentous crowning. See, for example, Edward D. Kennedy, ‘Malory’s Use of Hardyng’s Chronicle,’ Notes and Queries 16.5 (1969): 167–70. In the first version of the Chronicle, Arthur is offered the emperorship, though never gets to Rome because he hears of Mordred’s treachery [see John Hardyng’s Chronicle: Edited from British Library MS Lansdowne 204, vol. 1, eds. James Simpson and Sarah Peverley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015), ll. 3706–37]; in the second version, Arthur does have a coronation at Rome [see John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), p. 145].

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Camelot, at which the text’s Arthurian ideology – not just political, but also social, domestic, etc. – manifests itself most regularly and most assertively. Malory famously locates Camelot in Winchester. He explicitly links the two at four points in his Morte. At the end of the story of Balyn, Malory previews Balyn’s sword’s later arrival ‘unto the cité of Camelot, that ys in Englysh called Wynchester’ (74.24–25). Sirs Launcelot and Ector take leave of Elayne, Galahad’s mother, following his lapse into madness and, fifteen days later, ‘cam unto Camelot, that ys in Englyshe called Wynchester’ (657.3). At the beginning of the episode involving the Fayre Maydyn off Ascolot, Arthur calls for a tournament at ‘Camelott, that is otherwyse callyd Wynchester’ (804.4–5). Shortly thereafter in the same episode, Launcelot and Lavayne arrive at ‘Camelot, that tyme called Wynchester’ (807.12). It is interesting to note that the use of the names is in flux. The first two references indicate that speakers of English would know the city as Winchester, for that is what it is called in their language. The third mention hints that the two names exist sideby-side linguistically, that either name works. The final example of the collocation makes Winchester the older name, the name of the place at that time, namely Arthurian time. This one demands the most attention, as certainly Malory’s contemporaries – presumably regardless of their native tongue – would use the name Winchester (if they had reason to visit or discuss the place). However, this specific formulation suggests that ‘Camelot’ supersedes ‘Winchester,’ perhaps a sign of the mark that Arthur’s presence leaves. This mapping has received considerable attention, and rightly so, for as Rouse and Rushton tell us, ‘the locating of Arthurian geography within the actual landscape of the British Isles was not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, it was often a serious matter of political, cultural, and institutional importance.’52 This is certainly true for the placement of Camelot, which derives new and additional resonance because of this collocation. Winchester represents a natural site of power because of its political history and its Arthurian connections. In the Anglo-Saxon period, the city of Winchester housed the powerful Wessex monarchs, most notably King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899), whose presence can be felt as strongly as Arthur’s by the visitor today, but whose chronological distance from Malory’s own contemporary readers might legitimize Camelot without overshadowing it.53 The physical 52 53

Rouse and Rushton, ‘Arthurian Geography,’ p. 218. See chapter six, ‘Literary Terrains and Textual Landscapes: The Importance of the Anglo-Saxon Past in Late-Medieval Winchester,’ in Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 134–56.

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Round Table in the Great Hall at Winchester, now a tourist attraction but once a piece of political propaganda, certainly marks the city’s association with the Arthurian legend in a similar fashion (Plate 3).54 For Malory, the Round Table – as idea and object – becomes crucial to any understanding of the Arthurian community, as I will detail in the next chapter; because so much depends on the fellowship of the Round Table, the real-life existence of the Table at Winchester makes this an apt fit. Scholars date the Winchester Round Table to the reign of Edward I (r. 1272–1307) and connect it to a 1290 tournament held at Winchester in celebration of marriage engagements for three of his children.55 Martin Biddle’s extensive work shows that the Table would have been on display in Malory’s time, keeping the deep Arthurian connection current. The literature of King Arthur had also long used Winchester as a key location, though not Camelot, as Sue Ellen Holbrook shows.56 Both of these notions suggest to Malory’s readers a gravitas for Camelot rooted in Winchester’s past through both history and romance. It makes Camelot more important and more specific; it makes Camelot real. This realness adds physical, architectural structure to the social space of Camelot as well. Camelot’s presence depends upon much more than its Winchester location, however. Indeed, it is not until the fifth reference to Camelot that the association with the English town is made. The first reference to a ‘castell called Camelot’ is at the beginning of the story of Balyn (47.18). Initially, then, it is as a castle (not a city) and a source of Arthur’s own individual political power that Camelot achieves its significance. This political power will later be part and parcel of a much greater force that spatial practices create at Camelot, which provides a nexus for the political and communal functions of the castle. Camelot as a space and an idea flourishes just as the text makes its movement to a more communityfocused identity for Arthur’s kingdom. This shared locus, among others, becomes the body politic, as Chapter Two illustrates, but it is first through its association with Arthur – and especially through Arthur’s use of the 54

See George R. Stewart, Jr., ‘English Geography in Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur,”’ The Modern Language Review 30.2 (1935): 204 [204–209]. 55 See Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 387–92. The Table was later (re)painted in 1522 at the behest of King Henry VIII in preparation for the visit of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Both instances highlight the Arthurian legend as a tool for political standing. 56 See Sue Ellen Holbrook, ‘Malory’s Identification of Camelot as Winchester,’ in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), pp. 15–16 [13–27]. Holbrook goes on to name Hardyng’s Chronicle as a key inspiration for Malory’s location of Camelot at Winchester.

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Plate 3: Winchester Great Hall and Round Table

space – that Camelot gains its reputation and its importance in the text. Georg Simmel explains that ‘[a] geographic radius of so many square miles does not constitute a great kingdom; but rather this is accomplished by psychological forces from a central point which hold the inhabitants

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of such a region together politically.’57 More specific to the medieval world in which Malory lives and writes, and in which he places Camelot, Muriel Whitaker reminds us that the castle is ‘the centre from which the authority radiates.’58 These forces materialize quite literally in the Morte, as Camelot both pulls in and sends out Arthur’s subjects. The Morte introduces Camelot as just such a centralized location of power. Arthur is in London when he is warned about King Royns’s menacing of his lands and people, but he calls his men to meet him at Camelot: Than the kynge lette make a cry that all the lordis, knyghtes and jantilmen of armys sholde draw unto the castell called Camelot in tho dayes, and there the kynge wolde lette make a counceile generall and grete justis. So whan the kynge was com thidir with all his baronage and logged as they semed beste. (47.17–21)

The tale soon shifts away from this gathering, as the adventures of Balyn are about to take center stage, but the interwoven authority of Arthur and Camelot begins here. This castle exerts a centripetal force, pulling in not only Arthur’s men, but also the king himself. He leaves one power center (London) to meet at another that is more closely tied to himself, to his own brand of kingship. Movement to and from Camelot remains a key organizing principle – for the narrative as well as the plot – for much of the Morte. So many quests begin and end with the king imbued with the authority of his court and premier castle. Indeed, quests seem incomplete if they do not receive the royal sanction at their commencement and, especially, the courtly embrace at their conclusion. These various adventures are undertaken in Arthur’s name and thus serve to increase his reputation, political and otherwise. The quests of Gawayne, Torre, and Pellynor on the occasion of Arthur and Gwenyver’s marriage exemplify the pattern of movement to and from Camelot and the king. These quests begin with the irruption of a white hart, a white brachet, thirty black hounds, a lady, and a knight into the celebratory space of the hall. This initiates a need for three quests: Gawayne is assigned the hart; Torre is granted the search for the brachet, which has been carried away by a knight in the hall; Pellynor is to chase 57

Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Space,’ trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherston (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 137 [137–70]; originally published as Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologie des Raumes,’ Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 27 (1903): 27–71. 58 Muriel Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature 9.2 (1976): 74 [73–84].

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after the lady, who was snatched up by the trailing knight. Their success is certainly variable, with only Torre returning to great acclaim. Upon his return to Camelot, we learn that the ‘the kynge and the quene and all the courte was passynge fayne of hys commynge, and made grete joy that he was com agayne,’ and that ‘the kynge and quene made grete joy’ upon the rehearsal of his adventures (91.23–24, 31). The repetition of their joy moves the king and queen – and, thus, Camelot itself – to the center of this summative section of Torre’s quest. Camelot’s central presence manifests itself just as assertively in the cases of Gawayne and Pellynor. These two experience failure, with both quests resulting in the deaths of women, either directly (Gawayne accidentally beheads a women as he mercilessly strikes at a defeated knight) or indirectly (Pellynor’s neglect of a lady – his daughter, he learns when he return to court – results in her being eaten by lions). However, even with these disastrous results, Gawayne and Pellynor return to Camelot to report their (mis)deeds and reconcile those deeds with the king, the queen, and the court at large. King and queen are ‘gretely displeased with Sir Gawayne’ (87.1–2), but turn this into a teaching opportunity. Henceforth, he is to be attuned to both mercy and women. Pellynor initially receives a warm welcome, for he does return with the lady whom he sought; as with his son Torre, ‘the kynge and the quene was passynge fayne of hys commynge to the courte’ (96.32–33). Following a recap of his quest, this cheerful greeting turns to admonishment, as the queen and then Merlyn rebuke him for abandoning the grieving lady (his daughter) to her death in pursuit of his original goal. Armstrong and Hodges have (separately) illustrated the importance of this trio of quests with regard to the establishment of the Pentecostal Oath and the legislation of expectations for the treatment of women, points to which I will return later in the book, as the spatial implications of both the Oath and the governance of inter-gender behaviors are manifold.59 More important to me here are the paired forces that Camelot exerts, that of Arthur’s power over the space, and that of the gravitational pull that brings people cyclically back to this castle. Indeed, we can see both of these at work here. Arthur calls for these three knights to undertake this triple quest in order to right the wrong that the disruptive entries cause. With even marginal levels of success, then, the completion of these quests reasserts Arthur’s control over space and people. The continual return to Camelot signals the knights’ acceptance of this control and serves as a powerful affirmation of Arthur’s kingship. 59

See Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, pp. 38–43; Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, pp. 50–51.

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We can attribute this centripetal movement toward Camelot to the consolidation of power in place and person that has already occurred. Arthur’s defeat of Kings Lot and Nero and their hosts results in centralized British power that remains in place until (almost) the end of the Morte and that invests Arthur with the ability to expand his reach. Arthur concentrates this rule at Camelot not only through his victories – victories that he owes to Balyn, Balan, Pellynor, and the rest of his forces – but also through his actions following these battles. Arthur and company defeat Lot and Nero, killing them and an alliance of kings. Indeed, ‘all the oste’ of King Lot is killed (61.25). The deaths of the kings create a power vacuum that Arthur fills, and he does so with careful manipulation of ritual and spatial practices. It is through the act of burial that Arthur is able to subsume the power of the deceased kings. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall explain that ‘the emotional bonds which link the survivors to the deceased have usually demanded some form of symbolic commemoration.’60 While Gordon and Marshall focus on the needs of the grieving, the family members and friends who must deal with the death of a loved one – and we do see Lot’s wife and children participating in this process – their notion certainly also applies to the political needs at stake in this section of the Morte. Arthur uses the symbolic commemoration to position himself explicitly above these kings, sending a message to all who had bonds with Lot, Nero, and company, be those bonds emotional or political. Much like in the Suite du Merlin, Malory’s source for this section of the Morte, we get details about the location and style of entombment for the fallen kings and their host: ‘Also there was slayne at that batayle twelve kynges on the syde of Kynge Lott with Nero, and alle were buryed in the chirch of Seynte Stevins in Camelot. And the remanent of knyghtes and other were buryed in a grete roche’ (61.28–32). Camelot thus becomes a locus of commemoration for these many men. Their tombs will bear the memory both of their lives, and, especially, their deaths at the hands of Arthur. The elaborate decoration of these tombs ensures the preservation of this memory and marks Camelot as a site of power: And than Arthure lette make twelve images of laton and cooper, overgylte with golde in the sygne of the twelve kynges, and eche one of hem helde a tapir of wexe in hir honde that brente nyght and day. And Kynge Arthure was made in the sygne of a fygure stondynge aboven them with a swerde drawyn in hys honde, and all the twelve 60

Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.

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fygures had countenaunce lyke unto men that were overcom. All thys made Merlion by hys subtyle craufte. (62.5–11)

Arthur prominently displays himself with and – more important – above these defeated kings to symbolize his assumption of their power. The Arthur figure wields a sword, a constant reminder of this victory and the consolidation of power that ensues. The kings’ ‘countenaunce lyke unto men that were overcom’ likewise signals the shift in power. In this detail, Malory deviates only slightly from his French source, where the kings are bowing in supplication.61 Malory’s rendition seems, then, to highlight the martial victory and the physical dominance over the defeated kings and their subjects. It marks Arthur as actively and perpetually conquering the British map and indicates a very specific movement of power emanating outward – from him and Camelot – to this increasingly expansive kingdom. Camelot and Arthur together increase their political presence through this ritual. The funerary rites further solidify Arthur’s political position by bringing mourners to court. In particular, this convergence includes Arthur’s sisters and their families: ‘So at the enterement com Kyng Lottis wyff Morgause, with hir foure sonnes, Gawayne, Aggravayne, Gaherys, and Gareth. Also there com thydir Kyng Uryens, Sir Uwaynes fadir, and Morgan le Fay his wyff, that was Kyng Arthurs syster. All thes com to the enterement’ (61.33–62.2). It is not surprising that Lot’s family would join the proceedings, yet the arrival of his sons, all of whom will eventually become crucial members of the court (in good ways and bad), helps initiate what will become Arthur’s Round Table community. Arthur seems to finesse this relationship very intentionally, crafting for Lot an especially fine burial monument: ‘But of all the twelve kyngis Kynge Arthure lette make the tombe of Kynge Lotte passynge rychely, and made hys tombe by hymselff’ (62.2–4). The extra attention to Lot’s tomb signals both his 61

The French reads: Et en mi liu des .XIII. estoit l’image le roi Artus assés plus haut qu’il n’estoient tuit, et tenoit s’espee en sa main et faisoit samblant qu’il manechast cheus qui entour lui estoient. Et cil toutes voies li estoient enclin aussi coume il li criaissent merchi d’auchun mesfait. [In the middle of the twelve was the image of King Arthur, considerably higher than the others, holding his sword and seeming to threaten those around him, while they were bowing as if begging forgiveness for some misdeed.] French from La Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 2006), 153.19–23; translation from The Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, trans. Martha Asher, in Lancelot–Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, vol. 8, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 68.

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relative importance (compared to the other kings memorialized here) and Arthur’s desire to forge a bond with his sister Morgause and the four nephews she brings with her. The bonds with Gawayne, Aggravayne, Gaherys, and Gareth will eventually be formalized – alongside the full retinue of Round Table knights – in ways that highlight the communal nature of social space at Camelot and all of Arthur’s castles.62 In the short term, however, both the monuments and the people are now very visible parts of Camelot and participate in constructing its social space and crafting Arthur’s political sway over land and people. The nature of social space – ever changing in response to behaviors in and around it – reminds us that each act, each movement to, from, and within Camelot, can effect a shift in the space’s meaning. Camelot houses Arthur’s political presence and power, and this triangulation of meaning (idea, place, identity) is constantly in flux and under negotiation. As much as Arthur has imbued Camelot with significant power, his physical separation from the place diminishes that political weight. His actions and placement within the castle construct its social spaces – so too can his periodic absences affect the space as a political force. The relationship between Gwenyver and Camelot illustrates this very point. Gwenyver’s arrival at Camelot marks the beginning of an important shift in the spaces and the nature of Arthur’s politics. The marriage leads quickly and deliberately to the installation and formalization of the Round Table in both physical and ideological ways, as Arthur’s political identity becomes increasingly dependent on his community of knights and their actions in and beyond his official court spaces. The spatiality of that community is a central focus in Chapter Two. However, the marriage illuminates several key aspects of the relationship between politics and space in the Morte. Gwenyver becomes part of the power structure at Camelot.63 They ‘wedded at Camelot … in the chirche of Seynte Stephyns with grete solmpnité’ (81.12–14). This union between Arthur and the daughter of a man who 62

As much as these deaths and burials consolidate power at Camelot and usher in a new era that will see its greatest successes achieved in the name of the growing Arthurian community, they also gesture toward the very fissuring of that community. Malory looks ahead to Gawayne’s avenging his father’s death by killing Pellynor (61.25–28); to Merlyn’s death, at which time the candles on this monument will burn out (62.12–13); to the grail quest, which Merlyn here says will be achieved but will also serve to underscore most knights’ failures (62.13–14); and to the Dolorous Stroke (62.15–16). 63 Amy Kaufman argues that early in the Morte, ‘Arthur treats her as his position and his privilege dictate: an extension of himself. At first, Guenevere is greatly conscientious of her prescribed role in the symbolic order as Arthur’s wife, aware that she is a symbol of his power.’ Amy Kaufman, ‘Guenevere Burning,’ Arthuriana 20.1 (2010): 79 [76–94].

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was likewise threatened and attacked by King Royns forges an alliance that adds to Arthur’s political stature in Britain.64 Like the funerals of his enemies, this wedding ritual collects people at Camelot, and this gathering provides glimpses of a co-regnant queen. As discussed above, the marriage celebration leads to the triple quests of Gawayne, Torre, and Pellynor, each of which begins and ends at Camelot, and the queen becomes an integral part of the return and ensuing assessment of these quests, alongside Arthur and more prominently than the court as a whole. Gwenyver plays a more important role here in Malory’s version than she does in the French source. Malory’s Gwenyver is placed physically and grammatically next to her new husband for each knight’s return to Camelot. Together, they are pleased or displeased at the results of the quests.65 Moreover, Gwenyver’s role is hardly passive and dependent, particularly in the judgment of Gawayne’s quest. Indeed, it is by her ‘ordynaunce’ that the ladies decide what Gawayne must do in recompense (87.2). And it is certainly no coincidence, considering both his misdeeds and his female judges, that he is commanded to fight ever on the side of ladies. Gwenyver’s power in this situation far outweighs that which she is given in the French Suite, where judgment is passed from Merlin to Arthur, and then to Guinevere: Et li rois les em prie erraument pour chou qu’il voit que a Merlin plaist. Et la roine le commande a ses dames et a ses damoisieles que elles enjoingnent comme roi. Et celes vont a conseil pour ceste chose et revienent erraument, non mie que elles s’en entremesissent ja se pour la volenté dou roi et des Merlin ne fust. [The king then asked them at once to do it, since he saw that it pleased Merlin. The queen commanded her ladies and maidens to judge the matter like a king. They went to deliberate on this matter, and they returned at once, but they would never have meddled in it if it had not been the king’s wish and Merlin’s.]66

It is quite clear in this French version that the queen passes judgment only because it has been preordained by Merlin and the king. Malory’s 64

Even the very decision to marry reveals much about Arthur’s politics. It is at the general behest of his barons, who ‘woll let [Arthur] have no reste but nedis [he] muste take a wyff,’ that Arthur makes this move (76.9). His selection of Gwenyver, though, is a personal and individual one, and one that goes against the explicit advice of Merlyn, whom Arthur initially says must counsel him in this matter and even sanction his choice of bride (76.10). 65 See 87.1, upon Gawayne’s return; 91.23–24, upon Torre’s; 96.32–33, upon Pellynor’s. In the French Suite, the king and the people welcome home each returning knight – the queen is never part of the initial greeting. 66 Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Roussineau, 279.18–24; The Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 8, p. 135.

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Gwenyver acts with the full power of Camelot. Arthur himself recedes into the background, as Gwenyver rules over this situation. However, Arthur’s presence still proves determinative here, and we are reminded a few lines later that this was ‘the adventure of Sir Gawayne that he dud at the mariage of Kyng Arthure’ (87.10–11). Returning to Arthur before moving on to Torre reminds the audience that Arthur is indeed there, and perhaps silently sanctioning Gwenyver’s ordinance and the ladies’ rule. The importance of Arthur’s presence to Camelot’s political standing becomes apparent several episodes later when Gwenyver attempts to exert power on her own. While out on a forest hunting trip, Arthur is imprisoned and deprived of Excalibur and its scabbard, seemingly leaving Gwenyver in charge of a Camelot brimming with guests, most notably Morgan le Fay, her husband (whom she transported to Camelot magically and whom she has just attempted to kill), and her son (who prevented that murder). Upon hearing that her lover Accolon has died, Morgan desires to leave Camelot before Arthur, once again free and in possession of Excalibur, returns. Indeed, Arthur has sent a message that evokes his power and intimates that he knows about her plotting: ‘So whan Accolon was dede he lette sende hym in an horse-bere with six knyghtes unto Camelot, and bade, “Bere hym unto my systir, Morgan le Fay, and sey that I sende her hym to a present. And telle hir I have my swerde Excalyber and the scawberde”’ (117.23–26). This envoy prompts Morgan to plan an immediate exit from Camelot, not wanting to face her brother, the king. She seems well aware that the freedom she has had within the space of Camelot – enough to bring her husband in and almost enough to end his life – will disappear once Arthur returns. She initially requests leave from the queen, but does not accept Gwenyver’s answer: But welle sche wyste, and she abode tylle hir brothir Arthure came thydir, there sholde no golde go for hir lyff. Than she wente unto the quene Gwenyvere and askid hir leve to ryde into hir contrey. ‘Ye may abyde,’ seyde the queen, ‘tyll youre brothir the kynge com home.’ ‘I may nat, madame,’ seyde Morgan le Fay, ‘for I have such hasty tydynges that I maye not tary.’ ‘Well,’ seyde the quene, ‘ye may departe whan ye woll.’ (118.32–119.3)

Gwenyver’s grasp on Camelot’s power here proves nominal at best, as she exhibits no control over movements in and around the castle in the king’s

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absence. Indeed, Morgan’s courtesy in asking leave to depart proves only that: a courtesy and not a submission to Gwenyver. The queen denies Morgan’s request, but this denial carries with it none of the authority of either the king, whom she mentions, or Camelot. Even Gwenyver’s explicit wish that Morgan wait for Arthur’s return indicates that she cannot wield regnal power on her own. Morgan’s refusal to abide by the queen’s first response and the Gwenyver’s quick acquiescence tell us much about the power dynamics here. Certainly, the scene invites the reader to compare the relative power of the two women – a task that lies beyond the goals of my text, but one that deserves more critical attention. More germane to this study, it also functions as a sign of the complex mechanics of social space and the interwoven notion of political power in Malory’s Arthurian world. This aligns with Rushton’s argument about Camelot at the end of the text: ‘in the context of Mordred’s seizure of power, Winchester has been mentioned without the usual requisite assertion that it is or was Camelot; it is almost as though Arthur’s physical presence is required to make that identification real, and Mordred’s usurpation severs the link between legend and history.’67 Camelot thus relies on the active presence of its king. The same is the case across his kingdom; Arthur is able to create a powerful political space at a multitude of castles across his realm. Gwenyver’s political importance – and sway – does grow over the course of the Morte. Her body localizes political strife and power in the final sections of the text, for example, as politics increasingly bleeds into the private sphere (or vice versa), and the society resorts to battle to assert and maintain shreds of power. Her own body in danger (like Igrayne’s) becomes a crucial part of the political narrative. The health of Arthur’s body politic depends on her physical body. Space plays a key role in protecting Gwenyver’s body and her private affairs, but also in disclosing them. Both Gwenyver’s own behaviors and those actions surrounding her play out across castle space and force the Arthurian society and us as readers to reimagine the workings of that space. Indeed, the castle participates in legislating her body. Politics shift dramatically later in the text. The castle, as symbol and as space, is reconstructed in conjunction with the changing political landscape. However, Gwenyver’s arrival at court impacts the Arthurian community in space almost immediately in ways that intersect with and diverge from the political. The next chapter engages this conversation and turns attention to the development and evolution of the Round Table community as community. That Round Table can exist only in the glow 67

Rushton, ‘Malory’s Idea of the City,’ p. 113.

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of Arthur’s growing political presence and the establishment of authority both through and in his collected castles. Like the Alaskan Olive Garden that opened this chapter, this particular community seems only to have a place when and where the king has created it. These castles, especially Camelot, serve as markers of power and as both loci and pivot points for all Arthurian activity. The following chapters investigate the multiplicity of that activity, as the text and its stories move in various directions.

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Castles and Community Identity Arthur’s political success is largely predicated on the workings of his Round Table community in and out of his castle spaces. That community defines itself via architectural and social space in a pronounced way. Inclusion and exclusion manifest through closeness and distance both within and in relation to Arthur’s central castles. Throughout Malory’s Morte, we see considerable inward movement, with space collecting knights to join the fellowship of the Round Table, and knights striving to enclose themselves within the court’s embrace – Gareth and Balyn come to mind as two who do this in decidedly different ways and with quite opposite results for their identities, for their communities, and for space. There are also knights whose presence at court is desired and welcomed by king and court, and reassuring to the social identity of the Round Table. Launcelot’s premier position coupled with his frequent absence exemplifies the fraught relationship between the court as a place (the castle) and the court as a collection of knights whose actions define both space and group. And, of course, there are others who traverse Arthur’s castle spaces less frequently; this, too, can tell us much about how the community functions and exists in space. This chapter aims to peer into castle spaces especially in times of gathering, to examine moments of inclusion and exclusion, to see who gets close – and who does not – and what that means for Arthur’s Round Table community and its spaces. Indeed, I believe that we cannot fully understand Malory’s Arthurian community without considering it in place. Social space, the product of the relationship between a space and its inhabitants, makes the castle not only the literal space of the court, but also the embodiment of the court’s ideals and a crucial factor in the construction of the court’s communal identity. Bill Hillier sees space linking the abstract idea of a group and the concrete building in which it is housed: Buildings seem to be physical things, and societies and organisations seem to be abstractions. Yet our ideas of buildings seem to contain social abstractions, and our idea of social organisations seems to contain ideas of buildings. The common coin of both relations seems to be the idea of space. Space both gives the form to the social

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abstraction which we name in buildings, and space seems to be the content of the building that can be taken back to the more abstract conceptions of society and organisation.1

This chapter endeavors to illustrate this very point, to parse the conjunction of space and communal identity, by examining Arthur’s court. From a theoretical standpoint, space here will function as it did in Chapter One, in which Arthur’s political ideology was examined through castle spaces and uses of those spaces. The political function in fact overlaps considerably with the construction of a social identity for Arthur’s Round Table community, as Arthur’s political authority is dependent on the health of the realm as a whole, on a functioning body of knights. Moreover, as the narrative progresses, Arthur’s reputation and rule diffuse and derive increasingly from the conglomerate. His individual actions in space recede and group activity comes to the fore. The rise of the community as the source of power necessitates maintenance of that community and its health as a body. This entails constant attention to both the pieces and the whole – and the relationship between the two. Much of this occurs in Arthur’s castles, which host a variety of gatherings and participate in defining membership. Malory’s community of knights depends upon the twofold notion of fellowship that Elizabeth Archibald outlines in an essential essay on the topic. According to Archibald, Malory uses the term ‘fellowship’ in several of its meanings, two of which are especially important for understanding the text: There are two important kinds of fellowship associated with the Round Table: the friendship of individual knights out pursuing adventure and ‘worship,’ which may be more or less enduring, and the permanent bond of all Round Table knights, often invoked during quests and celebrated when they gather for feasts and tournaments, which ends only with the end of the story – the end of the Arthurian world.2

This term takes on these two meanings, Archibald argues, and often replaces the word ‘compagnie’ in the French source material. This duality, the use of the word for both public and private connections between and among knights, hints at how important the idea and the ideal are in the text, as Archibald goes on to demonstrate. Indeed, the Morte evidences not only a focus on fellowship, but a desire to valorize the fellowship 1

Bill Hillier, Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 373. 2 Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,’ The Review of English Studies 43.171 (1992): 316 [311–28].

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of Arthur’s knights. While questing, Pellynor witnesses a conversation between two knights about the Round Table fellowship: ‘What tydynges at Camelot?’ seyde that one knyght. ‘Be my hede,’ seyde the other, ‘there have I bene and aspied the courte of Kynge Arthure, and there ys such a felyship that they may never be brokyn, and well-nyghe all the world holdith with Arthure, for there ys the floure of chevalry. And now for thys cause am I rydyng into the northe, to telle oure chyfftaynes of the felyship that ys withholdyn with Kynge Arthure.’ (95.27–33)

Here two men unaffiliated with King Arthur (or so it seems) meet and discuss Camelot and the body of knights therein. The high praise that is given to the ‘floure of chevalry’ and the plan to spread this news attest to the reputation that the knights have achieved and the image that they present at court, for the speaker has just come from Camelot. This somewhat random encounter – overheard by Pellynor only by chance – also clearly localizes Arthur’s fellowship and links it specifically to Camelot, which Muriel Whitaker rightly terms ‘the archetypal centre of the chivalric milieu.’3 This suggests that space matters in the text’s construction of the community of knights. As I noted in the previous chapter, Malory’s location of Camelot at Winchester carries considerable political importance. The connection between Malory’s Winchester Camelot and the Round Table extends this significance from the political to the communal, as the Round Table becomes a symbol of and, indeed, a name for Arthur’s collection of knights. Just as the actual Round Table on display at Winchester then and now concretized the spaces of Camelot in the text, so too does its presence urge us to think about the spatialization of the community of knights (see Plate 3).4 The Round Table as object enters the Morte as the dowry that King Lodegreauns offers for the marriage of his daughter to the king, and it initiates a metamorphosis of the space – social and physical – of Camelot. Lodegreauns introduces his choice of this gift (rather than riches and lands) thus: But I shall sende hym a gyffte that shall please hym muche more, for I shall gyff hym the Table Rounde whych Uther hys fadir gaff me. And whan hit ys fullé complete there ys an hondred knyghtes and fyfty. And as for an hondred good knyghtes, I have myselff, but I wante fyfty, for so many hathe be slayne in my dayes. (77.7–11) 3 4

Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure, p. 41. See Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table, pp. 387–92.

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Malory’s redaction here evidences a slightly revised understanding of the Round Table. In both his version and his French source, the Suite du Merlin, the Round Table and its two-thirds complement of knights are the most important part of the dowry. Here, however, the Round Table has a more physical presence than it does in the French. Malory’s Table is marked as a gift separate from the knights figuratively attached to it, and also as a family heirloom (the mention of Arthur’s father Uther is not in the Suite du Merlin). This physicality of the Table intrigues me. Camelot as a space will be notably reconstructed with the arrival of Round Table. The Table makes physically manifest an idea that already existed (we have actually already heard about Arthur’s Round Table knights – Round Table knights without a table!).5 The physical, social, communal, and political are now intertwined. The spatial implications of the marriage of Arthur and Gwenyver on the community are multiple, and extend beyond the Table, of course. As queen, Gwenyver becomes an integral part of the community, though of course not a member of the Round Table.6 Gwenyver spends most of her time at court, and its gatherings thus cluster around her and her presence. She stands literally at the center of so many scenes, and even judges knights upon their return from quests at times, as I discussed in Chapter One. In that role, she participates actively in making both the body of knights and the court space what they are. However, dependent as it is upon her, the Round Table community also excludes her because she is a woman. No seat at the Table will ever bear her name. She is always both central and peripheral at court, always pulling the community together and always at risk of dividing it. The wedding participates in establishing communal ties, as its celebration culminates in the establishment of the Pentecostal Oath, which will guide and govern the group. This Oath formally knits together the collection of knights along with the actual Round Table and the spaces around it. It does so both in its technical codification of behaviors, most of which are strict proscriptions defining what not to do (murder, treason, rape, wrongful quarrel, etc.), and through the exchange that precedes it. Malory tells us, ‘than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys, and charged them’ with the specific legislation (97.27–28). The Oath thus binds the knights to their king, an allegiance he ensures by gifting them riches and lands; to the principles of chivalry, 5 6

At 11.25. Her arrival at court also signals the beginning of a separate community within these royal castles, one of ladies, about which we learn little as their presence in the text is not great.

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as outlined in the Oath itself; and to each other.7 Their communal bond is cemented by the annual swearing of the Oath: ‘So unto thys were all knyghtes sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and yonge, and every yere were they sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste’ (98.1–3). This yearly recitation, a confirmation of their shared bond and its ideas, ideals, and legislation, connects them to each other and to the spaces of the court. It is through this performance that the Round Table, the castle space, and Pentecost itself gain so much relevance in terms of community identity. Henceforth, we cannot entirely extricate Round Table knights from the Round Table itself, even as they roam and quest and rebel. The Round Table thus becomes a tangible manifestation of the social space and correlates with the communal meaning of Camelot, in line with Hillier’s theory of community spaces. The intermingling of the space of Camelot and its body of knights is not reducible to the Table – the court spaces are, indeed, multiple – but it is certainly represented by it. Felicity Riddy points to the Table as a ‘locus of a set of values,’ an idea with which I agree, though I do not see this in opposition to the Table ‘as a social institution,’ as she does.8 The two work in concert. And as much as the Round Table is a fixed location, it is also a moveable signifier, as its meaning travels to Arthur’s other castles without the Table itself. Indeed, it extends even to the individual apart from the group. The moniker ‘Knight of the Round Table’ refers quite often to a single questing knight, but its use implies the group and recalls the group’s – Arthur’s – court spaces. The label can be used to identify friends and foes alike, and carries with it always the weight of the community’s reputation. Membership to the Round Table community can, indeed, even gain one entrance into other spaces. Bleoberys de Ganys, for example, enters King Mark’s court and requests that Mark ‘gyff hym a bone, “what gyffte that I woll aske in this courte”’ (312.30). Mark’s response to this sudden request tells us much about the power of Round Table membership: ‘Whan the kynge herde hym aske so he mervayled of his askynge, but bycause he was a Knyght of the Rounde Table and of grete renowne, Kynge Marke graunted hym his hole askynge’ (312.31–33). Mark’s willingness to agree to Bleoberys’s request, both before and after the contents of that request are revealed, is based in part on his belonging to King Arthur’s collection of knights. Indeed, it is noted before Bleoberys’s renown is – and this despite the fact that Mark is not altogether enthusiastic about Arthur’s court. Bleoberys’s Round Table 7



For an excellent and important discussion of the Oath’s role in defining gender and generating narrative in the Morte, see Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, especially pp. 28–44. 8 Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), p. 106; emphasis original.

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status serves as a ticket to the gift of his choosing. He chooses as his boon the most beautiful woman in Mark’s court, and Bleoberys points to Sir Segwarydes’s wife (it is not clear that Bleoberys knows that he is choosing a married woman whom Mark and Trystram also love). What emerges, then, is a fascinating love pentangle, but one that strays from my topic here. Of most interest to me is that Bleoberys disrupts Mark’s court space and is able to do so with relative ease because he identifies as a Round Table knight. Malory’s emphasis on both the physical nature of the Round Table – as a thing in (castle) space – and on the intangible value associated with attachment to that space necessitates diligence in the creation and maintenance of the community, and this can often be seen in the selection process. Membership is reserved for the top tier of knights, at least in theory, and the limited places are highly coveted. Bagdemagus’s anger upon being overlooked in favor of Torre serves as a testament to the desirability of inclusion. This occurs in the aftermath of the War with the Five Kings, a battle that costs Arthur eight members of his Round Table. Following the victory and the establishment of an abbey at the battle site, ‘the kynge retourned unto Camelot in haste,’ and asks Pellynor for advice in filling the open seats (104.15–16). It is important that the decision happens directly upon arrival at Camelot, where the lack is visibly manifest in the gaps around the Table, and where the physical and social aspects of space coalesce most obviously.9 Pellynor’s counsel seems to respond to the space, particularly in his final recommendation. He first advises that Arthur add four old and four young knights to the fellowship. Arthur agrees readily to the suggestions, and the barons assent as well. Pellynor endorses Uryence, the Kynge of the Lake, Hervyse de Revell, and Galagars as the four old knights. He then provides three specific names for young knights: Gawayne, Gryfflette le Fyse de Du, and Kay. Each seems to be a good fit, and Kay in particular receives Arthur’s praise. For the final available spot, Pellynor shifts responsibility back to the king after nominating two potential knights. One of these is Bagdemagus, and the other is Pellynor’s own son Torre. This is an apparent effort to avoid accusations of nepotism, though Pellynor does 9

It is important to note that this is not always the case. Several times over the course of the Morte, a current Round Table knight promises membership to someone, and this seems to go unquestioned: Priamus, whom Gawayne recommends after fighting first against and then with him in the Roman War episode (185.18); Belleus, whom Launcelot vouches for (222.11–12); Plenoryus is promised a seat at the next feast, as long as one is available, by Launcelot (375.2); and a young Elyne le Blanke, who gains easy entrance as Bors’s son (656.3).

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offer plaudits for his son, saying there is not a better knight of his age, that none is ‘of bettir condycions, and loth to do ony wronge and loth to take ony wronge’ (105.12–13). Pellynor’s praise – and it is indeed high praise, though he has just declared it inappropriate to offer any for his own son – echoes the expectations that Round Table members exhibit both prowess and good character. Arthur is convinced and indeed, if this is a truthful characterization of Torre despite the family bias, he certainly merits inclusion in the group and will have a positive impact on the social space by bringing with him skill and virtue akin to those that have earned the group its reputation. That very space now suffocates Bagdemagus because it has excluded him. Malory narrates this with considerable attention to both the Table and space generally: So whan they were chosyn by the assent of the barouns, so were there founden in hir seges every knyghtes name that here ar reherced. And so were they sette in hir seges, whereof Sir Bagdemagus was wondirly wrothe that Sir Tor was avaunced afore hym. And therefore soddeynly he departed frome the courte and toke his squyre with hym, and rode longe in a foreste tyll they come to a crosse, and there he alyght and seyde his prayers devoutely. The meane whyle his squyre founde wretyn uppon the crosse that Bagdemagus sholde never retourne unto the courte agayne tyll he had wonne a Knyght of the Table Rounde body for body. ‘Loo, sir,’ seyde his squyer, ‘here I fynde wrytyng of you; therefore I rede you, returne agayne to the courte.’ ‘That shall I never,’ seyde Bagdemagus, ‘tyll men speke of me ryght grete worship, and that I be worthy to be a Knyght of the Rounde Table.’ (105.21–35)

Particularly angry about Torre’s promotion over him – a promotion that comes with a seat, a space – Bagdemagus leaves Camelot straightaway. The space has not welcomed him; indeed, it pushes him out. He soon learns how he will earn his way back into that space. His full acceptance at the court requires that he defeat a Round Table knight, thus proving himself worthy of a seat. Bagdemagus recognizes in particular that he must earn the praise of the community, that they must speak highly of him at court – their speech would reverse the outward thrust of the court and pull him into membership. Malory’s redaction here evidences some minor, but perhaps telling, changes from the French Suite du Merlin. In that source, Bandemagus remains at court overnight, and berates himself

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in addition to expressing anger that the younger Tor (a detail Malory omits) was advanced before him. Bagdemagus’s quick exit in Malory suggests that the space itself poses a problem and pushes him out.10 When he leaves in the French text, Arthur and Pellinor both lament his loss, and Pellinor even suggests that it would have been better to choose Bandemagus in order to prevent his departure, which is considered a great loss to the group. We do not see any reaction to his departure in Malory’s court. Another difference between the French and English versions lies in the prophecy, as Malory does without the French cross’s note that Bagdemagus will have to perform feats both near and far in addition to defeating a Round Table knight. Malory shifts this additional material from the prophecy to Bagdemagus’s own thoughts and words. He sees for himself what he needs, what can earn him a spot along with those recently seated. Bagdemagus’s intervening adventures are short-lived and lightly narrated, but quite interesting in terms of the overall arc of the story. Indeed, within the space of a page on the Winchester Manuscript, he is made a Knight of the Round Table, though quietly and without any sense of celebration at court.11 In the meantime, he encounters Merlyn (now forever separated from the court), but cannot move the stone and release him from his imprisonment; he sees a sign of the grail, a testament to his value; and he ‘dud many adventures and preved aftir a full good knyght’ (106.13). We learn nothing specific about these adventures, but if we trust his recent prophecy, he must defeat a Round Table knight in this stretch, because he then ‘come ayen to the courte and was made Knyght of the Rounde Table’ (106.13–14). Bagdemagus seems to experience just a short gap between rejection and acceptance, and his travails in the meantime are both noteworthy – they attest to his value as a knight and man – and decidedly not noteworthy, as suggested by the cursory rehearsal of them. On both accounts, however, they provide a path to re-entry into Arthur’s spaces and to Round Table membership. It is characters like Bagdemagus, those trying to get in, those hovering around the margins, those moving in and out, and also those to whom the court beckons, who are most interesting to me here. It is from these edges and movements that we can best see the interaction between the community and the castle as a social space. By traversing in, out, and around the court with several knights – Balyn, Gareth, Launcelot, Mordred, and Galahad – I hope to trace the identity of both the 10

Of course, this could be a case of shortening for its own sake. Regardless, the effect remains: the space cannot hold him. 11 Winchester MS (BL Add. MS 59678), 48v–49r.

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individuals and the membership as a whole. This wide range of knights defines the community in space through their behaviors and through the reception of their actions. One of the key communal functions of the castle in Malory’s Morte Darthur – as in many romances, Arthurian and otherwise – is as a geographical start and end point for the quests that in many ways define the genre. Although this might be rather obvious, and although the short Bagdemagus episode shows us this in summary, I do think that there is more to be said about the consequences of this cycle of setting out and returning and what it tells us about how diversely fundamental the castle and court are to the text. Carolyne Larrington rightly claims that the welcome back, as much as the welcome, evokes a set of emotions within the courtly community that intersects powerfully with the chief enterprise of the Arthurian court: the production and maintenance of collective and individual honour with their clear potential for generating pride, joy, and shame within the courtly context.12

I would like to add to her discussion more specific attention to the spaces themselves. Balyn’s adventures (or misadventures), for example, illustrate the hold that the castle and court have on the text’s understanding of knightly identity, and especially how the community participates in crafting that identity for individuals as well as for the whole. Much criticism about Malory’s Balyn episode has focused on how he vexes ideas of Arthurian chivalry and inclusion. Catherine Batt notes that he ‘blurs coordinates for chivalric hierarchy, destiny, and social order,’ and notes that his acts tie together worthiness and unworthiness.13 Deborah Ellis argues that Balyn’s story reveals that ‘treachery is a relative term’ in Malory, again pointing to the mixed messages this plot and character reveal.14 Andrew Lynch places Balyn and his tale at the point of convergence between axes of ‘wrongness’ and ‘rightness.’15 Several scholars point out that his attachment to familial ties and his fierce grip 12

Carolyne Larrington, ‘“Wyʒe, welcum iwys to þis place!”: Emotions in the Schemas for Arrival, Return and Welcome at the Arthurian Court,’ Journal of the International Arthurian Society 4.1 (2016): 94 [92–103]. 13 Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 59. 14 Deborah S. Ellis, ‘Balin, Mordred and Malory’s Idea of Treachery,’ English Studies 68.1 (1987): 67 [66–74]. Leitch echoes this idea, noting that Balyn is exemplary for being without treason in a tale that foregrounds treason, in Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 98–99. 15 Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 22.

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on blood feuds trouble the community and even Arthur’s sovereignty.16 This does correctly characterize his misdeed, but there is more to parse here. His conflicting commitments to feuds and the Arthurian court tell us much about how that court constructs and manages itself. Balyn’s movement in and around castle space highlights the relationship between individual and group in that process. As Malory’s Balyn leaves Camelot, his transgressions having seemingly confirmed the outsider status that already plagued him, he aims to take his adventure and then return. Indeed, he explicitly tells his squire to meet him back at King Arthur’s court (52.19). This is a court that has kept him ever on the margins. This is a court that has firmly rejected him. This is a court that has quite frankly determined that he does not belong. But because the court – meaning both the building and the retinue of knights – is a key determinative factor in assessing knighthood and in establishing the community and admission into that community, Balyn knows that he needs to return, and to be let in both literally and figuratively, despite his rejection and expulsion. Or perhaps he is simply dense, blissfully unaware of the implications of his own actions. I prefer, however, to think that his goal reveals his perceptiveness. More important to my discussion, however, is the text’s apparent understanding of the workings of social space. The opening of Balyn’s tale in Malory’s Morte certainly emphasizes the social space of the court. The remainder of the tale (his adventures outside Camelot itself) confirms the importance of the castle and court in completing any knightly quest and thus attaining membership of the community. Furthermore, it shows how the community uses its spaces to manage its membership and shape its identity. One of the most obvious ways that this occurs is through allowing certain people in, and preventing access by others (or even pushing them out). Because of this, liminal spaces within and around the castle prove locations of decisions that participate in the continual defining, redefining, and confirming of community identity. This is, of course, not restricted to castles, either in the text or in the world. The castle marks the proper end of a quest, 16

See, for example, Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992 [1985]), p. 220; Thomas H. Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 72. There are scholars who illustrate the ways in which Balyn is a (tragic) hero; see Ralph Norris, ‘The Tragedy of Balin: Malory’s Use of the Balin Story in the Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 9.3 (1999): 52–67; K. S. Whetter, ‘On Misunderstanding Malory’s Balyn,’ in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, eds. K. S. Whetter and Raluca Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 149–62.

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because the return to the court signals not only completion (which itself might include story-telling, relief, joy, etc.), but also acceptance into the communal fold (beyond or within that liminal space). Allowing a knight into the court’s embrace opens the door to his identity and actions, both of which will in turn shape the community’s identity. Balyn’s inauspicious beginning with King Arthur’s court highlights the role of the castle in determining one’s status and creating community identity. Balyn remains ever marginalized and on the periphery of the court, subject to competing centripetal and centrifugal forces and wavering between inclusion and exclusion. His inability to maneuver within the social space of the court in the beginning of his tale excludes him from fully establishing his knightly status, and this initial incompetence within the space plays a role in his continued inability to bring his quest to a satisfying end back at court. The first sign that Malory presents a Balyn who does not fit into the community appears at his very arrival on the scene. This episode begins with the king calling all of his barons to Camelot to counter the apparent aggression of King Royns of North Wales. This mass inward movement of knights whose status is assured brings to the fore the relationship between identity, community, and the castle. Interrupting this assembly is a damsel who claims to be a messenger of the Lady Lyle of Avilion. She bears a sword that can only be drawn ‘by a knyght, and he muste be a passynge good man of hys hondys and of hys dedis, and withoute velony other trechory and withoute treson’ (48.1–3). The damsel even notes that she has recently assayed the knights of King Royns, all of whom failed. This seems to be setting up a chance for Arthur’s team to prove dominance over the enemy – an even broader insider/outsider divide than the Balyn storyline presents. None of the gathered knights succeed, perhaps calling into question the reputation Arthur’s court has already achieved. But Balyn – a prisoner hailing from Northumberland – enters and succeeds.17 As others have noted, Malory shifts Balyn’s imprisonment to Arthur’s own court: as Malory tells us he ‘had bene presonere with hym half a yere for sleyng of a knyght which was cosyne unto Kynge Arthure’ (48.31–33). The French Balin had recently come to Camelot after having been released from a Northumberland prison.18 Malory’s change removes Balyn from the Arthurian community and defines him as

17

Armstrong and Hodges perceptively remind us that his Northumberland heritage aligns him with forces opposed to Arthur in the ongoing civil war, in Mapping Malory, p. 82. 18 In the Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Roussineau, 94.28–31; The Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 8, p. 41.

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socially outside its bounds.19 Indeed, his crime is relocated to place him against the Arthurian community, as well. In Malory he kills a relative of King Arthur; in the Suite, it is a relative of the King of Northumberland. His position outside the court is emphasized by his physical placement within and around it. He is delivered from prison because he seems likely of body, but he comes ‘pryvaly’ to the court, as if in the shadows and on the outside, his peripheral location mirroring his marginal status (49.1).20 He remains spatially separated because of that status. When Balyn does indeed draw the sword, he seems to put to rest questions about his status.21 Later news (from Merlyn) that the damsel was on a false errand which was itself filled with treachery might negate or reverse any good that his act has done for his status.22 And even in the moment, of course, Balyn’s spot is not confirmed. When the damsel requires that Balyn return the sword, he twice refuses, despite the warning that with it he will kill his best friend, the man he loves most in the world (this ends up being his doublet brother, Balan). This hazy sign of discourteousness is registered by many readers today, but not by Arthur. As in the French version, King Arthur reassesses Balyn’s value as a knight, as well as his own treatment of Balyn. Arthur apologizes and offers that ‘if ye woll abyde in thys courte amonge my felyship, I shall so avaunce you as ye shall be pleased’ (50.20–21). Arthur here indicates that Balyn has achieved membership of the community, and he pulls him from the periphery, to both the court and the fellowship, twin components of the social space. Interestingly, Arthur’s invitation is juxtaposed with the passing mention of a general consensus among knights that Balyn’s success in achieving this sword was thanks to witchcraft (as in the French), which suggests that while Arthur pulls Balyn in, the group as a whole remains suspicious and rejects him as a peer. Balyn declines the king’s offer, perhaps sensing the need to convince the crowd that he belongs. Within a couple of lines, the Lady of the Lake arrives and Balyn smites off her head. Although she comes seeking the head of Balyn or the lady 19

Crofts argues that the key to this change is the fact that Arthur does the imprisoning here; for Crofts, then, this act thus ‘upholds Arthur’s status as law-giver, and Balyn’s as outlaw,’ in Malory’s Contemporary Audience, p. 73. 20 The French Balin does hang back while the more prestigious members of the court try and fail to draw the sword, but then comes forth of his own accord and courage. 21 Larrington notes that Balyn’s brief initial success highlights how a newly arrived knight must ‘capitalize on the marvel schema to draw positive attention to himself, to be accepted into the court and to win promises of favour from the king,’ in ‘“Wyʒe, welcum iwys to þis place,”’p. 98. 22 This has proven a sticky point for scholars. See, for example, Robert L. Kelly, ‘Malory’s “Tale of Balin,”’ Speculum 54.1 (1979): 88–90 [85–99]; Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 20.

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who bore the sword, as a gift that Arthur owes her for furnishing him with Excalibur, this beheading registers as a trespass. Balyn’s brutal act severs not only the Lady’s neck, but also, at least temporarily, the ties between Balyn and the court. The result is a swift push outward. Arthur explains: ‘For what cause soever ye had … ye sholde have forborne in my presence. Therefore thynke nat the contrary: ye shall repente hit, for such anothir despite had I nevir in my courte. Therefore withdraw you oute of my courte in all haste that ye may’ (51.34–52.3). Balyn’s act of killing the Lady of the Lake – an affront to the prescribed behaviors within the space – induces an overwhelmingly centrifugal force. He is once again an enemy unwelcome within the walls of Camelot (or wherever Arthur’s court might be housed), and as Kate McClune has argued, a threat to the king’s rule.23 Arthur’s comment, focusing on how to behave in his court and, specifically, in his own presence, illustrates how space gains meaning from its inhabitants. Arthur’s castles bring with them expectations and even rules for the knights. As Cresswell says, it is in the wake of transgressions that the rules and expectations of space are most clearly articulated. He explains that ‘we may have to experience some geographical transgression before we realize that a boundary ever existed.’24 Though a proscription against beheading a visitor – and a lady at that – perhaps should be self-evident, Balyn’s error is multiple. One key mandate for the knights of the Round Table is to align oneself with Arthur’s loyalties (here to the Lady of the Lake). Elizabeth Pochoda sees Balyn’s ‘antisocial behavior’ as a sign that he does not extend his ‘personal loyalty to Arthur … to the community of the court, or to the realm as a whole.’25 I question even that personal loyalty to the king, or at least his ability to enact it. Balyn has from the very start transgressed in killing the king’s relative. This second murderous act occurs in Arthur’s space, and thus Balyn is regarded as a trespasser in the court – among the people and in the castle. Malory has thus left no doubt about Balyn’s outsider status. For this reason, Balyn’s insistence on completing his mission (destroying the aggressor King Royns) and returning to the court is perplexing, but also illuminating. I want to look at his quest as an attempt to return to the court and to earn the embrace of the community, and then consider 23

Kate McClune, ‘“The Vengeaunce of my Brethirne”: Blood Ties in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ in Arthurian Literature XXVIII: Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur, eds. David Clark and Kate McClune (2011): 93 [89–106]. 24 Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 23. 25 Elizabeth Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 63–64.

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the implications for Balyn, for the Morte Darthur as a whole, and for our understanding of the relationship between the castle, the community, and knighthood. As I do so, I want to keep Simmel’s notions on group space in mind. He explains, ‘We always conceive of the space which a social group fills up in some sense as a unit that exercises and supports the unity of that group, just as much as it is carried and supported by it.’26 The Arthurian court – as a space and as a community of knights – exerts its influence in order to maintain that unity, to police its membership. For the rest of this tale, Balyn hovers near the Arthurian court and often even in Arthur’s good graces. He seems to be circling the court – and its approval and acceptance – but his quest is never completed, and his belonging is never confirmed by the community. He never really returns to Camelot to complete his quest. Like everything in his tale and his life, there is no closure, but rather only deferment, coupled with constant beckoning toward the (often distant) future. However, the urgency of his need for the court and its communal embrace does not subside and this, like the opening episodes of his story, highlights the importance of that return – and specifically the return to the castle itself – in defining the knight, the quest, and, indeed, the community. Also like the opening episodes, the adventures that God ordains for Balyn exhibit an oscillation between forces pulling him in and those pushing him out. When Balyn rides away from Camelot, he is followed by Launceor, who aims to avenge the despite done to Arthur and the court. Balyn slays him (which also results in Launceor’s lover’s suicide), then laments that he has done more to displease Arthur and repeats his pledge to make amends by defeating King Royns of North Wales. He and his brother Balan successfully defeat Royns’s band of knights and take Royns prisoner. Interestingly, instead of delivering him to Arthur themselves – a deed that would all but assure acceptance from the king and possibly even the larger community – they deposit their captive with porters (59.15). This hand-off occurs outside the actual castle – it is at the gate – and thus signals an incomplete quest. Even though defeating Royns is exactly what he set out to do, and even though it resolves the very problem that had begun this tale, Balyn has apparently not achieved full closure or gained entry, and this despite the fact that as soon as Arthur finds out who conquered Royns, he retracts all ill will toward Balyn. Indeed, upon finding out that it was Balyn and his brother who captured and brought him Royns, he says that he is ‘muche beholdynge unto hym, and I have evill deserved hit agayne for hys kyndnesse’ (59.30–32). What 26

Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Space,’ p. 141.

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results, then, is a sense that Balyn is still very much in the middle of his quest and thus still in a liminal position with regard to the court. This pattern continues. Balyn edges closer to the court, but never gets in (physically). He and Balan fight on Arthur’s side against Nero and then Lot – so successfully in the former battle that the crowd marvels and Arthur considers them the ‘doughtyeste knyghtes that ever he sawe’ (60.17–18). Other onlookers, however, cannot pinpoint the source of their prowess: ‘And all they that behelde them seyde they were sente frome hevyn as angels other devilles from helle’ (60.15–17). Either assessment (angelic or devilish) indicates that Balyn and Balan exhibit superhuman ability, but offering both highlights the uncertainty that surrounds Balyn. This again forestalls Balyn’s full inclusion in the Arthurian community, though Malory does show more preference for Balyn than his French source does by adding the reference to angels. Those watching the French Balin suggest that he is a monster or devil.27 Malory’s version thus highlights the competing court forces pulling Balyn in and pushing him away. Arthur then sends him off to fetch a grieving knight. With each new chapter to his quest, Balyn is thus kept at the outskirts, away from the center, the community, and the status that a central location could confer. This segment, too, confounds Balyn’s ultimate goal. His charge, Harleus le Berbeus, is slain by the invisible Garlon while in his care, and unsurprisingly this adds to his quest and delays his desired return to Arthur’s court. This proves to be a permanent delay, as it sets in motion a series of adventures that include, most notably, the Dolorous Stroke that wounds King Pellam and the deaths of Balyn and his brother Balan at each other’s hands. Balyn never does return to Camelot.28 Only his sword eventually makes its way back to the court. Merlyn puts the sword into a marble stone that ‘hoved allwayes above the watir, and dud many yeres. And so by adventure hit swamme downe by the streme unto the cité of Camelot that ys in Englysh called Wynchester’ (74.23–25). The sword’s eventual movement to the court perhaps both ends Balyn’s quest – finally – and renews it, as the sword goes to Galahad and the search for the grail begins.29 Malory’s choice of the word 27

See the Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Roussineau, 142.11–17; The Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 8, p. 62. 28 This counters Jeanie R. Brink’s claim that Balin successfully completes his quests, in ‘The Design of Malory’s “Tale of Balin”: Narrative and Dialogue Counterpoint,’ Studies in Short Fiction 17.1 (1980): 2 [1–7]. 29 The text here notes Galahad’s future achievement of this sword: ‘and that same day Galahad the Haute Prynce com within Kynge Arthure, and so Galaad brought with hym the scawberde and encheved the swerde that was in the marble stone hovynge upon the watir. And on Whytsonday he enchevyd the swerde, as hit ys rehersed in the Booke of the Sankgreall’ (74.25–30).

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‘hoved’ here to describe the stone floating or waiting on the water is telling. Like Balyn himself, the sword remains liminal and deferred. In the PostVulgate Suite version, this sword in a stone travels many rivers, eventually landing at Camelot. Here it is static, seemingly upstream of Camelot, biding its time, aimed at and wanting to return to court – Balyn-esque. Despite being decidedly unsuccessful in several regards, most notably for the sake of this discussion in not geographically and communally completing his quests, Balyn and his tale do help establish the model of adventure that will dominate a large portion of the Morte. Several of Malory’s seemingly minor tweaks of his source material produce a nuanced understanding of the ways in which the social and physical space of the court functions as a judge of knights and their quests. Later knights’ completed quests, ones that do cycle back to the castle, show how an adventure must be mapped circularly to use space effectively. The three quests on the occasion of Arthur’s marriage to Gwenyver certainly follow that pattern, as do the similarly triplicate adventures of Gawayne, Uwayne, and Marhaus. Gareth, too, provides a recognizable example of this; as will be shown, his relationship to space overlaps Balyn’s early in his tale, but then diverges considerably. Together, Balyn’s inability to re-enter the court and his failure to win over the knightly community as a whole show the relationship between space and identity. Both Balyn’s own identity as a marginal knight and the Arthurian community’s construction of itself are mapped across the castle. The community protects itself and its spaces by keeping Balyn at and beyond its edges. I sense that the community understands intrinsically the ways in which space participates in creating its reputation and identity. Balyn’s hovering and marginal status tears at the very seams of this model even as it establishes it, however, and these tears have a ripple effect. The much later quests that this tale hints at – in particular, Galahad’s path to the grail – bear the mark of this tragic ending (or notquite-ending). Galahad does achieve the grail, but he does not return to Camelot or the Round Table. The majority who do return in that instance come to report failure of various sorts. Scholarship on Balyn as a symbol of the inherent trouble with crossed loyalties evidences a problem endemic to Malory’s text and his spaces. Hodges argues rightly that there are ‘potential fissures in the community’ emerging in this tale.30 Putting these fissures into conversation with the court as a place reveal that as much as Camelot can be an apt symbol of Arthur’s unilateral political power, it is a fraught space for the developing community. As this chapter 30

Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 46.

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works its way through several key members of the community and looks at them in space, I hope to show that the frequent enclosure of the Round Table within castle walls produces friction and concern as much as it does an ideal Arthurian communal identity. The story of Gareth certainly illuminates an ideal social space, but one that troubles itself. Like Balyn, Gareth does not garner the immediate approval and embrace of the full Arthurian court. He, too, begins his Arthurian story in liminal spaces: he moves from entryway to kitchen, and then to the world beyond the castle. Gareth famously rejects any appearance of belonging and obscures the bloodline that would grant him automatic entrance to the community, choosing instead to prove himself over time. In the process, his narrative tells us much about the spaces of the court and its Round Table fellowship. However, he is not eternally deferred; his entry is not entirely blocked. Gareth’s story shows us the possibility for a narrative like Balyn’s, and it too helps us understand the shared workings of space and community. At the same time, his placement in and around the castle reflects spatial problems that undergird the court even early in the text. Gareth enters Arthur’s court on Pentecost, a day of particular importance for the Round Table community, and exhibits knowledge of how the court space functions, both in general and on this particular day. Despite that apparent sense of how to be in this space, and likely also how to make himself a part of that space, Gareth maps his journey on the fringes of the court, in the spaces not associated with Arthur and his knights. Scholars have traced this mapping with attention to local and ‘global’ geographies. Ruth Lexton has recently turned critical attention to the starting place of this tale, ‘a cité and a castell in tho dayes that was called Kynke Kenadoune, uppon the sondys that marched nyghe Walys’ (223.4–6), which she argues ‘situat[es] king and knights in a vulnerable place on the edge of Arthur’s territories.’31 Lexton sees this borderland as one that troubles the Arthurian castle space, and articulates Gareth’s tale as an interrogation of institutional courtesy. The court falls short, Kay as a representative of the court being the primary offender. Lexton thus rightly points to much of what we can learn about Arthur’s court spaces here, but I believe there is an even more basic sense of the court’s use of 31

Lexton, Contested Language, p. 112. P. J. C. Field has placed Kynke Kenadoune in northern Wales; see his ‘Malory’s Place Names: King Kenadoune,’ Arthuriana 22.4 (2012): 67–76. Armstrong and Hodges’s discussion about northern Wales in the Morte puts the importance and the complexity of this potential location into conversation with key alliances and enmities in the text; see Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, pp. 45–71.

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space that emerges across Gareth’s narrative. The ongoing making of the community is apparent in this story. Gareth is first spotted through a window, beyond the confines of the court. Gawayne, his brother, sees but does not recognize him. Rather, Gawayne pronounces the arrival of ‘strange adventures,’ just what is needed to allow the Pentecost feast to commence (223.17). Marking Gareth as an adventure, as part of this particular custom of the court – and not a potential member of the court – participates in marginalizing Gareth. These marvels are transient by nature; they pass through the court and initiate a quest or test. These marvels enter and exit in a flurry of excitement and are often not seen again. Certainly, the Gareth marvel does bring with it the test of courtesy that Lexton adroitly examines. It also sets Gareth on his own path to becoming a worshipful knight, something that I have previously argued he does largely through the successful manipulation of the matrix of gazes that confer and confirm knighthood.32 However, there is more to be said about what these episodes tell us about the court as a space and Gareth’s placement within it. Once he enters the court, Gareth maintains the liminal position that Gawayne’s view of him through the window suggests. Like Balyn, it is through a negotiation of centripetal and centrifugal impulses that Gareth locates himself, though Gareth has much more agency over his location. He intentionally hides his identity, which would clear a path to the court’s center.33 Larrington sees this as a ‘theatricalization of his identity, initially staging the Self as Other.’34 Indeed, Gareth does present himself as an outsider. He indicates that he has three wishes, but asks only ‘mete and drynke suffyciauntly for this twelve-monthe,’ and delays further requests for a full year – as this will of course be on the next Pentecost feast, he is presaging another marvel in accordance with the custom (224.15). Aware of the peripatetic nature of Arthur’s court, Gareth adds that he will make his next wishes ‘wheresomever ye holde your hyghe feste’ (224.11). This also perhaps hints that he understands the relationship between the court and its spaces. In response to this relatively small request, Arthur 32

Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 25–48. 33 Much has been said about this as a ‘Fair Unknown’ tale. See, for example, Robert H. Wilson, ‘The “Fair Unknown” in Malory,’ PMLA 58.1 (1943): 1–21; P. J. C. Field, ‘The Source of Malory’s “Tale of Gareth,”’ in Aspects of Malory, eds. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981 ), pp. 57–70; Arnold Sanders, ‘Sir Gareth and the “Unfair Unknown”: Malory’s Use of the Gawain Romances,’ Arthuriana 16.1 (2006): 34–46; Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 83–89. 34 Larrington, ‘“Wyʒe, welcum iwys to þis place!”’ p. 97.

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suggests that, as it appears that he has ‘com of men of worshyp’ and will himself ‘preve a man of ryght grete worshyp,’ he should seek something loftier – surely an act of pulling Gareth into the court (224.19–20). Gareth rejects this offer, but Arthur seems to keep open his embrace by ordering that Gareth be served the best food and drink, and be provisioned for ‘as though he were a lordys sonne’ (224.32–33). One finds the best food and drink in the hall, where it is served to the court. Though the specific place is left unspoken, this menu would at least associate Gareth with the hall, and those who feast there, among whom would be many a lord’s son; it would align him with the Round Table knights. Kay, however, is less keen on Gareth, whom he names ‘Beawmaynes,’ mocks repeatedly, and sends ‘into the kychyn’ (225.4). Kay shuttles Gareth away in large part because he reads him as not belonging, as not being of the appropriate class for the hall or for knighthood.35 Indeed, he assumes that this stranger was born of the lower class and raised in an abbey where he did not receive appropriate nutrition. In the kitchen, he will eat broth and be fattened like a hog.36 The kitchen itself is certainly a marginal space in the Morte. It is quite rare that we get a glimpse behind that curtain – indeed, only occasionally does Malory even gesture toward it. Likening Gareth to a hog connects him with spaces even further from those of the Round Table knights, though Gareth physically remains in more proximal margins. As the seemingly incompatible words ‘proximal’ and ‘margins’ suggest, competing forces continue to keep Gareth near to but away from the court. When Sir Kay ‘bade gete hym a place and sytte downe to mete,’ Gareth ‘wente to the halle dore and sette hym downe amonge boyes and laddys, and there he ete sadly’ (225.21–23).

35

Several scholars have discussed the notion of class in relation to this tale. See, for example, Joseph R. Ruff, ‘Malory’s Gareth and Fifteenth-Century Chivalry,’ in Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, eds. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerly (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1980), pp. 101–16, 169–71, especially at 107–109; Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, pp. 60–83; Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘Malory’s Gareth and the Comedy of Class,’ in The Arthurian Yearbook I, ed. Keith Busby (London and New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 165–93. Hodges explores the threat of shifting class lines, with members of the upper class rejecting knighthood and lower-class men joining it, in Forging Chivalric Communities, pp. 79–80. Though only briefly touching on Gareth himself, Sarah Peverley nicely historicizes the ‘men of nought’ idea in the later Middle Ages, in ‘Political Consciousness and the Literary Mind in Late Medieval England: Men “brought up of nought” in Vale, Hardyng, Mankind, and Malory,’ Studies in Philology 105.1 (2008): 1–29. 36 Kay specifically notes that he will end the year ‘as fatte … as a porke hog’ (225.6).

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His choice of location and his companions both speak to his liminality.37 The ‘halle dore’ implies that he is just beyond the great meeting place of the Round Table knights, and in a between place. The door provides access to and from both the hall and the less courtly locales in the castle. He thus places himself neither completely inside nor entirely outside the knights’ space. The lads and boys with whom he sits likewise can be read as marginal figures. Their youth and inexperience certainly separate them from the adult knights who occupy the hall, go on quests, and so forth. Both words can also point to servanthood or low birth. The word ‘laddys,’ however, can refer to young members of a noble’s – even a king’s – retinue.38 Though I do believe the primary goal here is to associate Gareth with the lower class, as Kay has (perhaps recklessly) done, the various connotations render the class standing of Gareth’s meal-mates somewhat ambiguous. Gareth, though ‘sad,’ seems committed to the margins for the year. Launcelot and Gawayne both offer ‘hym [to] com to his chamber’ to eat a likely better meal in a much more courtly setting, but Gareth does not take either of them up on it (225.24).39 Instead, he takes only what Kay, the man blocking his path to the Round Table, provides in terms of both space and food. Gareth thus seems to accept his social and spatial ostracism, but he keeps the places of the court and – especially – its community within sight. Malory notes that Gareth takes the opportunity to watch jousting knights whenever he can (225.34–35). Both in the doorway and as a spectator to knightly activity, Gareth skirts the borders of the court. He is excluded from, but on the verge of, the action, fringing the court and its acceptance. He does participate in ‘ony mastryes doynge,’ activity not reserved for knights and thus not exclusionary in the way others are (226.2). His success at these strength competitions (casting bars and stones) prompts Kay to remind him of his distinct spatialization with respect to the court. Kay responds to his feats of strength with, ‘How lykyth you my boy of the kychyn,’ calling on others – likely those already considered members of the court – to look at him and to think about his kitchen status as much as his prowess (226.4). Thus, even when he has a 37

Hyonjin Kim notes that Gareth chooses a position that is ‘perhaps inappropriate to the gentry but still likely to have attracted some of their ill-fated younger sons,’ in The Knight without the Sword: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. 40. 38 ‘ladde,’ Middle English Dictionary [accessed 21 July 2016] . 39 Gareth does, however, accept the gold and clothing that both Launcelot and Gawayne offer him (225.35–226.1), and thus prepares to enter knighthood at his own chosen time.

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central position, competing successfully before an audience – much like his own watching of the joust – Kay keeps him in the margins. Gareth’s self-imposed yearlong wait for his next two wishes passes – much of it spent in the kitchen, I would guess, and not watching jousts, heaving stones, etc. – and Pentecost comes around again. Surely, as Ryan Naughton suggests, we must see in the choice of Pentecost for Gareth’s arrival and his setting out as a nod toward the Round Table’s Oath and its role in the establishment and annual affirmation of the community.40 This year, King Arthur and company are celebrating at Caerleon, one of Arthur’s Welsh castles. A marvel arrives in the form of an unknown woman, who, like Gareth, refuses to identify herself. Lynet, whose name we learn later, requires the service of a knight to help ‘a lady of grete worshyp to my sustir, and she is beseged with a tirraunte, that she may nat oute of hir castell’ (226.15–16).41 Arthur does not comply with her wish, citing her namelessness, which places her on unfixed – and for that reason liminal – geographical and class landscapes. In this regard, as well as in his noble birth, Gareth provides a good match for her, though the ambiguity on both sides clouds that point. As promised, on this feast day Gareth will make his final two wishes known; also as promised, Arthur is beholden to grant those wishes. Like the paired forces that have pushed and pulled Gareth to and from the Round Table over the course of the year, here again there is spatial tension. Gareth enters just after the lady’s request has been refused and as she prepares to move on, disappointed. He recalls his year and looks forward to the next stage in his movement toward the Round Table fellowship: ‘Sir kyng, God thanke you, I have bene this twelve-monthe in your kychyn and have had my full sustynaunce. And now I woll aske my other too gyfftys that bene behynde’ (227.2–5). Gareth exhibits a full awareness of the sociospatial expectations and his place within the court. He graciously refers to his year in the margins, and thanks Arthur for the nourishment that was provided. He then reminds the audience of his remaining promises, which have been implicitly granted in advance. Like so much thus far 40

Ryan Naughton, ‘Peace, Justice and Retinue-Building in Malory’s “The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney,”’ Arthurian Literature XXIX (2012): 152 [143–60]. 41 In response to Arthur’s questions about the identity of the besieged lady, Lynet more or less repeats her initial pieces of information, but adds more: ‘as for my ladyes name, that shall nat ye know for me as at thys tyme, but I lette you wete she is a lady off grete worshyp and of grete londys; and as for that tyrraunte that besegyth her and destroyeth hir londys, he is kallyd the Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys’ (226.21–25). Lynet here adds reference to the lady’s land-holding (thus gesturing to her class status) and identifies the knight-perpetrator, a man and danger recognized immediately by Gawayne.

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in his tale, Gareth’s two wishes on this Pentecost – and their fulfillment – will involve inward and outward forces. He asks to take up this mysterious woman’s quest, which will shuttle him off far from the court and its members, but will eventually secure him a place among them. He also asks to be knighted by Launcelot, the premier Round Table knight, and this ritual crucially occurs outside the castle, away from the court and its eyes. Choosing Launcelot of course forges an unending link between the two, and also implies loosened ties to his own brothers, particularly Gawayne – Gareth affirms this choice toward the end of his tale because of Gawayne’s ‘conducions’ and ‘vengeable’ nature (285.30, 31). Gareth thus prioritizes the Round Table community and its ethos over kinship ties even before becoming a member of the fellowship. Gareth’s quest moves him out of Arthur’s castles and away from the Round Table community even as it provides him with an opportunity to earn a place within that community. Indeed, he spends much of the time away from the built environment altogether as he and Lynet wend their way toward her captive sister. Gareth’s liminal status persists, keeping at the surface his physical displacement in Arthur’s court. Lynet ensures that the reader, the knights whom they encounter, and Gareth himself do not forget this, as she continually insults him by calling him a ‘kychyn knave,’ which she does on at least thirteen occasions.42 Four times she notes that he bears with him still the particular grime and, especially, the unpleasant stink of the kitchen.43 This goes a step further than a reminder, as it indicates that he carries the kitchen and all of its implications and apparent associations with him. In addition, when the defeated Grene Knyght invites them to lodge at his home, Lynet ‘wolde nat suffir hym to sitte at hir table, but as the Grene Knyght toke hym and sate wyth hym at a syde table’ (236.25–27). Lynet here forces Gareth’s physical movement away from more privileged court spaces, though notably the Grene Knyght chooses to sit with him and even suggests to Lynet that her running commentary seems unfit for a knight who will likely prove himself and his royal lineage. This is of no interest to Lynet, and it does not shake her from her course of ill speaking. Much has been said about what these rebukes – and the comments with which they are often paired, that his victories over knights are all mishap and misadventure – say

42

At 227.17, 229.32, 230.5, 232.5, 232.31, 234.6, 234.24, 235.15, 236.5, 236.9, 237.19, 238.14, and 241.1–2; some of these she modifies with ‘bawdy.’ She uses the phrase ‘kychyn page,’ as well, at 231.5, 231.29, and 235.29; an ‘unhappy knave,’ at 233.3; and a ‘bawdy knave,’ at 235.32. 43 At 229.27 (here she also points to his dirty apparel), 230.30, 234.6, 241.1.

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about Gareth, Lynet, and their relationship.44 I would argue that because they do in fact align with his own choice to spend a year in the margins, they are a welcome reminder that he wants to prove his place among the knights before being invited into the courtly spaces at Camelot and elsewhere. Indeed, though Gareth eventually points out quite strongly that her running commentary does not correlate well with his deeds, his response to her apology shortly thereafter positions him differently.45 The initial rebuke focuses exclusively on his own prowess and the discord between his success and her insults. However, once Lynet admits the marvel that she has in seeing him respond so courteously to her, Gareth addresses the ‘kychyn knave’ invectives directly: ‘Damesell,’ seyde Bewmaynes, ‘a knight may lytyll do that may nat suffir a jantyllwoman, for whatsomever ye seyde unto me I toke none hede to your wordys, for the more ye seyde the more ye angred me, and my wretthe I wreked uppon them that I had ado withall. And therefore all the mysseyyng that ye mysseyde me in my batayle furthered me much and caused me to thynke to shew and preve myselffe at the ende what I was, for peraventure, thoughe hit lyst me to be fedde in Kynge Arthures kychyn, I myght have had mete in other placis, but alle that I ded, I ded hit for to preve my frendys, and that shall be knowyn another day. And whether that I be a jantyllman borne or none, I latte you wete, fayre damesell, I have done you jantyllmannys servyse, and peraventure bettir servyse yet woll I do or I departe frome you.’ (241.29–242.6) 44

See, for example, Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, pp. 118–120; Felicia Nimue Ackerman, ‘“Your charge is to me a pleasure”: Manipulation, Gareth, Lynet, and Malory,’ Arthuriana 19.3 (2009): 8–14; Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, ‘Tough Talk or Tough Love: Lynet and the Construction of Feminine Identity in Thomas Malory’s “Tale of Sir Gareth,”’ Arthuriana 24.2 (2014): 126–57; Siobhán Mary Wyatt, ‘“Gyff me goodly langage, and than my care is paste”: Reproach and Recognition in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth,’ Arthuriana 25.2 (2015): 129–42. 45 Gareth decries her chydyng hym in the fowleste manner. ‘Damesell,’ seyde Bewmaynes, ‘ye ar uncurteyse so to rebuke me as ye do, for mesemyth I have done you good servyse, and ever ye thretyn me I shall be betyn wyth knyghtes that we mete, but ever for all your boste they all lye in the duste or in the myre. And therefore y pray you, rebuke me no more, and whan ye se me betyn or yoldyn as recreaunte, than may you bydde me go from you shamfully, but erste, I let you wete, I woll nat departe from you; for than I were worse than a foole and I wolde departe from you all the whyle that I wynne worshyp.’ (239.30–240.4) Here, too, Gareth invokes space – though not the space of the castle – as he points to the location of his defeated opponents (in the dust and mire) as evidence of his continued success.

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I quote here at considerable length in order to show the full context into which Gareth (also Malory, of course) injects this reference to his time in the kitchen and simultaneously rejects and owns the ‘kychyn knave’ epithet. He begins and ends this speech with specific mention of class status – his own and Lynet’s. He reminds her that he has been knightly and has done her ‘jantyllmannys servyse,’ as is required for a gentlewoman in need. Indeed, here he seems to gesture toward the explicit instructions laid out by the ladies’ clause in the Pentecostal Oath: he most certainly provides her succor. Invoking the Oath recalls its own spatialization, as it is repeated annually within the central castle spaces, and indicates that Gareth belongs within that sphere. Furthermore, though not claiming the status of gentleman – and indeed delaying revelation of his lineage quite intentionally – Gareth juxtaposes his (kitchen) spaces in Arthur’s court with allusions to his social class and, thus, the spaces of that class. Gareth clarifies that his kitchen placement was by choice, pointing out that it pleased him (‘it lyst me’) and that he could have taken his food in other places, something Malory makes clear early in the text, with Launcelot’s and Gawayne’s invitations for meals. Furthermore, Gareth indicates why he opted for a year in the kitchen: to prove his friends. He sees this time as a test of others in order to learn just who his friends are, but his proving is anything but a one-way transaction. During his time in the kitchen and his time questing, he endeavors to prove himself out of place in the kitchen, not unlike Balyn’s quest to belie his own marginal status. However, quite contrary to Balyn’s trajectory, Gareth does eventually capitalize on the balance of inward forces that pull him from the margins to the court and the Round Table community. With or without Gareth’s complicity, however, Lynet’s words certainly have kept him in the kitchen – at least in part – until both his deeds and his identity pull him closer first to Gryngamoure’s and Lyonesse’s, and ultimately to Arthur’s, central court spaces. Gareth’s move toward belonging depends on both his noble birth and his performance of knighthood. His defeat of the Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys, who had been terrorizing Lyonesse and holding her hostage, certainly piques the interest of Lyonesse and her family, but not enough for them to open their arms – and, more important to this discussion, their doors – to him. Indeed, he ‘rode streyte unto the castell, and whan he com to the gate he founde there men armed, and pulled up the drawbrygge and drew the portcolyse’ (255.5–7). Notably, they use the castle, and not their words, to signal his continued outsider status. The closed drawbridge and portcullis prevent entry and let Gareth know that he quite literally cannot enter, that he has not earned a space at their court despite the service that he has done for their lady. Hoping to learn ‘why they wolde nat suffir hym to

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entir’ (255.8), he goes to a window and speaks to the rescued damsel, with whom he grew besotted at first (distant) sight. Just as when Gawayne first spotted Gareth through a window, the castle architecture attunes the reader to his outsider status. Gareth, too, is cognizant of this status, though confused – perhaps surprisingly46 – that his entry was not secured by his feats of arms in rescuing her. He declares to Lyonesse, ‘I have nat deserved that ye sholde shew me this straungeness’ (255.15–16). Also similar to the scene of his arrival at Camelot, perhaps, the porousness of the window indicates that this status is mutable. As Batt has pointed out, the barred entry becomes ‘a structural marker, an impetus to a further series of adventures that will culminate in Gareth’s reaccommodation at Arthur’s court.’47 The move in this direction comes very quick, indeed. Lyonesse’s brother Gryngamoure soon learns the rescuer’s identity from Gareth’s dwarf, whom he kidnapped for that very purpose, and the family becomes willing and even eager to admit Gareth into their own circle and their own spaces. Gareth arrives at Gryngamoure’s castle in order to retrieve his dwarf, and Gryngamoure invites him in. Indeed, ‘Sir Gryngamoure toke hym by the honde and ledde hym into the halle where his owne wyff was’ (259.8–9). Holding Gareth’s hand eliminates much distance between the two, and leading him into the hall literalizes the centripetal forces. Both are indicators of Gareth’s spatial and social belonging. Once there, Gareth again falls in love with Lyonesse, whom he does not recognize: and evermore Sir Gareth behelde that lady. And the more he loked on hir the more he loved hir, and so he brenned in love that he passed hymself farre in his reson. And forth towardys nyght they yode unto souper, and Sir Gareth myght nat ete, for his love was so hoote that he wyst nat where he was. (259.15–20)

As I have argued before, this scene shows Gareth incapacitated by the vision of Lyonesse.48 Leitch further notes that ‘the way in which he is affected by her is rhetorically and cognitively expressed through his sense, his confusion, of space.’49 Leitch rightly connects this to the erotic forces at play here. Lexton points out that Gareth has lost his ‘sense of direction, which has enabled him to confidently navigate the rooms of the court, the vagaries of the questing landscape and the spaces of various 46

Catherine Batt does point out that he has not previously been refused, in Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 95. 47 Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 96. 48 Martin, Vision and Gender, p. 42. 49 Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom,’ p. 50.

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noble castles and pavilions,’ and sees his domestic service suffer as a result.50 This domestic service can be seen as proper response to space: reading the clues and behaving according to the norms and expectations of the room. On a more basic level, even being in a courtly space – not to mention being heartily welcomed there – effects a shift in his spatial awareness that will take some time to adjust to. Gareth’s marginal status and positioning continue, in tandem with his joining this group. The couple are soon betrothed, and wish to forgo any customary delay (until marriage) to consummate their relationship. Lyonesse ‘counceyled Sir Gareth to slepe in none other place but in the halle, and there she promysed hym to com to his bed a lytyll afore mydnyght’ (260.28–30). Lyonesse’s reasons for the particular spatial instructions could be multiple, including easing access to him for their planned tryst. However, they also seem to legislate his status and prevent his movement across the castle space – he will stay in the hall, and she will come to him. Gareth willingly complies, but reframes the rationale for this location. As advised, when it comes time for bed, Gareth eschews rich chambers, claiming that ‘he wolde go no farther than the halle, for in suche placis, he seyde, was convenyaunte for an arraunte knyght to take his reste in’ (261.7–9).51 Though not as strikingly as he did in Arthur’s kitchens, Gareth maintains a marginal position here, pointing to his status as a knight errant and gesturing toward a need to await acceptance into the larger knightly community headed by Arthur himself. Lyonesse soon joins him in his bed, asserting authority over both the spaces in the castle and her own body – though it is an authority that is challenged and ultimately thwarted. This episode tells us much about the multifaceted relationships between space and sex and thus concerns the castle’s domestic functions – the topic of Chapter Four. For now, the initiation of sexual relations, or at least the attempted initiation, like the invitation to Gryngamoure’s castle and feast, serves as a sign of Gareth’s apparent viability as a member of the community there, while Gareth’s choice of sleeping place hints at his desire for the Round Table and King Arthur to embrace him in their own community before he can traverse castle space freely. Indeed, in parallel action, Gareth is – even from a distance – being pulled into Arthur’s court and to the Round Table. Just as Lyonesse and 50 51

Lexton, Contested Language, p. 123. It is important to note that fairly sumptuous bedding, in the form of ‘grete cowchis and thereon fethir beddis’ (261.9–10), is brought to him. This seems to be a further negotiation of his status and of the space – the hall, central to so much court action but perhaps a marginal place for a noble knight at bedtime, itself is transformed to highlight his worthiness.

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company open their embrace only gradually, so too does Arthur require proof of Gareth’s noble birth and news of his prowess. Both come to him and his castles, and prompt him to articulate his own complete acceptance of Gareth within his knightly spaces. On Pentecost – again, arguably the most important date for the Round Table as community because it is the day on which they reaffirm their commitment to each other and chivalric value via the recitation of the Oath, and for Gareth’s own narrative, as his Arthurian adventure begins on Pentecost – the Grene Knyght (Sir Partholype), the Rede Knyght (Sir Perymones), and the Blew Knyght (Sir Persaunte of Inde) arrive at Arthur’s court in Caerleon. Each brings with him a retinue of knights (fifty, sixty, and one hundred, respectively) and yields to King Arthur in the name of Sir Bewmaynes, a testament to Gareth’s prowess.52 Shortly thereafter, Sir Ironsyde, The Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys, follows suit with 500 of his own knights. He, too, attests to Gareth’s prowess and acculturates himself into Round Table chivalry by publicly renouncing the shameful customs that had made him an enemy to Arthur and his court. Here in Arthur’s central court space on a privileged feast day, Ironsyde becomes what the space requires of him – with much help from his defeat at the hands of Gareth and Gareth’s decision to afford him his life in return for a change of character. For this and in deference to the still unknown knight Bewmaynes, Arthur promises a seat at the Round Table, the inner sanctum of his court: ‘wete you well I shall do you honour for the love of Sir Bewmaynes, and as sone as ever I may mete with hym I shall make you all uppon a day Knyghtes of the Table Rounde’ (265.21–24). Notably, this promise is dependent upon the presence of Gareth. Although his admission to the Round Table is not explicitly narrated alongside these knights, who do receive the honor at the end of this tale, I believe we should read Gareth as included in this promise of promotion. Arthur’s desire for Gareth’s presence intensifies after Morgause’s arrival at the castle proves Arthur’s assumption that he is indeed of high birth. The Quene of Orkenay comes with a large group of ladies and knights, following the pattern of the four defeated men’s entrances. 52

As Rouse has argued, when these knights submit to Arthur and tell their stories of defeat at Bewmaynes’s/Gareth’s hands, they and their (geographic) spaces are becoming part of his court, ‘bringing this expanded space within the textual and political orbit of the central organizing court. Thus the narratives are told as part of a chivalric system of exploit and memorialization that acts to narrate an expanding and reinscribed world.’ Robert Allen Rouse, ‘What Lies Between?: Thinking through Medieval Narrative Spatiality,’ in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 21 [13–29].

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Here, too, it is a permitted entrance into central spaces and serves as a placeholder for Gareth, whose absence and marginalization become an increasingly visible rupture in the court. Gareth’s anonymity and the spatial implications it imposed – though he took this on himself – unsurprisingly strike a discordant note with his mother, prompting action designed to bring Gareth to Arthur and his court. Morgause’s opening words highlight the spatial disjunction in her son’s experience with Arthur and his knights: ‘Where have ye done my yonge son, Sir Gareth? For he was here amongyst you a twelve-monthe, and ye made a kychyn knave of hym, the whyche is a shame to you all. Alas! Where have you done my nowne dere son that was my joy and blysse?’ (266.13–17). She twice asks ‘where’ Gareth has been sent, emphasizing place over other facets of their treatment of him. Moreover, she juxtaposes the fact that he was ‘amongyst’ them with his ‘kychyn’ status. The mention of the kitchen of course recalls his time on the margins, quite different from being truly among the king and his community. Following Gawayne’s and Arthur’s attempts to mollify her by saying that they did not recognize him, she repeats and strengthens her initial claim: ‘ye dud yourself grete shame whan ye amongyst you kepte my son in the kychyn and fedde hym lyke a porke hogge’ (266.23–25). Once again she uses the words ‘amongyst’ and ‘kychyn,’ the second of which functions more or less the same way it did in her previous line. The ‘amongyst,’ however, severs Gareth from the group. No longer is he among them; rather they are decidedly opposed to Gareth spatially. She further highlights the insult to her son (and surely to herself) by comparing this treatment to that of a pig. Just as did Kay’s words when he earlier made this analogy, this claim pushes Gareth beyond the margins of the castle itself into its agricultural centers. It moves him outside the specifically human court spaces altogether – let alone the knightly ones. Prompted by his sister’s displeasure, Arthur upgrades his earlier promise to make Gareth a member of the Round Table whenever they meet again to a push to find him immediately, to secure his physical presence so that his status can be recognized and he can be joined to the court and its spaces. Arthur assures Morgause, ‘by the grace of God he shall be founde and he be within this seven realmys. And lette all this passe and be myrry, for he is proved to be a man of worshyp and that is my joy’ (267.24–27). Arthur pairs his vow with a hint at celebration, asking his sister to let her anger pass and to be merry because Gareth’s belonging is now assured. Arthur’s promise to find Gareth proves easy to fulfill. As Launcelot and Sir Bawdwyn of Bretayne note, they can find Gareth through Lyonesse. They are correct, but Gareth’s movement to the inner circle proceeds at the pace of his choosing. At Gareth’s behest, Lyonesse

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responds to Arthur’s message with a tournament at her own castle and places her own hand in marriage as the top prize. The tournament magnetizes Lyonesse’s castle and Gareth himself, as Arthur and company travel to the tournament and the splendid festivities and lodging that Lyonesse arranges. At the tournament, Gareth will make a spectacle of himself (though anonymously) to prove his worth as a knight in person. For this tournament, Lyonesse lends him a ring that prevents his loss of blood and changes his color, so that even his hidden identity is mutable. In addition to the marvel of the ring, Gareth draws attention to himself through his success in both fighting and manipulating audience attention to himself.53 At the end of the tournament, in which he defeats many knights (including Gawayne), Gareth’s name is revealed, but he continues to hold himself aloof from the now powerful embrace of the court, and rides off. On this final set of adventures, Gareth encounters a series of knights, the last of which is his brother Gawayne. The two fight until their identities are revealed, at which time they stop, hug, and engage in the formalities of brotherhood.54 What follows this personal and family reunion is the embrace of the king and the whole court, and gatherings of the entire community, of which Gareth is now a member. King Arthur and company first join the brothers at the location of their battle, and then in Arthur’s own castle for Gareth’s wedding to Lyonesse. For the first celebration, Arthur ‘commaunded that all maner of knyghtes that were undir his obeysaunce’ (283.32) should lodge there and participate in a feast that ‘lacked no thynge that myght be gotyn for golde nother sylver, nothir of wylde nor tame’ (283.35–284.1). The comprehensive nature of the invitation (actually a command) and the generosity and splendor of the feast certainly hint that Gareth has been pulled from the margins. Indeed, he here (alongside Gawayne) becomes for a spell the central attraction for the entire court; he becomes the centripetal force. Malory notes that Arthur spares no expense in gathering things both wild and tame for this celebration. Though presumably referring to the meat to be served, this also reflects the spaces that Gareth has travelled (the wild) between his past and future within Arthur’s castle (the tame) as a member of the Round Table. Further connection between wild and tame space manifests when Lyonesse arrives at this impromptu Arthurian place, marked only by the lodging and feasting of the king and his community. Having brought the couple 53 54

See Martin, Vision and Gender, p. 44. See McClune, ‘“The Vengeaunce of my Brethirne,”’ pp. 95–96, for an excellent reading of this scene in the context of Gareth’s withdrawal from Gawayne’s company – and separation from the family in general – that follows.

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together, Arthur questions their intentions and their love, wondering first ‘whether he wolde have this lady as paramour, other ellys to have hir to his wyff’ (284.26–27).55 Marriage, certainly as articulated by Launcelot earlier in the Morte, is the ultimate tame, or domestic, space.56 Gareth’s exclusion from the tournament at his wedding celebration – an exclusion prompted by Lyonesse’s desire that married men not participate (perhaps an effort to keep her own new husband, and those of her family members, safe) – suggests that the spaces of marriage do not easily intermingle with those of knighthood. Indeed, Armstrong argues that ‘There could not be a stronger piece of evidence to suggest that the office of knighthood and the state of matrimony cannot successfully coexist in the chivalric community.’57 However, Gareth’s later participation in tournaments means that this injunction is unique to the occasion, and might tell us more about Lyonesse’s thoughts regarding marriage than it does about how things play out for wedded knights across the text. The wedding celebration as a whole marks Gareth’s assumption of his proper place among Round Table knights. His full integration into the community cannot occur in this only temporarily ‘Arthurian’ space. It requires presence at the king’s castle(s), especially in times of gathering, and participation in appropriate courtly activities. Gareth’s wedding provides just such an opportunity. Michaelmas is appointed as the day of the wedding – it should come as no surprise that the wedding coincides with a Christian feast day – and it will occur at Kyng Kenadowne, where his knightly journey began.58 The festivities knit Lyonesse’s family together with Gareth’s family and Arthur’s court, as Gaherys and Aggravayne marry her sister Lynet and niece Lawrell, respectively. This proliferation of marriage, done specifically at Arthur’s command, marks the king’s approval of Gareth’s choice and functions as a sign to Gareth that he is fully enfolded into the community. 55

Karen Cherewatuk sees this question as evidence of ‘tension between the attitude of the higher nobility toward marriage and that of the gentry,’ in Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 19. 56 In response to report of rumors that he loves the queen, and that she has used enchantment to prevent him from loving another, Launcelot explains that if married, ‘than I must couche with hir and leve armys and turnamentis, batellys and adventures’ (206.10–11). Marriage is, in this construction, antithetical to the knightly life. This does not quite play out in other knights’ histories, and might, of course, be nothing more than verbal misdirection to quiet the dangerous rumors. He also notes that paramours are a sign of lechery and a detriment to prowess in battle. This certainly does not seem to affect the likes of Trystram, who is emboldened by his love and whose knightly value is beyond question. 57 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 122. 58 At the beginning of the tale it is called ‘Kynke Kenadoune.’

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Moreover, there is a great descent upon the court for the wedding celebration. The various knights whom Gareth defeated along the way come at his summons, as do ladies he has rescued. The defeated knights, all now part of Gareth’s retinue, will join him in his satellite court: Sir Pertelope the Grene Knyght requests the position of chamberlain; Sir Perimones the Rede Knyght wishes to become chief butler; Sir Persaunte of Inde asks to be wine server; and Sir Ironsyde, The Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys, desires to be his carver.59 It is important to note that it is the knights themselves who want these positions, and that they recall Gareth’s own entry into the court via the kitchen. Riddy reads here evidence that this tale is not just of Gareth’s quest for knightly status (and thus entrance to the court), but also about ‘access to and mastery of the feast.’60 Lexton similarly states that Gareth has ‘model[led] how martial service may be transformed into domestic service at table,’ and that this ‘restore[s] correct protocol to Arthur’s court.’61 I agree that Gareth has demonstrated this transformation – he has moved from the marginal spaces of the kitchen to the central spaces of feast here (and later to those of battle). In addition, these four knights are made knights of the Round Table as promised, and thus operate in both domestic and more recognizably knightly spaces.62 However, I want to push back on the notion that Gareth has restored protocol. I think instead that the spaces have opened up to him and allowed him to participate in their existing and spatially encoded protocol. Indeed, the celebration that follows attests to this very fact. Malory tells us that ‘the kynges, quenys, pryncis, erlys, barouns, and many bolde knyghtes wente to mete; and well may ye wete that there was all maner of plenté and all maner revels and game, with all maner of mynstralsy that was used tho dayes. Also there was grete justys thre dayes’ (287.11–14). This collection of guests marks the inclusivity of the event. As Karen Cherewatuk has noted ‘it would appear that this wedding is attended by all members of elite society.’63 That is the case for male members of the society anyway, though it seems that only queens among women are invited or worth noting. This inclusivity works both ways, as it represents Gareth’s own belonging, his own acceptance at the court. Gareth thus becomes a member of the Round Table community, aligned closely with Launcelot already, and increasingly with Trystram in 59

See Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 21. Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 75. 61 Lexton, Contested Language, pp. 124 and 125. 62 The Deuke de la Rowse, also defeated by Gareth, likewise becomes a knight of the Round Table. 63 Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 21. 60

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the following sections of the Morte. Though it is routinely said that Gareth’s marriage moves him out of the knightly world – indeed, I myself have noted that his appearances are relatively few after his eponymous tale ends64 – he does travel with Trystram and Dynadan, among others, and participates successfully in the tournaments at Lonezep and Westminster. He appears, too, at court with nearly all living knights in the Sir Urry episode, and there alongside his brothers. Though not a main character again until the moments surrounding his death, Gareth certainly does not disappear into the recesses of the text. Indeed, even his seeming absence is conspicuous, a sign of his detachment from the family’s blood feuds in favor of affiliation with Launcelot. And his story, though self-contained, tells us much about the Morte as a whole, as the relationships formed here figure prominently in the later unfolding of Arthur’s kingdom. The particular spatial resonance is also both meaningful and powerful. Gareth’s incorporation into the society shows us how the space can be welcoming, but selectively so. It also demonstrates the very necessity of this inclusivity. Examining Gareth’s eventual acceptance at court alongside Balyn’s fruitless quest to return to that space emphasizes the protective nature of the court as a social space, as a place defined by and defining Arthur’s coterie of knights. Expectations of the individuals who seek entry and embrace – expectations that range from prowess and behavior to lineage and class – are inscribed in that space. As much as Gareth’s tale promotes a spatial stasis, a desire for continuity and homogeny of both space and society, however, it also hints at the fraught nature of Arthur’s court. Indeed, the trouble underlying the acclaim and success of the court peeks out here, as it often does throughout the Morte. Gareth’s time in the kitchen exposes the margins as a site perhaps full of worthy knights, and his move to the center of the court reveals blurry and permeable borders between knightly and non-knightly spaces in ways that Balyn’s continued exclusion cannot. Moreover, enfolding Gareth into the social space of the court sharpens the attention on crossed loyalties and heated spaces within the court (though his own role in this lies dormant for some time), as he rejects Gawayne and the rest of his family in favor of knights he deems more worthy. The hasty departures of Lameroke and Trystram following the marriage festivities likewise point to turmoil within Arthur’s spaces.65 64

Martin, Vision and Gender, pp. 46–47. I now ask myself, ‘Relative to what?’ His name appears about ninety times after his tale and before the plot to entrap Launcelot and Gwenyver, from which he abstains, but which eventually leads to his death. 65 It is not until much later in the text that we actually see Trystram become an official member of the Round Table (the story’s chronology is rather unclear), at 453.18–19.

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Malory notes that ‘Kynge Arthure and all the courte was sore dysplesid’ by these sudden exits (287.34–35). This, too, highlights the porous nature of Arthur’s court as a physical and social space, as it cannot enclose these two highly ranked knights. Indeed, the body of knights at court is always in flux, even in the Round Table society’s most whole state. Knights must move in and out of the space, and each readmittance, though generally assured for members, invites us to examine the space and its inhabitants anew. We must be mindful of these movements in and out and their effects on the space. Edward Casey explains that ‘[r]ather than being one definite sort of thing – for example physical, spiritual, cultural, social – a given place takes on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurrence as an event: places not only are, they happen.’66 Gareth’s movement into the court and his wedding there among the vast collection of knights and other nobles amplify and assure its existing identity. Gareth’s efforts to gain admittance highlight the possibility for place to ‘happen’ as Casey says, and underline the constant process of defining and redefining space. The making of Arthur’s court space and the relationship of that space to the communal identity occurs not only at its borders, of course. Launcelot, routinely listed as the premier knight of the Round Table, presents a quite different case. Unlike both Balyn and Gareth, Launcelot spends no time in the margins socially at the outset of his narrative. He enters the Morte already a highly valued member of the Round Table society. His presence delights the court, but it is also rather rare – and intentionally so – that he resides at court. Following the successful defeat of the Romans and Arthur’s ensuing coronation, the Morte shifts back to Britain and thus back to the Round Table knights at home. The narrative, too, changes, as it begins focusing more on individual knights and how they fit into the realm. Gareth’s story, of course, also belongs to this portion of the text, but it is Launcelot whom we follow first. Across the tale that editors have named after him, we see very little of Launcelot at court. Like Gareth, he begins and ends there, but spends much time out questing. However, his position at court is assured. The stable status that he maintains at court through much of the text again tells us about the interplay between the Round Table Knights and the castle space that houses them. In the aftermath of the Roman War, Arthur’s court breaks into festivity that celebrates the body of knights and, for a time, keeps them there. The 66

Edward S. Casey, ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,’ in Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), p. 27 [13–52].

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energies of the knights and their displays of prowess are localized to the court: Sone aftir that Kynge Arthure was com from Rome into Ingelonde, than all the Knyghtys of the Rounde Table resorted unto the kynge and made many joustys and turnementes. And som there were that were but knyghtes whiche encresed in armys and worshyp that they passed all other of her felowys in prouesse and noble dedys, and that was well proved on many. (190.2–7)

The fellowship here returns to King Arthur and his court, and there they play games of prowess in which they can prove themselves among their peers. Launcelot unsurprisingly shows himself to be the best: ‘But in especiall hit was prevyd on Sir Launcelot de Lake, for in all turnementes, justys, and dedys of armys, both for lyff and deth, he passed all other knyghtes’ (190.7–10). Thus Launcelot ‘encresed so mervaylously in worship and honoure’ (190.12–13). Launcelot’s growing reputation does the same for the Round Table community as a whole, and marks these spaces as ones of worship and honor. However, Launcelot seems quite aware that this requires more than just prowess within the space. It requires the movement in and out, the return. The Round Table, most recognizable as both thing and idea when it hosts its knights in their appointed seats, requires that its members routinely abandon and leave bare these seats. Without this venturing out, the court and its Round Table would become only a space of entertainment, and not home to the most reputable band of knights. Launcelot knows this: he ‘rested hym longe with play and game, and than he thought hymself to preve in straunge adventures’ (190.19–20). This realization that play and game will not help him prove himself or the fellowship in the way that adventure abroad can echoes in the many quest narratives across the text, and like those other quests, Launcelot’s travels will culminate in the necessary return to court for assessment and acclamation – for both knight and court. His homecoming following these ‘straunge adventures’ indicates that he brings joy to the court. These adventures have served to confirm his standing at court, but also hint at the potentially divisive nature of his presence, as rumors about his relationship with the queen swirl around his travels. That trouble is yet to surface fully, however, and for now he adds value the court space. After his time questing, Launcelot ‘com home too dayes before the feste of Pentecoste, and the kynge and all the courte were passyng fayne’ (221.9–11). This happiness increases when several knights learn that it was Launcelot in Kay’s armor (and not Kay himself) who has so easily defeated them: ‘Than there was lawghyng and smylyng

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amonge them and ever now and now com all the knyghtes home that were presoners with Sir Terqyun, and they all honoured and worshipped Sir Launcelot’ (221.14–17). This is perhaps the most lighthearted and joyful that we see the court. Launcelot’s preeminence as a knight provides an assuring presence. Gawayne, Uwayne, Sagramoure, and Ector de Marys feel both relief and delight that their defeats were to Launcelot, as it does not dim their own reputations – or the court’s. Quite the contrary, it seems to bolster the court reputation. This is a byproduct of simply having Launcelot among them. A series of additional knights whom Launcelot either saved or overcame in battle enters, and they, too, attest to Launcelot’s prowess and keep him the focal point at court. This clustering around the greatest knight makes this court space a celebration of itself. Knight, court, and castle alike grow in fame with the telling and retelling of Launcelot’s deeds. The tale ends with a reminder about his status: ‘And so at that tyme Sir Launcelot had the grettyste name of ony knyght of the worlde, and moste he was honoured of hyghe and lowe’ (222.13–15). It is this status that translates his arrival at court to a celebration. Particularly intriguing is the fact that his acclaim comes from both ‘hyghe and lowe,’ a sign that it is both within the hall and beyond – outside even the castle walls. The court, too, is then defined such that both those within and those without recognize the space of and for the best. Launcelot’s time at court continues to be largely about his return, and the ways in which he valorizes the space – for the bulk of the Morte, anyway. Simmel tells us that ‘The proximity or the distance, the exclusivity or the multiplicity displayed by the relationship of the group to its territory is, therefore, often the root and the symbol of its structure.’67 It seems that Launcelot’s movement to and from Arthur’s central territory – his castles and court – and especially these moments of return manifest Simmel’s idea. His closeness, his presence, matters to the court and makes it what it must be for the realm as a whole to succeed. The text repeats with variation Launcelot’s return to court, but the king and the Round Table as a body are routinely happy in his presence. We can see this, for example, at the end of his period of madness,68 and shortly thereafter at 67 68

Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Space,’ pp. 140–41. After some deliberation, in part because he is embarrassed by his lapse in sanity and in part because his relationship with the queen is unsure in the wake of sleeping with Elayne twice (indeed, that is what sent him out of a castle window into madness in the first place), Launcelot is convinced by Ector to return. The court is pleased: ‘and wythin fyftene dayes journey they cam unto Camelot, that ys in Englyshe called Wynchester. And whan Sir Launcelot was com amonge them, the kynge and all the knyghtes made grete joy of hys homecommynge’ (657.2–5).

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the Pentecost on which the grail quest begins.69 Gwenyver’s reception of Launcelot fluctuates more readily in response to signs of his love for her (i.e., whether he appears to maintain his love for her and her alone or whether he seems to have forsaken her and their love). Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for the two of them to share castle space after the grail quest, as their love becomes both more urgent and more disruptive. Putting their relationship into conversation with space specifically, however, is a matter for Chapter Four. The king and the court still enjoy and even require his presence for the space to function properly. Twice Malory writes of the positive emotions upon his return from the grail quest. First, ‘all the courte were passyng glad of Sir Launcelot’ when he returns to Camelot at the end of his grail quest (778.1–2). At the start of the next tale, Launcelot and Bors are singled out among the crowd of returners because their absences were extended: So aftir the queste of the Sankgreall was fulfylled and all knyghtes that were leftte on lyve were com home agayne unto the Table Rownde, as The Booke of the Sankgreall makith mencion, than was there grete joy in the courte, and en especiall Kynge Arthure and Quene Gwenyvere made grete joy of the remenaunte that were com home. And passyng gladde was the kynge and the quene of Sir Launcelot and of Sir Bors, for they had bene passynge longe away in the queste of the Sangkreall. (790.1–9)

The repetitive nature of these opening lines speaks to the importance of being together at court. This passage evidences a threefold narrowingin on the source and nature of the joy in the gathering. First there is a general joy in the court, which results from simply being together. Next, the text targets ‘the remenaunte that were come home’ as a specific cause of celebration. It is the return of the Round Table knights that creates this happiness because it makes the castle the space of the court again, and, indeed, makes it ‘home’ for all those gathered. The grail quest was the first time since the Roman War episode that the hall emptied – all the knights went on the quest, leaving the king without his retinue, with a court-less court. Finally, Malory focuses attention on Launcelot and Bors in particular. Their presence makes the king and queen ‘passynge gladde’ 69

Launcelot’s absence here has been quite short – he left just the day before when summoned to knight Galahad, but his return still elicits happiness: ‘Than he departed frome them and toke hys too cosynes with hym, and so they com unto Camelot by the owre of undirne on Whytsonday … Than the kynge and the quene were passynge glad of Sir Launcelot and Sir Bors and Sir Lyonel, and so was all the felyshyp’ (667.3–8).

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in a way that demands mention over and above the return of the knights in general. The arrival of the most successful living grail questers remakes Arthur’s court as the locus of the best knights. Arthur’s castles increasingly become a place for Launcelot to return to in order to showcase his dominant physical prowess, often in rescuing the queen. Indeed, even as his relationship with Gwenyver renders his presence problematic, he receives more and more opportunities to prove himself physically on Arthur’s own turf. This contrasts with his earlier returns to court to document his success on the road. These new arrivals also provide a contrast in that they do not necessarily include communal gathering, which becomes less feasible as dissension grows.70 Early fissures in the community spirit, evident in Gareth’s feelings about his brothers, widen, and the cracks mark a space incompatible with the corporate whole. Mordred’s presence at court will mirror, and to a degree cause, this trouble, as I detail below. However, even in the midst of this shift away from a fully and happily functioning community space, the Sir Urry episode collects nearly the entirety of the Round Table in a way that both valorizes Launcelot and recalls the possibility and potential of the court as space and as a body of knights. As Archibald notes, this is ‘an episode invented by Malory and placed at the very end of the penultimate book as a final celebration of the Round Table fellowship before the collapse of the Arthurian world.’71 The space here enfolds the community and hinges its self-construction on the apparent miracle of Urry’s healed wounds. Arthur exhibits an urgency to see the court flourish. This episode occurs on Pentecost, and on this occasion Arthur is holding court at Carlisle. Sir Urry arrives at court bearing seven wounds that were given to him by a knight whom he killed in a tournament, Sir Alpheus of Spain. Alpheus’s mother cursed Urry so that he must endure those wounds, which will ‘one tyme fester and another tyme blede, so that he shulde never be hole untyll the beste knyght of the worlde had serchyd hys woundis’ (861.16–18). This prompts Urry’s mother and sister to transport him from court to court in search of that ‘best knyght of the worlde,’ a journey that takes them to many countries before they land at Arthur’s court in Carlisle. A quest ordained for the best knight (or a variation on that phrasing) is a familiar trope in Malory’s text, and in the Arthurian corpus generally. Locating that best in Arthur’s court serves both to valorize Arthur and his knights, and to remind them and us – as Lambert, Archibald, and Riddy have 70 71

An exception is the Westminster Tournament. Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,’ p. 326.

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done in looking at the Morte – that there is in fact a hierarchy among the renowned collection of knights, and that if there is a best knight, there are many who are not the best (and there is, presumably, a worst in the group).72 I think this trope problematizes the court and its spaces, as the Balyn example above and the Galahad one below illustrate, but for Arthur – and, perhaps, for Malory – Urry’s arrival, wounded and in need, presents an opportunity, as the group will join together in a single pursuit, and do so at one of Arthur’s castles. The king enjoins all the knights to participate and try to heal Urry (and prove themselves the best): And than the kynge commaunded all the kynges, dukes and erlis, and all noble knyghtes of the Rounde Table that were there that tyme presente to com into the medow of Carlehyll. And so at that tyme there were but an hondred an ten of the Rounde Table, for forty knyghtes were that tyme away. (862.25–29)

Arthur here is pulling the present knights together physically, and enclosing them in a single space. Interestingly, the chosen spot is not the hall, the traditional gathering room and the setting for much of the activity at Arthur’s castles. The location, ‘the medow of Carlehyll,’ is in fact more often used for tournaments (Plate 4); thus, the choice of place conflates this task, which is reminiscent of the grail quest, with the staged battle of the joust or the melee. This seems an effort to put the knights in their own best location, and to use the space as a source of power for the group’s task. As he did in the Balyn sword-pulling episode, Arthur here joins the knights in this endeavor. He attempts to heal Urry first, thus serving as an example and leading the way for the 110 knights present. Arthur’s searching of Urry’s seven wounds does not release his curse. Quite the contrary, ‘som of hys woundis renewed uppon bledynge’ (863.7–8). This extreme failure – making Urry worse, not better – should remind the reader of the court’s tenuous position, and of the delicate nature of social space. The castle and its court have earned its reputation, but must continue to earn it via the constant construction and reconstruction of the space. Moreover, the bleeding wounds hint at the rupture in the community. The listed knights who follow likewise cannot heal Urry’s wounds, a sign that none of them is the greatest. Even in defeat, though, 72

See Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 58–59; Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,’ p. 326; and Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 106.

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Plate 4: Carlisle Castle

the list does represent togetherness, as the names share the space on the page(s) as they do that of the meadow of Carlisle.73 Recording their names in this way is, for Stephen Atkinson, ‘a way of reviewing the whole history of the Round Table.’74 Indeed, we see almost all the living knights we know – plus some for whom this is the only appearance in the Morte – and revisit some key storylines. This togetherness, is, however, perhaps undercut by the grouping, first hierarchically – beginning with kings, then moving through a duke and an earl before getting to the knights – and second by kinship.75 As Lexton notes, this has the effect of ‘heightening the impression that loyalties have been consolidated.’76 Notably missing from the group is Launcelot: ‘So cam in the knyghtes of Sir Launcelottis 73

It should be noted that although Malory indicates twice that there are 110 knights present who search Urry’s wounds, neither the Winchester Manuscript nor Caxton’s print edition lists quite that many, even with the repetitions (Constantyne most certainly, Hebes perhaps) and the knights who perhaps have returned from the dead (such as Collgrevaunce). See Field’s note in his edition, vol. 2, p. 763, n. 866.7. 74 Stephen C. B. Atkinson, ‘Malory’s “Healing of Sir Urry”: Lancelot, the Earthly Fellowship, and the World of the Grail,’ Studies in Philology 78.4 (1981): 344 [341– 52]. 75 Lambert does point out that the impetus for each knight is participation in the group activity, not a belief in his own preeminence, in Malory: Style and Vision, p. 61. 76 Lexton, Contested Language, p. 153.

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kyn, but Sir Launcelot was nat that tyme in the courte, for he was that tyme uppon hys adventures’ (863.23–25). His absence serves multiple purposes in this communal effort. First and foremost, it allows all to play a part, if an unsuccessful one, in the scene. Each knight marks his own presence and belonging by taking his turn searching Urry’s wounds. Because all try and fail – as the knights of many other countries have done before them – Launcelot’s eventual success garners more significance. We can compare his ability to make Urry whole to others’ inability and judge him as the greatest. Most important for an investigation of the court as a shared space for this body of knights is the attention on Launcelot’s arrival that his initial absence allows. After Arthur and the full complement of knights have tried and failed to heal Urry, the king laments Launcelot’s absence: ‘“Mercy Jesu,” seyde Kynge Arthur, “where ys Sir Launcelot du Lake, that he ys nat here at thys tyme?”’ (866.9–10). Arthur here turns rhetorically to the absent best knight, in part excusing the present knights’ failure. The question and its implied admission about the quality of the court without Launcelot also forces those present to look outwards in order to find their own center. The question also serves as a narrative call, beckoning Launcelot into both the story and the court: And thus as they stood and spake of many thyngis, there one aspyed Sir Launcelot that com rydynge towarde them, and anone they told the kynge. ‘Pees,’ seyde the kynge, ‘lat no man say no thyng untyll he be com to us.’ So whan Sir Launcelot had aspyed Kynge Arthur he descended downe frome hys horse and cam to the kynge and salewed hym and them all. (866.11–18)

At just the right moment Launcelot appears from his questing to join the Round Table knights and complete both the task and the court. Urry’s sister Fyleloly and then Urry himself immediately sense that his healer has arrived. Fyleloly says to her ailing brother, ‘here ys com a knyght that my harte gyveth gretly unto’ (866.21). Urry responds with the same feeling: ‘so doth my harte lyghte gretly ayenste hym, and my harte gyvith me more unto hym than to all thes that have serched me’ (866.22–24). Neither seems to know of Launcelot specifically, but his very presence assures them of his greatness. Fyleloly once and Urry twice note that their hearts sense that this is the knight for whom they have searched. This can be read as a sign that Launcelot’s arrival fills the space and earns that

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space its reputation. These two strangers, like the collection of knights and Arthur himself, know that Launcelot changes and completes the community. Launcelot himself hesitates, perhaps unsure of his position at court in light of his inability to achieve complete success on the grail quest and his return to his illicit relationship with Gwenyver in the aftermath of that quest. He likely notes that this test resembles those of the grail quest, despite the location in a meadow at Arthur’s castle.77 As a result, Arthur must coax him into participation, into joining the community effort, first saying, ‘“Sir, ye muste do as we have done,” and told hym what they had done and shewed hym them all that had serched hym’ (866.25–27).78 The obligation asserted by ‘must’ speaks to the importance of communal activity, and to the need for constant enactment and reenactment of the Round Table bond. This is also apparent in Arthur’s presentation of the group of gathered knights. Arthur specifically points to the Round Table knights, a reminder of the relationship between and among knights. Launcelot’s initial refusal points to his fellows – and thus the fellowship – in excusing himself. He notes that it would be wrong ‘whyle so many noble kyngis and knyghtes have assayde and fayled, that I shulde presume uppon me to enchyve that all ye, my lordis, myght nat enchyve’ (866.28–30). Launcelot’s self-effacement here likely stems largely from his demotion upon the arrival of Galahad, a demotion that his relationship with the queen confirmed in the search for the grail and continues to assert. It also nods toward the idea of an equality among the group: if these others are not good enough, how could he be? This response neglects the fact that it has always been the case that some are better and one is best, and that the Round Table needs that best among its number in order to define itself and to function well. Arthur replies with a repeated command to Launcelot to do as the others have done, strengthening the force of his words by using the verb ‘commaunde’ (866.31). Launcelot again hesitates, caught between a desire to obey the king and his belief that participating is making a claim that he ‘shulde passe all othir knyghtes,’ which he fears would be a great shame (867.1). In his final words before Launcelot undertakes the task that he so wants to avoid, Arthur emphasizes the communal aspect of this quest before him: 77

For a discussion of this test’s similarity to those encountered on the grail quest, see Atkinson, ‘Malory’s “Healing of Sir Urry,”’ p. 346. 78 Atkinson highlights that ‘[f]or Arthur, participation in this adventure … is a matter of fellowship,’ in ‘Malory’s “Healing of Sir Urry,”’ p. 347.

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‘Sir, ye take hit wronge,’ seyde Kynge Arthur, ‘for ye shall nat do hit for no presumpcion, but for to beare us felyshyp, insomuch as ye be a felow of the Rounde Table. And wyte you well,’ seyde Kynge Arthur, ‘and ye prevayle nat and heale hym, I dare sey there ys no knyght in thys londe that may hele hym. And therefore I pray you do as we have done.’ (867.2–8)

Arthur makes it clear that participation will be an act of group fellowship, and not a sign of any belief in his own status above the other knights. Selfevident as it might seem, Launcelot needs to be told that being part of the group demands being part of the group. At the same time, however, Arthur gestures toward the very preeminence that Launcelot is trying to forego. His final words of persuasion move beyond the fellowship as a whole and point out that if Launcelot cannot succeed, it seems unlikely that anyone in the land could.79 Archibald rightly claims, then, that ‘[t]he moral of the story of Sir Urry, and indeed of Malory’s presentation of the Arthurian world, is that the Round Table is the fairest fellowship that ever could be, and that all its fellows are equal, but some of them are more equal than others.’80 The other knights seem to agree with this idea, following up Arthur’s words with prayers to Launcelot to search Urry’s wounds. Indeed, Launcelot’s pattern of arrival at court proves this point. Each (re)entry highlights his standing as first among equals. Arguably, even at the start of the grail episode, when Galahad comes and takes the Siege Perilous, and when Launcelot is explicitly told that he is no longer the best, his return from knighting Galahad is seen as the return of the Round Table’s best knight in Arthur’s prevailing upon him (without success) to try his hand at pulling the sword from the stone. The space naturally pulls Launcelot into a position of esteem and even reverence. Having been beseeched thus by Arthur, by the Round Table fellowship, and then by Urry himself, Launcelot begins this test, but not without a trepidation rooted in, as he says, the fact that he ‘never was … able in worthynes to do so hyghe a thynge’ (867.17–18). Before searching the wounds, Launcelot notes that he does this by Arthur’s commandment and then says a prayer. This is both a public and a private prayer, asking for the divine assistance he needs to heal the long-suffering Urry. Though speaking ‘secretely unto hymselff’ (867.22), Launcelot’s physical actions, holding up his hands and looking toward the Holy Land, belie the secrecy 79

These words might also simply refer back to the fact that the rest of the greatest knights in the land, those Round Table knights who are present, have already undertaken this task and failed to heal Urry. 80 Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,’ p. 327.

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and make this prayer part of his rejoining the community.81 Launcelot proceeds to search each wound in turn – the three on the head, the three on the body, then the one on the hand – and each is ‘fayre heled’ (867.29). This successful healing of Urry brings Launcelot fully into the group in a way that mere participation could not. Batt perceptively notes that ‘The nature of Urry’s wounds draws together issues of social integration, moral integrity and the numinous; their healing signals reintegration for Launcelot after his own wounding at the bars of Guinevere’s window at Meleagant’s castle has called his integrity into question.’82 Likewise, Raluca Radulescu claims that this episode ‘emphasizes the return to community, to social (understood as chivalric) life and its demands.’83 The group follows Launcelot’s model of public prayer after he has performed this act of healing: ‘Than Kynge Arthur and all the kynges and knyghtes kneled downe and gave thankynges and lovynge unto God and unto Hys Blyssed Modir’ (867.34–868.1). In mirroring Launcelot’s own prayer (with the healing serving rhetorically as the mirror), the court unifies in a new way, and that way recognizes Launcelot as its premier knight. Launcelot’s own reaction, puzzling as it may be to the modern reader (myself included), certainly draws attention to just how fundamentally important Launcelot’s reputation as the best knight is for the king, for the community, and perhaps also for Launcelot himself.84 He ‘wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn’ (868.1–2). This physical manifestation of extreme emotion surely reflects not just this moment, but Launcelot’s complete journey as a Round Table knight up to this point. The text, however, quickly moves to traditional court celebration, and this activity alternates between outer and inner castle spaces. A large tournament ensues – this is, of course, outside, perhaps even on the very same grounds just consecrated by Launcelot’s success – at which Urry 81

Angela Gibson highlights the privacy of this prayer and its revelation of the importance of an ‘inner life in Malory’s chivalric community,’ in ‘Malory’s Reformulation of Shame,’ Arthuriana 11.4 (2001): 74 [64–76]. 82 Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 155. 83 Raluca Radulescu, ‘“now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges”: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood,’ in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 286 [285–95]. 84 For an overview of scholarly interpretations of Launcelot’s reaction, see J. Cameron Moore, ‘Outward Seeming: Launcelot’s Prayer and the Healing of Sir Urry in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 24.2 (2014): 3–4 [4–20]. Moore notes that all of the readings are valuable and argues in particular that his ‘tears demonstrate that his inward spiritual state differs from his outward seeming,’ at p. 5. Alfred E. Guy, Jr., sees in this tale proof that Malory considers ‘a balance between earthly and heavenly chivalry … the most profound ideal,’ in ‘Knightly Perfection in Malory: Sir Urré as Lancelot’s Sword-in-the-Stone,’ Medieval Perspectives 7 (1992): 85 [78–90].

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and Lavayne perform best, and after which they are made Round Table knights ‘by assente of all the kynges and lordis’ (868.20–21). Lavayne then marries Urry’s sister Fyleloly ‘with grete joy’ (868.24). This event, presumably celebrated within Arthur’s castle walls, encloses the body of knights, including the two new members of the Round Table, whose continued close alignment with Launcelot means that their integration parallels his own reintegration into the court and its spaces. All of this festivity depends upon Launcelot’s arrival at court and his ability to achieve the healing task that the rest of the assembled knights could not. His return therefore brings cheer and unity to the court. Indeed, Malory writes that ‘[t]hus they lyved in all the courte wyth grete nobeles and joy longe tymes’ (868.31–32). Though the text itself will move quickly to the schismatic disintegration of the Arthur’s Round Table, Malory insists that Launcelot’s arrival and the healing of Urry ushers in a decidedly positive period in the court, and one that includes significant time spent together with Arthur in his castle spaces. This episode, like the larger pattern of return across Launcelot’s narrative, speaks to the creation and maintenance of the idea social space in Arthur’s castles. The court, as a space and as a body of knights, requires its very best to be enclosed and embraced both physically and socially so that the Round Table and Arthur’s realm more generally can function appropriately and affirm its reputation. For this reason, the text needs to represent and focus on Launcelot’s many arrivals. Launcelot is the best of the knightly class, and thus the best of the Round Table fellowship.85 His presence at court provides the ‘energy’ (to use Lefebvre’s term) to construct in Arthur’s castle an ideal form of social space. His preeminence lends its aura to the court as both a space and a collection of knights. Arthur’s castle exists as a predominantly positive reflection of his court throughout the majority of the Morte as a result of Launcelot’s presence, as well as the presence of other high-quality members of the Round Table. However, Wolfgang Natter and John Paul Jones III remind us that the situation is not so simple: spatial structures elide totalization – except, perhaps, in appearance – for no structure can fully erase difference. Instead, any structure, in this case spatial, simultaneously incarnates alterity and – through configuration and hierarchy – imposes order over it. Though structured space can be presented as a totality – in ways that are 85

Trystram is considered a very close second (excluding Galahad, who surpasses both), and he is likewise desired at Arthur’s court, but his position there is marked most by his absence and departures.

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naturalized via representations of space – such orderings can never thoroughly subsume difference.86

Space cannot be seen as a single and wholly homogenous entity. And, of course, it is always in flux. Ongoing efforts to enmesh deserving knights – especially the top-tier ones – in the court betray a sense of urgency with regard to space. The text also tries, it seems, to exclude those whose aberrant ‘energy’ might define the space in ways that do not benefit the king and the community.87 This exclusionary force is most apparent in the relationship that Mordred has to the spaces of Arthur’s court and its people. He is largely, but not entirely, excluded from its communal spaces over the course of the narrative – and this works toward maintaining court identity – but his difference cannot be entirely contained when he does traverse Arthur’s castle spaces, and the effects extend to community and castle alike. Mordred’s admittance into the Round Table fellowship seems to be at once both assured, by dint of his dual lines of kinship to Arthur, and remarkably uncertain – perhaps because of that very doubling or crossing of kin lines. The son and nephew of the king is a natural choice for a prominent position at court, and even for assumed inheritance of the crown itself. However, Mordred’s position is as precarious as it is seemingly set in stone. His very survival is by chance. While the other May-Day children die, he escapes that fate. Perhaps more important, much of his time in the text is spent well away from court; he is outside and distant to varying degrees. Indeed, as Cory Rushton points out, although Malory ‘promises to relate how Mordred came to Camelot: a good man finds the infant and eventually brings him to court,’ he never does so.88 Malory gives Mordred no arrival scene. In addition to existing primarily away from court, Mordred is also sometimes pitted against an Arthurian knight or the text’s central figure in a given section, even when grouped with other Round Table knights. For example, Launcelot lines up on King Bagdemagus’s side against Mordred, Madore de la Porte, and Gahalantyne.89 At this tournament, Launcelot (of 86

Wolfgang Natter and John Paul Jones III, ‘Identity, Space, and Other Certainties,’ in Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, eds. Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 150 [141–61]. 87 This is, of course, not wholly successful even early in the text. Gawayne’s troubling attachment to his family’s blood feud provides one such counter example. 88 Cory Rushton, ‘Absent Fathers, Unexpected Sons: Paternity in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Studies in Philology 101.2 (2004): 142 [136–52]. Malory’s promise comes at 1.46.19. 89 At 198.4–199.35.

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course) gets the best of all three (sixteen knights in total fall to him). At the close of the Launcelot section of the text, Mordred is noted as being at court to report these results, but otherwise he is absent (at least textually). Later, Mordred rides with La Cote Male Tayle and Maledysaunte, but parts company with them when Launcelot arrives.90 In another episode, when Dynadan comes to his and Aggravayne’s rescue, they express their hatred for him (they will later kill him, we learn).91 Mordred also fights against Alysaudir le Orphelyne because he is besotted with Alysaundir’s lady.92 Mordred (along with his brothers Aggravayne and Gaherys) jousts with and loses to Palomydes on the fifth day of the tournament at Surluse.93 Mordred and the other Orkneys (save Gareth) kill Lameroke and his horse (in the opposite order) in a ‘pryvy place’ (554.12). Mordred’s seat is empty at Lonezep, signaling either that he does not participate, or, as Arthur himself suggests for some of the absent knights, that he will fight on the opposing side.94 On this occasion, specific attention is drawn to the open seats at the Round Table, as Arthur directs Kay to find out ‘how many knyghtes there bene hyre lackynge of the Table Rounde, for by the segis ye may know’ (576.19–20). This gestures to the physical space as a symbol of the group. At the Great Tournament (at Westminster), Mordred fights with Arthur but against Launcelot. This list is not exhaustive, but I think it is fairly representative, and it certainly highlights the degree to which Mordred’s position is contentious. His alliances, his enmities, and his geographical placement alike render him a peripheral – and even dangerous – figure. This is confirmed when we see him at court – socially and physically inside. His presence participates in redefining the space of Arthur’s court in rather unsavory ways. Of course, he is not alone in doing this, so my attention is perhaps too narrowly placed, but I hope that the sharp focus helps illuminate the interanimation between space and its inhabitants. 90

At 367.26. Malory writes: Whan they undirstode that hit was Sir Dynadan they were more wrothe than they were before, for they hated hym oute of mesure bycause of Sir Lameroke. For Sir Dynadan had suche a custom that he loved all good knyghtes that were valyaunte and he hated all tho that were destroyers of good knyghtes. And there was none that hated Sir Dynadan but tho that ever were called murtherers. (488.26–33) Malory thus implies that their hatred of Dynadan signals that they are not good knights. 92 At 513.27–514.11. 93 At 524.10. It is important to note that Mordred is here with his brothers. He is not entirely separated from the Round Table community, even though he is not frequently at court. 94 At 576.18–27. 91

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Mordred’s few appearances at court across the body of the text are often scenes of trouble. He appears to be there (though details are limited) when Sir Parsydes runs into him and Kay, and shares with them a message from Percyvale, whom he has just lodged. Percyvale had complained that he ‘shall never forgete theire mokkys and scornys’ on the day he became a knight (641.7–8). Both Mordred and Kay admit that they had not expected much of Percyvale, that ‘he was full unlykly to preve a good knyght’ in their estimation (641.23–24). Mordred is also among the two dozen at dinner during the poisoned-apple episode, an episode of particular interest in terms of the use of space, and one that I will address in Chapter Four. He also participates in the attempt to heal Sir Urry. Mordred is on both occasions a sidelight, so I shall push forward in the text to the section that Field, in his edition of the Morte, calls ‘Aggravayne.’ I presume that it is Aggravayne’s role in initiating the conversation about the affair between Launcelot and Gwenyver and his death that elevate him to the position of titular character, but he and Mordred are nearly equal agents in redefining court space here – this is Malory’s change – and Mordred’s survival of the clash with Launcelot in Gwenyver’s chamber marks his importance in this episode and going forward.95 Moreover, it is Mordred who has been noticeably away from court in much of the text; I argue that it is his presence that opens up the space for the gossip and scheming (or maybe a purgation, to see it from a generous angle – which I don’t). The opening scene in this episode foregrounds the spatial implications of the plotting. Malory writes: So hyt myssefortuned Sir Gawayne and all hys brethirne were in Kynge Arthurs chambir, and than Sir Aggravayne seyde thus, opynly and nat in no counceyle, that manye knyghtis myght here: ‘I mervayle that we all be nat ashamed bothe to se and to know how Sir Launcelot lyeth dayly and nyghtly by the quene. And all we know well that hit ys so, and hit ys shamefully suffird of us all that we shulde suffir so noble a kynge as Kynge Arthur ys to be shamed.’ (870.16–23)

Gawayne, Gaherys, and Gareth all express a desire not to publicize the matter, with Gawayne notably requesting that Aggravayne ‘meve no such maters no more afore me, for wyte you well I woll nat be of youre counceyle’ (870.25–26). Mordred, however, proclaims that he absolutely wants to be a party to Aggravayne’s talk: ‘Than woll I!’ he asserts (871.2). 95

Lambert argues that though both participate in the scheming, ‘[t]he two are not equally important … Aggravain is the more important conspirator,’ in Malory: Style and Vision, p. 164.

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The three Orkney brothers aiming to keep the peace depart (making great dole). Gawayne and Gareth in particular note that what has happened in this space will result in the demise of the community: ‘“Alas!” seyde Sir Gawayne and Sir Gareth, “now ys thys realme holy destroyed and myscheved, and the noble felyshyp of the Rounde Table shall be disparbeled”’ (872.1–3). As Archibald notes, Malory’s emendations to his source material include adding the mention of the Round Table fellowship.96 This should not go unnoticed, as remarkable changes to the court – as a space and a body of knights – are underfoot. Indeed, both the fellowship and its spaces are being ‘disparbeled’ in this scene and the aftermath. Meanwhile, Aggravayne and Mordred confront King Arthur with their report. Admittedly, Aggravayne has the longer speeches here, but his use of ‘we,’ and the two instances of Mordred and Aggravayne speaking together, enfold them both in this new spatial construction. It is important to note here that Malory’s version of the conversation differs slightly from both the French Mort Artu and the English Stanzaic Morte Arthur, the two sources for this section of the text, in other ways, too. These changes manufacture the space in new ways. In the French Mort, the initial conversation is noted as a private one, and apparently outside the queen’s chamber (as it is upon exiting the queen’s chamber that Arthur comes upon the Orkneys).97 In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, ‘The knyghtis stode in chambyr and spake’ (1673).98 The location here is non-specific, though perhaps some level of privacy is implied because they are within a chamber (an unnamed one, which Arthur will soon enter). Certainly, Mordred’s role in both source works is decidedly smaller. Malory’s Morte evidences a shift to include Mordred more in this

96

Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship,’ pp. 323–24. The French text reads: Il avint un jor qu’il estoient tuit cinc enmi le pales et parloient de ceste chose moult a estroit; et Agravains en estoit plus engoissex assez que nus des autres. Endementiers qu’il parloient de ceste chose, avint que lei rois issi de la chamber la reïne. [One day it happened that all five of them were in the palace and were talking about this matter privately; and Agravain was much more concerned about it than any of the others. While they were speaking about this, it happened that the king came out of the queen’s chamber.] French text from La Mort le Roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe siècle, 3rd ed., ed. Jean Frappier (Geneva: Libraire Droz; Paris: M. J. Minard, 1964), 85.39–44; translation from The Death of Arthur, trans. Norris J. Lacy, in Lancelot–Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, vol. 7, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 57. 98 Le Morte Arthur: A Critical Edition, ed. P. F. Hissiger (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975); cited parenthetically by line number. 97

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moment, as Peter Korrel has argued.99 His presence in the castle looms large here. Malory’s redaction convinces me that he is attuned to space in some way. In Malory’s hands, the conversation moves to King Arthur’s chamber and becomes decidedly less private. With just a cursory glance, these two changes seem to be at cross purposes. Arthur’s chamber might be considered more private than a space outside a chamber, but the king’s rooms were in fact places of political and social meetings. Conversely, the spot outside the queen’s chambers of the French text might be in a less-traversed section of the castle, as women’s spaces tended to be more interior and secure. Moreover, Malory is clear that this gossiping occurs ‘opynly and nat in no counceyle, that manye knyghtis myght here’ (870.18). The intent is clear: speak publicly and the information (already well known, it seems) will be made officially public. As Leitch has argued, it is here that the private affair also becomes public from a legal standpoint, as it is termed ‘treason.’100 At this moment the private and public worlds of Arthur, Gwenyver, Launcelot, and the fellowship as a whole are on the verge of crashing into each other, and spatial distinctions are likewise collapsing. Walls and doors do not hold secrets anymore. Politics and sex now intermingle on the same stage.101 Evidence of spatial shifts – in the uses and meanings of court space – becomes part of the action that follows. Aggravayne and Mordred direct how space will be used. Arthur is to leave for a hunting trip, and they plan to ensnare Launcelot as he moves into Gwenyver’s space. As Whitaker tells us, ‘the motif of entrapment, before associated only with evil castles, is attached to Arthur’s castle at Carlisle.’102 We should here recall that Basso tells us that ‘[t]he experience of sensing a place … is both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic. As places animate the ideas of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed.’103 For this very reason, the choice to let Mordred – to let anyone – into the physical and social space of Arthur’s castles bears with it a host of risks, many unforeseeable. We 99

Peter Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Origin, Development and Characterization of Arthur, Guinevere and Mordred (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), p. 277. 100 Leitch, Romancing Treason, p. 111. See also Ryan Muckerheide, ‘The English Law of Treason in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 20.4 (2010): 66 ff. [48–77]; Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, p. 337; Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience, p. 126 [‘chinks appearing in the collective armor of silence’]; Lexton, Contested Language, p. 163. 101 See Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 187. 102 Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure, p. 101. 103 Basso, ‘Wisdom Sits in Places,’ p. 55.

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stamp our spaces by entering into and being in them. Once we have left our mark, the space changes in ways that will affect not only ourselves, but others that enter. Mordred’s continued presence in the text proves an irreversible disruption to spaces within the castles and, indeed, on the page. Although the seismic rupture of the community and the concomitant inability of the spaces to hold the communal body together arise in the final sections of the Morte, I believe that the dissonance between the communal spirit of Arthur’s castles and the physical realities of its spaces begins at the very inception of the Round Table. Much of my discussion in this chapter thus far has focused on the ways in which the community creates meaning in space by policing, or at least attending to, its borders. The margins, in fact, determine the social space as much as does the center, where we have found delight in Launcelot and a desire to hold on to knights deemed worthy. The story of Galahad, however, invites a reconsideration of the relationship between inside and out, between great hall and hallway. In his perfection and in his completion of the Round Table space, he makes a margin out of the center. He disrupts space from its very core, and shifts the court away from the central castle spaces, both in the immediate moment of the grail quest, and in the long-term ‘disparbeling’ that occurs in its aftermath. The omnipresence of the Siege Perilous functions as a reminder about how the space itself helps form the community, at times in very tangible ways. Galahad’s place in the court always exists, even before he is born. The court is always awaiting its own completion – a completion that will only briefly hold in place, of course. From almost the beginning of the text, Galahad is a specter of the end, in ways both good and bad, perhaps. That specter is manifest in the seat awaiting his arrival. On occasion, we are called to look upon and contemplate the Siege Perilous. Malory notes its creation. We see knights placed next to the Siege Perilous (Pellynor and, much later, his son Percyvale), which both asserts their own (near-)worthiness and serves as witness for present absence, for future fulfillment, and then for absence again. Early in this chapter, I discussed the centrality of the Round Table and its role in linking physical and social spaces, and in localizing the communal identity. I now return to the Round Table, to think about not just what it adds to Camelot and King Arthur’s collective, but what it leaves out. It is important to pay attention to what is not there, what is not done – and invest in the idea that the void, that nothing, is something. As both an object and an idea, the Round Table (and thus Camelot, I argue) remains always incomplete – a point that Malory emphasizes. The very

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visibly empty Siege Perilous, ever awaiting Galahad, serves as a constant reminder that Camelot and its Round Table ideology exist always and only in a state of lack. It is this vacancy, this hole, that defines Camelot as a social space as much as the many successes attributed to King Arthur and his community of knights. This final part of the chapter examines this absence as it constructs and deconstructs the Round Table ideology and the communal identity of Camelot. As has been noted, the Round Table comes to Arthur as Gwenyver’s dowry. Her father Lodegreauns explains that the Table brings with it 100 knights, but lacks fifty. Thus, even at its very arrival it invokes incompleteness. This will continue. As the Table nears completion – I imagine knights elbow to elbow – its open spots become fewer, but more meaningful. Arthur expresses considerable delight at the Table as an apt accompaniment to his beautiful bride,104 and asks Merlyn to help him fill the fifty seats, requesting that he ‘go thou and aspye me in all thys londe fyfty knyghtes which bene of moste prouesse and worship’ (77.25–27). Arthur wants a full Table. It is a long, slow process filling all these seats, and the eventual fulfillment is very short-lived. But we get close quite quickly. Merlyn’s first search discovers ‘such knyghtes that sholde fulfylle fourty and eyght knyghtes, but no mo wolde he fynde’ (77.28–30). These fortyeight (or twenty-eight, depending on your editor, or your reading of the manuscript and sources)105 new Round Table knights are brought to Camelot, and their seats are blessed by the Bishop of Canterbury. The attention is as much on the seats as on the knights. This becomes more apparent as the seats receive the names of the knights who sit in them: ‘And whan they were gone Merlion founde in every sege lettirs of golde that tolde the knyghtes namys that had sitten there, but too segis were voyde’ (78.1–3) These unfilled and unassigned seats unsurprisingly invite questions. Not much later, Arthur queries Merlyn: ‘What ys the cause,’ seyde Kynge Arthure, ‘that there ys too placis voyde in the segis?’ ‘Sir,’ seyd Merlion, ‘there shall no man sitte in tho placis but they that shall be moste of worship. But in the Sege Perelous there shal nevir 104

Arthur says, ‘Thys fayre lady ys passyngly wellcom to me, for I have loved hir longe, and therefore there ys nothynge so leeff to me. And thes knyghtes with the Table Rownde pleasith me more than ryght grete rychesse’ (77.19–22). 105 As Field explains in the notes to his edition of the Morte, the Winchester Manuscript and Caxton’s edition both have ‘xxti and viij’; he sees this as an error for ‘xxii (two score) and viij’ (see vol. 2, p. 67, n. 77.29–32).

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man sitte but one, and yf there be ony so hardy to do hit he shall be destroyed, and he that shall sitte therein shall have no felowe.’ (80.26–32)

This exchange gives us much to unpack, and I am going to do it with particular attention to the seats, the Table, and Camelot as space. Returning to Lefebvre’s idea that ‘physical space has no “reality” without the energy that is deployed within it,’106 and to Rose’s further explanation that ‘space is a doing, that space does not pre-exist its doing, and that its doing is the articulation of relational performances,’107 helps us parse this spectral seat. It is the action, the behavior, the being in space that gives it meaning and makes it real. Here, as Camelot is being constructed through and with the Round Table, the filling of seats (or even the promise of such) helps assert Arthur’s political prowess and develop the ideology of his court and reign. Both are dependent on this growing fellowship, this filling of space(s). All ‘relational performances’ at the Table will be in relation to King Arthur, to the other knights, to the fellowship, to the space of Camelot and the Table generally – and to these empty seats. Every court, every feast, every moment in the hall is a dance around this space to be avoided. Often that dance is invisible in the text, though it must always occur. On occasion, though, the empty seat breaks through and becomes even hypervisible. Gawayne’s antagonistic relationship with the Siege Perilous, near to which his enemy Pellynor earns a seat, comes to mind here. Massey stretches Lefebvre’s thoughts, pointing out that space is not only ‘the product of interrelations as constituted through interactions,’ but also ‘the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality,’ and ‘always under construction.’108 I want to pause on this idea of space as a ‘sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity’ and put it into direct conversation with these empty seats. Taking Massey’s idea quite literally, I imagine one or more paths (one or more possibilities) in interpreting these seats and how they are constructing the Round Table and Camelot both. We can see the hopefulness of something even better on the (distant) horizon, and for much of the Morte, I think it is easy and comforting to feel that way. We, like King Arthur and his knights, are waiting for the final jewel in the crown. However, this moment is decidedly ominous, and 106

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 13. Rose, ‘Performing Space,’ p. 248. 108 Massey, For Space, p. 9. See also Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 116. 107

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in a couple of ways. Merlyn tells Arthur that anyone foolish enough to insert himself into this seat will be destroyed. The seat then promises violence and becomes a threatening presence of honor and worship to achieve (or not achieve). Malory reduces the Siege Perilous down to this simple idea. Earlier versions provide a fuller backstory for the Table: the French Vulgate Merlin, for example, details the rich religious history of the Round Table, connecting it to the Last Supper and to Christ risen from the dead (with an empty seat awaiting Judas’s replacement). That same text illustrates the magical ability of the Round Table to build fellowship among those who commune at it. That version, too, offers more specific information about the danger of the Siege Perilous. The wrong person at that seat would be melted into a ball of lead – and indeed, one man tries and is melted accordingly. Malory dispenses with this, limiting his version of the story to the simple notion of destruction for the foolhardy man who tries the seat. Here in the Morte, the knights immediately fall in line. They do not test the seat or its meaning, but rather accept this incompleteness and imperfection. We thus have a fellowship that exists always without its presumably best fellow. But the best fellow – Galahad, whose time in the seat and among the Round Table knights will be exceedingly brief, whose entrance and assumption of the Siege Perilous will segue into a grail quest that will empty further seats – is not actually a fellow at all.109 Merlyn tells Arthur that ‘he that shall sitte therein shall have no felowe.’ On the surface, this means simply that he will be peerless, that his perfection sets him apart from (and above) the rest of the knights, but it is also a reminder that the fellowship is predicated on the idea that its best member (forecasted and delayed, then just a memory) is not indeed part of the fellowship. Thus, even when Galahad eventually does take the seat, he is not really joining them. Rather, he serves to point out the chasm that lies between them and him, between the idea (or ideal) of Camelot and the reality. My contention, then, is that this empty seat means as much as the full ones taken as a whole. The space that is Camelot is constructed around this void, and this in turn affects how the knights perform their Round Table knighthood in and beyond Camelot, because as much as social space is a product, it is a producer, as Soja has argued. Indeed, Soja tells us that ‘produced space’ is ‘both outcome/embodiment/product and medium/presupposition/producer.’110 We can only make sense of the 109

See Richard Sévère, ‘Galahad, Percival, and Bors: Grail Knights and the Quest for Spiritual Friendship,’ Arthuriana 25.3 (2015): 49–65, for a discussion of changing paradigms of fellowship/friendship on the grail quest. 110 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 129.

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social space if we take into account this cycle of meaning and influence. McDowell and Sharp, as I note in the Introduction, take this one step further: ‘The spaces in which social practices occur affect the nature of those practices, who is “in place,” who is “out of place” and even who is allowed to be there at all.’111 Camelot and its labeled Round Table seats hold even knights in place out of place, because they cannot occupy the premier position. Moreover, social space puts pressure on how to belong, how to behave. Social space tells us what it wants from us. Casey’s notion that ‘[t]he power a place such as a room possesses determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location, but how I am together with others’ helps us understand this.112 The empty seat and its reminder that the Round Table is unfulfilled, that the best is not among them (as much as Launcelot is touted, and others are listed just after him), continually reinforce this notion that Camelot is not whole, and perhaps that it cannot stand. The Morte cycles back to the Siege Perilous at several points as it moves toward the arrival of Galahad. We see it when Pellynor and much later Percyvale enter and are placed so close to it. Indeed, Percyvale’s arrival shows us that Arthur and his court cannot discern greatness on its own. He is first seated among the ‘meane knyghtes’ (485.25), until a maiden comes in, calls him ‘noble kngyht and Goddes knyght,’ and leads him to the seat directly to the right of the Siege Perilous (485.31–32). Galahad likewise is led in by an outsider – ‘a good olde man and an awnciente, clothed all in whyght, and there was no knyght knew from whens he com’ (669.23–25) – and ushered to the seat long held open for him. Shortly before his arrival, near the end of the Trystram section, we are reminded of the injunction against sitting in the Siege Perilous. When asked about the empty seat by a hermit (who just happens to stop by), Arthur explains on behalf of all the knights, ‘There shall never none sytte in that syege but one, but if he be destroyed’ (620.11–12). Upon the hermit’s query about the seat’s intended occupant, ‘“Nay,” seyde kynge Arthure and all the knyghtes, “we knowe nat who he ys that shall sytte there”’ (620.14–15). The hermit then shares the prophecy that the chosen knight will be begotten that very year, and that he will achieve the grail. I want to linger on this moment. The king and all of the knights respond to say they do not know. This is the fellowship acting in concert to emphasize what 111 112

McDowell and Sharp, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3. Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. 23. Rapoport speaks of the ‘cues’ in settings that tell or remind entrants how to act, and importantly connects this process not to individuals, but to cultural systems, in ‘Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings,’ p. 12.

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is not there. This is the fellowship remembering that they are incomplete, and remembering the promise of violence that currently sits in the Siege Perilous. This is 285 folios after learning about Siege.113 The between, I argue, can only be understood as existing with that violence overhead, around, and beside. That is Malory’s Camelot as a community space as much as the festive and celebratory moments of inclusion and arrival are. Galahad’s eventual taking of the seat reinforces this notion. On that fateful Pentecost day, to be discussed at length in the next chapter, the Siege Perilous announces itself as ready for its rightful occupant. Galahad, newly knighted by his father Launcelot, arrives and claims his seat, now etched with his own name. His arrival makes the Round Table whole for just a moment, but that wholeness will fragment almost immediately. Riddy notes that ‘that unity which Arthur cherishes and which is completed when Galahad takes his seat at the Round Table which has remained empty for so long – is forsaken in pursuit of the holy.’114 Elizabeth Edwards echoes that argument: ‘Galahad completes the Round Table by filling this one vacant seat, but in doing so he defeats wholeness altogether, bringing with him departure and dissolution.’115 This departure is, of course, a mass exodus from the communal space. Though the Urry episode, which knits the remainder of the community back together for a spell, lies ahead, the tear that the open seat makes visible early on here rips to reveal a gaping hole (and no whole). Though ending on a decidedly stark note – one I did not set out to find – I do think that the court and the text assiduously try to assert the communal function of castle space across the Morte – and manage to do so much of the time. The many episodes of gathering and conjointure speak to the space’s absorption and reflection of the reputation of the body of knights, even as the Siege Perilous gleams in the background. The Morte is a book about a fellowship, about its temporary successes and its ultimate end. As the following chapters will show, this political and communal space depends on and is constructed by not only the assertion of royal authority and chivalric gathering, but also its rituals and its extrachivalric functions.

113

That is f. 36v–37r and then f. 322r. Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 116. 115 Elizabeth Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 91. 114

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Castles and Ritual As Chapter Two illustrates, community identity depends upon its spaces – how they are used and who gets to be there, for example. The use of space varies throughout the day, during the course of a year, and over a longer period, and ranges from the mundane to the remarkable, from the simple to the complex, and from the seemingly meaningless to that steeped in cultural importance. Deeply meaningful actions, especially those repeated in some form or fashion, like rituals, are particularly adept at telling us about their practitioners. Rituals suture together thought and action, belief and practice. Indeed, ritual demands meaning behind behaviors and actions. Catherine Bell elaborates on ritual theory: ‘ritual mediates thought and action,’ and ‘is a dialectical means for the provisional convergence of those opposed forces whose interaction is seen to constitute culture in some form.’1 Rituals thus become a lens through which we can make sense of a community, because they are a physical enactment of its belief system. Rituals, like all acts, occur in and thus interact with space, and participate in defining that space. Thinking about where rituals happen can tell us about both the place and the particular rite. Jonathan Z. Smith emplaces ritual for us, arguing that ‘[r]itual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest … It is this characteristic, as well, that explains the role of place as a fundamental component of ritual: place directs attention.’2 For Smith then, the locales in which rituals occur help us look, both literally and critically, at the right things, the important parts. Both movement across and pauses in ritual spaces – be they temples, homes, forests, or so forth – help us piece together how a ritual works and what it tells us about the community and its places. Moreover, thinking about the meaning imbued in spaces by ritual activity – and vice versa – helps us unpack narrative (or lived) moments of ritual. Ronald L. Grimes invites us to think about ritual space through a series of questions that ask whether the ritual occurs in a fixed or fluid location, in a natural or built environment, in a permanent or temporary location; how the space looks and feels; and how the people relate to the space – territorially, or hierarchically, for 1

Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 23. 2 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 103.

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example.3 I aim to parse these details in my own discussion of some key rituals in King Arthur’s Round Table community.4 Rituals and customs abound in the Morte, whose Round Table community depends on them to make both its identity and its places. Of course, this happens in tandem, the spaces both constructing and being constructed by the community and its ritual acts. These acts vary widely. They are sometimes procedural and sometimes ceremonial. Furthermore, ritual and custom cut across many of my other divisions: they are an inherent part of the political process, and figure largely into the communal and domestic spheres in Malory. Arthur’s custom – across texts – to wait for the arrival of a marvel before partaking in a feast exemplifies the multifaceted nature of ritual within his community. The need for something strange, or even miraculous, speaks to the desire to have both the space and the celebration marked as somehow special. This word and idea ‘marvel’ is expansive in this regard: both the arrival of Gareth, at once knightly and unknightly in his appearance, and the news that there is a mysterious sword to be drawn (and with it a knight to be proclaimed the best) sanction feasts, for example. Indeed, both of these customary marvels coincide with and participate in the broader activity, both secular and sacred, clustering around Pentecost, or Whitsun. Pentecost is arguably – or perhaps it is beyond argument – the most important holiday on the Arthurian calendar. It is a day that marks fundamental rites and beliefs for Arthur and the Round Table, as well as for the Christian community more generally. Indeed, it is this intersection of the secular and the sacred – both as confluence and conflict – that makes it most interesting to me. Though the Morte weaves through an unstable and uncertain chronology, we can mark the movement of times (at least hazily) by the recurrence of Pentecost. This is a day5 marking the descent of the Holy Spirit, fifty days after Easter, on the Christian calendar, but – and this is generally more important in Malory’s text – it is also a day that marks Arthur’s coronation, the establishment of the Round Table community via its Oath, and many a knighting. Arthur’s kingship and Round Table fellowship are both deeply rooted in Pentecost. After he has easily pulled the sword from the stone on successive feast days (Christmas, Candlemas, Easter), the knights of the land forestall 3



Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995 [1982]), p. 27. 4 I am mindful of Philippe Buc’s concerns about using modern-day ritual theory to analyze the medieval period (and especially late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in his study), but do find it a very useful way to understand these narrated moments. See Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2001). 5 The celebration could last upwards of a week; this extended period is called Whitsuntide (‘Whytesontyde’) on at least three occasions in the Morte, at 226.5, 723.5, and 804.16.

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the young Arthur’s assumption of the crown ‘and put it of in a delay tyll the feest of Pentecoste’ (10.21–22). Each of these earlier days represents an important milestone in the Christian story and faith, and perhaps Arthurbecoming-king needs a connection to each, needs birth, presentation, and resurrection. The first Pentecost of the Morte provides the setting for that final sword pull: ‘And at the feste of Pentecost alle maner of men assayed to pulle at the swerde that wold assay, but none myghte prevaille but Arthur, and pulled it oute afore all the lords and comyns that were there’ (10.29–32). Here the gathered commoners assert Arthur’s kingship – this is his people claiming him – and threaten death to any who oppose.6 All assent and kneel down to honor Arthur their king, and ‘so anon was the coronacyon made, and ther was he sworne unto his lordes and the comyns for to be a true kyng, to stand with true justyce fro thensforth the dayes of his lyf’ (11.6–9). Malory does not stray far from his source material in terms of the arc of the sword pulling test. His French predecessor likewise shows this series of events marked on the calendar according to these Christian feast days. There, too, the accession to the throne culminates on Pentecost and is followed by a coronation, and, as in Malory, includes the newly crowned king’s oath swearing fidelity. The specifics of the coronation oath are telling: whereas the earlier version articulates specific allegiances that Arthur owes to church and land as king, Malory presents a pared down version that focuses abstractly on being a true king and upholding justice.7 The choice 6

On the presence of the commons in this scene, see Lexton, Contested Language, pp. 18–26. 7 See Lexton, Contested Language, pp. 26–35, for a discussion of the particularities of Malory’s version of the oath. The French Lestoire de Merlin provides more detail about the coronation in general and the oath sworn in particular: Et quant il vindrent la si dist li arceuesques . artus se tu es tels que tu veus iurer & creanter a tous sains & a toutes saintes . & a sainte eglize sauuer sa droiture & sa maintenir loialte & pais en terre & a conseillier tous desconseillies a ton pooir . & a maintentir toutes droitures & toutes loiautes & droite iustice maintenir . si va auant & pren lespee dont nostre sires ta eslut . Et quant artus oi ce si plora de pitie & de ioie & maint autre pour lui . Et il dist . ausi voirement comme diex est sires de toutes choses me doinst il force & pooir de bien faire & de maintenir ce que vous maues dit & iou lai entendut . [And when they had come there the archbishop said, ‘Arthur, if you are willing to swear and promise all the saints that you will safeguard the rights of the Holy Church, keep lawful order and peace in the land, give help to the defenseless as best you can, and uphold all rights, feudal obligations, and lawful rule, then step forward and take the sword with which the Lord has shown that you are His elect.’ When Arthur heard this, he wept for joy, and many others wept for him. And he said, ‘As truly as God is Lord of all things, may he give me the strength and the might to do what is right and to uphold all the things that you have told me and I have heard.’] The French text from Lestoire de Merlin, in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. Sommer, vol. 2, 88.3–11; the translation is from The Story of Merlin, trans. Rupert T. Pickens, in Lancelot–Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and PostVulgate in Translation, vol. 2, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer), p. 98.

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of Pentecost (in Malory as in his sources) as the appropriate date for the coronation aligns with the feast day’s later importance in the text; it also adheres to the expectation outlined in the Liber Regalis that the coronation should occur on a Sunday or a solemn day.8 The expectation that the king be crowned on a day already sacred highlights the role of the Church in sanctioning the reign and marks the coronation itself as sacred from a temporal standpoint. Moreover – and more germane to my own discussion – the place of the coronation (the Liber Regalis indicates a preference for Westminster or St. Paul’s) participates in the consecration of the new king. Of course, neither Westminster nor St. Paul’s is a castle. Pentecost’s significance for King Arthur and his community expands when it becomes the day of the establishment and annual swearing of the Pentecostal Oath. This event proves more essential for my own study, as it is necessarily connected to and emplaced within Arthur’s court. As I discussed in Chapter Two, this annual swearing rite binds the knights to each other, to the king, and to the guiding principles outlined in the Oath. Upon the return of Gawayne, Torre, and Pellynor from their trio of marriage quests, than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys, and charged them never to do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, uppon payne of forfiture of theire worship and lordship of Kynge Arthure for evir more; and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes succour, strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them uppon payne of dethe. Also that no man take no batayles in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtes sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and yonge, and every yere so were they sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste. (97.27–98.3)

This first occasion of the Oath in particular emphasizes the reciprocity expected between the king and the members of the Round Table, as lands and riches are distributed by the king in exchange, it seems, for adherence to this shared set of beliefs. Later recurrences presumably focus more squarely on the encoded values; we are told that they swear the Oath annually at Pentecost, but there is no indication here that the king repeats 8

See Liber Regalis seu ordo consecrandi regem solum: Ordo consecrandi reginam cum rege. Ordo consecrandi reginam solam. Rubrica de regis exequiis. E codice Westmonasteriensi, ed. Carl Beauchamp (London: Roxburghe Club, 1870), p. 2. The ordo as described in the Liber Regalis is considerably more complex than what Malory depicts.

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his own gesture of sharing the places of his kingdom with his Round Table knights at each ritual recitation. Of course, Malory never actually returns to the Oath; we must accept (or not) that it happens based solely on the narration of its establishment and the reference to its recitation on the day of the Pentecost feast each year. We do know from the text more broadly that Pentecost is a day for the gathering of the Round Table community, and thus apt for this annual reminder of the values each knight is expected to uphold, and the rules each must abide by. Repeatedly throughout the story, knights mention returning to court themselves for the next Pentecost and instruct those whom they have defeated or whom they intend to honor to meet on that day at King Arthur’s court. The performance of the Oath not only reinforces shared beliefs, but also renders the group coherent. As Grimes argues, ‘[c]eremony invites the participants to surrender idiosyncrasies and independence to some larger cause, for which one is willing to fight, die, or pay homage. This cause is not only considered righteous, it is legally enforced and therefore binding under direct threat.’9 The Pentecostal Oath’s delineation of prescribed and proscribed behaviors defines knighthood for the members of the Round Table. The group swearing ceremony – the details of which we can only imagine – create out of the group of nearly 150 knights a single unit dedicated to the preservation of this Oath, as well as the king and his kingdom. The Oath articulates a code for the knights as they journey and quest beyond the walls of the castle. However, it is during the ritual itself that the group is most cohesive – and perhaps coherent. The performative nature of the annual swearing creates a unanimous and briefly anonymous body of knights through their univocality and togetherness. The Oath and the ceremony surrounding it are imbricated into any understanding of castles within Arthur’s kingdom, but particularly Camelot, where the actual Round Table resides and where the knights swear this Oath for the first time. The spatial details, be they physical or social, are almost entirely implicit in this scene. Malory makes it clear that they are at Camelot, and thus Winchester, so the well-traveled reader in Malory’s day or our own can supply geographical or architectural details based on that, but otherwise the text remains silent, except to reference the ‘Table Rounde.’10 Analysis must rely, then, on the relationship between 9

Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, p. 47. For Grimes, ceremony is one of the ‘impulses’ of ritual, alongside ritualization, decorum, magic, liturgy, and celebration. 10 In our own times, a ‘well-traveled’ reader might make only virtual journeys and will certainly have just the remains of the Great Hall at Winchester and other surrounding remnants – plus imagination – to construct mentally the built environment here.

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the Oath and the Table to understand the space of the recitation. Together, however, these tell us much. The Table’s very roundness dovetails with the unity impressed upon the group by their Oath swearing, and in many interpretations (in and out of scholarly materials) enforces an equality among the coterie of knights. The annual return to court – though the location may differ – and to the Oath and its tenets confirms their shared identity. This Pentecost ritual heightens the centripetal force of Arthur’s court and partially explains the repeated desire to return there for that day. Rituals in the Morte often serve to secure bonds within the community, and the Pentecostal Oath exemplifies this both literally and figuratively. Many of the rituals are celebratory and require community participation. However, at times they do quite the opposite, severing bonds and scattering the community. Grimes notes that ‘[c]oming together and pushing apart – intimacy and aggression, symbiosis and isolation – are some of the most basic rhythms from which ritualization is constructed; hence, these actions are quite susceptible to habituation.’11 Occasionally fusion and fission coexist in the time and place of a single rite: an act of togetherness precedes dispersal; an act of departing unites. Each ritual’s role in bringing together or dispersing the Round Table engraves meaning upon the spaces of the court through that motion. That meaning, in turn, tells us about the state of the court. Until the grail quest, Pentecost crystallizes the community spirit and constructs the court space as one of celebratory union. The iteration of the feast day that begins the grail quest requires the fellowship and the reader alike to reconsider the relationship between the court as physical place and the court as a collection of knights with shared ideals and talents. In Malory’s Morte Darthur, like in its source, on the day of the Pentecost 454 years after the Passion, Galahad arrives at Camelot to assume his prominent seat at the Round Table (the Siege Perilous, which has long awaited him) and to pull the sword from its stone (again, this adventure was meant for him – a point that he notes). Both of these events recall earlier moments at and around court, some with explicitly ritual connections. Galahad’s assumption of the seat that has been left empty for him harks back to the establishment of the Round Table on the occasion of King Arthur’s marriage to Gwenyver. The Siege Perilous was of course always intended for Galahad, but the anonymity of the seat-filler lurked – both promisingly and ominously, as I discuss in the previous chapter – around the court until the Pentecost day on which he arrives. That sense of anticipation heightens on Pentecost eve, as the 11

Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, p. 43.

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Siege Perilous itself announces the arrival of the man who will be able to sit safely upon it. This moment hints at the particularly important nature of this Pentecost celebration because it will mark the long-awaited completion of the Round Table and emphasize the feast day’s unifying tendency. The second announcement – the presence of another sword in the stone – likewise tells the court and us that this Pentecost will exceed regular expectations. This sword-pulling, which like the Siege Perilous is destined for Galahad, who will arrive on Pentecost itself, serves as a reminder about Arthur’s own becoming king. It also pulls the group out of the castle to the river, where they will find the adventure of the sword. This already hints at dispersal, and the sword test amplifies this. While Pentecost has traditionally been an opportunity to bring the Round Table knights (and others) together both physically and mentally, the sword is designed to separate them, to distinguish the best among them. Indeed, even before the grail’s arrival, Arthur recognizes that the moment of mass exodus is nearing, and yearns for time with the court: ‘Now,’ seyde the kynge, ‘I am sure at this quest of the Sankegreall shall all ye of the Rownde Table departe, and nevyr shall I se you agayne holé togydirs. Therefore ones I woll se you all holé togydir in the medow of Camelot, to juste and to turney, that aftire youre dethe men may speke of hit that such good knyghtes were here such a day, holé togydirs.’ (672.25–30)

For Arthur, the imminence of departure is clear – and upsetting. He sees this moment, this Pentecost, as an end point, a notion to which he will return following the grail’s visit. This provides the first glimpse of an Arthur grasping at his community, trying to hold it all together in place as it slips from his reach. Malory, like the writer of the French Queste, pushes back a little on Arthur’s stated reason to host a tournament on this occasion – as if one is needed at all – pointing to the king’s desire ‘for to se Galahad preved,’ but also notes that the need for immediate proving stems from the impending departure: ‘for the kynge demed he sholde nat lyghtly com agayne unto the courte aftir thys departynge’ (672.33–35). The group is indeed ‘assembled’ one more time (672.35). The tournament ritual brings them to the meadow to partake in their games of knighthood. The tournament is quickly followed by a mass service – another ritual – and a feast during which the grail makes its fateful appearance. The arrival of the grail confirms and intensifies Arthur’s fears about his court’s dispersal. It is also the moment that shifts this Pentecost from one of heightened mystery to one of miracle, and that initiates a parallel change

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in Camelot itself as a space. The narration of this sacred marvel invites the reader to revel in the grail and to explore the spaces of the court (and I quote at length to allow that reveling): And than the kynge and all the astatis wente home unto Camelot, and so wente unto evynsong to the grete monester. And so aftir uppon that to sowper, and every knyght sette in hys owne place as they were toforehande. Than anone they harde crakynge and cryynge of thundir, that hem thought the palyse sholde all to-dryve. So in the myddys of the blaste entyrde a sonnebeame, more clerer by seven tymys than ever they saw day, and all they were alyghted of the grace of the Holy Goste. Than began every knyght to beholde other, and eyther saw other, by theire semyng, fayrer than ever they were before. Natforthan there was no knyght that myght speke one worde a grete whyle, and so they loked every man on other as they had bene doome. Than entird into the halle the Holy Grayle coverde with whyght samyte, but there was none that myght se it nother whom that bare it. And there was the halle fulfylled with good odoures, and every knyght had such metis and drynkes as he beste loved in thys worlde. And whan the Holy Grayle had bene borne thorow the hall, than the holy vessel departed seddeynly, that they wyst nat where hit becam. Than had they all breth to speke, and than the kyng yelded thankynges to God of Hys good grace that He had sente them. (673.26–674.10)

The assembled Round Table, a complete body of 150 knights for the first time, witnesses thunder paired with super-bright sunbeams, sees the best version of each knight, and experiences speechlessness before the grail arrives covered in samite; they enjoy an array of smells and excellent food and drink while it is there.12 All are surely hallmarks of a miraculous occurrence within their already significant space.13 It is perhaps not surprising that this event motivates the Round Table to undertake the grail quest. A partial vision is tantalizing indeed. But 12

Kenneth J. Tiller, pointing to the word ‘semyng,’ argues that Malory is intentionally casting doubt on whether each knight actually is the best version of himself, in ‘“So precyously coverde”: Malory’s Hermeneutic Quest of the Sankgreal,’ Arthuriana 13.3 (2003): 85 [83–97]. Sandra Ness Ihle connects this particular effect of the grail’s arrival with the text’s larger theme of brotherhood, and marks this as a distinction between Malory’s work and his source, in Malory’s Grail Quest: Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 41. 13 Of this moment, P. J. C. Field notes that the description of the grail’s arrival and its effect ‘suggest an explicitly Christian interpretation, but the rest of the scene does not develop this as much as expected,’ in ‘Malory and the Grail: The Importance of Detail,’ in The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), p. 150 [141–55].

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this is also a moment rife with interesting happenings in and to space. When something this dramatic occurs, space cannot but bear the mark, the memory of that occurrence, and become something new in its wake. The grail’s arrival at Camelot, in Malory as in his sources, specifically recalls the descent of the Holy Spirit on the occasion of the original New Testament Pentecost, with the grail as sacred relic replacing the Holy Spirit itself. The Vulgate narrates this visitation: et cum conplerentur dies pentecostes erant omnes pariter in eodem loco et factus est repente de caelo sonus tamquam advenientis spiritus vehementis et replevit totam domum ubi erant sedentes et apparuerunt illis dispertitae linguae tamquam ignis seditque supra singulos eorum et repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto et coeperunt loqui aliis linguis prout Spiritus Sanctus dabat eloqui illis. [And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak.] (Acts 2:1–4)14

Pentecost thus originates in the visitation and completion of the godhead, in the form of the Holy Ghost, ushered in like a storm from heaven, and affecting the group in a room together. The immediate result is the ability to speak in tongues. The grail’s arrival at the Round Table has the opposite effect, as it leaves the knights unable to speak at all, but even so certainly recalls the biblical predecessor. The arrival of the Holy Ghost takes place in the Cenacle (also called the “Upper Room”), the same location that hosted the Last Supper. In returning to that room, that table, the Holy Ghost retreads ground previously made sacred. The space is thus already appropriate. Nevertheless, it is newly and differently sanctified that Pentecost day. It becomes a space of arrival, fulfillment, and promise. This circular pattern – from the table, to the cross, once more to the table – resonates in the Morte’s own Pentecost history, as a day (and place) for return. Pentecost celebrations in the churches of western Europe could include a re-enactment of sorts of the descent of the Holy Spirit as 14

Latin from Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 5th ed., eds. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellscaft, 2007 [1969]); Douay-Rheims English translation from The Holy Bible Translated from the Latin Vulgate (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1914).

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outlined in the Bible. Many churches, Canterbury Cathedral among them, had (and may still have) what is termed a Holy Ghost hole, an opening in the ceiling that allows the entrance of the Holy Spirit. These holes might be decorated for Pentecost, and in some versions of the feast-day celebration, a dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit deriving from the biblical story of the baptism of St. John, would be lowered into the church .15 Throughout the Morte and the French Queste, the arrival of the grail is thus unsurprisingly often accompanied or preceded by a dove. The grail’s arrival at this moment in the heretofore secular regions of Camelot, and not in the minster or even a chapel within the castle, moves the spiritual encounter out of spaces designated for Christian ritual. This overlap between the biblical and secular narratives thus parallels the crossover of spaces. This moment in Malory urges the reader to reconsider the boundaries between secular and sacred space. Though Barbara Newman reminds us that ‘the secular [is] always already in dialogue with the sacred,’ the two types of space have been constructed separately for the most part over the course of the text – indeed here we see the company move from the sacred minster to the secular hall, but the grail and its quest blur the Arthurian community’s and our own understanding of what constitutes sacred space.16 The mysterious arrival of the grail at Camelot (as elsewhere) signals a space very different from the social and political (and domestic, etc.) court that this has been so far. Jill Mann argues that ‘[t]he appearance of the Grail at the evening supper consecrates the completion of the Round Table, the eradication of its one remaining gap.’17 The space and its inhabitants are reconstructed, and expectations for behavior within the space are reconstituted. The actions of the knights present immediately reflect a new spatial code. Most important, perhaps, the Round Table community itself is redefined in the wake of this marvelous intrusion. Camelot as a space has, over the course of the text, been defined primarily by a series of interrelated acts of (secular) politics and (equally secular) community building. But that meaning is fungible, constantly reacting to and interacting with behaviors with the castle. Sten Pultz Moslund has pointed out that ‘[w]e impulsively and incessantly establish places through our sensuous and orientational interactions with the

15

See John 1:32–33, Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:10, and Luke 3:22. Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), p. ix. 17 Jill Mann, ‘Malory and the Grail Legend,’ in A Companion to Malory, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 210 [203–20]. 16

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world.’18 The events on this particular Pentecost day, both before and after the grail’s procession through the hall, highlight the extremes of orientation and, especially, the sensual. Sights, sounds, and tastes are heightened and superlative. These point to this moment’s importance, as well as its likeliness to resonate within the space. Social space theories also emphasize the bilateral nature of the relationship between space and its inhabitants. I return to the words of Hanawalt and Kobialka, who rightly claim that ‘[n]ot only did people create uses for space, but having done so, that space could influence the behavior of those who occupied it; defining space tended to prescribe the behavior within it’;19 and those of Casey, who explains that ‘[t]he power a place such as a room possesses determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location, but how I am together with others.’20 Our places determine our behaviors, and tell us how to judge their appropriateness. Sometimes this occurs not only through the invisible forces of social space, but also through architectural patterns, furnishing and so forth. Hallways, with their narrowness and (usual) lack of seating, urge us to move; a room with large and comfortable chairs might invite casual lounging; and a formal living room can impose a particular regard for etiquette.21 If we put these two basic forces of social space (people making space, space making people) in conversation, a tendency toward slow change or even inertia seems natural. Defined space produces and enforces behaviors that fit the space. Behavior deemed appropriate already participates in constructing the space in the same way. Thus, in many spaces, one requires a chronologically large sample to measure change. However, sudden intrusions can mark pivot points in our understanding of a space. The arrival of the grail at Camelot provides just such a moment. It introduces a new value system (arguably, anyway) and certainly leads to a cataclysmic shift in the narrative as a whole. I am going to focus on the short-term effects (in other words, the ways that we see new behaviors, new versions of the characters, and thus new space in the immediate aftermath of the grail’s demi-showing), but I do think that the effects, spatial and otherwise, endure. I see Malory’s text more clearly responding 18

Sten Pultz Moslund, ‘The Presencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied Mode of Reading,’ in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 34 [29–43]. 19 Hanawalt and Kobialka, ‘Introduction,’ p. x. 20 Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. 23. 21 These are not absolutes, of course. Each space and each use of space individually constructs its meaning, though generally in conversation with larger societal norms.

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to the shifting social space, to the sacralization, of Camelot than does the French Queste, though the grail’s arrival and passage through the building are not much altered.22 Malory actually removes a couple of references to the place of the grail in its movement, but carries over most details. We can chart the effects on space by looking at Gawayne, Launcelot, and especially Arthur. The king and the knights react in starkly different ways, with Gawayne manifesting a seemingly drastic turn toward religion. Pointing to the material effects of the grail’s visit (namely the provision of food and drink) and to the partial nature of its showing, which he claims ‘begyled’ them, he devotes himself to the spiritual quest of achieving the grail vision in full (674.16). He begins his oath with both temporal and spatial references, saying, ‘I woll make here avow that to-morne, withoute longer abydynge, I shall laboure in the queste of the Sankgreall’ (674.17–18). Kenneth Tiller argues that ‘arch-literalist’ Gawayne’s proposed quest misses the mark, saying that he plans ‘a completely literal journey to lift a completely tangible covering off of a real cup.’23 While the narrative substantiates the claim that Gawayne does not quite get it (the idea or the grail itself), here he seems to understand better than Tiller allows. He promises a year (or more, if necessary) of his life for this search, and claims, ‘never shall I returne unto the courte agayne tylle I have sene hit more opynly than hit hath bene shewed here. And iff I may nat spede I shall returne agayne as he that may nat be ayenste the wylle of God’ (674.20–23). His promise indicates his submission to the will of God, both in following the quest prompted by the grail’s passing through and in returning only if that is in fact God’s plan for him. He perhaps senses that his position – and maybe anyone’s position – at Camelot is dependent upon God’s will, and (for now at least) God’s will is that the Round Table knights seek the grail. Though handed down from Malory’s sources, this Gawayne remains a source of surprise to me, as much so as a grail visitation is. We need to remember that this is a man whose previous utterances in Camelot have included such things as (and I paraphrase here): ‘I hate this guy, and I will kill him’; or ‘Ugh, now I hate his son, and I can’t believe Arthur loves him so much – why does he love everyone we 22

See La Queste del Saint Graal, roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Champion, 1923), pp. 15.3–16.3. 23 Tiller, ‘Malory’s Hermeneutic Quest,’ p. 85. Tiller goes on to explain that this ‘is to be a quest, following a variety of hermeneutic paths, that hopes to see beneath metaphoric veils and covers,’ also at p. 85. I have previously discussed the ways in which the text in general charts this quest for a literal, versus a spiritual, vision: Martin, Vision and Gender, chapter 4, ‘Romancing Religion: Competing Modes of Vision on the Grail Quest,’ pp. 118–47.

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hate?’; or ‘Whoops, I cut this lady’s head off!’ He has at times bumbled his way into and around this court and its community only thanks to his blood relation to Arthur and his exceptional reputation as a knight in battle. Once on the quest (out of this space made newly sacred), he does return to that bumbling. However, here Gawayne immediately recognizes the moment for what it is and what it means. In fact, Malory eliminates the French Queste’s mention of a time lapse in the form of conversation among knights. Gawayne seems innately and immediately able to read and lead the room spiritually.24 Indeed, the Round Table knights quickly fall in line behind him: ‘they arose up the moste party and made such avowes as Sir Gawayne hadde made’ (674.24–26). In Malory, there is also neither the silent second guessing of the earlier French Gauvain, nor the need for the knights to participate in further swearing of their vows to go on this quest. Nor must they further sacralize the space or the moment by introducing relics. This may, of course, be simply the result of Malory’s consistent cutting of his source material in his redaction, but even as such, the space and the people prove more attuned to their own spirituality with less implicit or explicit guidance. The grail’s movement through the room accomplishes this on its own. Gawayne does not have any more direct speech in this scene, as Launcelot takes up the defense of the quest. Launcelot, too, recognizes the significance of the moment, if with less explicitly spiritual reference. His attempt to assuage Arthur’s anger and sorrow about the impending departure of his knights speaks to the particular value of this quest for the grail: ‘“A, sir,” sayde Launcelot, “comforte youreself! For hit shall be unto us a grete honoure, and much more than yf we dyed in other placis, for of deth we be syker”’ (675.7–9). Launcelot’s words accept the likelihood that this quest will result in the loss of many knights, but he suggests that those deaths will bring more honor to ‘us.’ It is not entirely clear how inclusive this ‘us’ is – does Launcelot mean the Round Table knights embarking on the quest, or does he want it to embrace Arthur, too? The latter reading seems more likely to me (and would be more enticing to Arthur himself). The Round Table community and its king have always benefitted from the deeds of its individual members. Launcelot also gestures toward location, pointing to the places of death. The quest itself becomes a place, and one in which (on which) death is particularly 24

David Eugene Clark has argued that ‘unlike some Round Table knights, Gawain’s spiritual life is characterized chiefly by participation in Christian worship and ritual only when necessary or as part of the community,’ in ‘Constructing Spiritual Hierarchy through Mass Attendance in the Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 25.1 (2015): 130 [128–53]. My reading pushes back on that notion a little.

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valuable.25 The commodification of death is not peculiar or unique to this moment, of course, but Launcelot’s words speak to his awareness that the journey and test before them is markedly different from previous adventures. New experiences in a familiar place (Camelot) help guide him to that understanding. Gawayne and Launcelot both attend mass and command their men to do the same after arming for the quest. Even this small detail – arming before attending mass (at the minster, not in the hall, of course) perhaps suggests that the differentiation between secular and sacred spaces has lessened. What we are seeing here then is a new relationship between space and the community at this point in the text. McDowell and Sharp explain that space tells us who is in place and who is out of place.26 Camelot has always done that, creating the Round Table community by pulling in and holding those who belong (as much as it can, considering the quest culture) – putting their names on seats certainly participates in this – and by expelling those who do not fit, who are not Round Table material, as Chapter Two illustrates. Camelot continues to do so, but with a new rubric, new methods. The space cannot quite contain the community anymore, at least not as a secular band of knights. The group commits itself to the quest and departs (as a group, only to disband after their first stop). The grail’s brief appearance has retaught the knights how to belong to the court, as both a physical space and an idea. King Arthur, however, no longer has a space among (or at the head of) this fellowship that he founded and nurtured. He does not fit into a sacred Camelot, which has decidedly different demands and expectations from the ones established by his years of governance. This is apparent both in his initial reaction to the grail’s appearance and his continued expression of sadness and even anger as the group makes its vows and prepares to undertake the grail quest. Following the passage of the grail through his hall, Arthur does offer thanks to God (in both indirect and then direct speech, one after the other), and points specifically to the appropriateness of such grace on ‘thys day at the reverence of thys hygh feste of Pentecoste’ (674.12–13). Indeed, receiving a spiritual visitation of sorts on the day marking the descent of the Holy Ghost to the apostles makes sense. It is Christianity’s re-appropriation of the secular Arthurian feast day. Notably, Malory does not depict a joyous Arthur, even here before the knights have vowed to in search of the grail, as the author of 25

The Lancelot of the French Queste likewise compares the place of death on the grail quest to death ‘en autre leu,’ or in another place; see the Queste, ed. Pauphilet, p. 17.25. 26 McDowell and Sharp, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3.

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the French Queste does. Arthur’s requisite and even routine thanks to God turn quickly to anger and (extreme) sorrow once Gawayne and company vow to embark on this quest, which will take them all away temporarily, and many away permanently. It is this loss of his Round Table knights – his fellowship, as he terms them three times in quick succession – that most sparks Arthur’s emotional outbursts and tears. In his complaints to Gawayne (who has, he says, nearly slain him, put him in great sorrow, and betrayed him), Arthur claims that Gawayne has ‘berauffte me the fayryst felyshyp and the trewyst of knyghthode’ (674.30). Arthur repeatedly emplaces and displaces the fellowship, eventually specifically in his court. He first bemoans that ‘whan they departe from hense I am sure they all shall never mete more togydir in thys worlde,’ and that ‘hit shall greve me ryght sore, the departicion of thys felyship, for I have had an olde custom to have hem in my felyship’ (674.32–33, 674.35–675.2). He grows progressively more specific in terms of space, first reproaching Gawayne because, as he says, ‘I have grete doute that my trew felyshyp shall never mete here more agayne’ (675.4–5). Then Arthur turns to Launcelot, and cries that he is sad to think about the great loss, because ‘there was never Crysten kynge that ever had so many worthy men at hys table as I have had thys day at the Table Rounde. And that ys my grete sorow’ (675.12–13). These last two comments move from the general sense of the group no longer being together in the world, to their very emplaced absence ‘here,’ at the Round Table. Notably, in the second instance, Malory adds to his source materials the specific reference to that Round Table. He thus makes it more about this particular location, this particular space. This is important to me because it indicates that Arthur (and maybe Malory) is thinking about space here, and thinking about the relationship between himself and his band of knights in that space. He is both extremely proud to have been the only king to have stood (sat) at the helm of such a fellowship and patently aware that his grip on that fellowship has changed. The departure of his knights will empty out this now sacred hall, as all 150 Round Table knights leave that next morning and render Arthur a king without his kingdom, in a way. If we think about how Arthur’s power has worked until this point in the text, the overwhelming and multiple pain of this event makes sense. The court has been Arthur’s territory, and he has controlled movement in the castle. Robert Sack explains that [t]erritoriality for humans is a powerful geographic strategy to control people and things by controlling area. Political theories and private ownership of land may be its most familiar forms but territoriality occurs to varying degrees in numerous social contexts.

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It is used in everyday relationships and in complex organizations. Territoriality is a primary geographic expression of social power. It is the means by which space and society are interrelated.27

Arthur has moved people into, out of, and around his court spaces by commanding, modeling, and suggesting appropriate action. (Roman ambassadors, Balyn, and Round Table members are early examples; very recently we have seen the sword-drawing test – to which he leads Galahad by the hand – and the tournament designed to see Galahad proved, where the word ‘mevynge’ is used.) He loses that control over his space once the grail comes into Camelot’s resplendent hall. This surely prefigures a slipping grip on much more. The disjunction between sacred Camelot and Arthur’s use of space speaks to this moment as a major crux in the text. Arthur is pushed aside by the spiritual quest (which has no room for him), by Gawayne’s newfound spiritual leadership (something that, of course, returns in less spiritual form as the tragic ending of the Morte unfolds), and by the emptying table. A Round Table without knights gains nothing from having a king at its helm. For that, as much as for the truth in Arthur’s prescient fears about the impending diminishment of his forces, this is indeed a very sad moment and one that heralds a new era for Camelot and its king. It is an era in which the tension between the sacred and the secular rises to the surface. Like several clashes that unfold across the remainder of the story (for example, the bleeding border between public and private, which is discussed in the next chapter), there is a potent spatial dimension to what Arthur now seems to see as an intrusive Christianity. The ensuing Pentecosts and the many returns to Camelot across the text bear this mark, if silently.28 The change in the relationships between the coterie of knights and both Arthur and the space (we could add to each other, here) lingers. Indeed, at the beginning of the ‘Fair Maiden’ episode, Arthur wistfully recalls that fateful feast day as the remaining knights gather for the tournament: ‘“That me repentith,” seyde the kynge, “for thys seven yere ye saw nat such a noble felyship togydirs excepte the Whytsontyde whan Sir Galahad departed frome the courte”’ 27

Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 5. Sack later explains that ‘enforcement of access’ is one of the key ‘tendencies of territoriality,’ at p. 32. 28 In addition to the reference at the head of the ‘Fair Maiden’ episode, mentioned below, Pentecost receives three mentions after the grail quest: it is said that Lavayne will be knighted at the next celebration of the feast day at the very end of that same episode (831.7–8); Malory tells us that the queen’s knights are appointed on Pentecost, if a death has left an opening (843.15–20); and the healing of Sir Urry occurs on Pentecost, as is discussed in the previous chapter (861.28–30).

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(804.15–17). It is notable that here, as on the day of the grail’s visit, his focus is again on the state of his secular Round Table. Camelot and Arthur’s other court spaces host many other rituals over the course of the Morte. In each instance, of course, the ‘accumulated’ meaning derived from the annual Arthurian Pentecost celebrations continues to imbue meaning on the space and its inhabitants.29 Each individual ritual also participates in the process of constructing that social space. Marriages and death – in the text as often in our own lives, perhaps – bring cause for gathering and carry expectations for certain solemn and celebratory rites. The weddings of Arthur to Gwenyver and Gareth to Lyonesse were central to Chapter Two’s discussion of the communal court. In both instances the clustering knights, and not the particularities of the ritual itself, dominate the narrative. Similarly, I see the burial of King Lot as primarily a part of Arthur’s political process, as I note in Chapter One. Some deaths are marked with a tomb – Balyn and Balan, for example, and Sir Patryse come to mind here – and are memorialized by the monument and the words it may bear. These burials gesture toward funerary rituals, but do not linger upon them and their spaces. At the end of the Morte, however, Malory pays more attention to the processes of death, burial, and grief, and the rituals that surround them. The deaths and burials of Gawayne and Launcelot, both of whom are laid to rest at castles, and those of Arthur and Gwenyver receive considerable attention. All four of those passings have an intense impact on the story, and the former two, especially Gawayne’s, help us understand the function and social space of castles, as well. Though death primarily involves an individual severing ties with the world (and thus Arthur, the Round Table, the court more broadly, etc.), it can also make space for conjoining, and reintegration. These deaths effect a critical change in the spaces of death and burial, all spaces that continue to be used by the living, though the text tends to leave them behind. The acts of dying and entombment, as much as the behaviors of the living in the wake of death, change the spaces where they occur and redefine them as sites of memory and memorialization, as markers and keepers of a great Arthurian kingdom and the Round Table ideology. Gordon and Marshall’s introduction to their edited collection The Place of the Dead begins with an idea that both instigates and grounds my 29

Kevin D. Fisher speaks of the accumulating or ongoing biography-making of monumental structures, in ‘Investigating Monumental Social Space in Late Bronze Age Cypress: An Integrated Approach,’ in Spatial Analysis and Social Spaces: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Interpretation of Prehistoric and Historic Built Environments, eds. Eleftheria Paliou, Undine Lieberwirth, and Silvia Polla (Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter, 2014), p. 195 [167–202].

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own thinking about burial rituals at the end of the Morte. They remind us that ‘the dead are always with us,’ and that, as a social or historical category ‘the dead’ can only be approached through the expressed and recorded memories, hopes and fears of the living … Moreover, even beyond an initial period of grief and bereavement, the emotional bonds which link the survivors to the deceased have usually demanded some form of symbolic commemoration, as well as a belief in the continued existence of the dead in some afterlife place or state. If societies are to continue to function, the dead must, in a variety of senses, be put in their place.30

Gordon and Marshall rightly point to a social need to demarcate memorial loci, to make physical, visible, and tangible the transient memories that the living bear. My own father was not buried, not marked in place with a stone, with etchings of his birth and death, but still I insist on making space for him (and about him) in various ways – on acknowledgements pages, in photographs hung carefully on the wall, in sad tangents in a book. He, like the dead and dying of the Round Table, needs his place. And also like those Round Table knights, he leaves his mark on those memorial spaces. This is the nature of space. As we have seen, there is an inherent and bidirectional relationship between space and society, and between space and the individual. Space defines the behaviors it contains, and those behaviors in turn define the spaces. This is no less true during and after acts of dying. Indeed, I cannot decide if it is simpler or more complex when the agents constructing space are not among the living – or not long for life. I do know that the workings of death on space – and space on death – end up telling us as much about Malory’s sense of Arthurian life as about his sense of Arthurian death. That Arthurian life is, at its best, a fellowship. Gawayne’s death and interment at Dover Castle – a noteworthy change from the source material – are maybe the easiest to parse in terms of spatial resonance; they also have arguably the most significant and lasting effect on the Round Table ideology espoused in the text. After a (textually) brief but difficult naval battle, Arthur is able to land on English shores below Dover Castle. Mordred and those loyal to him abandon Dover and flee west, ceding to Arthur complete control over the castle (Plate 5). Dover and its castle become at this point a site of potential, of return to rightful rule, of stability. The text pauses at Dover, and at the castle in particular, primarily for Gawayne’s death and burial, and it does so in ways not found in versions before Malory’s. Tuan explains 30

Gordon and Marshall, The Place of the Dead, p. 1.

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Plate 5: Dover Castle

that place is space made familiar.31 Place thus becomes a pause, whereas space is movement.32 This pause thus allows meaning to sink into a space, to become a part of that space. As a result of this gained meaning, a space becomes known. Time connects space and society. The pause that is Gawayne’s dying allows for, in theory if not fully in practice, the resumption of the Round Table fellowship even in the midst of its collapse. At Dover Castle Gawayne dies, after forgiving Launcelot, retracting his call for vengeance, and making way for severed links to be re-forged – of course, this comes too late, but that is another story. Like Arthur and Launcelot after him, Gawayne dies a slow death, one that allows him to initiate a revival of the ideas and ideals of the Round Table. Gawayne is ‘liynge more than halff dede’ when Arthur finds him in a boat following the battle (917.29–30). This is the only use of the phrase ‘half dead’ in the text, and it stands out as an important detail, a detail that initiates a pause. Gawayne’s death is well underway, and we will now experience the remainder – two and a half hours by Gawayne’s prognostication, as he writes in his deathbed letter to Launcelot – and see its effects on the space(s) of Dover Castle. This short time is spent talking to his uncle and king, and writing to his onetime friend (made enemy) Launcelot. In both speech and text, Gawayne communicates a 31

Tuan, Space and Place, p. 73. Tuan’s use of ‘place’ aligns closely with my own and others’ use of ‘social space.’ 32 Tuan, Space and Place, p. 138.

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desire to reach an accord between himself and King Arthur on the one side, and Launcelot on the other.33 He takes the blame for his own death, citing ‘hastynes’ and ‘wylfulnes’ (918.6, 7). Likewise, he assumes responsibility for ‘all thys shame and disease,’ pointing to his pride as the culprit (918.11). The letter to Launcelot details the current state of England – disaster – and heaps praise on his former brother-in-arms. In the letter, he again assumes blame for his own death, explaining that he ‘soughte’ it, but also notes that his death comes from the wound received at Launcelot’s hand (918.30). This is not an accusatory assertion, though, as he claims that ‘of a more nobelar man myght I nat be slayne’ (919.1–2).34 Gawayne takes pride in having died at the hands of so noble a man, and in doing so – and indeed in naming Launcelot and not one of Mordred’s troops as his slayer – opens a path toward posthumous reconciliation. Finally, he asks (‘requyre’) Launcelot ‘that thou wolt se my tumbe’ (919.17–18). This is Gawayne returning to the man who wanted to preserve ties with Launcelot and keep quiet the slander and noise of an affair with the queen. This is Gawayne arguing on behalf of fellowship. And he is doing it in a way highly attuned to the ritual space of death, making his tomb a focal point in the forgiveness he wants to share. Each of Gawayne’s words, each of his acts, functions as space-changing ‘energy’ or ‘doing,’ in the words of Lefebvre and Rose (respectively).35 The result is a nostalgic Arthurian space, one that echoes with the ideals of the fellowship and the Pentecostal Oath. The actions that unfold at Dover in the aftermath of Gawayne’s death point to this as a space newly constructed on the model of friendship and knighthood that the Round Table always wanted to be, and for a time was. Malory writes: And so at the owre of noone Sir Gawayne yelded up the goste. And than the kynge let entere hym in a chapell within Dover Castell. And there yet all men may se the skulle of hym, and the same wounde is sene that Sir Launcelot gaff hym in batayle. (919.23–27)

Malory makes it clear that Gawayne is interred right at Dover Castle. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur says that Gawayne is buried at the castle, presumably but not emphatically Dover, and the French Mort has Arthur 33

See Kenneth Hodges, ‘Wounded Masculinity: Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,’ Studies in Philology 106.1 (2009): 23 [14–31], on Gawayne’s injury to the body politic. 34 See Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, p. 95. 35 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 13; Rose, ‘Performing Space,’ p. 248.

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commanding that Gawain’s body be shipped to Camelot, granting Gawain’s own request, to be buried with his brother Gaheriet. Malory’s decision to mark this place with Gawayne’s burial is telling. This leaves a physical mark on the place, a mark that connects Dover Castle to Arthur, to his victory at this location, and especially to the gestures toward reconciliation and a resumption of fellowship.36 Indeed, once we take into account Gawayne’s own re-interpretation of the wound that Launcelot gave him (as stated in his letter), the skull as a reminder of that injury likewise re-tethers the two halves of the Round Table. Moreover, Malory makes it clear that this mark lasts to his own present day: Gawayne’s skull remains on display, forever providing proof of his death at Dover and bearing the evidence of his battles against Launcelot – a point that Caxton seconds (or firsts) in the ‘Preface’ he writes to the first print edition of the Morte. Caxton lists the skull among a host of relics and assorted evidence attesting to the historicity of King Arthur – a historicity that Caxton himself doubts. I must admit I did not see Gawayne’s (or anyone’s) skull at Dover Castle, but maybe I missed a room on my tour or was simply a few centuries too late. In the textual moment, this relic claims Dover as Arthur’s castle, as a function of Arthur’s (royal) power. Indeed, Whitaker reminds us the castle is ‘the centre from which the authority radiates,’ and this is only possible when the castle is claimed, and is clearly in someone’s possession.37 Indeed, this is the last such castle, and it is a structure whose physical and symbolic importance loom mightily across English history. More important for my discussion here, Gawayne’s tomb and skull claim the space in the name of reconciliation, in the name of a re-formed (and maybe even reformed) Round Table.38 I think that we can see this as a redefined space most clearly if we investigate what happens at Dover later in the text. As Arthur and company head west in pursuit of Mordred, destiny, and death, Dover proves a locus of unity. Having received Gawayne’s deathbed letter, Launcelot returns to England via Dover. At Bors’s suggestion, he decides first to avenge Gawayne and see his tomb; then he will seek revenge on Mordred for his acts against Arthur and Gwenyver. And like Malory, Launcelot pauses at 36

On Gawayne’s appearance in Arthur’s dream as proof of the ‘efficacy’ of intercessions on behalf of the dead, see Robert L. Kelly, ‘Penitence as a Remedy for War in Malory’s “Tale of the Death of Arthur,”’ Studies in Philology 91.2 (1994): 115, n. 9 [111–35]. 37 Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ p. 74. 38 Gawayne’s later appearance in Arthur’s dream (not at Dover) again attempts to unify Arthur’s Round Table fellowship.

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Dover. As we think about these moments, it is important to keep in mind that the relationship between space and its inhabitants (alive or dead) is not a unilateral one, but a bi- or multi-directional and even cyclical one. Launcelot’s behaviors at Dover Castle seem to confirm it as a spot dedicated to a Round Table ‘holé togydirs,’39 in spirit, at least. Gawayne’s tomb and skull have mandated and codified those behaviors. Launcelot and his affinity hurry to Dover, but do not reach England in time to help Arthur in his battle against Mordred. He learns of the king’s death and then shifts his attention to Gawayne and the space of his burial: And than sertayne peple of the towne brought hym into the castel of Dover, and so they shewed hym the tumbe. Than Sir Launcelot kneled downe by the tumbe and wepte, and prayde hartely for hys soule. And that nyght he lete make a dole, and all they that wolde com of the towne or of the contrey they had as much fleyssh and fysshe and wyne and ale, and every man and woman he dalt to twelve pence, com whoso wolde. Thus with hys owne honde dalte he thys money, in a mournyng gowne; and ever he wepte hartely and prayde the people to pray for the soule of Sir Gawayne. (931.18–25)

Launcelot’s actions here mimic the community of the Round Table that dominates the early portions of the text, and recuperate its spirit of sharing. The feast provided here, though not described in detail, is certainly extravagant in its quantity and its inclusivity. Indeed, the presence of ‘all that wolde come’ recalls the very beginning of Arthur’s own reign, dependent as it was on the commoners’ as well as the barons’ support, though I will not argue that this is an intentional circling back.40 Launcelot and then the gathered kings and knights (1,000 of them!) offer sums of money and prayers for Gawayne, pooling their resources in a way that unifies the living in the name of the dead, and in the place of the dead.41 As Cherewatuk has argued, Launcelot’s actions in response to Gawayne’s death, and indeed Gawayne’s own deathbed acts, underscore the intense religious sentiment guiding the two.42 We here see the melding of ritual action and belief in Launcelot’s efforts on behalf of his late companion. 39

See 672.27, for example. On the role of the commoners in the establishment of Arthur’s reign, see Lexton, Contested Language, pp. 18–26. 41 See Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 61. 42 Karen Cherewatuk, ‘Christian Rituals in Malory: The Evidence of Funerals,’ in Malory and Christianity: Essays on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, eds. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., and Janet Jesmok (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), p. 82–83 [77–91]. 40

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Before moving on to find the queen, Launcelot ‘lay too nyghtes uppon hys tumbe in prayers and dolefull wepynge’ (931.32–33). Launcelot’s placement here on Gawayne’s tomb, chiastically before and after the acts of donation, suggests the resumption of the Round Table. His tears and prayers commingle with the earlier ones of Gawayne and Arthur. In grief, death, and – especially – forgiveness, Malory finds space to retie the loosened and severed knots of the Round Table.43 These ritual acts lead to a ‘purified fellowship,’ as C. David Benson suggests.44 It is a scene that will be re-enacted on the tomb of Arthur and Gwenyver, and that instance, too, participates in the recuperative process. Evan Zuesse’s characterization of ritual can help us further parse this moment. Zuesse explains: As bodily action, symbolic in nature, ritual must be both internal and external, both formal and spontaneous, and at different times one or another of these poles must be more prominent. To a large extent, these polar elements are modulated by other fields of experience, especially the social, in a complex interweaving.45

Launcelot’s responses to Gawayne’s death and burial site fit Zuesse’s model. His generous donations, the provisioned feast, and public mourning – in his ritual attire – and prayer are in keeping with formal patterns of dealing with death. They are to varying degrees even prescribed for someone of his wealth and status. His tears and nights upon the tomb, though rites in their own way, are informal, and not quite prescribed, though still a performative and ritualized act of grief. Both sets of actions, the very public events and the more private weeping, coalesce internal and external measures. They are emotional responses to the loss of a loved one and thus reveal Launcelot’s inner psychology, but also provide an outward show and, particularly in the case of the feast, an outlet for shared grieving, for wider participation in the ritual. As with Gawayne’s death scene, Malory here departs from his sources in a couple of key ways. Batt notes that Malory’s changes here and elsewhere ‘accord him [Launcelot] the central role in commemorative processes.’46 I want to stretch that to think about how incorporating 43

On forgiveness at the end of the text, see Larry D. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 235. 44 C. David Benson, ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur,’ in A Companion to Malory, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 234 [221–38]. 45 Evan M. Zuesse, ‘Meditation on Ritual,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43.3 (1975): 520 [517–30]. 46 Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 174–75.

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Launcelot into the burial spaces indicates that Malory is attentive to the possibility of and desire for rehabilitating the Round Table ethos. It becomes a space of cohabitation such as we have not seen for some time. These authorial changes do bring Launcelot to the forefront, but they also bring the space to the forefront. In the Stanzaic Morte, Lancelot does land at Dover and there receive news about the dreadful end of his beloved king, but does not pause. He sets off almost at once to find the queen at Amesbury. Dover is simply a pivot point in the adulterous love triangle. In the French Mort, Lancelot arrives in England and goes immediately into battle with Mordred’s sons. Only for Malory does this space seem to matter so much. Massey’s idea about space, that it is ‘the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality,’ provides a template for understanding this space at work.47 The text itself is multiple, plural here. We are at the tragic end, but we are also in the midst of a very un-tragic reflowering of Arthurian chivalry. Because space allows for this potential, in the moments of death and in the spaces of entombment – spaces where we both feel and perform our grief – we also get a clear picture of the Round Table fellowship at its most functional, its feuds settled by the death and destruction that coexist with it in these same spaces. As Tiller claims (speaking of the tombs in the Balyn section in particular), ‘Malory’s tombs thus forge communal ties between the dead and the living.’48 I think that Malory needs space (in his geography, in his text, in his mind) for this remanifestation of the Arthurian community. Dover very aptly fills this need and provides that space. Harvey explains, ‘what goes on in a place cannot be understood outside of the space relations that support that place any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places.’49 If we step back and consider Dover as the ‘Key to England,’ as Goodall and others have claimed,50 it makes sense for Malory to locate his Round Table revival there. It is the entryway, the point of return (still for many today). Malory’s two pauses dovetail with this sense of Dover’s standing in and for England. For Arthur, Gawayne, Launcelot, and for readers, Dover is a testament to everything that Arthur wanted his kingdom and his fellowship to represent. Launcelot likewise is buried at a castle. Joyus Garde, a site of war and love, as later chapters detail, provides his resting place. Launcelot has 47

Massey, For Space, p. 9 Tiller, ‘En-graving Chivalry: Tombs, Burial, and the Ideology of Knighthood in Malory’s Tale of King Arthur,’ Arthuriana 14.2 (2004): 42 [37–53]. 49 Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again,’ p. 15. 50 John Goodall, ‘The Key of England,’ Country Life Weekly, 18 March 1999, 44–47. 48

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promised the queen that Joyus Garde will be his burial site, and it is a promise that he only ruefully intends to keep as he nears his death. Indeed, by this point Joyus Garde recalls more readily the chasm that split the Round Table than any idea of fellowship. However, the rituals of burial and those mourning allow the text to intimate resolution and reunion. Launcelot’s own intense grief upon the tombs of Arthur and Gwenyver, so like his earlier groveling at Gawayne’s gravesite, and indeed the collocation of the king and queen in death speak to the post-mortem reaffirmation of the Round Table that time did not allow them while living. Launcelot’s funerary rites provide the same locus of fellowship for the remaining few knights. The text pays close attention to the ritual behaviors attending his interment: And there they layed his corps in the body of the quere, and sange and redde many saulters and prayers over hym and aboute hym. And ever his vysage was layed open and naked, that al folkes myght beholde hym; for suche was the custom in tho dayes that al men of worshyp shold so lye wyth open vysage tyl that they were buryed. (938.28–33)

Malory notes the various ways to honor a man of such worship: recitation of song and psalter, prayer, and visibility. Indeed, this final piece – being visible – is marked as a ‘custom,’ as a part of the ritual procedure for dealing with the death of a man of such high stature and value in the community. Malory did not find these specific details in La Mort le Roi Artu, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur does not dwell on the customary nature of the proceedings.51 The scene thus seems to represent Malory’s own ideas about the appropriate mourning space for Launcelot. Moreover, like with Gawayne’s interment at Dover Castle, the interment at Joyus Garde provides a place to recall Round Table ties, to suture together the remaining knights geographically (for the moment) and ideologically (in the longer term). Sir Ector arrives at Joyus Garde and performs his grief in a now familiar fashion: ‘he fyl doun in a swoun. And whan he waked it were harde ony tonge to telle the doleful complayntes that he made for his brother’ (939.9–11). Ector goes on to perform a threnody for his dead brother, one that extolls Launcelot as lover and knight in superlative terms.52 This passionate speech recalls not only the specific value of 51

La Mort le Roi Artu is more attuned to the actual tomb, which he shares with Galahaut, and the inscription upon it. None of this appears in Malory. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur describes five days of mourning before Launcelot’s body is transported to his grave in the chapel at Joyes Gard (ll. 3890–3905), after which Ector arrives. 52 I have previously discussed this passage as a return to the romance genre and its models of vision and masculinity at the end of the Morte, in Martin, Vision and Gender, p. 179.

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Launcelot – though it does that in no small way – but also the binding tenets that undergird the Round Table. While it does not linguistically repeat the terms of Round Table behavior laid out in the Pentecostal Oath, Ector’s description of Launcelot represents an ideal enactment of its prescriptive language. The Oath legislates knights’ performance for women (do help, do not rape) as well as for other knights (do grant mercy, do not participate in wrongful quarrel). Labeling Launcelot the ‘curtest knyght,’ ‘truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors,’ ‘trewest lover,’ ‘kyndest man that ever strake wyth swerde,’ ‘godelyeste persone that ever cam emonge prees of knyghtes,’ ‘mekest man and the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes,’ and ‘sternest knyght’ aligns Launcelot with the expectations outlined in the Pentecostal Oath, and even marks him as their exemplar (939.15–22). In returning to what made knights knights, and especially what made them fit for the Round Table, Ector’s bier-side threnody returns to that Round Table. Following the death and burial of Launcelot, those still alive move beyond this secular knighthood and disperse – away from Joyus Garde, from England, and from each other. These nine knights (Bors, Ector, Gahalantyne, Galyhud, Galyhodyn, Blamour, Bleoberys, Vyllyars, and Clarrus) each ‘drewe them to theyr contreyes. Howbeit Kyng Constantyn wold have had them wyth hym, but they wold not abyde in this royame. And there they al lyved in their cuntreyes as holy men’ (940.4–6). Launcelot’s death, alongside Arthur’s and so many others’, pushes the knights away, but to a shared cause across the map. They turn to the spiritual life of holy men. This conversion is prompted not only by the death of the premier knight, but by the final phase – both temporally and spatially – of his life. They are following his lead in taking up the holy life. They are finding their own religious places. In this way too, then, Launcelot’s death brings about a version of togetherness. Joyus Garde, like Dover Castle before it, becomes a site of recuperation and reunion, just as it also serves as a point of departure. My discussion of these rituals within the castles of King Arthur and his knights has highlighted their binding nature – even in moments of dispersal, communal ties are often tightened. Each of these castles – Camelot, Dover, Joyus Garde – bears the mark of Arthur’s reign and the Round Table ideal (as well as its community), and also evidences shifts. These rites use and construct the castle spaces in ways that help us understand how the community makes meaning of and for itself through ritual behaviors and celebrations. In life and in death, in celebration and lament, the Round Table relies on its rituals to consolidate its fellowship and assign meaning to its places. The place-making of these ritual moments happens alongside the political and communal – indeed, nearly

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everything in this chapter overlaps with those functions. Together, these first three chapters have worked to understand the core meaning of Malory’s castles, and the discussion has remained focused much more often than not on the architectural and social centers of those castles. The following chapters move more to the margins – to bedrooms and prisons and walls – and thus aim to make whole the picture of castle space in the Morte.

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Castles and the Domestic Sphere As the previous chapters have discussed, the castle is the site – architecturally, symbolically, and socially – that houses the king and his community and participates in defining both. However, while performing myriad public duties, castles remain the primary domestic space for the king and queen (though not always together), as well as many other knights. Indeed, the castle as fortress and residence necessitates the presence of the domestic, which here and throughout this discussion I understand broadly, as in its Latin root, domus, or home. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, offers a vast definition: ‘Of or belonging to the home, house, or household; pertaining to one’s place of residence or family affairs; household, home, “family.”’1 This potentially encompasses everything at or related to the house and family; this chapter explores several domestic areas, though it focuses primarily on love (and lust and marriage) and childrearing, and peers briefly at food (both its preparation and its consumption).Within the walls of the Morte’s castles, we see many acts of love and nourishment. These glimpses into the private sphere offer – or at least hint at – a rounded picture of the life in and around Arthur’s court, but often via controversy and trouble. Gaston Bachelard says, ‘We must first look for centers of simplicity in houses with many rooms. For as Baudelaire said, in a palace, “there is no room for intimacy.”’2 How true this is in the Morte Darthur, where we often see the uncomfortable and even impossible overlap between the domestic – the private – and other more public affairs. Indeed, I am not sure the domestic is ever entirely distinct from politics, war, community, etc. Specifically domestic resolution and success prove difficult to find. Malory’s castles, like those across much medieval literature and life, provide an exaggerated example of the home office, but one in which home is routinely sacrificed for office. The scenes of domestic life tend to have a significant impact on political and military action, and on the health of the Arthurian community as a whole. Marion Wynne-Davies has argued that ‘Malory’s main concern in the Morte Darthur is to examine the role of men in relation to their private desires and public responsibilities; however, as a natural adjunct to this central theme, 1 2

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘domestic’ (2a), www.oed.com. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 29.

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the position of women in fifteenth-century literature is inevitably touched upon.’3 To the first half of this claim, I would add that women’s private and public impulses are likewise interrogated in and central to the text. For both men and women, the private – the domestic – underlies and butts up against the public, and this plays out across the castle floor. The domestic life of the castle tends to disrupt its other functions, and what results is a (sometimes silent) competition over the space and how to define it. That competition injures both the domestic and other functions, and it lurks in the spaces between and among the political, communal, and ritual activity that have already been discussed, as it will in the carceral and martial spaces highlighted in the following chapters. The domestic is both central and peripheral, essential and hidden, supportive and deleterious. There are many feasts, but little attention to consumption – and as the poisoned-apple episode will show, eating itself can be dangerous. Drinking likewise presents problems, as intoxicating poisons can taint seemingly benign beverages. Sex and even love are nearly always fraught in the Morte. Family in and of itself vexes Arthur’s community. Children are conceived (and born) but shuttled away – dramatically in Arthur’s and Mordred’s cases. Family units consist primarily of adult relatives: fully grown children, siblings, cousins, and nephews being the most prominent.4 Throughout, domestic events are pushed out of the spaces that seem designed for them, literally and figuratively. The use of domestic space thus tells us much about the threat that it presents. In its pursuit of the domestic, my reading will necessarily push against Terrence McCarthy’s claim that ‘[a]s Malory takes us on a guided tour of Camelot, the doors marked “private” remain unopened.’5 McCarthy speaks metaphorically of the these ‘doors,’ going on to note that what Malory forgoes is psychological depth and the interior lives 3





Marion Wynne-Davies, Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the Sword (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 61–62. 4 Though not central to my discussion, I would note that family itself is a fraught category in the Morte. Blood ties, both overt and covert, create problems. The Orkney clan’s quest for vengeance against their father’s murderer (and Gawayne’s later quest for vengeance against his brothers’ killer) provides the most obvious example, but it is one of many. But the text also pits family against itself, sometimes unwittingly. Cory Rushton points to the ‘sense of tragedy and horror which potentially attends fraternal combat’ in discussing episodes of battle between Balyn and Balan, and between Gareth and Gawayne, for example, in ‘Absent Fathers, Unexpected Sons,’ p. 148. 5 Terrence McCarthy, ‘Le Morte Darthur and Romance,’ in Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 151 [148–75].

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of his characters. However, I think that Malory throws those doors open (or breaks them down) and examines the physical and psychological interiors behind them, though both domestic space and its emotional underpinnings suffer as a result. This look at domestic endeavors and space will necessarily nuance the preceding discussions, as the spaces and, at times, the very moments, are ones that I have already analyzed in the explorations of the castle as political, communal, and ritual space. The overlap itself is not surprising – the castle is always many things at once, some of which we see clearly in the text, and some of which we can only imagine happening routinely in the background. Running a castle and its estate demands labor, for example, but we see only the rarest glimpse of that behind-the-scenes action. However, the domestic does occasionally emerge and become the focus of the narrative, even as other functions swirl around it. Nowhere is this more apparent, I think, than in the establishment of the Round Table. As I discuss in the second chapter, the table comes from Gwenyver’s father, King Lodegreauns, as part of her dowry. He explains: But I shall sende hym a gyffte that shall please hym muche more, for I shall gyff hym the Table Rounde whych Uther hys fadir gaff me. And whan hit ys fullé complete there ys an hondred knyghtes and fyfty. And as for an hondred good knyghtes, I have myselff, but I wante fifty, for so many hathe be slayne in my dayes. (77.7–11)

While this does help found the community and its space, domestic implications abound as well. The very fact that this is indeed a family heirloom – something not noted in Malory’s source, the Suite du Merlin – evokes the domestic. The Round Table as a table also matters here. This tangibility rings – and I do joke a bit here – as an act of redecoration. While the gift of the Round Table is, of course, not primarily about a new table, a new space for feasting and taking guests, it does result in a noticeable change in the organization of the king’s physical space and his body of attendant knights. The Round Table, with its complement of knights, some from Lodegreauns and others added by Arthur, formalizes the political system that then dominates the remainder of the text. The space of the castle is now physically changed – new wife, new table, new knights – and its ideology is likewise formulated in a novel manner. At least in part, this change is a domestication, not only of the spaces, but also of the proprietor (King Arthur), inhabitants, and visitors. It is my contention that Malory, often considered overly nostalgic for a mythical chivalric past – a past housed in and around the castle – is undertaking a

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comparatively radical re-examination of the fluidity of both castle space and (character) identity. The union with Gwenyver forces a revision of the king’s, the court’s, and the text’s – and consequently the audience’s – understanding of royal spaces. Camelot and other places associated with the king are drastically redefined in the wake of the marriage. Gwenyver’s presence amidst Arthur’s knights changes the nature of the relationships between and among the king and his loyal followers, and this change reflects the domestication of the king, his political system, and his spaces. The reconstruction of space incited by this marriage problematizes the very community that it creates. Indeed, domestication functions both to unify and to divide. Even as this chapter moves away from this particular domestic arrangement, the troubling nature of the activities of home and family remains a constant. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones narrow the notions of social space that have guided this book to the domestic, to the home; they say that ‘The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person.’6 They add that ‘[h]ouse, body and mind are in continuous interaction, the physical structure, furnishing, social conventions and mental images of the house at once enabling, moulding, informing and constraining the activities and ideas which unfold within its bounds.’7 Their idea figures heavily into this chapter’s readings of spaces in and beyond the castle. Gwenyver exerts a new energy, to use Lefebvre’s idea, in Arthur’s castle and produces new meaning for that space.8 It simply cannot be the same after her arrival. The revised space in turn prescribes behaviors and identities in new ways and affects how the community makes sense of what happens within that space – and how we make sense of it. If we think back to Whitaker’s notion that the castle is ‘the centre from which the authority radiates,’ we can see how this domestication effects change.9 Authority in the Morte is overwhelmingly within the male purview, whether it be that of Arthur, his knights, clerics, or the author himself. However, the castle itself is now split; its energy and its authority resonate with both the male (king) and the female (queen). Gwenyver quickly assumes a role of both private and public importance in the Morte. Privately she is the wife, the avowed love of King Arthur. Publicly, she becomes an integral part of the political machine, even beyond the institution of the Round Table. She 6



Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘Introduction,’ in About the House: LéviStrauss and Beyond, eds. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 2 [1–46]. 7 Carsten and Hugh-Jones, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2. 8 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 13. 9 Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ p. 74.

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plays several very public roles in relation to knights and their adventures. Murray’s argument that in Malory, ‘castles depart almost entirely from the battlefield and become the realm of queens, and proprietresses, female captives, inhabitants, and guests’10 (an argument with which I do not wholeheartedly agree) seems relevant here, as this change in social space, this redefinition of castle and court, results from the addition of an important female inhabitant. The changes parallel the broader changes to the narrative. Murray highlights the trouble with castles’ connections to the feminine: they are ‘associated with women to illustrate the condition [decay] of society.’11 This eventual large-scale decay, with which the book ends, may be on the very distant horizon, but already noticeable changes are afoot. Archibald claims that ‘the collapse of the Arthurian world [becomes] a domestic tragedy as well as a political one.’12 And henceforth, the castle becomes the central node of the text and its many episodes featuring individual knights or larger groups. The marked difference in Arthur’s rule over the court and its spaces manifests itself all the more clearly in the War with the Five Kings episode, which closely follows the marriage and the swearing of the Pentecostal Oath. Though the most noticeable changes to space occur away from any castle, this episode illuminates the interwoven relationship among Arthur, space, and Gwenyver, as well as the role of the domestic in that triangle, and helps us understand through extrapolation how things now work at Camelot and other residences. When word comes that the five kings (of Denmarke, Irelonde, the Vale, Sorleyse, and the Ile of Longtaynse) have been slashing and burning their way through British cities, Arthur presents himself as the active warrior, saying, ‘Now shall I never reste tylle I mete with tho kyngis in a fayre felde’ (101.2–3). This mimics his behaviors in his pre-marriage battles, where Arthur maintains a very active and visible position among the fighting knights. We have previously seen his formidable role in battle: ‘With that Syre Arthur torned with his knyghtes and smote behynd and before, and ever Sir Arthur was in the formest prees tyl his hors was slayne undernethe hym’ (14.5–7). King Lot smites him down, but with Excalibur’s help, Arthur gains the advantage and hurries to London to hold a counsel with his barons. What stands out in this earlier battle is Arthur’s ‘foremost’ position on the field of war and the male counsel that he seeks. In these early stages of his kingship, Arthur’s attentions are on males and male pursuits. His life is 10

Murray, ‘Women and Castles,’ p. 22. Murray, ‘Women and Castles,’ p. 36. 12 Archibald, ‘Arthur and Mordred: Variations on an Incest Theme,’ Arthurian Literature VIII (1989): 26 [1–27]. 11

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very public and knightly. He appears to be taking this same posture as he heads out against the five kings. However, even the spaces of war and battle have been transformed by his nuptial bliss. He orders Gwenyver to prepare to join him, to travel to the site of battle, believing that he ‘may nat longe mysse’ her and that she will ‘cause [him] to be the more hardy’ (101.14–15). But her presence, her space-producing and space-changing energy will maintain its sway. Indeed, Arthur notes before they set out that he does not want to put her in any jeopardy, a proviso that Malory adds to his source. This crucial juxtaposition – wanting her around but not wanting her in danger – changes his space. The pavilion where he lives during the battle becomes a domestic haven, and a place demanding extra safety measures to ensure the wellbeing of the queen. He will not be just a king and commander, a soldier and a political figure; he will also – and maybe primarily – be a husband. Much of this material, as is the case across the Morte, Malory takes from his source. However, I find that his apparent edits, even minor ones like the aforementioned note on keeping Gwenyver safe in close proximity to war, evidence heightened attention to space, its use, and the force it exerts on and receives from its inhabitants. That said, the general plot outline remains unsurprisingly stable. The king and queen retire to their pavilion for the evening, and are ‘betrayed’ during this liminal time (between acceptable periods of battle). Warned about the onslaught and the approaching danger, Arthur rushes Gwenyver to safety before turning back to the battle. This occurs in both versions, but with one particular difference. In the Suite du Merlin, the king and queen have already risen from their repose and are readying for mass when they must shift into modes of flight (for the queen) and fight (for Arthur). Malory’s version has Arthur ‘unarmed and leyde hym to reste with his quene Gwenyvere’ (102.2–3). The shouts of betrayal and treason rouse him to action, namely arming himself and (with Kay, Gawayne, and Gryfflette) escorting the queen to the Humber River. Keeping the king and queen at rest marks the space as problematic. It is a marriage bedroom, not a meeting place or military headquarters. Moving forward, in the French, the queen manages to ford the river of her own accord as Arthur and the three knights defeat the charging five kings, and the ford is then named for the queen. Malory’s Gwenyver remains on the battle side of the river – in Arthur’s space – during the fight and is sent to safety in a barge only after the successful slaying of the enemy kings. Again, Malory’s minor edits, here keeping Gwenyver close, highlight the domestication of the king and his spaces. The space of the battle is also a space of marriage, as the queen is still there, still in danger, and still reliant for her safety – indeed for her life – on the king and his fellow knights.

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Here, as in Camelot with the emplacement of the Round Table, Gwenyver’s presence makes manifest Judith Okely’s premise that ‘different groups inhabiting the same space can create shifting boundaries by subtle means.’13 The subtle means in this instance are simply her presence and the love that it engenders in the king. Because she is in the space, it is different and new. The split between public and private, between political and domestic, blurs, or even ceases to exist. When she becomes part of the royal couple – or, more accurately, when she creates the royal couple with her arrival – she takes a measure of responsibility, but also changes the natures and the balance of the king’s own responsibilities and places, and introduces new dangers to herself and her husband. Over the longer term, once Gwenyver comes into the picture, Arthur begins to recede into the background, into the domestic sphere. While the glimpse of the couple in bed together in that pavilion is not the norm, it is analogous to his overall shift in place (increasingly in the castle, it seems) and to his new role among the knights in service to him. This is admittedly not yet a permanent change – Arthur does return to fight the five kings, and he certainly plays a crucial and mobile role in the Roman War episode that still lies ahead – but Arthur’s temporary movement away from the danger and rigors of battle here is representative of the tenor of the bulk of the book. This is a liminal period, where we see the beginnings of his domestication and consequent marginalization. Even battle becomes domesticated through the long stretch until the final episodes: after the Roman War, tournaments and individual quests replace war. The Morte’s engagement with the domestic is not just about Gwenyver and the Round Table, of course. Indeed, the systemic connection between domestic and other castle functions across the text speaks to the ways in which the domestic interferes with other aspects of court life, knighthood, kingship, and so forth. The War with the Five Kings episode implies that love and sexual activity, in particular, affect space in such a way as to make it less amenable to the smooth functioning of the king and his knights as political and military bodies. Indeed, with nearly every manifestation, sex (having it, wanting it, etc.) interferes with and impedes the status quo, and this plays out spatially. The relationship between sexual behavior and the castle – where it happens and who can access that space, for example – highlights the disruptive nature of this slice of domestic life. The reasons are manifold. The sex that we see (or nearly see) in the text exists almost exclusively outside of the institution of marriage. Arthur’s 13

Judith Okely, Own or Other Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 3.

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and Gwenyver’s lying together on the verge of the war with the five kings provides an exception.14 By the end of the text, this exception has disintegrated. Arthur’s claim that he is ‘much more … soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse of my fayre quene; for quenys I myght have inow, but such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company’ reflects the problem of the domestic in his repudiation of it in favor of his chivalric community (886.29–887.1). This sentiment does not surprise at that late stage, however; rather, it has rippled throughout the story. The Morte’s opening on Uther’s rape of Igrayne proves particularly tumultuous. Chapter One looked at the ways in which Uther’s movement into Tyntagil and eventually Igrayne’s bed reconfigures the political space. It also forces the reader, right at the start of the book, to wrestle with the text’s presentation of domestic matters. By its nature, rape impinges upon the most private space, the body. Rape holds a central position in the story, both through the prominent examples across the pages of the Morte, and in the codified prohibition of rape in the Pentecostal Oath.15 The setting for this particular rape, Igrayne’s bed within her husband’s castle, provides a nexus of personal and political conquest for Uther, and initiates a rewriting of the local and ‘global’ landscapes. The rape itself is both cataclysmic and uneventful – after all, she believes that she is sleeping with her own husband. It is the aftermath that emphasizes the disruptive nature of the domestic. Once the Duke of Cornwall’s death is discovered, Igrayne is left doubly vulnerable: she is widow of the king’s enemy, and she does not know who was in her bed. About the latter, ‘she mourned pryvely and held her pees’ (4.4). She is soon married to the ‘lusty’ king, ‘in a mornynge with grete myrthe and joy’ (4.15, 16–17). Her daughters are then married off, as well. The spate of marriages normalizes rape, but also hints at a peaceful accord between the domestic and political impulses of Uther and the text more broadly. This sense, if one feels it at all, does not last. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Igrayne is party to the mirth and joy that characterize her own wedding day. Her concern about the night of her husband’s death and the stranger that she lay with – something expressed in her mournful silence, an effort to recede into the redefined spaces, it seems – weighs on her for six months. Uther exerts this heavy burden on her until, as he ‘lay by his quene,’ he forces out of her the story of her own rape (4.26). This proves an act of both oppression and relief for 14 15

Of course, Malory does not explicitly state that they are engaging in sex. See Wynne-Davies, Women and Arthurian Literature, p. 63; and Catherine Batt, ‘Malory and Rape,’ Arthuriana 7.3 (1997): 78–99.

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Igrayne: she must break her silence, but she also learns that it was Uther in her bed.16 Here again the narrative gestures toward a domestic peace: ‘Thenne the quene made grete joye whan she knewe who was the fader of her child’ (5.6–7). This knowledge comforts the queen; it gives her joy.17 However, this is not a joy that Malory or the text indulges. Immediately following this revelation, the legitimization of her unborn child, a shift will push the domestic away. The next conversation about this pregnancy touches upon the raising of this child – a domestic concern, to be sure. Here more than anywhere else in the Morte, does Malory attend to the necessity of childcare, and especially nourishment. Indeed, in the space of one page, a form of the word ‘nourish’ is used six times.18 Malory transitions into this conversation by vaguely emplacing it: ‘Sone come Merlyn unto the kyng and said, “Syr, ye must purvey yow for the nourisshyng of your child”’ (5.8–9). As the conversation continues, the spatial implications increase. Indeed, Merlyn’s command – a command that he has by right of the promise Uther gave in return for the opportunity to rape Igrayne in the first place – legislates the displacement of the domestic.19 The child will be removed from Uther and Igrayne’s care and home, and into Ector’s: ‘Wel,’ said Merlyn, ‘I knowe a lorde of yours in this land that is a passynge true man and a feithful, and he shall have the nourysshyng of your child; and his name is Sir Ector, and he is a lord of fair lyvelode in many partyes in Englond and Walys. And this lord Sir Ector, lete hym be sent for for to come and speke with you, and desyre hym yourself, as he loveth you, that he will put his owne child to nourisshynge to another woman and that his wife nourisshe yours. And whan the child is borne lete it be delyverd to me at yonder pryvy posterne uncrystned.’ (5.11–19) 16

As Hodges has noted, Igrayne here proves her loyalty to her husband – her domestic loyalty – and will later share the same story in asserting Arthur’s true parentage, at which time she must prove ‘her faithfulness to her country, not her husband, and her story (at least in theory) has the power to decide who should be king,’ in Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 44. Politics thus infringe on this domestic narrative, and vice versa. 17 This plays out differently in Malory’s source, the Merlin, where Uther adds to the shame that Ygraine already feels by not revealing the truth, and instead using her ignorance (and the resultant illegitimacy of the child) as justification for the child’s later removal. 18 The Middle English verb ‘nourish’ and its gerund form can refer to feeding in particular, and also to providing life’s necessities and childrearing. See ‘norishen’ and nourishing(e),’ Middle English Dictionary, . 19 In this we can see something of a reversal of the imposition of the domestic on Igrayne in the rape scene.

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The fate of the child, and specifically his nourishment, will involve movement away from Uther and his castle. Several spatial elements look outward from this conversation (at Uther’s castle) and consequently point to a dissonance between the domestic and other aspects of castle life. Merlyn first notes that Ector, the appointed foster father, has lands across both England and Wales, something that Malory seems to add to his source material, where the foster family’s financial situation is presented as relatively dire.20 The text thus looks out upon the British landscape broadly, and turns away from their own location (perhaps especially if they remain at Tyntagil, in Cornwall, which, as Armstrong and Hodges point out, is in many ways distinct from England proper).21 Merlyn notes, in Malory as in the earlier French text, that Ector’s wife will have to pass her own child to another for nourishment (here, specifically breastfeeding) so that she can accommodate her new charge.22 This decouples conception from childrearing for both families, though the break is more drastic in the case of Uther and Igrayne’s unborn baby. For them is left behind a domestic void; they receive no foster child to rear. Of course, Igrayne’s other children have also been wrenched away, for marriage or the nunnery, in Morgan’s case.23 This separation will notably happen before the child has been christened, a dictum that further separates the parents and their places from the child. Finally, the place of the impending exchange, ‘yonder privy postern’ – apparently Malory’s addition24 – aligns with this idea that the domestic is not concomitant with the king’s castle. With ‘yonder’ Merlyn points away from the interior of the castle, and the choice of a private back door notes a desire both for secrecy and for removal from the public locations and functions of the castle. Uther carries out Merlyn’s directive, as expected (and promised in advance). Immediately upon birth, it seems, the break is made. Malory tells us that 20

See Lestoire de Merlin, in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. Sommer, vol. 2, 74.28–36. 21 Armstrong and Hodges, Mapping Malory, especially pp. 20–22. 22 Malory does not give Ector’s wife an opportunity to voice her concerns about not nourishing her own child. In the earlier version, she agrees because her husband rules her (much as he follows his king’s orders), but expresses considerable dismay. Thus, the French elaborates on the domestic, and Malory attends more to the void. 23 Though we do not have specifics about their ages, this could be the appropriate stage in each one’s life for just such a shift. 24 There is no mention of the place of delivery at this point in the French version. After the birth, instructions point simply to the ‘huis de la sale’ [‘door to the hall’ (85)]; see Lestoire de Merlin, in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. Sommer, vol. 2, 76.15; The Story of Merlin, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 2, p. 83.

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So like as Merlyn devysed it was done. And whan Syre Ector was come he made fyaunce to the kyng for to nourisshe the child lyke as the kynge desired; and there the kyng graunted Syr Ector grete rewardys. Thenne when the lady was delyverd the kynge commaunded two knyghtes and two ladyes to take the child bound in a cloth of gold, ‘and that ye delyver hym to what poure man ye mete at the postern yate of the castel.’ (5.20–26)

The separation is made quickly, as the transfer of the child occurs immediately after the birth. Interestingly, both use the word ‘delyver,’ intimating, perhaps, that the second act is likewise a birth. The use of a poor man to convey the child from the castle’s back door to his new home with Sir Ector again drives a wedge between the domestic on the one hand, and the castle and its king and queen on the other. It is then with a sense of final division that the child is conveyed to Ector and christened, and ‘Sir Ectors wyf nourysshed hym with her owne pappe’ (5.29–30). The text then moves quickly away from Arthur’s childhood, and on to Uther’s illness, continuing battles, and eventually his death – perhaps all testaments to the disruptive nature of his dealing with Igrayne both before and after Arthur’s birth. Neither the castle nor the text itself affords the space for the domestic. The ideas introduced in this opening scene remain close to the surface throughout the Morte. Both the disruptive nature of the domestic (especially, but not exclusively, sexual activity, as this chapter aims to show) and the inability to make space for it in the castle prove persistent problems, and ones with effects that are both deep and wide. Two later incidents share with this episode the combination of illicit sexual activity and resultant children out of place: the conceptions of both Mordred and Galahad. The narration of Arthur’s dalliance with Morgause is fairly tame compared both to some earlier versions of their coupling and to Uther’s rape of Igrayne.25 However, even in its brevity, it captures the uncomfortable intersection between politics and the domestic, especially 25

These two episodes are often looked at together. Peter H. Goodrich, for example, speaking of the tradition generally says, ‘Arthur’s incestuous sin (usually with Morgause, wife of his former opponent King Lot, but in some versions with Morgan), recapitulates the lust of his father Uther in engendering Arthur upon the Ygerna, wife of his ally Gorlois,’ in ‘The Erotic Merlin,’ Arthuriana 10.1 (2000): 98–99 [94–115]. Beverly Kennedy likewise yokes the two incidents: The theme of adultery is central to the story of King Arthur. The king himself was begotten by means of adultery; as a young man he committed adultery (as well as incest) in begetting his son and nephew, Mordred, upon Morgawse, his half-sister and King Lot’s wife; and his reign came to an untimely end because he could not resolve the political crisis engendered by Mordred’s openly accusing his queen of adultery. In ‘Adultery in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,’ Arthuriana 7.4 (1997): 63 [63–91].

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the bedroom. In the midst of securing his kingdom, Arthur ‘rode unto the cité of Carlyon,’ and in his castle there he will sleep with King Lot’s wife, who is also his half-sister (unbeknownst to him) (33.30).26 While in the earlier Lestoire de Merlin version, this scene plays out as a rape – Arthur sneaks into her bed in the dark of night such that she assumes it is her husband – Malory, like his immediate source, the Suite du Merlin, presents this as an act of consensual sex, but one fraught nevertheless: And thydir com unto hym Kynge Lottis wyff of Orkeney in maner of a message, but she was sente thydir to aspye the courte of Kynge Arthure, and she com rychely beseyne with hir foure sonnes, Gawayne, Gaherys, Aggravayne and Gareth, with many other knyghtes and ladyes, for she was a passynge fayre lady. Wherefore the kynge caste grete love unto hir and desired to ly by her; and so they were agreed, and he begate uppon hir Sir Mordred. And she was syster on the modirs syde Igrayne unto Arthure. (33.30–34.4).

Malory stresses the fact that this is not a rape scene. Arthur desires Lot’s wife, and ‘they were agreed.’ This agreement, a relative rarity in the case of consummated desire in Malory, does not, however, diminish the disruptive nature of the sex. Indeed, Armstrong has rightly argued that it is this very agreement, on Morgause’s part, that marks this sex and its product, Mordred, so problematic, and that it is ‘her agreement, her active role in the exchange of her body, that threatens the political and social order of Arthur’s kingdom.’27 The lady’s claiming her own domestic activity and space thus impinges on the rights of her husband, on the male chivalric order, and on politics broadly.28 Though limited, the spatial details here help illustrate this. The episode occurs in one of Arthur’s key castles, as Caerleon is certainly a power center and plays host to a number of important scenes across the text. Lot’s wife (she is given no name here) arrives on an explicitly political errand, namely to spy on Arthur and his court. She brings her family with her, imposing domestic 26

Speaking of the Suite du Merlin version (Malory’s source) and approaching sin through the lens of St. Thomas Aquinas, David Scott Wilson-Okamura stresses that ‘Arthur commits incest unknowingly, but adultery knowingly. No one as yet knows that the woman involved is Arthur’s sister. But everyone at court knows that she is Lot’s wife, not Arthur’s. His ignorance, therefore, mitigates the sinfulness of incest, but not that of adultery,’ in ‘Adultery and the Fall of Logres in the PostVulgate Suite du Merlin,’ Arthuriana 7.4 (1997): 25 [16–46]. 27 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 52. Armstrong’s discussion of this scene tells us much about the gender expectations and the relationship between seemingly private acts of sex and the larger public society. 28 See Dorsey Armstrong, ‘Malory’s Morgause,’ in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, eds. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas, TX: Scriptorium Press, 2001), p. 156 [149–60].

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life on the castle. The age of these four sons at this point in the narrative is unclear. The oldest would likely be around Arthur’s age, as Lot and Morgause marry when Uther and Igrayne do, after all. Gareth is presumably a child, as he will later be unrecognizable when he comes to court on the cusp of knighthood. Malory does not indulge in any further family scenes here – this is no surprise, given the regular suppression and marginalization of the domestic – but including her sons in this entourage while on ‘business’ highlights the seepage between functions. Immediately after their agreedupon liaison, we learn that Mordred is conceived and are reminded that this is incest. Both shatter the illusion of comfortable domesticity that the family vacation and the consensual sex might suggest. Together, these two pieces of information will receive particular attention, and will be clearly spatialized. In the meantime, though, they are just a ripple for the reader. Malory indicates that Morgause remains at Caerleon: ‘So there she rested hir a monthe, and at the laste she departed’ (34.5). I assume that she continues to spy during this interval, perhaps using her sexual closeness to Arthur for even greater access to both space and information. However, the results of her spying and its impact on the ongoing power struggles receive no attention. The effects of her sexual dalliance with Arthur, however, haunt the rest of the text, signaling again the deep trouble with domestic endeavors (of almost any sort, it seems). The ‘monster’ that is Mordred, the ‘most destructive element in the text,’ lurks for some time in the background, but will, of course catapult the story and the kingdom into its ending with later domestic disturbances.29 Like the newborn Arthur, this baby cannot stay, though the reasons for and the methods of removal differ drastically. King Arthur himself learns the extent of the horror of this act somewhat gradually. Upon Morgause’s departure, he first has a frightful dream of griffins and serpents destroying his land and people. Arthur kills them, but not before receiving a grave wound of his own. He wakes, and chooses to hunt as an apparent coping mechanism.30 Merlyn approaches him, first in the guise of a child and then as an old man, to tell Arthur that Uther and Igrayne are his parents,31 and further, that ‘ye [Arthur] have done a thynge late that God ys displesed with you, for ye 29

Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 54, p. 49. It is on this hunting excursion that Arthur first encounters the questing beast and King Pellynor, hot on its trail. Elizabeth Archibald has discussed the connections between the beast and incest, in Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 196–198. 31 The unraveling of the secret behind Arthur’s parentage involves a mother-son reunion. Igrayne provides testimony about the conception and removal of her child, after which Merlyn introduces the two. Upon meeting, ‘Kyng Arthure toke his modir Quene Igrayne in hys armys and kyssed her, and eythir wepte uppon other. Than the kynge lete make a feste that lasted eyght dayes’ (38.4–7). 30

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have lyene by youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the knyghtes of youre realme’ (36.14–16).32 Merlyn soon continues this prophecy: ‘for hit ys Goddis wylle that youre body sholde be punysshed for youre fowle dedis. But I ought ever to be hevy … for I shall dye a shamefull dethe, to be putte in the erthe quycke; and ye shall dey a worshypfull dethe’ (36.22–25). While critics have debated just what constitutes the major problem here, incest or adultery, Merlyn clearly points to the former, and Archibald’s argument that incest stories were indeed in ‘vogue’ further bolsters this notion.33 The act of incest is by its very nature a crossing of domestic ties; it is, as McClune argues, ‘an overly intimate sibling bond’ that the two forge here.34 Siblings become lovers, and the family tree becomes an uncomfortable web with father-uncles, mother-aunts, and brother-cousins frustrating notions of domestic order. The resultant prophecy speaks of both long- and shortterm punishments, which will play out on the body as well as on the geographical space of the kingdom.35 The intimate connections between the king’s body and his spaces resonate here as a third body, and those places (geographical, architectural, etc.) matter as much as the physical body and the body politic.36 Arthur and his kingdom will fall to the child of this sexual union (though Arthur’s death will be ‘worshypfull’) – that lies far in the future – and Merlyn himself will much sooner be removed from the society and the text.37 The dire and far-reaching consequences of this adulterous incest (or incestual adultery) highlight the dangers of domestic entanglement.38 Indeed, more immediately, it is this coupling that sparks King Lot’s enmity for Arthur shortly afterward in the text.39 The prophecy also leads to the plan to eliminate the threat of Mordred, though ‘[a]ction is not the correct response to categorical prophecies,’ 32

Merlyn later repeats this idea: ‘And he [Pellynor] shall telle you the name of youre owne son begotyn of youre syster, that shall be the desctruccion of all thys realme’ (43.4–6). 33 Archibald, ‘Variations,’ p. 6. Archibald traces the development of this as an incest story and helpfully positions it within that tradition, highlighting its divergence from that tradition. 34 McClune, ‘“The Vengaunce of my Brethirne,”’ p. 91. 35 See Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 121. 36 On the political theory of the king’s two bodies, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1957]). 37 Jane Bliss has rightly pointed out that ‘the narrative of Part VIII is silent about God’s punishment of Arthur for incest and that the disaster is caused by a number of other things, not only the little snake but also the personal conflicts’, in ‘Prophecy in the Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 13.1 (2003): 11 [1–16]. 38 Lexton discusses the ‘confused’ and ‘incomprehensible’ nature of this prophecy, particularly in its linking Merlyn’s own death to it, in Contested Language, p. 62. 39 See McClune, ‘“The Vengaunce of my Brethirne,”’ p. 92.

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as Rachel Kapelle has argued.40 Malory’s depiction of the attempt to kill Mordred (and other children with a similar birth date) provides a counterexample to Arthur’s own removal from his parents’ home. In Arthur’s case, the violence of the act (a mother bereft of her child, in particular) is muted and overshadowed. In Mordred’s, it is multiplied. Because a child born on May Day will destroy Arthur and his kingdom, all children born on that day – or near that day, it seems – are rounded up to be dispatched. The realm feels this impact broadly: he sente for hem all in payne of dethe, and so there were founde many lordis sonnys and many knyghtes sonnes, and all were sente unto the kynge. And so was Mordred sente by Kynge Lottis wyff. And all were putte in a shyppe to the se; and som were foure wekis olde and som lesse. And so by fortune the shyppe drove unto a castell, and was all to-ryven and destroyed for the moste party, save that Mordred was cast up, and a good man founde hym and fostird hym tylle he was fourtene yere of age, and than brought hym to the courte, as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the end of the Morte Arthure. So, many lordys and barownes of thys realme were displeased for hir children were so loste; and many putte the wyght on Merlion more than on Arthure. So what for drede and for love, they helde theire pece. (46.10–23)

One does not have to read too deeply to be troubled by this passage. Children are sent to a watery grave, in a scene that is both familiar and strange. Malory notably – or un-notably – does not prepare the reader for this decision to carry out what amounts to a massacre; in this, as in the outcome, he differs markedly from his source.41 Moreover, as Kathy 40

Rachel Kapelle, ‘Merlin’s Prophecies, Malory’s Lacunae,’ Arthuriana 19.2 (2009): 74 [58–81]. 41 In the Suite du Merlin, Arthur gathers the children in a tower with the intent of killing all of them. Having been warned in a dream that this plan conflicts with his responsibilities to his people (including these children), Arthur puts the lives of the children in God’s hand. He places them in a boat, and lets God decide whether they shall live or perish – they live. Mordred himself does not make it to the tower or onto this ship. Lot and his wife intend to follow the king’s orders and send Mordred (who will be recognizable by a scar on his forehead and a note attached to his cradle). The ship that is to bring him to the tower is wrecked, and all except Mordred die. Mordred, as in Malory, is found by a fisherman and brought to Duke Nabur to be fostered. In the French version, the people do rightly blame Arthur, but are quieted by Merlin in part because he promises them that God has protected their children, and that all will eventually return in full health and safety. Field has discussed at length the ways in which Malory’s version perhaps surprisingly paints Arthur in a bad light here; see P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory’s Mordred and the Morte Arthure,’ in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 89– 102; this is a revised version of the essay, which was originally published in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, eds. Jennifer Fellows et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 77–93.

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Cawsey has noted, the text here plays – uncomfortably, to be sure – with well-worn tropes of May Day and of the slaughter of the innocents. In particular, Cawsey points out that we expect the perpetrator of the slaughter to be a clear antagonist and that ‘in medieval literature Mayday is supposed to be a time for romantic and erotic love, not for the killing of babies.’42 Malory thus flirts with the domestic in order to disturb it. The domestic implications, as well as their overlap with politics, stretch further. Each family with a son approximately four weeks old loses that child; each such family thus endures an unbefitting fate, as their children are not of ‘polluted birth,’ as Helen Cooper explains.43 This mass death upsets each family’s own domestic situation, and leads to the displeasure of many lords and barons. Though the blame is placed more squarely on Merlyn’s shoulders, keeping the peace does not equate to being in accord. A circular pattern of disruptive domesticity emerges. Arthur and Morgause’s sexual liaison placed the domestic squarely at odds with the goals for Arthur’s reign; the resultant intrusion on the domestic lives of so many families puts pressure on the political situation, a pressure that is abated but not eliminated by both love and fear. The spatial details here are perhaps sparse, particularly with respect to the removal of children from their homes. However, I do think that they can help piece together the idea that the domestic is simply incompatible with other functions, even as it remains necessary (i.e., for the preservation and perpetuation of life). The narrative does briefly explore the spaces of Mordred’s survival, and provides two specific pieces of information about Mordred’s place within castles. First, as the lone survivor of the shipwreck (into a castle), Mordred is fostered by a ‘good man.’ Malory excises the details about Mordred’s fostering, and leaves us without a clear picture of his youth or nourishing, as we get in Arthur’s case and in the Suite du Merlin’s version of this episode. There, it is explicitly a nobleman, Duke Nabur, who raises Mordred, as the fisherman who finds the floating cradle recognizes the high birth of the child therein and delivers it to an appropriate home. Thus, the French indicates a ‘fitting’ domestic place for Mordred’s childhood, and at least hints at the domestic life of the castle. In Malory, we have only questions and assumptions about this period. What we do get is a fast-forward of fourteen years to Mordred’s arrival at court (now fully raised, now ready 42

Kathy Cawsey, ‘The Once and Future Childslayer: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Inversion of Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 25.2 (2015): 69 [67–83]. 43 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 377.

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to move out of the domesticity of youth). Of course, this promised return to court is never narrated; there is no family reunion. The motivation behind this omission – if it even is an omission – remains unclear, but the result is the displacement of the domestic, and a more violent one than the fostering of Arthur provides.44 When Mordred does reappear, he has come ‘to the court of a father who refuses to acknowledge him as a legitimate heir.’45 This, too, suppresses the domestic. Morgause’s affair with Arthur is not the only time the text peers in on her in the bedroom. The next time Malory peels back that curtain to reveal her domestic life proves horrific. Morgause’s relationship with Lameroke, blood enemy to the Orkney clan because his father Pellynor killed their father, provides an especially stark example of the text’s problems with domestic endeavors.46 Their relationship will come to a tragic and bloody end when Morgause is beheaded by her own son while in bed with Lameroke. Matricide alone speaks to the difficulties of domesticity; slaying one’s own mother severs maternal/filial ties and fractures the family tree. Gaherys’s act is an abnegation of family (in the name of family). Although Malory shows us this affair most prominently through the eyes of Morgause’s sons, eyes that understand it only as part of the blood feud and an act of extreme vengeance on Lameroke’s part (vengeance for the murder of his own father, Pellynor), we do see the lovers’ shared emotions on a couple of occasions.47 The text’s introduction – just a hint, really – of the relationship occurs when Lameroke argues with Mellyagaunt about who is more beautiful, Gwenyver (whom Mellyagaunt loves openly, though with no hope for reciprocity) or Morgause. In rejecting Mellyagaunt’s claims about Gwenyver’s superlative beauty, Lameroke declares, ‘Quene Morgause of Orkeney, modir unto Sir Gawayne, she ys the fayryst lady that beryth the lyff’ (380.31–33).48 His willingness to fight for her claim to be most beautiful, misguided as it may be, especially since he later 44

See Rushton, ‘Absent Fathers, Unexpected Sons,’ p. 142, for a discussion of this omission. 45 Laurie Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, ‘Who’s Your Daddy?: New Age Grails,’ Arthuriana 19.3 (2009): 25 [25–33]. 46 The fact that this death occurred in battle – certainly not a murder – and in a battle in which Lot opposed King Arthur does not prevent the Orkney brothers (in particular, Gawayne, Aggravayne, and Gaherys) from claiming and maintaining this blood feud. 47 Gawayne, having been recently defeated by Lameroke in battle, talks to his brothers about the feud they have with Lameroke’s family, and specifically attributes Lameroke’s affair with their mother to his ‘despyte of the death of Kyng Pellynor’ (482.33). 48 I previously discussed this scene’s expression of the subjectivity of beauty, in Martin, Vision and Gender, p. 85.

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admits that ‘so every knyght thynkith hys owne lady fayryste,’ evidences his attachment to her (381.32). Lameroke’s love manifests again when the text, following King Mark, passes by him in full lament beside a fountain. There, ‘he cryed and wepte and sayde, “O thou fayre quene of Orkeney, Kynge Lottys wyff and modir unto Sir Gawayne and to Sir Gaherys, and modir unto many other, for thy love I am in grete paynys”’ (456.10–13). Here again, Lameroke invokes his lover’s domestic ties in proclaiming his love for her, identifying her both as wife (though she has long been a widow) and mother. It is perhaps her domestic presence that attracts him. When we see them in bed together, on the fateful night of Morgause’s decapitation, their mutual love is quite apparent. Morgause comes to a ‘castel besyde Camelot,’ at Gawayne’s behest (his plan is to lure Lameroke there in order to kill him), and the lovers arrange a night for him to come to this castle (486.6). Malory depicts this meeting from Gaherys’s perspective as he lies in wait – a narration that shapes our own reading as voyeuristic and makes complicit stalkers out of us: And than he [Gaherys] sy where he [Lameroke] cam rydynge all armed, and where he alyght and tyed his horse to a prevay postern, and so he went into a parler and unarmed hym. And than he wente unto the quenys bed, and she made of hym passynge grete joy and he of her agayne, for aythir lovid other passynge sore. (486.13–17)

Malory carefully articulates their joy and love; he also attends closely to space here, tracking Lameroke’s movement toward his beloved Morgause.49 We see him move from the back door (‘prevy postern’ – its very privateness a reminder that the two must hide this love, this domesticity), through the parlor, and into the bed. As he moves closer to Morgause, he disencumbers himself of various signs of his professional knighthood, tying up the horse and then removing his armor. Each act strips away his public duties and prepares him for the personal relationship with Morgause. Each occurs architecturally closer to the lovers’ embrace, too. He leaves the horse behind at the door and unarms himself in the parlor. This perhaps signals the incompatibility of the two aspects of his life and a desire to carve out separate spaces for each – similar to Launcelot’s later appearance unarmed in the queen’s room on the fateful night on which they are discovered. 49

Malory’s source, Le Roman de Tristan en prose, focuses far less on Lamorat’s movements; rather it follows closely the path that Gaheriés takes to his mother’s room in order to slay her. See Le Roman de Tristan en Prose, eds. Philippe Ménard and Jean-Claude Faucon, 9 vols. (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1991), vol. 4, ch. 10.143ff.

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Malory does not indulge this love any further. Indeed, he shifts away from their mutual joy to its violent eradication. The text transitions back to the watching and waiting Gaherys, who ‘cam to there beddis syde all armed, wyth his swerde naked, and suddaynly he gate his modir by the heyre and strake of her hede’ (486.18–20).50 Quite unlike Lameroke’s pairing of disarmament and movement toward the bed, Malory notes that Gaherys is armed and has an unsheathed sword ready for action. While Lameroke’s movement tracked spatial separation, Gaherys brings with him the trappings of his knighthood; he thus disrupts the private space, and violently so. He brings the battlefield to the bedroom. This leaves Lameroke with blood all over him – the blood of his lover, he notes, as he decries Gaherys’s actions. This marks a drastic end to the domestic alliance and the mother who dared partake in one. The bloodied bed and lover bear witness to this deed. Lameroke speaks ‘grete shame’ to Gaherys for this matricide, and asks why the mother, and not he himself was the victim (486.26). Gaherys points to the private domestic sphere, and specifically to Lameroke’s ‘naked’ body – that nakedness a token of Lameroke’s attempt to assert domestic space, to leave other spaces – as the reason he is alive for now, as it would be shameful to kill an unarmed knight (487.5). Gaherys sees no shame, however, in killing his mother, in allotting no space for her, not even her own bed, which Hollie Morgan reminds us was often women’s domain.51 Quite the opposite, it seems, she caused shame, so he asserts his control over the space. Karen Cherewatuk explains that ‘[t]he excessive violence results from Lamorak’s direct threat to patrilineage and patrimony.’52 Kenneth Hodges parses Gaherys’s stance (one not quite shared by his brothers – or anyone else): 50

This is not the first time a member of the Orkeney clan has witnessed/participated in such a violent bed scene, though the ramifications here are both real and permanent. Previously, Gareth’s two attempted rendezvous with Lyonesse are thwarted by her sister Lynet, who sends a (magical) knight to interrupt their domestic intentions. This knight introduces violence to their tryst, wounding Gareth in the thigh, for which Gareth decapitates him (Lynet is able to mend this injury). Similarly, on their second attempt at sexual activity, the knight appears, Gareth is re-injured, and he again strikes off the intruder’s head, this time cutting it into a hundred pieces (all easily healed). This violence serves to protect Lyonesse’s virginity, and thus her marriageability; it saves her for a particular sort of domesticity, which we will not see, as she recedes into the background after their wedding. This scene also serves as a reminder about the dangers of domestic activity and invites consideration of the uses of castle space for that activity. Lyonesse notably tells Gareth to sleep in the hall – not a bedchamber. As a result, as Leitch has noted, this scene ‘involve[s] appropriating or invading the hall space for the activities of the boudoir,’ a clash of space that mirrors the more common encroachment on domestic spaces. See Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom,’ p. 51. 51 Hollie L. S. Morgan, Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), p. 176. 52 Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 106.

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Morgause must be held accountable; she has shamed her children by sleeping with their father’s killer, violating her duty to her family. He obviously believes that women, not mere objects of desire, are responsible for their own moral conduct and can be punished for their failings, a view that appears elsewhere. Morgause should have continued the family feud, and she did not.53

This is not a popular position. Malory explicitly notes that Arthur, Launcelot, and many others are ‘passynge wrothe’ (487.18).54 The king banishes Gaherys, though his exile seems short-lived. Even Gawayne is angry, but, as in the source text, this seems as much about Lameroke’s being alive as about their mother’s dreadful death. This displeasure with Gaherys soon dissipates; it is the later slaying of Lameroke that will more permanently anger the hearts and minds of the Round Table knights and continue to haunt the text. The mention of Lameroke’s name and the Orkney brothers’ murder of him will repeatedly cause lament and fond remembrance, the likes of which Morgause is not afforded. Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of her death, the text does not make space for grief, just fleeting anger. Cherewatuk rightly argues that Morgause ‘disrupts the patriarchal structure of Arthurian society as both an adulterous married woman and a sexually active widow.’55 In doing so, she seems to flaunt her own domestic possibilities, a move that is perhaps multiply problematic because she is a woman and matriarch to such a prominent family. Her efforts to make private space for herself infringe upon the political and communal workings of Arthur’s court. Indeed, they even obstruct her own family, it seems. Only when she works publicly with and for her family’s position at the Round Table does the group make room for her. She is allotted space at her husband’s funeral, and she is attended to relatively closely when she comes looking for Gareth. Space closes in around her, and violently so, when she foregrounds her own sexual desires. Gibson points to this scene as prime evidence that seemingly private ‘bedroom activity is, paradoxically, a social affront that causes violence and provides opportunity for violence or revenge.’56 Gibson rightly notes that these acts of domesticity leave knights exposed and open to attack, and argues that it is the revelation (not necessarily the act itself) that creates conflict, that leads to violence. Certainly here, readers likely find Gaherys, 53

Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 97. Launcelot also notes that Trystram, too, would be furious, and would not want to return to Arthur’s court, if he knew of this slaying. 55 Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 41. 56 Gibson, ‘Malory’s Reformulation of Shame,’ p. 67. 54

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and not Morgause and/or Lameroke, most problematic. I would add that exposure is a case of privacy, of walls, not holding. The configuration and permeability of space as much as the lover’s dropped guard allows – or even enforces – the imposition of violence and the squeezing out of private domestic matters. Like those already discussed, Launcelot’s bedroom scenes highlight the fraught nature of domestic spaces. Across the text, he moves in and out of several bedrooms, and this movement is marked by deception, discomfort, pain, or violence – often a combination that multiplies the trouble. In each case, domestic happiness remains out of reach, either pushed away by or snatched from Launcelot. This may be no surprise for a knight who has declared both wives and girlfriends inimical to his profession, all the while carrying on a twenty-four-plus year love affair (even if of an indeterminate nature) with his king’s wife. His love for Gwenyver is always threatening to disrupt political and other societal matters because of both its illicitness and the shadow that it casts wherever Launcelot is. His disruptive domesticity is thus symptom and contagion, both with and without the queen. Launcelot’s relationship with Elayne of Corbyn in particular yokes together a number of the above domestic and spatial problems, as it involves rape, a child out of place, and the threat of violence.57 As such, it underscores the text’s inability to make room for the domestic. Even as it overlaps with previous forays into the bedroom and leaves the same overall impression of the role of the domestic in the Morte, and even though scholars have looked closely at this episode (myself included), the particulars of this scene and the fallout from it – especially the spatial details – invite more critical attention. From the opening of the section that Field titles ‘The Begetting of Galahad,’ Malory keeps the reader focused on the architectural and geographical details of Launcelot’s and other characters’ movement. Once Launcelot passes the Pounte de Corbyn, for example, he notices ‘the fayryste towre that ever he saw, and thereundir was a fayre lytyll towne full of people’ (620.24–25). The focus narrows on architectural details as Launcelot is led into the castle where he will save the lady forced to endure boiling water: ‘And so anone they brought Sir Launcelot into the towre. And whan he cam to the chambir thereas this lady was, the doorys of iron unloked and unbolted, and so Launcelot wente into the chambir that was as hote as ony styew’ (621.9–12). Though 57

Elizabeth S. Sklar argues that this tale is ‘disruptive’ in several ways, in ‘Malory’s Other(ed) Elaine,’ in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, eds. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas, TX: Scriptorium Press, 2001), p. 61 [59–70].

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not in and of itself a domestic endeavor (unless, as it has been posited, the boiling woman is, in fact, the Elayne who will give birth to Galahad),58 this attention to towers, chambers, doors, and locks attunes the reader to the space, the use of it, and especially how to move through it. I think that we should remain trained on it during the entire episode. After saving the woman in the boiling water and slaying a dragon, Launcelot enters the court of King Pelles, and there he has his first encounter with the grail. The arrival of the grail seems both to prefigure and to bless the conception of Galahad and its spaces. As the evening progresses, Pelles and Dame Brusen plot that conception, using space and movement as part of their deception. Brusen uses an apparent token of Gwenyver, a ring, to suggest that she is in a nearby castle – just five miles away, in fact, a proximity that excites Launcelot. This knowledge spurs him to move quickly toward the queen and the domestic privacy of her bed (of course, actually the bed of Pelles’s daughter Elayne): Than Sir Launcelot ayenst the nyght rode unto that castell, and there anone he was receyved worshypfully wyth suche people, to hys semynge, as were aboute Quene Gwenyvere secrete. So whan Sir Launcelot was alyght he asked where the quene was. So Dame Brusen seyde she was in her bed. And than people were avoyded and Sir Launcelot was lad into her chambir. And than Dame Brusen brought Sir Launcelot a kuppe full of wyne, and anone as he had drunken that wyne he was so asoted and madde that he myght make no delay but wythoute ony let he wente to bedde. And so he wente that mayden Elayne had bene Quene Gwenyvere. (623.26–35)

It is the intoxicant that allows the illusion of Gwenyver’s presence. Launcelot’s rush through both geography and castle speak to the lure of the queen, particularly the queen in the bedroom. Malory has not previously put Launcelot in that extremely private space. And, of course, he does not actually do it now, but his quick moves, though aided at the last minute by the intake of wine, strike me as a sure sign that Gwenyver’s bedroom and – more scandalously – her bed are not new to him. The privilege of her bed, which he will expound upon in the later Mellyagaunt episode and which I discuss at length in the next chapter, presents itself as one that he takes for granted. As the people move out of 58

See Yvette Kisor, ‘“Naked as a nedyll”: The Eroticism of Malory’s Elaine,’ in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, eds. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), p. 56 [55–67].

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his way, Launcelot is led into her chamber. This ‘into’ seems important: he is all the way in the room, though not within the bed curtains, when he drinks the wine that leads him to believe that he is with Gwenyver.59 This easy movement, this comfort with Gwenyver’s domestic spaces is surely a crisis in the making. The particular crisis at hand in this moment, however, derives not from his relationship with the queen (or not entirely from it), but rather with the morning’s realization that he slept with Elayne of Corbyn. Malory carefully traces Launcelot’s steps across the room once he wakes up, as he did his entrance into the chamber and bed. He ‘arose up and wente to the wyndow, and anone as he had unshutte the wyndow the enchauntemente was paste. Than he knew hymselff that he had done amysse’ (624.8–10). Thus, he leaves the bed (still under the assumption that it is Gwenyver’s bed) and walks to and opens the window. I have previously discussed the role that the windows play in this trick: they prolong the night, allow enchantment, and obscure sight, all essential elements in the plot to bring about the conception of Galahad.60 There is a spatial dimension, as well. Leitch has rightly pointed to the importance of the window here: ‘His desire, while perhaps aroused by the potion, can be acted upon because of the darkened bedchamber, and is dissipated as soon as Launcelot opens a window, breaching the hermeneutically sealed space to which he has been brought and thus breaking the “spell” of his dis-placed desire.’61 The window is, indeed, key to unraveling this scene and its implicit commentary on domestic space. The window provides access to and connection with the outside world. Closed, it is a border, a disconnector. Shutting and covering ‘wyndowys and holys of that chambir’ blocks out that outside world and, it seems, the knowledge of it (624.6). For Launcelot, that outside world contains his knightly life and his relationship with Gwenyver, both of which would preclude sleeping with Elayne. While that window remains closed, however, it seems to contain his relationship with the queen, to protect it from the public gaze. Launcelot’s movement toward that liminal window space (which works for and against him simultaneously) is a movement away from the bed both literally and figuratively. 59

In Malory’s immediate source, Le Roman de Tristan, he imbibes before entering the room. Notably, in that earlier version, he exerts more agency over his movements (though it is a misguided agency, as he has been deceived already about the queen’s proximity, as in Malory). 60 Martin, Vision and Gender, p. 159. 61 Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom,’ p. 48.

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The ensuing action reveals a very troubled Launcelot. His recognition of the situation leads immediately to the threat of violence and death.62 He draws his sword on Elayne, saying ‘What arte thou that I have layne bye all this nyght? Thou shalt dye ryght here of myne hondys’ (624.14–15). Drawing a sword in the bedroom – something he will be forced into again later when Aggravayne, Mordred, and company explode any sense of a boundary between the private domestic world and spaces of politics and the knightly community – and especially threatening a woman with it seem to overlay this domestic space with troubling martial pursuit. His response to Elayne surely derives from a number of factors, including the realization that he has compromised his (still enigmatic) relationship with the queen, the rightful assessment of himself as a victim of a rape, and the sense that he has violated his host–guest relationship with King Pelles. This last point, of course, is not a problem, as Pelles has sanctioned and aided this sexual activity to ensure the conception of Galahad.63 (Malory seems decidedly less troubled by this than I am.) The first two, however, do matter, to Launcelot and to the space and what it can tell us. Rape in and of itself indicates that domestic space offers no safety; it is the introduction of violence on the body and the presumed sanctuary of the bedroom. This rape and the conception of Galahad liken Launcelot to Igrayne in the text’s opening episode. Critics have noted in particular the ways in which this episode takes agency out of Launcelot’s hands. Janet Jesmok terms Launcelot ‘a pawn, his body offered up like a sacrificial virgin’s.’64 Batt points to the ways in which this rape scene tugs against the text’s construction of Launcelot’s identity and, indeed, masculinity itself. She argues that ‘Launcelot asserts his lack of volition and so throws into question, not only his specific traditional heroic definition, but also a fundamental means of defining and understanding masculinity.’65 Furthermore, Batt locates 62

This is not the first time that Launcelot has drawn his sword because of bedroom activity. Early in his own adventure in the Morte, Launcelot takes lodging in another man’s pavilion, and when that man, Sir Belleus, returns to his bed and begins kissing Launcelot, assuming him to be his beloved waiting for him in bed, Launcelot immediately moves to fighting off what he sees as a violation (see 196.6 ff.). From this scene emerges a tension between the comical case of misidentification at its surface, and its revelation of problematic notions about gender, sexuality, and knighthood that undergird the text more broadly. See Kathleen Coyne Kelly, ‘Malory’s Body Chivalric,’ Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 60–61 [52–71]. 63 At 622.32–623.4. 64 Janet Jesmok, ‘Comedic Preludes to Lancelot’s “Unhappy” Life in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 14.4 (2004): 30 [26–44]. 65 Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 122. Batt has elsewhere discussed Elayne’s own lack of volition in this rape, as she is acceding to prophecy and her father’s will, in ‘Malory and Rape,’ p. 89.

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a point of crisis in the ‘appropriation of Launcelot’s reproductive power in the interests of the perpetuation and fulfillment of the chivalric ethos,’ and sees ‘Launcelot’s disavowal [as a] revers[al of] the normative gender definitions of the Pentecostal Oath, where it is woman who are sexually violable.’66 William Fitzhenry notes similarly that Launcelot exposes his ‘vulnerability, his tenuous hold on his chivalric identity’ in his dealings with Elayne and Dame Brusen.67 In this way, domestic space and especially what happens in that space upend what are at this point firmly established ideas about how Round Table knights construct their own identity with and against women. Elayne’s bedroom thus becomes a space of collision on several fronts. Launcelot’s masculinity crashes into female spaces in the Oath. As in the case of Uther and Igrayne and those of Morgause and both Arthur and Lameroke, the bedroom becomes a space of violation. Launcelot’s rush to violence and physical threat attempts to re-inscribe his own masculine knightly standing. He is fighting back in a way that Igrayne both could and would not, perhaps even if she had recognized the rape as rape. Launcelot’s actions also highlight the fraught nature of domestic space, and make a claim for the space itself. Elayne’s attempt to save her own life in response to the sword drawn on her suggests that the space has indeed changed, that Launcelot’s move to violence has made this bedroom a knightly space, at least in part. Her defense straddles classifications, including both domestic and non-domestic notions: Than this fayre lady Elayne skypped oute of her bedde all naked and kneled down afore Sir Launcelot and seyde, ‘Fayre curteyse knyght, ye ar comyn of kynges bloode, and therefore I requyre you, have mercy uppon me! And as thou arte renowmed the most noble knyght of the worlde, sle me nat, for I have in my wombe begetyn of the that shall be the moste nobelyste knyght of the worlde.’ (624.16–21)

She seems to intuit that the most important part of her defense relies on a connection to Launcelot’s martial (and masculine) instincts here – maybe the sword provides her with a vital clue. She notes both his noble lineage and his knightly standing, while requesting mercy. In doing so, she capitalizes on the tenets of the Pentecostal Oath and its requirement that knights accede to such requests. She thus positions herself as a knight, but also helps reinscribe him within the ‘proper’ (knightly and male) side of the code of behavior. It is only after establishing his duties 66 67

Batt, Remaking Arthurian Tradition, p. 122. William Fitzhenry, ‘Comedies of Contingency: Language and Gender in the Book of Sir Tristram,’ Arthuriana 14.4 (2004): 14 [6–15].

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as a member of the Round Table as a reason not to slay her that she weaponizes their strong domestic bond. The newly conceived child links the two henceforth – though not as closely as Elayne might like.68 As Karen Cherewatuk has noted, Malory adds this part of her defense, and I read this as a sign that she is foregrounding domesticity while pushing it away.69 Elayne also positions this child in terms of his future status as ‘moste nobelyste knyght,’ which recalls her earlier reminder about Launcelot’s own standing. Much like Mordred and Arthur before him, Galahad, as a child conceived in such circumstances, has no place in the text, at least not until he can participate in the community, its politics, and its rituals. Malory assures us that Galahad ‘was well kepte and well norysshed’ (625.10–11). Bors sees him shortly thereafter in Elayne’s arms, but the text does not bear witness to his youth, his maturation. Although his mother remains central to the story for a series of episodes – her second time in bed with a deceived Launcelot and her role in nourishing him back to mental health and knighthood both delve into domestic spaces and reveal trouble – Galahad is pushed beyond its edges. When he arrives again on the scene, he is fully formed into the man who is to become that most noble knight. Indeed, we learn that he had been sent out of the castle to be raised in the nunnery where Launcelot eventually meets and knights him. Launcelot’s relationship with Elayne of Corbyn continues to menace castle and society. He becomes increasingly complicit – indeed, Launcelot’s behavior is, as Beverly Kennedy states, ‘utterly shameful’ in this episode, especially in this second dalliance with Elayne – and the threat associated with domestic space manifests more clearly.70 Soon after their first encounter, Elayne and Launcelot meet again on the occasion of a great feast in celebration of a return from battling Kynge Claudas. Elayne attends the party, and she is dressed to impress, displaying her beauty and perhaps reminding Launcelot, Gwenyver, and the rest of the court of her (domestic) ties to Launcelot. She is an irruption of domestic discord. Launcelot ‘was so ashamed, and that bycause he drew hys swerde to her on the morne aftir that he had layne by her, that he wolde not salewe her nother speke wyth her,’ though, as Malory notes, he deems her ‘the fayrest woman that ever he sye’ (631.8–12). Indeed, Cherewatuk suggests that Launcelot’s recognition 68

Both her rejection of Sir Bromell la Pleche’s marriage proposal, which immediately follows the birth of Galahad in the text, and the claim she makes to Gwenyver that she is the more appropriate domestic partner for Launcelot attest to her desire to deepen their relationship. 69 Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 68. 70 Kennedy, ‘Adultery in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,’ p. 74.

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of her beauty and shame about his threat of violence in her bedroom evidences attraction to Elayne.71 Her arrival also upsets the queen, and in her own castle. The domestic thus fights itself, and that notion plays itself out across castle space quite explicitly in this episode. After a fairly chilly meeting between the two women, Gwenyver plots to keep Elayne close and to have Launcelot join her that evening in her bed: Than at nyghte the quene commaunded that Dame Elayne shulde slepe in a chambir nygh by her chambir, and all undir one rooff. And so hit was done as the quene commaunded. Than the quene sente for Launcelot and bade hym com to her chambir that nyght, ‘other ellys,’ seyde the quene, ‘I am sure that ye woll go to youre ladyes bedde, Dame Elayne, by whome ye gate Galahad.’ (631.26–31).

Most interesting to me here is Gwenyver’s attempt to control domestic space in ways that seem to guarantee trouble of some sort. The text emphasizes the extreme proximity of their allotted sleeping quarters: Elayne’s room will be near the queen’s, and they are both under the same roof.72 The second point seems an unnecessary addition, but it puts them both architecturally and idiomatically in the same domestic sphere, with the phrase ‘all undir one rooff’ signaling tightly shared space. Though it is left unspoken, this appears to be an attempt to keep watch over Elayne – a move that backfires dramatically. Taking what seems to be a big risk, she requires that Launcelot come to her room for the evening. This move tries to flaunt her power over him and their love, as well as over domestic space, with Elayne – so close in the abutting chamber – as the target of that flaunting. It also jeopardizes the secrecy of their relationship and forces him to risk his position in the Round Table community. Most important, this command represents the first time that Malory portrays Launcelot being called by the queen to her room. The audacity that springs from her own territoriality – both spatial and interpersonal – squeezes the spaces of the communal court and her relationship with Launcelot. Sack explains that territoriality is the use of space in exerting agency over people.73 By assigning places in the castle for both Launcelot and Elayne, Gwenyver marks her own authority over them and the situation – or tries to. Gwenyver’s command over space proves not powerful enough. As in the previous encounter between Elayne and Launcelot, Dame Brusen 71

Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 68–69. There is here a slight change from the source, in which she sleeps in the queen’s room. The ensuing trick is thus more perplexing, as Launcelot is led further astray from an architectural standpoint. 73 Sack, Human Territoriality, p. 5. 72

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is able to manipulate space in order to trick Launcelot into Elayne’s bed, this time without any apparent concoction. As Leitch suggests, ‘the operative factor lies in space, and particularly in the shifting relationships between spaces. If there is an enchantment, it is one that operates through the management and “duplicity” of spaces.’74 Once everyone is asleep, Brusen ‘cam to Sir Lancelottes beddys syde and seyde, “Sir Launcelot du Lake, slepe ye? My lady Quene Gwenyvere lyeth and awaytyth uppon you”’ (632.13–15). Here, Brusen relies on the power of suggestion (that she is Gwenyver’s messenger and that the queen awaits his arrival) as well as her comfortable management of castle space. Her movement to Launcelot’s very bedside indicates (or seems to indicate) her spatial privilege in the castle, particularly in its more private enclaves – though we do not know how tucked away Launcelot’s sleeping quarters are, there is an air of intimacy in this approach. The ruse works. Launcelot replies, ‘I am redy to go wyth you whother ye woll have me’ (632.16–17). He promptly throws on some clothes and grabs his sword, after which ‘Dame Brusen toke hym by the fyngir and lad hym to her ladyes bedde, Dame Elayne, and than she departed and leffte them there in bedde togydyrs’ (632.19–21). Brusen thus maneuvers herself and Launcelot through the castle, snatching territorial authority from Gwenyver in doing so. The success of the trip, namely depositing Launcelot in Elayne’s bed and arms again, reveals the dangers of the domestic and its spaces. Domestic space here seems particularly fungible, as are those who traverse it and long for a place within it. Launcelot’s desire for the queen leads him into the wrong domestic space a second time. Like the last instance, the fallout involves violence and anger, and an expulsion, but here Launcelot will be on the receiving end of each (though some is partially self-inflicted). He is not the only victim, however. The queen soon realizes the limits to her control over both the castle space and her knight. When Launcelot does not come to her as commanded and cannot be found, Gwenyver ‘was nygh oute of her wytte, and than she wrythed and waltred as a madde woman, and myght nat slepe a foure or a fyve owres’ (632.30–32). Because she placed Elayne so close her own chamber, the next room over and under the same roof, she can hear him talking in his sleep as he lies next to her nemesis: Than Sir Launcelot had a condicion that he used of custom, to clatir in his slepe and to speke oftyn of hys lady Quene Gwenyvere … And in his slepe he talked and claterde as a jay of the love that had bene betwyxte Quene Gwenyvere and hym, and so as he talked so lowde 74

Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom,’ p. 49.

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the quene harde hym thereas she lay in her chambir. And whan she harde hym so clattir she was wrothe oute of mesure, and than she cowghed so lowde that Sir Launcelot awaked. And anone he knew her hemynge, and than he knew welle that he lay nat by the quene. (632.33–633.8)

Launcelot’s habit of clattering – Malory uses this word three times – in his sleep indicates a constant threat. It is his (sleeping) ‘custom’ to regale the night with talk of the love he shares with the queen, and to do so loudly. It should be no surprise, then, that so many people seem to know about his love early in the text even though Malory has not shown it to us explicitly. The audibility and familiarity of both Launcelot’s clattering and Gwenyver’s hemming speak to the innate problems of domestic spaces and the queen’s attempt to control the territory. Kaufman smartly claims that, ‘Guenevere’s stifled outburst, combined with the claustrophobic setting and suffocatingly familiar details of their intimacy – Lancelot’s instant recognition of her “hemyng,” her deep familiarity with his “clatter” – transport us into the horror of betrayal.’75 This is a betrayal of the queen and her right to manage space at court. She has been sidestepped, and the flaunting appears to be reversed. Gwenyver becomes the victim of her own spatial scheme. The queen reasserts herself by punishing Launcelot mightily – indeed, he is rendered unable to participate either in his relationship with the queen or in knightly life in general, two key facets of his (masculine) identity. As soon as he realizes that he is not lying next to the queen, Launcelot lepte oute of hys bedde as he had been a wood man, in hys shurte, and anone the quene mette hym in the floure; and thus she seyde: ‘A, thou false traytoure knyght! Loke thou never abyde in my courte, and lyghtly that thou voyde my chambir, and nat so hardy, thou false traytoure knyght, that evermore thou com in my syght.’76 (633.9–14)

Because she was unable to force Launcelot into her room – from her perspective, Launcelot appears to have chosen another’s bed, and the lack of overt enchantment does raise questions about his desire for Elayne – she forces him out permanently. This proscription asserts a firm control over the spaces around her, as the punishment includes her chamber, 75 76

Kaufman, ‘Guenevere Burning,’ p. 82. Gwenyver will likewise turn Launcelot’s lover out of her court, but not before Elayne rebukes the queen for taking a man that she herself deserves (by right of her domesticity: her love, her sacrificed maidenhood, and their shared child).

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her court, and any space within her realm of vision. It is a significant restraining order, and its impact on Launcelot furthers the deterioration of his mental health (he was already showing signs of a ‘wood man’). The knight swoons, and the queen leaves the room, thus helping enact the third provision of the punishment (sight). Launcelot awakes and, in his madness, ‘lepte oute at a bay wyndow into a gardyne, and there wyth thornys he was all to-cracched of his vysage and hys body, and so he ranne furth he knew nat whothir, and was as wylde woode as ever was man,’ a condition that lasts for two years (633.19–23). Elayne later (twice) reports that he made a terrible noise when he leapt from the window, describing it as ‘the moste pyteuous gronys’ and ‘the greselyeste grone’ that she has ever heard (634.11, 30). Following the emotional violence, of which both Gwenyver and Launcelot are victims, we thus see Launcelot inflict injury upon himself by jumping out of the window, where he finds thorns that mar his face and body. This act scratches away Launcelot’s physical identity and places him outside the castle. By exiting through a window, Launcelot bypasses the prescribed routes of egress and thus initiates immediate separation from the court and its community. Indeed, his movement away from the castle and his knightly life will continue as he pursues the life of a wild man without his wits and ‘endure[s] many sharpe showres’ (643.30–31). Launcelot’s return from madness back to Arthur’s court progresses step by step, each move bringing him mentally and spatially closer. He will live on the outskirts of courtly life, first tied up by Blyaunte and Selyvaunte at Castell Blanke and later positioned as a fool at the gate of the castle at Corbyn. It is as a fool that he is brought into Corbyn, where Elayne eventually recognizes Launcelot and nurses him back to health. The pair then live a relatively secluded domestic life until the lure of the tournament and assurances that Arthur and Gwenyver anxiously await his return to Camelot pull Launcelot back to the community and out of his cohabitation with Elayne. This period of living together at Joyous Ile represents perhaps the text’s longest sojourn in any sort of domestic bliss, but it is in the end treated as just a waystation, a pause in Launcelot’s life as a knight of the Round Table. Indeed, though Elayne ‘mad grete sorow,’ at his departure, Launcelot exhibits no emotional struggle (656.28). He speaks some cursory words about Galahad and heads toward Camelot, which lies fifteen days’ journey away. Launcelot’s rejection of this domestic possibility and its spaces is repeated with a second Elayne, the Fayre Maydyn of Ascolot. Like Elayne of Corbyn, she participates in a romance of sorts with him, in this case involving what seems to her a courtly gift of her sleeve for Launcelot

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to wear in a tournament (to him it is just a disguise) rather than sexual activity. Like the previous Elayne, the Fayre Maydyn nurses Launcelot back to health, helping him recover from injuries sustained in that tournament. And like the earlier Elayne in love, she offers herself and a steady domestic life to Launcelot. His rejection of her rings of the same casualness, but it stings much worse. She cannot fit herself into Launcelot’s life, because he will not make (domestic) space for her – indeed, she offers herself as a wife or, failing that, a paramour. Martin Shichtman sees this as Elayne of Ascolot’s desired ‘compensation,’ in line with the paradigms of feminine behavior.77 In this instance, Launcelot gestures lightly at the domestic by offering a dowry for Elayne to bring to a marriage with some other worthy knight, but (for this reader, anyway) this is more of a slap in the face than any just compensation, particularly in its disregard for the emotional depths of Elayne’s desires and intentions. In this instance, too, the lack of domestic space is suffocating. Elayne sees no life but one devoted to that love, and no place for that love but death. The rupture of the domestic bliss she thought she might share with her beloved knight thus manifests in the end as violence, which increasingly seems to be the natural product of forays into the domestic quarters in the castle. Each of these episodes exhibits the tangle between the domestic and other aspects of courtly and chivalric life. They all point to the inability of the castle and the community to accommodate fully domestic endeavors. Of course, with the exception of Arthur’s marriage to Gwenyver, each of these encounters is misaligned with society’s norms in some other way.78 They are examples of rape, adultery, incest, and extra-marital sex. They break codes of conduct and sever lines of loyalty. This plays out across space, as the castle – its rooms, beds, hallways, doors, windows, etc. – figure heavily in the incompatibility of the domestic life, despite its obvious allure (not to mention its integration into the chivalric economy). As a result, the domestic emerges as a dangerous force, and cannot be enclosed or secreted away in the castle. In no case is this more apparent than in Gwenyver and Launcelot’s relationship. Already, we have seen how its existence governs Launcelot’s dealings with other women – the two Elaynes, yes, and also the many with whom he crosses paths in 77

Martin Shichtman, ‘Elaine and Guinevere: Gender and Historical Consciousness in the Middle Age,’ in New Images of Medieval Women: Toward a Cultural Anthropology, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), p. 263 [255– 72]. 78 Though not a part of this conversation, the marriage between Arthur and Gwenyver likewise sits uncomfortably beside the society’s norms perhaps because of Merlyn’s warning about her future infidelity.

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his adventures earlier in the text – and intermingles in the spaces that Launcelot shares with these women. However, as the Morte progresses and their affair becomes increasingly physical – or, perhaps more correctly, as the narration of the affair allows the audience to see its physical and emotional depths more clearly – the relationship problematizes castle space in cataclysmic ways. Their dalliance in Mellyagaunt’s castle, discussed at length in the following chapter, evidences the intrusive nature of their affair. In that episode, Launcelot, having rescued the imprisoned queen, breaks into her room in order spend the night with her, and he cuts his hand in the process. The blood from his wounded hand marks her bed and speaks to the interweaving of domestic affairs and violence, to the impossibility of containing this type of relationship. That blood also leads to further violence, as it becomes the ‘proof’ of the queen’s improper sexual relations with one of her knights (not Launcelot) and eventually leads to Mellyagaunt’s own death. Their later attempt to be alone has even more disastrous results, at the individual and communal levels, and indeed proves to be both the final truly domestic scene (or almost-domestic scene, as it is interrupted, imposed upon) and the last moment of a full Round Table. Elizabeth Edwards has argued persuasively that castles ‘are also strongly associated with adultery,’ which she considers a nexus of contradictory loyalties.79 I want to emplace that contradiction. Gwenyver’s bedroom becomes an explosive meeting point for domestic, communal (such as it is at this point in the story), and martial activity, as both spaces and functions collide. The ‘Sir Aggravayne’ section of the Morte opens upon the divided Orkney brothers discussing the widely known adulterous affair between the queen and the premier knight of the Round Table. As I discuss in Chapter Two, this moment marks a turning point in the construction of communal space, in large part because of Mordred’s looming presence. Nevertheless, the community and its politics edge out the domestic.80 As a result of this conversation, King Arthur himself learns – or learns directly – about the treasonous relationship, and a trap is set to catch the lovers in flagrante delicto, a plan which is partially achieved. This achievement lies more in the collusion of space than in any clear visual evidence of sexual activity. 79

Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The Place of Women in the Morte Darthur,’ in A Companion to Malory, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 43 [37–54]. 80 Peggy McCracken’s work on adultery highlights the likelihood that exposure of the queen’s liaison with a knight is often aimed at removing that knight from a position of power within a kingdom, in The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 23.

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The entrapment scheme involves the king leaving the castle for a hunting trip in order to make the castle appear a more private – and thus more welcoming – space for adultery. Launcelot, falling into the plotters’ hands, accepts the queen’s invitation to her chambers, and will not be dissuaded by Bors’s concerns that ‘the kynge ys oute thys nyght frome the quene bycause peradventure he hath layne som wacche for you and the quene. Therefore I drede me sore of som treson’ (873.25–27). Bors knows, whether by intuition or rumor, that something is afoot and that the privacy of spaces cannot be trusted. Indeed, his specific reference to a ‘wacche’ hints at the permeability of space. However, for Launcelot, the risks associated with the possible (actual) watch pale in comparison to the idea of not obeying the queen and her own territoriality, her assertion of power through the management of space. He explains that he cannot understand Bors’s suggestion: ‘I mervayle me much why ye say thus, sytthyn the quene hath sente for me. And wyte you well, I woll nat be so much a cowarde but she shall undirstonde I woll se her good grace’ (873.32–35). He makes a couple of important points here. First and foremost, he is explicitly obeying the queen, who has sent for him. In the earlier episodes with Elayne of Corbyn, his attempts to do so were thwarted, particularly with their second tryst, which dismantled the queen’s control over the spaces. For Launcelot, the success of the relationship – both its domestic and its chivalric aspects – depends upon acquiescence to her will, to her manipulation of space. Second, Launcelot associates a failure to appear with cowardice. Both elements of Launcelot’s reply to Bors nuance the more straightforward claim in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, where he simply says that he is going to see his lady, according to her will.81 Malory’s Launcelot foregrounds the queen’s command by placing it immediately after his surprise that Bors would recommend he not go, and presents his obedience as a given; he also adds the threat of cowardice. Launcelot’s choice to go to the queen is thus necessary but ultimately impossible and, indeed, labels the domestic as such within the court (as a space and a community). His (and her) insistence on their relationship, on marking out domestic space for their love, and on the notion of privacy, cannot hold. As Corey Olsen has claimed, following McCarthy, ‘the end 81

In the Stanzaic Morte, Lancelot responds as follows: ‘Bors,’ he sayd, ‘holde stylle, Suche wordys ar noughte to kythe. I wille wende my lady tille Som new tythandes for to lythe. I ne shall nought bote wete hyr wylle.’ (1784–88)

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result of all this priviness is exposure.’82 That exposure comes quickly. Their domestic moment, their space for love and sex, is brief, but even in its few lines, it lingers over and around the bedroom: So Sir Launcelot departed and toke hys swerde undir hys arme, and so he walked in hys mantell, that noble knyght, and put hymselff in grete jouparté. And so he past on tylle he cam to the quenys chambir; and so lightly he was had into the chambir. For, as the Freynshe booke seyth, the quene and Sir Launcelot were togydirs. And whether they were abed other at other maner of disportis, me lyste nat thereof make no mencion, for love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadays. (874.3–10)

Malory follows Launcelot’s movements to the queen: he walks there with sword but no armor, arrives, and is let in. There the text insistently stops tracing Launcelot’s steps – a ‘strategy of ambiguity,’ E. Kay Harris calls it.83 Robert Sturges argues that ‘The issue of physical adultery – whether they were in bed together or not – is both raised as the crucial question (this would be the evidence Agravain and Mordred need) and hastily dismissed.’84 Leitch explains further that ‘the Morte seeks to emphasize not their guilt but rather the ways in which they are not culpable,’ something it accomplishes with the ‘defensively circuitous’ depiction of what happens in that chamber.85 We do not get to look further into the private enclave, into the bed itself – as much as the reader may want to. The text leaves murky what happens inside the chamber, coyly referring the reader to the French book (presumably La Mort le Roi Artu, which is but one of Malory’s sources here, and which does follow Launcelot into the room and narrates his undressing and then entrance into the bed). The Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Malory’s other source here, likewise makes 82

Corey Olsen, ‘Adulterated Love: The Tragedy of Malory’s Lancelot and Guinevere,’ in Malory and Christianity: Essays on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, eds. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., and Janet Jesmok (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), p. 38 [29–55]. 83 E. Kay Harris, ‘Evidence against Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory’s Morte Darthur: Treason by Imagination,’ Exemplaria 7.1 (1995): 187 [179–208]. Batt pushes further in her trenchant analysis of this scene, making connections between this moment and the reader’s own position, in Remaking the Arthurian Tradition, p. 166. 84 Robert Sturges, ‘Epistemology of the Bedchamber: Textuality, Knowledge, and the Representation of Adultery in Malory and the Prose Lancelot,’ Arthuriana 7.4 (1997): 48 [47–62]. In that same issue of Arthuriana, Beverly Kennedy has famously claimed that the pair commit adultery just one time (in the ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode), and considers it decidedly ‘unlikely’ that they engage in sexual activity here, in ‘Adultery in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,’ p. 80. 85 Leitch, Romancing Treason, p. 108.

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clear that the two are in bed, though it is decidedly less interested in spatial details leading up to that point.86 Olsen finds it ‘interesting … that Malory goes out of his way to generate uncertainty at this pivotal moment. If the narrator had not brought up the issue of whether or not they were “abed,” no one would have asked the question.’87 And, as Olsen goes on to say, Malory could easily exculpate them here by explicitly narrating them out of bed. While this is surely the case – it would be easy, if less titillating, to say that the two were having a fully-clothed conversation about the weather – additional information would allow the domestic a space that the ambiguity leaves the couple and the text without. Indeed, the very page gives them no more space, as the ambush and its resultant violence occur in the next line. Aggravayne, Mordred, and their party of twelve immediately converge upon the lovers in the queen’s chamber. Malory tells us that this faction of the Arthurian community – outsiders who have become insiders, as the court turns on itself – calls Launcelot (not the queen) a traitor ‘with grete cryyng and scaryng voyce’ (874.13). The text seems to want us to notice the noise in particular here.88 Indeed, the next line reiterates its power: ‘And thus they cryed wyth a lowde voyce, that all the courte myght hyre hit’ (874.15–16). Neither of the previous versions lingers on sound in quite this way. The English poem pays it no attention, and the French version speaks more generally about the loud noise. 86

The Stanzaic Morte reads as follows: Non armore he dyde hym uppon; Bot a robe all sengle wrought; In hys hand a swerde he fone; Off tresson dred he hym right noght; There was no man undyr the mone He wende with harme durste hym haffe sought.

Whan he come to the lady shene, He kissed and clypped that swete wyght; For sothe they nevyr wolde wene That any treson was ther dyght. So mykylle love was hem bytwene That they noght departe myght; To bede he gothe with the quene And there he thoughte to dwelle alle nyght. (1794–1807) This version notably embraces the possibility of continued domestic space, as Lancelot plans to spend the whole night, despite telling Bors that he would be quick. 87 Olsen, ‘Adulterated Love,’ p. 40. 88 For a discussion of Malory’s particular attention to the noise here, see D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., ‘Malory, the Mort[e]s, and the Confrontation in Guinevere’s Chamber,’ in Sir Thomas Malory: Views and Re-views, ed. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 80–81 [78–89].

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Malory not only lets the sound echo by repeating it, but also emplaces it. Their cries of ‘traitor’ can be heard throughout the court. This indicates not only noise level, but also the power and place of these words. Cherewatuk causally connects the ‘eruption of the adultery into the noise of the court’ and ‘the Round Table’s factional warfare.’89 Leitch notes that more immediately, ‘Malory’s Agravain and company effect a public appeal of treason that generates a need for a legal trial, and exhibit a focus on proclaiming the status of traitors that matches Wars of the Roses practice.’90 Launcelot himself recognizes their voices’ potential impact, telling Gwenyver as he prepares to fight, ‘thys shamefull cry and noyse I may nat suffir, for better were deth at onys than thus to endure thys payne’ (875.1–3), and announcing his plan to open the door by telling the ambushers to ‘leve youre noyse and youre russhynge’ (876.1–2).91 Their rushing the door intends to break the barrier between domestic and other endeavors, and their noise announces that de-privatization to the community at large and makes known what they have discovered (or think they have discovered). Exposure, as a response to domesticity, now finds a home in Arthur’s castle. This sound, along with the violence that follows, completes the eradication of domestic space. These voices are a harbinger of the fighting that will break out at, within, and beyond the threshold of Gwenyver’s chamber. We are reminded of the assertive domesticity of the bedroom (or at least the attempt at such) when Launcelot hopes in vain that there might be some spare armor lying around Gwenyver’s room. The lack of armor or martial preparation of course makes sense for a bedroom, but ‘bedroom’ and domestic space themselves are not allowed to make sense. They are what is out of place, not the violence that rewrites their meaning as social space. The gathered mob has yelled at Launcelot both to ‘com oute of the quenys chambir’ and to ‘lat us into thys chambir’ (874.34; 876.5). Each command requires that the border between domestic and other spaces be transgressed: either Launcelot must leave the room, his love, and the queen, or they will violate its privacy. Both occur, as Launcelot manipulates the door and the spaces it separates, and fends off the ambush. 89

Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance, p. 53. Leitch, Romancing Treason, p. 111. See also chapter five, ‘Fellowship and Treason,’ especially pp. 139–42, in Lexton, Contested Language, which outlines the dual nature of treason as a legal term and as a part of public discourse and discusses how ‘these meanings of treason overlap and conflict’ in the text (p. 139). 91 Launcelot also gives the group one more chance to ‘make no more noyse’ after killing Collgrevaunce of Gore but before attacking the larger group (876.24). 90

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Launcelot uses a two-part defense – which, unsurprisingly, shifts quickly to offense – in escaping the men at the door. He first allows a single knight to enter Gwenyver’s chamber and fights him one-on-one. Then, he puts on the quickly defeated opponent’s armor in order to take on the rest of the group together. Malory pays particular attention to fine details of architectural space in the first instance, showing Launcelot manipulating the door to his advantage in order to control the flow of his attackers into the room: That Sir Launcelot unbarred the dore, and wyth hys lyffte honde he hylde hit opyn a lytyll, that but one man myght com in at onys. And so there cam strydyng a good knyght, a much man and a large, and hys name was called Sir Collgrevaunce of Goore. And he wyth a swerde strake at Sir Launcelot myghtyly, and so he put asyde the stroke, and gaff hym such a buffette uppon the helmet that he felle grovelyng dede wythin the chambir dore. (876.7–13)

Allowing but a single man to enter the room, to transgress – and thus render non-existent – the border between public and private, hints at a small measure of control over the space, even as the communal, political, and martial spaces impose themselves on the domestic. This will be a short-lived sign of territorial power, as the space, like their love affair, will soon be opened to the entire Round Table. The dead body reminds both us and the lovers that this power is fleeting. The slain Collgrevaunce lies explicitly both inside and outside the room: he is ‘wythin the chambir dore,’ and immediately after killing him, ‘Sir Launcelot wyth grete might drew that dede knyght within the chamber dore’ (876.14–15). This second use of ‘within the chamber dore’ reframes its spatiality. The first instance points to the threshold. This liminal corpse serves as a memento mori for Gwenyver’s and Launcelot’s relationship (inside), and indeed for the entire kingdom (outside, beyond). The second iteration of the phrase narrates the movement of the body into the room, through the doorway. In this case, the domestic space is fully infiltrated, by both noise and death itself. This version of the story highlights these placements, both the borderstraddling and the border-crossing, more than earlier ones do. While Malory’s rendition of Launcelot’s deadly stroke certainly echoes both of his sources, neither the close attention to the mechanics of Launcelot’s allowing just a single knight into the chamber nor the duality of ‘within’ can be found in either the French Mort or the English Stanzaic Morte Arthur. In the French version, Lancelot invites the intruders in, but they step back upon witnessing the death of one of their own:

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Lors tret l’espee et uevre l’uis et dit qu’il viengnent avant. Uns chevaliers qui avoit non Tanaguins, qui haoit Lancelot de mortel haïne, si se met devant les autres, et Lancelos, qui ot l’espee hauciee, le fiert si durement, a ce qu’il i mist toute sa force, que li hiaumes ne la coife de fer nel garantist qu’il nel porfende jusqu’es espaules; il estort son cop, si l’abat morte a terre. Et quant li autre le voient si atorné, si n’i ot celui qui ne se traie arrieres en tel maniere que l’entrée remest toute vuide. [Then he drew his sword and opened the door and told them to come in. A knight named Tanaguin, who mortally hated Lancelot, stepped forward before the others. Lancelot raised his sword and, with all his power, struck him so hard that neither his helmet nor his iron coif could prevent him from being split down to his shoulders. Lancelot pulled out the sword and struck him dead. When the others saw what had happened to him, they all drew back so that the doorway was left empty.]92

Here Lancelot seems to be inviting all of them in, and Tanaguin selects himself because of a particular enmity toward Lancelot. Unlike in Malory, all could enter, but no one else does. Indeed, Lancelot’s quick dispatch of Tanaguin repels them, and causes them all to recoil, to step away from the door. They pause their attack and let domestic space stand just a little longer. Considering Malory’s version alongside this one, then, invites another assessment of Launcelot’s manipulation of the entryway by holding the door. While it does evidence a (slight and fleeting) ability to control access to the domestic sphere, and thus briefly maintains its sanctity, it also reveals the very necessity of holding that line. Launcelot must apply force to maintain domestic space. These minor differences between Malory and La Mort le Roi Artu continue as the scene moves forward. As in Malory, the French Lancelot then pulls the slain man into the queen’s chamber, but the emphasis shifts: Lors regarde Lancelos le chevalier qu’il avoit ocis, qui estoit chaoiz a l’uis de la chamber par dedenz; il le trest a soi et ferma l’uis. [Lancelot looked at the knight he had killed. The man had fallen inside the door; Lancelot pulled the body toward him and closed the door.]93

The French text is thus less explicit than Malory about the body’s liminality, even though it seems that Lancelot must move it inside in order to close 92

La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, 90.40–50; The Death of Arthur, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 7, p. 62. 93 La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, 90.55–58; The Death of Arthur, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 7, p. 62.

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the door, an act that redraws the barrier between the private domestic space and the rest of the castle.94 The Stanzaic Morte Arthur likewise holds the barrier between spaces longer: The chamber dore he sette upryght. An armyd knyght before in wente And wende Launcelot wele to sloo, Bot Launcelot gaffe hym soche a dynte That to the grounde gonne he go. The other all agayne than stente, Aftyr hym dorste folowe no moo; To the chambyr dore he sprente And claspid it with barres two.

(1839–47)

Like in the French, the group of knights in the Stanzaic Morte hesitate upon seeing Launcelot kill their fellow. Here, too, the pause reinforces the border between the domestic spaces and functions of the castle and its other ones. This version further draws the boundary by showing distance between Launcelot and the door. He has to sprint back to it in order to close it on the awestruck knights. The two spaces are thus clearly delineated by his movement to the doorway and his opponents’ movement away from it, and secured by the bars that clasp it shut. Malory’s Morte most clearly depicts the breakdown of domestic space in this episode. This collapse is complete as Launcelot leaves the chamber and fights his way past the ambushers. As in the Stanzaic Morte, he kills all but Mordred.95 As the lone surviving witness, save Launcelot and Gwenyver, Mordred then carries the information back to Arthur: Now turne we agayne, that whan Sir Mordred was ascaped frome Sir Launcelot, he gate hys horse and cam to Kynge Arthur sore wounded and all forbled; and there he tolde the kynge all how hit was, and how they were all slayne save hymselff alone. ‘A, Jesu mercy! How may thys be?’ seyde the Kynge. ‘Toke ye hym in the quenys chambir?’ ‘Yee, so Go me helpe,’ seyde Sir Mordred, ‘there we founde hym unarmed.’ (881.29–882.2) 94

Malory does not mention the act of closing the door, though it is certainly implied by the later need to open it in order to fight the rest of the ambushing knights. 95 In the French version, Lancelot kills only one (unnamed) knight, which sends the others fleeing for their safety and allows Lancelot to escape unharmed, at least physically.

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Mordred proceeds to tell of Collgrevaunce’s death, Launcelot’s assumption of his armor, and the whole story ‘frome the begynnyng to the endynge’ (882.3–4). There is no further information about Mordred’s version. We do know that Mordred presents his report as proof of their treasonous relationship, and that it is taken as such. No one – not Arthur, not Mordred, not the narrator – hesitates here to leave open just what Launcelot might have been doing in that chamber, as was so intentionally done earlier when the text first peered into the bedroom. As Lexton has argued, Arthur has already ‘committed himself to seeing the adultery whether it is there or not.’96 As a result, the very fact of being caught in the bedroom, or being caught there unarmed, provides proof enough to set in motion the queen’s punishment and the eventual demise of the Round Table.97 According to Christopher Clason, the bed ‘is the venue of sexual love and conception, where royal marriage is consummated and the line of succession assured, as well as the site where medieval families engender children and promote continuous, domestic welfare.’98 Similarly, Diane Wolfthal sees late medieval and early modern architecture trying to create private space for the husband and wife while explicitly preventing other men from accessing that space.99 This has not worked well across the Morte, and here the bedroom – regardless of whether or not Launcelot and Gwenyver used the bed – signals the opposite. Indeed, the queen’s chamber and domestic space more generally are rendered only as disruptive and destructive. Arthur’s question upon seeing Mordred focuses on the space, not on the action. His response to the news is to comment on Launcelot’s prowess – fondly, it seems – and note that this marks the end of his relationship with Launcelot and a permanent schism in the Round Table community. He also moves to punish the queen, his wife and domestic partner, with death. It is the bedroom – the fact of the bedroom – that causes this, that functions as proof. The chamber space has taken on the full meaning of the domestic affair, even in its ambiguity. The social space of the bedroom can now only mean problematic (treasonous) domestic space. This closure of domestic space paradoxically affords Launcelot and Gwenyver their first opportunity to speak their love openly. As the 96

Lexton, Contested Language, p. 167. Only Gawayne articulates a defense of Launcelot’s potentially benign presence in the chamber (as well as of his secretive approach to her quarters), pointing to their political relationship. See Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 148. 98 Christopher R. Clason, ‘Deception in the Boudoir: Gottfried’s Tristan and “Lying” in Bed,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103.3 (2004): 277 [277–96]. 99 Diane Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marriage Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 75. 97

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noise barrels down upon them from outside the door and again when surrounded by the bodies of the slain knights, the interlopers in this domestic space, the two hug and kiss and express their mutual desire to sacrifice themselves for one another. They say farewells, but not without the promise of a rescue that they both know will be necessary. It is this notion of service that prompts C. David Benson to label this ‘chivalric rather than sexual love,’ but I think this understates the emotional depths on display here as each speaks of dying for the other.100 Before separating, they exchange rings and speak to each other as lovers such as they have never done before in this text. Thus, only in the absence of the domestic space, in the aftermath of its collapse and redefinition as a space of battle and a piece of proof, does their love really manifest itself as something worth hiding away, something worth protecting across time and space. With the chamber laid open to the intruders, the audience gets its first full glimpse of their emotional attachment to each other. When they meet again, Gwenyver is at the stake, condemned to death by burning. She is ‘dispoyled into her smokke,’ an outfit best suited for the deep recesses of her own chamber and not, as she appears here, in the midst of battle and on display (884.22). Gwenyver becomes a spectacle of both disruptive and extinguished domesticity. When Launcelot arrives, he covers her and, having received simple thanks, whisks her off to the safety of Joyus Garde. This is a castle space known for allowing indulgence in the domestic – it houses Trystram and Isode at a key point in their similarly adulterous but more openly intimate relationship101 – but offers nothing of the sort here. Malory tells us that ‘there he kepte her as a noble knyght shulde’ (885.20–21). This phrasing evokes none of the emotion of the earlier scene and, like the battle that ensues, rejects any domestic endeavors. As Gwenyver later confirms in rejecting Launcelot at Amesbury Abbey and, indeed, in choosing for herself a space averse to sexual relationships, there is no more room for their love in the text. It was both brief (in how much the audience saw) and long (over twentyfour years in some capacity), both atemporal in its amorphous beginning in Malory and strictly defined by its end. Space, like time, forecloses the relationship, squeezes out domesticity. That final scene between this 100 101

Benson, ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur,’ p. 230. Trystram and Isode provide an important counterexample for much of their relationship, in which we are privy to their intimate thoughts and actions more readily. It is perhaps Trystram’s insider/outside status (alongside the general sense that King Mark is no Arthur) that allows this spatial freedom not afforded to Launcelot and his queen. However, although more ‘public’ and sanctioned throughout the narrative, their domestic endeavors, too, result in violence and exposure (if offstage).

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pair of lovers represents the complete abnegation of domestic space. In the cloister that cordons Gwenyver off from the secular world – indeed, from the whole world, it seems – she quashes Launcelot’s final hopes for some domestic ‘happily ever after.’ Whether we see either as truly having turned to the religious life, and whether either really repents of their love (and I believe that Gwenyver absolutely has and does), the space disallows their love as anything but past tense, as part of some other place. The domestic reach of Launcelot and Gwenyver’s relationship stretches beyond (and before) the bedroom, both spatially and otherwise. Indeed, their love affair motivates what ends up being the most immediately disastrous feast in the Morte. Throughout Malory’s text, there are many feasts, but the truly domestic aspects of them – the preparation of the food and the nourishment that the feasts provide (or do not provide) – rarely emerge from imagined shadows. We do see Gareth in the kitchen, as Chapter Two illustrates, but that placement serves more to illuminate the relationship between and among knights and the spatialization of the community. There the domestic world of the kitchen is clearly demarcated as both separate from and distinctly less desirable than the hall, where the prepared food is enjoyed. In that scene, as elsewhere throughout the story, the feast and its spaces are often less about food and nutrition than about the other, intersecting functions that occur in the hall during or around the feast: the politics in the Roman War episode,102 or the various ritual activities that cluster around Pentecost celebrations, for example. These feasts are often disrupted – again pushing the domestic out – as people and things enter and exit the hall, with the narrative usually following them in some fashion. The ‘Poisoned Apple’ episode is no exception to this pattern of interruption; however, it does pay close attention to the food itself. Indeed, the food becomes the central object in the story. Immediately after the grail quest – a quest which can be read as highlighting problems in this secular, domesticated court – a rift between Gwenyver and Launcelot moves her to throw a dinner party. This entire episode emerges from and exposes the disruptive nature of domestic endeavors. In doing so, it prefigures much of the domestic strife that breaks out in her chamber later in the Morte. Their very rift arises from 102

Indeed, in this instance, Malory’s text shows much less interest in the specifics of food than does the poet of the Alliterative Morte, his source for the episode. For a look at the extensive attention given to food in the Alliterative Morte, see Jennifer Bartlett, ‘Arthur’s Dinner; or, Robert Thornton Goes Shopping,’ Arthuriana 26.1 (2016): 165–79.

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the danger endemic to their relationship on social, legal, and spiritual fronts. Launcelot returns to court after his partial grail vision charged with maintaining the chastity imposed by the injunction against women on the quest and the specific instruction issued to him en route. However, by the tenth line of the section (in the Winchester Manuscript), his resolve falters. He ‘began to resorte unto Quene Gwenyvere agayne,’ and ‘ever his thoughtis prevyly were on the quene, and so they loved togydirs more hotter than they dud toforehande’ (790.10–11, 15–17). The overwhelming pull of their love quickly becomes spatialized, as first they seek out places for ‘prevy draughtis togydir,’ which prove anything but private as ‘many in the courte spake of hit’ (790.17–18).103 Already, then, there are signs that they cannot be discreet even when they try; the castle disallows the privacy they crave, even, it seems, if they aim to remain extra-domestic, or out of the bedroom. Like in the later ambush scene, noise and its movement through the court troubles Launcelot. Conscious of his and the queen’s reputation in the mouths of the court, he avoids – and thus greatly angers – her. She calls him to her chamber, though not to be abed, but rather to admonish what she sees as mistreatment and a sign that he loves other ladies. Unconvinced, or perhaps not caring, that his actions reflect his desire to prevent ‘shame and sclaundir’ – noise throughout the court – for both of them, she banishes him, forces him out of not only her private domestic spaces, but the court as a whole (791.25).104 Moreover, she then flaunts her own domesticity without him. Indeed, she proves (here, at least) to be the kind of lady who wants her reputed lover to know that she is going to be fine when he thinks they need a little time apart – and the kind of lady who is going to dine with his best friends to make sure he hears about it. Malory tells us: ‘So the queen lete make a pryvy dyner in London unto the Knyghtes of the Rownde Table, and all was for to shew outwarde that she had as grete joy in all other knyghtes of the Rounde Table as she had in Sir Launcelot’ (793.6–9). Benson argues that this feast ‘emphasizes the fellowship of the Round Table,’ and it ostensibly does so, but only in the face of the despair of the domestic.105 Edwards smartly points out that the queen’s feast functions just like Launcelot’s attempts ‘to hide the signs of special regard for one’s lover by multiplying such signs and applying them to 103

See Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, pp. 134–35, on the political implications of these ‘prevy draughtis’ as a sign of favoritism. 104 Alan Gaylord has rightly noted that Launcelot does not quite strike the tone of a lover in his response to her, in ‘Back from the Queste: Malory’s Launcelot Enrages Gwenyvere,’ Arthuriana 16.2 (2006): 80 [78–83]. 105 Benson, ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur,’ p. 223.

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everyone,’ the emphasis on fellowship thus serving as a cover.106 Malory highlights the private (‘pryvy’) nature of the dinner – a notion repeated a few lines later: ‘And so thes foure and twenty knyghtes sholde dyne with the quene in a prevy place by themselff, and there was made a grete feste of all maner of deyntees’ (793.19–21). Here the text indicates not only the exclusiveness of the invitations (and the extensive food selection), but also, and more important for my purposes, the feast’s interior location: the dinner will apparently be not in the hall, but in a more private spot. This would most likely be further inside the castle, closer to or within the queen’s quarters, which, as Amanda Richardson’s access analysis study reminds us, are more difficult to reach because they are located within and beyond the public domain of the castle.107 It is thus an intimate space and an intimate domestic scene (eating). Neither of Malory’s sources, the French Mort Artu and the English Stanzaic Morte Arthur, dwells on or even mentions the location of the dinner. As is typical, Malory pays extra attention to the space, to the castle. This inner domestic space proves especially dangerous. A poisoned apple intended for Gawayne (who, as we learn, has a penchant for fruit – especially apples and pears – and has one with every meal, a practice that the hostess is keenly aware of and kindly attentive to108) ends up in the hands and mouth of a slightly inebriated Sir Patryse, who swells up and dies before the crowd of knights. The entire dinner party is convinced (wrongly, but convinced nonetheless) that the blame lies with the hostess. As Malory tells us, ‘considerynge Queen Gwenyvere made the feste and dyner they all had suspeccion unto hir’ (794.4–6). It is important to note that here the entire meal, the entire domestic endeavor, is put on Gwenyver herself: making the feast and the dinner itself are attributed to her. Earlier and later, the text tells us that she ‘lete make’ the dinner (794.20), phrasing that both indicates a level of separation between the queen and the meal and likely more closely aligns with what would happen in this scenario. The queen would likely not collect the food, prepare and cook the meal, or serve it herself (except maybe in some ceremonial way). But the initial reaction in the text seems to place all of the responsibility – for the food and the crime – squarely in her hands as the representative of the domestic 106

Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative, p. 149. This is, of course, the very thing that upset Gwenyver to the point of banishing Launcelot in the first place. 107 Richardson, ‘Gender and Space in English Royal Palaces.’ 108 Speaking of modern dinner parties, Mary Douglas tells us, ‘[i]n the name of friendly uniformity, the menus tend to be designed not to satisfy food preferences but to avoid food hate,’ in ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,’ Social Research 58.1 (1991): 303 [287–307]. On the contrary, Gwenyver is attentive to preferences.

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order. Indeed, once she is able to speak for herself (after being rendered speechless and even swooning because of the tragic results of her meal), she takes on this level of domestic accountability, even as she attempts to exculpate herself. Gwenyver is unofficially indicted by the group’s unwillingness to vouch for her: ‘Than they answerde by and by, and seyde they coude nat excuse the quene for why she made the dyner, and other hit muste com by her other by her servauntis’ (795.10–12). Malory tells us, again presenting the queen as the meal’s maker and even noting that the servants (the only other possible culprits in their eyes) are in fact hers. She is then officially accused by the dead knight’s cousin, Sir Madore de la Porte, and her response to the charges again emphasizes her domesticity. She tells the king and the gathered knights, ‘Alas … I made thys dyner for good entente and never none evyll, so Allmyghty Jesu helpe me in my ryght as I was never purposed to do suche evyll dedes, and that I reporte me unto God’ (795.13–16). Gwenyver’s claims here fall on deaf ears, as she will only be ‘proven’ not guilty of the crime when Launcelot vanquishes Madore in trial by combat. Even that seemingly inevitable ending – Launcelot has always been the queen’s knight, and he always wins in head-to-head combat – hangs somewhat in the balance because Launcelot has been sent away because of his (albeit temporary) post-grail-quest desire not to continue his (still undefined) relationship with Gwenyver. More revealing for my purposes, however, is the explicit realization in the queen’s words that the domestic sphere – its actions and its places – is a fraught space. Of course Gwenyver’s claim about her intentions – that they are good and not evil – can also be considered somewhat disingenuous. Her motivation for throwing this party was to establish herself as the queen and friend of all knights; this is good, yes, but not entirely true. She hopes to prove that her feelings for Launcelot are not greater than her feelings for the other knights. This is not only, or even primarily, for the good of the group. It emanates from a desire to quiet the suspicions about their domestic or extra-domestic relationship which have risen to the surface, and will soon bubble over. Parsing her behavior (here as elsewhere) indicates that this is also – and probably at least as much – meant as a show for the (absent) Launcelot. Neither of these rings of entirely good intent. Even as Gwenyver rightly proclaims herself innocent, she invites questions about her ‘purposes,’ and I believe these questions extend to the space. The use of the spaces for both preparing and consuming food proves uncomfortable within the Arthurian community. They do not fit; the domestic is just too troublesome. As the story plays itself out, Gwenyver is proven innocent by – of course – Launcelot’s decisive (if difficult) victory in battle. Madore retracts

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his claim, and the queen is freed. Arthur and Gwenyver thank Launcelot, though she does not embrace him as she does in the French, and the entire court celebrates as a community. The Round Table’s shared joy, especially on the heels of their general refusal to take up the queen’s cause, belies their own role in these events. Communal functions assert their precedence over the domestic. The text follows suit, allowing this shift in space by disallowing space for matters of the home and heart. As part of the process of a house-move, which took place as I was writing this very chapter, my husband and I sought to account for a variety of needs and functions. Different spaces across the floorplan of our new house make room for different activities, but the assignments (here, an office; there, a dining, room) do not preclude overlap and seepage. We eat in the living room on occasion, and work in the sun porch. Our house makes sense as a home because we explore the spaces and their multiplicities, because we allow everything to be and not be domestic. That is not that case in Malory’s text. Throughout, the domestic inherently infringes on the castle’s other functions – indeed from the very arrival of Gwenyver, soon to be queen, and the Round Table. Domesticity does more than overstep its bounds, more than transgress spatial limitations, because there is simply no space for it. The Morte continuously disallows domestic peace and domestic place. From an architectural perspective, this makes no sense. Indeed, I began this book by emphasizing that what makes a castle a castle is its very duality, its use as both stronghold and residence. These residential qualities (and quantities) of space are a necessity – continued life demands eating, sleeping, reproduction. Donald Sanders explains that ‘[h]uman beings are territorial animals. We define spaces, mark them for specific uses, create visible and invisible boundaries, and will defend the territory against unwanted intrusion.’109 Throughout Malory’s Morte, defending the domestic sphere cannot sustain its territory, its meaning, despite being ‘labeled’ by its beds and cookware, and often explicitly walled off (to hide as much to protect, it seems). Indeed, as the next two chapters will illustrate, castle walls more generally cannot hold – not privacy, not prison, not peace.

109

Donald Sanders, ‘Behavioral Conventions and Archaeology: Methods for the Analysis of Ancient Architecture,’ in Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, ed. Susan Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 49 [43–72].

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Castles as Prisons A survey of castle prisons across the medieval period evidences considerable variety. Prison cells may occupy towers or gatehouses or underground chambers, for example. Records of captivity likewise hint at variability in the treatment of prisoners: some experience the relative comfort of a trapped guest, while others endure physical and emotional hardships. This holds true in Malory’s Morte Darthur. However, across these different types of prisons, commonalities emerge. Prison cells enforce containment, but one not easily established, as prisoners yearn for the world beyond the walls. By their nature, prisons also produce a hierarchical relationship between captor and captive, both of whom tend to look inward and outward, toward and away from the cell. The relationships of both jailer and jailed to the spaces of imprisonment prove complex and essential to understanding characters and spaces alike – this is no surprise, as the prison and its cells are, of course, social spaces. The social project of the prison cell (of the space at work) is to break the captive, to stop him or her from looking either inward or outward. Malory’s imprisoned knights and ladies cannot be thus conquered by the spaces, treacherous as these spaces may be at times. They are, with few exceptions, ever looking in and out, ever thinking in and out, and ever gesturing in and out. The prisons become porous in response to this. We can learn much about Malory’s castles and his characters on both sides of the imprisonment by inspecting the prisons and their inability to enclose. The mechanics of power implicit in castle structures as a whole, and particularly in their various prisons, which are designed to subjugate in an extreme fashion, constantly push against the opposing power and identity of the captives.1 1

Both in the architecture and in the mechanics of vision and power, these castle prisons differ markedly from the well-known model of the Bentham’s Panopticon as theorized by Michel Foucault. Foucault himself notes that ‘[t]he panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light, and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two … Visibility is a trap,’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 200. Most of the prison spaces described in this chapter (Gwenyver’s tower prison in Mellyagaunt’s castle providing a notable exception) conform to this notion of the dungeon to some degree. Throughout the text, it is the reading audience and the prisoners themselves – and not the jailers – who most frequently look into the spaces of captivity.

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This chapter will roam far and away from Arthur’s own castles, as we so rarely see them used as prisons. Indeed, as Chapter Two details, we see Balyn’s imprisonment only in his release, a move that, though intentional, highlights that even the prisons of Camelot cannot hold. The porousness of Arthur’s prisons is not examined further in the text. Arthur and his knights win many prisoners over the course of the Roman War, but there it is the taking of the prisoners and not the keeping of them that seems to matter most. Many are brought to Paris and seemingly forgotten. The Duke of Moyseslonde (Metz) is sent to Dover, after King Arthur assures his wife and the women that they are safe: ‘the deuke was dressed to Dover with the kynges dere knyghtes for to dwelle in daunger and dole dayes of his lyff’ (186.5–7). There is here a hint of a successful prison, but we do not glimpse the duke once imprisoned, and when the text much later returns to Dover, the duke is nowhere to be seen. As the story approaches its end, Aggravayne, Mordred, and company are unable to test the prison walls when they try to take Launcelot from the queen’s chamber, as he escapes their grip. Launcelot himself tells Aggravayne that he ‘shall nat preson me thys nyght’ (876.20). Launcelot will not be thus captured and made captive – something he experiences on multiple occasions, as this chapter will detail. Arthur’s castles simply do not make space for prison. So I will be looking at Arthur, his knights, and his queen as prisoners in others’ castles, in others’ spaces of danger, and focusing primarily on episodes in which the text goes into the prison spaces themselves.2 These prisons then provide a locus for competition between Arthur’s rule and others’, and the use of space attests to that. They also complicate a reading of prison space, as they do not participate in any sanctioned penal system. Indeed, it is the jailers and not the jailed who are deemed to be trespassing, sometimes explicitly so in the text. This, at least in part, seems to explain why these captors must shift between looking in and looking out, as the captive does. A discussion of the prisons of the Morte Darthur necessarily wanders not only out of Arthur’s own castles, but also out of the text itself. It must consider the author’s own imprisonment. His experiences of the spaces of captivity – spaces he inhabited during the very writing of the text – frame his story and its creation. Indeed, Sir Thomas Malory’s own status as a ‘knight prisoner’ largely dominates the mythos of his life and figures prominently in all histories of him.3 Malory, of course, invites 2

As a result, instances when knights are just said to be captured will not receive attention here. 3 For a good discussion of Malory’s time in prison, see chapter 7, ‘Prison,’ in Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, pp. 105–25; P. J. C. Field, ‘The Malory Life Records,’ in A Companion to Malory, eds. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 115–30; Anne Sutton, ‘Malory in Newgate: A New Document,’ The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographic Society, 7th series 3.1 (2000): 243–62.

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this reputation, not only through his apparently criminal life, but also by labeling himself as such in the explicit of the first book, titled ‘King Uther and King Arthur’ in Field’s 2013 edition: ‘Who that woll make any more lette hym seke other bookis of Kynge Arthure or of Sir Launcelot or of Sir Trystrams; for this was drawyn by a knyght presoner, Sir Thomas Malleorré, that God sende hym good recover. Amen’ (144.1–4).4 This short autobiographical note appended to the story shows Malory himself contemplating the effects of prison, if briefly. He is a knight, a prisoner, and a writer here, and the triangulation of these branches of his identity is pieced together and spatialized. Speaking of the phrase ‘knyght presoner,’ Riddy argues that ‘[t]he relation between the two worlds seems to be disjunctive; that is, the idea of the knight and the idea of the prisoner pull in different directions.’5 Corey Sparks further reminds us that ‘Spaces of confinement are a problem for those confined precisely because they take away the ability to exercise the will for one’s own purposes.’6 Malory’s jail term seems to limit his ability to write, even. He tells the reader to look elsewhere for additional stories – all stories that will eventually be included in the ‘Hoole Book’ (940.17) – perhaps alluding to the fact that he does not have ready access to the materials, particularly the earlier texts, needed to enact his will, to tell this story. We can also tease out the pairing of inward and outward glances here. He looks inward to the prison that (for now) disallows the continuation of the story, and he reaches outward both to additional books and to God’s help to ‘recover,’ to restore his life beyond the walls of imprisonment. Two further explicits highlight this focus on the world beyond the cell. They include exhortations to the reader to pray for the deliverance of the writer. Following ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney,’ Malory writes, ‘And I pray you all that redyth this tale to pray for hym that this wrote, that God sende hym good delyveraunce sone and hastely. Amen’ (288.10–12).7 At the end of ‘The Morte Darthur’ – the end of the entire text – Malory reiterates this plea: ‘I praye you all jentylmen and jentylwymmen that redeth this book of Arthur and his knyghtes from the begynnyng to the endynge, praye for me whyle I am on lyve that God sende me good delyveraunce, and whan I am deed, I praye you all praye for my soule’ (940.21–25). Both of these ask the 4



Italics original to the edition, here and in the two following quotations. This explicit does not appear in the Caxton edition of Malory’s text, which means that it is only since the discovery of the Winchester manuscript and subsequent publication of the first Vinaver edition that scholars have been forced to grapple with this. In two later explicits (at the end of the Trystram and Sankgreal sections), Malory refers to himself as a knight without adding that he is a prisoner. Both call upon help from Jesus. 5 Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 94. 6 Corey Sparks, ‘Lydgate’s Jailbird,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014):79 [77–101]; emphasis original. 7 Caxton does not include this explicit.

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readers for prayers of deliverance. When read in conversation with the explicit in which Malory names himself a ‘knyght presoner,’ these two notes evidence Malory trying to write his way out of prison.8 Of course, as A. C. Spearing reminds us, ‘we would surely not have the greatest English prose work of the fifteenth century if Thomas Malory had not been a “knight prisoner.” Imprisonment provided enforced leisure in which those of high birth, who might normally have entertained themselves with hunting or courtly dalliance, were driven to write instead.’9 Just as Malory himself is bound to the prison spaces, then, so too is his text. Roberta Davidson furthers the connection between the prison and the book, arguing that by writing this story while imprisoned, ‘Malory constructed a new definition of knightly action, and, through the restrictions necessarily associated with his undertaking, he devised, consciously or not, a particularly brilliant solution to the problem of proving knightly identity when the knight is unable to express that identity physically.’10 The narration of knightly endeavors thus becomes itself a knightly endeavor in Davidson’s argument. Those imprisoned in the story likewise become divorced from the performance of their own identity, and often wrestle with this idea. Trystram battles illness, for example, and Arthur seems to relax his moral code. Gwenyver’s authority is diminished, and Launcelot requires the assistance of women – a reversal of the pattern of adventures in which he so often rescues ladies and damsels (including from prison). The characters take different routes to resuming their desired identities, but as Davidson indicates, this is not possible for Malory himself. He creates a new version of himself, and it is, indeed, this writer identity that sticks. This idea, too, suggests meditation in and out of the prison as Malory works to make his inside activity parallel to actions beyond his wall. In this way, Davidson sees Malory working around the effects of confinement on the will. Writing becomes the enactment of the will to be a knight. Though Malory’s own time in jail must influence our reading of episodes of imprisonment in his Morte, there are crucial differences between the historical and literary situations, not the least of which is the lack of any legal procedure in the text. The customary uses of custodial, 8

As Joanna Summers has pointed out, without the first explicit, these two calls for deliverance could refer not to prison, but to sin, in Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 176. 9 A. C. Spearing, ‘Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d’Orléans,’ Modern Language Quarterly 53.1 (1992): 84 [83–99]. 10 Roberta Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 14.2 (2004): 54 [54–63].

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coercive, and penal imprisonment relate to individuals who have been taken into custody based on specific transgressions – real or perceived.11 This system involves not only enclosure, but usually specific expectations that the jailed will in various ways finance his or her own imprisonment, or incur debt. Law and precedent together guide the governing bodies and the jailers. Malory’s stays in prison certainly fit this model, and we might be able to see (or at least imagine) that at work in a few moments in the text: Gwenyver’s being detained following accusations of poison and adultery, and Balyn’s time in Arthur’s prison (for killing Arthur’s cousin), for example. However, Malory does not enter those spaces of captivity themselves. The extra-legal imprisonments of Arthur, Gwenyver, and assorted knights do not fit this pattern. None of these prisoners has run afoul of the law itself; rather they have made some sort of personal trespass (often quite legal and customary), have presented an obstacle of some sort, or are desirable in and of themselves. The ‘air of an arbitrary use of power’ is magnified by the outlaw status of several of the captors and jailers in each of the scenes that I investigate below.12 Spatial implications abound when we move captivity out of the legal system and officially sanctioned prisons. Though castles were certainly used for public imprisonment – Malory himself provides a key example here – the prison spaces of Darras, Damas, Morgan and company, Mellyagaunt, and so forth show no evidence of official approval. Moreover, the spaces tend to differ from those of prisons used in the penal system. G. Geltner notes that many medieval prisons were centrally located in cities, and prisoners often maintained contact with the outside world. As a result, ‘the visibility and accessibility of medieval inmates helped mitigate a tension between social rehabilitation and social destruction,’ and ‘medieval urban prisons never became truly liminal spaces, nor their inmates liminal people.’13 This does not apply to many of the prison spaces that we see in Malory, which are not public prisons, but rather private enclosures within castle walls. These spaces are multiply liminal. They are seemingly out of the reach of Arthur’s governance, even when squarely within his realm. The actual prison cells likewise appear to be in the margins of their castles. Though we do not often get a full sense of the floorplan (Mellyagaunt’s castle, 11

For an excellent overview of prison in England in the Middle Ages, see Ralph B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Though five decades old, this book continues to be a standard in the field. 12 Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 278. Though, as Hillner’s title implies, she is dealing with an earlier period, the sentiment stands. 13 G. Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 57 and 58.

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which holds Gwenyver and then Launcelot captive, is an exception, and it certainly directs Launcelot in particular to its lower borders, between castle and earth), the illness experienced in and the darkness of the prison spaces hint at their separation from the central parts of the structure. As a result, those whom we see in captivity experience liminality, both physically and socially, as they are pulled from their own community, its customs, and its activities. As Davidson has noted, Malory provides the most detailed and most emotionally resonant description of prison time when Trystram, along with Dynadan and Palomydes, is taken prisoner by Sir Darras – their host at the time – because Trystram had killed Darras’s three sons (in a recent tournament, a point Darras does not know).14 In this episode, we glimpse the physical and emotional toll that imprisonment exacts. Trystram suffers terribly while a captive: ‘Than withoute ony taryynge Sir Darras put Sir Trystram, Sir Palomydes, and Sir Dynadan within a stronge preson, and there Sir Trystram was lyke to have dyed of grete syknes’ (426.34–427.1). The specific cause of Trystram’s ‘grete syknes’ remains untold. It does not, it seems, stem from malnourishment, however, as Malory explicitly states that Darras ‘wolde nat suffir that [to slay Trystram as his kin suggest], but kepte them in preson, and mete and drynke they had’ (427.8–9). Likewise, the text does not connect Trystram’s contraction of illness to any wound.15 We are left with only imprisonment itself, with ‘stronge preson,’ to blame.16 This episode provides Malory with the opportunity to delve into connections between imprisonment and health – both physical and emotional: So Sir Trystram endured there grete payne, for syknes had undirtake hym, and that ys the grettist payne a presoner may have. For all the whyle a presonere may have hys helth of body, he may endure undir the mercy of God and in hope of good delyveraunce; but whan syknes towchith a presoners body, than may a presonere say all welth ys hym berauffte, and than hath he cause to wayle and wepe. Ryght so ded Sir Trystram whan syknes had undirtake hym, for than he toke such sorow that he had allmoste slayne hymselff. (427.10–17).

14

Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity,’ p. 59. As Field indicates in his notes (vol. 2, p. 356, n. 426.10–17), Malory’s source, Le Roman de Tristan en prose, mentions injury here, but not illness until later in the story. See Le Roman de Tristan en prose, eds. Ménard and Roussineau, vol. 3, ch. 18.150–57. 16 Riddy suggests that his illness derives from ‘the pain of utter destitution,’ as imprisonment renders him possessionless, in Sir Thomas Malory, p. 96. 15

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Malory here details the relationship between physical health and the ability to sustain oneself emotionally while enduring the hardship of prison. In particular, Malory points out that sickness takes hope – hope for deliverance, and thus hope for what is beyond the enclosing walls – from its imprisoned victims.17 Sickness further constricts the jailed, shutting off the possibility of what lies beyond captivity both spatially and temporally. It is sickness, then, and not imprisonment alone that serves as the ultimate punishment. The effects on Trystram prove severe. He cries and contemplates suicide. The space of the prison becomes his only and his last space – or seems to, at least – its walls coupling with his illness to shut him down. If we think of this in terms of social space, of space constructed by the action and behaviors therein, this physical and emotional distress becomes part and parcel of this prison space.18 It is hard not to read in this passage Malory’s own prison experiences, and to see him lose sight of the outside world as Trystram does. This is one of relatively few impassioned breaks from the narrative (the lusty month of May and the complaint about the newfangled English people siding with Mordred also come to mind), and thus perhaps reveals Malory’s particular concerns about prison as a space and a social project. The text moves briefly away from the knights in prison – the Trystram section is, arguably, the most interlaced in Malory – and returns to find Trystram again suffering illness. Though the three have just learned that they are not to be killed, ‘Sir Trystram fyll syke, that he wente to have dyed’ (434.15–16). Here he is on the verge of death due to illness and not its emotional effect or any thoughts of suicide. His dire state concerns not only his fellow prisoners, who both weep and are ‘makynge grete sorow,’ but also their jailer, Darras, who fears for his own reputation should good knights die while in his keeping (434.17). Upon learning of Trystram’s condition, and especially the likelihood of his death, we see Darras looking into his prison and thinking beyond it: ‘“That shall nat be,” seyde Sir Darras, “for God deffende, whan knyghtes com to me for succour, that I sholde suffir hem to dye within my preson. Therefore,” seyde Sir Darras, “go fecche 17

Summers notes that the use of the word ‘deliverance’ here echoes Malory’s own calls for deliverance in his explicits, and thus ‘suggest[s] conflation between citedauthor and narrator,’ in Late-Medieval Prison Writing, p. 179. 18 This is not Trystram’s first time in prison. He was previously captured upon arrival at Castell Plewre (see 328.4ff.). His captivity there is fleeting, as he undertakes the required custom of the castle, namely fighting against the proprietor and putting his lady’s beauty to the text against the lady of the castle. I have discussed this episode in Martin, Vision and Gender, pp. 80–85. Trystram is later imprisoned by King Mark twice in a short span, and is delivered by Percyvale the first time, and La Beall Isode the second. See 533.5–540.3.

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me that syke knyght and hys felowis afore me”’ (434.21–24). These are the concerns of a man looking quite literally into and out of the prison where he holds his captives. The captor, too, is lured by what lies beyond, though not for his prisoners, but rather for himself. His own reputation – namely, how he is seen by the world around him, the world outside his castle-prison – depends on what happens within his walls and how those walls project his identity. These simultaneous inward and outward thoughts emphasize the intimate connection between what happens in his prison and how he will be perceived at large. Darras’s identity is intimately wrapped up in his spaces, spaces that he creates through his actions, not unlike how Arthur’s own political presence depends upon Camelot, as Chapter One details. Darras thus brings the three men out of their prison and into his own audience, where he expresses grief over Trystram’s illness and releases them from captivity. Here he reiterates his concern about the effects on his own reputation should Trystram die in his prison: ‘Sir knyght, me repentis of thy sykenes, for thou arte called a full noble knyght, and so hit semyth by the. And wyte you well that hit shall never be seyde that I, Sir Darras, shall destroy such a noble knyght as thou arte in preson’ (434.26–29). Trystram explains the actions that led to their time in prison – namely the death of Darras’s three sons at his hands in tournament – as a function of knighthood, a point that Darras concedes. Upon being given his freedom, Trystram is nursed back to health, and the three leave and soon part ways to take up separate adventures as they resume their knightly lives. Darras’s quick admission that Trystram’s slaying of his sons was not really a breach and his decision to release the three highlight what Davidson calls ‘Malory’s own disinclination to dwell excessively upon issues of abstract justice in his representation of imprisonment. Rather, he reflects prison’s pragmatic function of denying mobility to those who are in the control of a temporarily stronger opponent.’19 Darras exerts power over the spaces and the knights even in letting the men go. His active choice, one guided by consideration of his reputation, indicates, however, that this power is tenuous, that the jailer, like the jailed, is in some way trapped by imprisonment. This prison episode gives us more to think about than just the effects of illness on captives and their captors (or one effect, as Arthur’s imprisonment, described below, reveals a very different result of prisoner illness), as its walls hold not only these three knights, but also the enmity between Palomydes and Trystram. This hatred ebbs and flows over the 19

Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity,’ p. 59. Davidson is here using the work of Michel Foucault to understand and theorize imprisonment. She cites Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 40.

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course of their shared narrative space, based as it is on their both loving Isode and the competition that results, and is heightened (at least on Palomydes’s part) by their close and restrictive quarters. When they first find themselves in prison, Malory writes, ‘And every day Sir Palomydes wolde repreve Trystram of olde hate betwyxt them, and ever Sir Trystram spake fayre and seyde lytyll. But whan Sir Palomydes se that Sir Trystram was falle in syknes, than was he hevy for hym and comforted hym in all the best wyse he coude’ (427.1–5). Palomydes at first seems to revel in the physical proximity and the limited mobility enforced by their shared imprisonment. It provides the opportunity – endless opportunity – to speak his hatred. Palomydes thus looks inward at Trystram, his ill will toward Trystram sharpened by their shared space. Like Darras later, however, Trystram’s sickness causes him to change his course of action, and he shifts from hatred to compassion. However, when the text returns to the three prisoners, Palomydes again ‘brawled and seyde langayge ayenste Sir Trystram’ (433.29–30). Dynadan shames Palomydes, saying ‘I mervayle of the, Sir Palomydes. And thou haddyst Sir Trystram here, I trow thou woldiste do none harme; for and a wolff and a sheepe were togydir in a preson, the wolff wolde suffir the sheepe to be in pees,’ and wryly challenges Palomydes to turn words to actions (433.31–34). Thus duly reminded of their shared plight, of the shared suffering of enclosure, the ‘abaysshed’ Palomydes relents (434.4). Trystram expresses his unwillingness to fight, citing not Palomydes as his source of fear or restraint, but rather their captor and thus the prison experience: ‘I drede the lorde of this place that hath us in his governaunce’ (434.7–8). Davidson explains that in this response ‘Trystram is simply more honest than most prisoners in openly expressing his understanding that the loss of physical freedom entails the loss of freedom of choice, and that the strongest controlling factor in the behavior of prisoners is fear.’20 His response also shows that, even in his dire illness, Trystram feels the effects of imprisonment, and specifically the hierarchized relationship between captive and captor imposed by the walls. This fear speaks to the power wielded by the jailer. Trystram’s own history indicates that he need not worry about a battle against Darras on the open field. This fear is predicated on the physical and emotional effects of enclosure. Imprisonment changes his view of the jailer, and Darras’s position thus marks him as fearsome, as dangerous. This is a power invested in him by the prison walls. Indeed, here the social space of the prison imbues the captor with meaning. The strong walls – Trystram and company are only 20

Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity,’ p. 60.

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able to leave because he allows it – impose fear and mark him and his castle as forces to fear. The role of fear in enforcing imprisonment is perhaps most evident when Arthur himself is held captive in the decidedly evil Damas’s cell. Arthur’s imprisonment arises not because of any perceived breach; rather, it is framed as an act of injustice designed to perpetuate larger injustices. Even the method of capture hints at this. Arthur, Uryence, and Accolon are hunting when they encounter a mysterious and enticing ship that seems to land on shore just for them. At Arthur’s request, his companions join him in investigating the ship, in which they find sumptuous silk hangings, ample torchlight as darkness falls, and twelve damsels. They are first ‘ledde … into a fayre chambir,’ in which they are served a wondrous meal (107.14–15). Their movement in and around the ship is clearly guided, a sign that they are already sacrificing freedom of mobility. This increases following the meal, as the men again are brought to new spaces in the ship, this time to separate chambers: And so what they had souped at her leyser Kyng Arthure was lad into a chambir, a rycher besene chambir sawe he never none; and so was Kynge Uryence served and lad into such anothir chambir; and Sir Accolon was lad into the thirde chambir passing rychely and well besayne. And so were they leyde in theire beddis easyly, and anone they felle on slepe and slepte merveylously sore all the nyght. (107.19–26)

Nothing and everything about this should alarm Arthur and company. This is the treatment that a king should expect – and both Arthur and Uryence are kings – but the superlatively rich chamber, particularly combined with the strange arrival of the ship and their enforced separation should perhaps put the men on alert. It does not, and neither does the fact that again they entrust their mobility, their own spatiality, to their nameless guides. For the reader, surely, the revelation that enchantment undergirds this whole experience is not a surprise. Uryence wakes up the next morning back at Camelot – a two-day journey – and Accolon finds himself perilously close to a well’s edge and curses the damsels who have thus tricked the three men, but is soon outfitted with Excalibur and its scabbard by a dwarf sent by his lover Morgan le Fay (who is plotting to kill her husband, Accolon’s erstwhile companion Uryence, as well as her brother Arthur). Most notable for the sake of this discussion, Arthur has been made a captive: ‘And whan Kynge Arthure awoke he founde hymself in a durke preson, heryng aboute hym many complayntes of wofull knyghtes’ (107.30– 31). Upon asking about their complaints, Arthur learns of the dire situation that he joins; he is told, ‘We bene here twenty knyghtes presoners, and som

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of us hath layne here eyght yere, and som more and some lesse’ (107.34– 35). It seems that Sir Damas has taken these knights prisoner in hopes of convincing one to fight for him against his younger brother, Outlake, who is beloved and whom Damas refuses his rightful property unless he fights for it. Damas, however, cannot defeat Outlake, and thus requires a standin. Arthur learns not only the reason for this mass jailing, but also that Damas, the captives’ ‘mayster,’ is ‘evyll beloved, for he is withoute mercy, and he is a cowarde’ (108.10–11). This mercilessness seems to relate more to his snatching and treatment of the prisoners than to his withholding Outlake’s inheritance. The knights elaborate on Damas’s scheme: And whan Damas saw this, that there was never a knyght wolde fyght for hym, he hath dayly layne awayte wyth many a knyght wyth hym and takyn all the knyghtes in the contray to se and aspye hir aventures: he hath takyn hem by force and brought hem to his preson. And so toke he us severally, as we rode on oure adventures, and many good knyghtes hath deyde in this preson for hunger, to the number of eyghtene knyghtes. And yf ony of us all that here is or hath bene wolde have foughtyn with his brothir Outlake he wolde have delyverde us; but for because this Damas ys so false and so full of treson we wolde never fyght for hym to dye for hit, and we be so megir for hunger that unnethe we may stonde on our fete. (108.18–29)

This depiction of Damas as jailer, as the man who both takes and holds prisoners, is grim. Davidson explains that ‘(i)mprisonment is a form of single combat between the knight and his jailer, and between the hardships of the imprisonment and the knight’s endurance.’21 Damas is, thus far, winning this combat with ease. He uses violence to capture good knights and enforces imprisonment with the cruelty of hunger and the omnipresent specter of death. Nearly half of the knights whom he has enclosed in his prison cell have died under this carceral regime. This prison thus likens itself to a tomb, a space of death and decay. Those still alive – those whom Arthur hears as he awakes – seem only barely alive. Damas’s prison thus exists on the border between life and death. Here in the margins of life, the prisoners look inward at their own mortality, for looking outward is no better. Reaching that outside requires sacrificing honor, a sacrifice that fighting on behalf of Damas entails.22 This choice of death speaks to Damas’s character – and that of the prisoners. The captives each use their remaining shred of freedom to deny themselves 21 22

Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity,’ p. 59. In a brief note, Andrew Lynch points out that although Damas’s treachery prevents his finding a champion to fight for him against his brother, he is able to secure the many knights who assist in capturing those he hopes to coerce into the job. See Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 88, n. 30.

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the very freedom they desire, as it is an unpalatable freedom to be gained by fighting on Damas’s behalf. The choice also, of course, defines this space. This space is a resignation to hunger and death, and it earns an air of both horror and honor as a result. Arthur responds to this information with an immediate glance to the freedom outside the walls, and weighs the two sacrifices. He proclaims, ‘God delyver you for His grete mercy’ (108.30). Like Malory himself, Arthur reacts to the idea of imprisonment with a call for deliverance, with the hope for an end to captivity. Indeed, unlike the twenty knights he meets in the prison – or the eighteen who have already perished under Damas’s hard conditions – Arthur will elect to fight on behalf of his captor. A damsel reiterates the prisoners’ explanation of the terms of imprisonment: ‘and ye woll fight for my lorde ye shall be delyverde oute of preson, and ellys ye ascape never with the lyff’ (108.34–35). A life sentence awaits him, as it does the others whom Damas has captured and placed in holding. Arthur does not adopt the moral stance of his fellow prisoners, who eschew the idea of fighting on behalf of a treasonous knight. Though admitting the difficulty of the choice, Arthur opts for the proposed exit strategy: ‘“Now,” seyde Arthure, “that is harde; yet had I lever fyght with a knyght than to dey in preson. With thys,” seyde Arthure, “I may be delyverde and all thes presoners, I woll do the batayle”’ (109.1–3).23 Arthur’s look into the prison that briefly confines him convinces him that he wants no part of it, no part of being defined by its restrictions and horrors. Perhaps, as Riddy suggests, the stark divide between his and the other prisoners’ ‘honourable status as knights 23

Malory greatly condenses his source here, eliminating much of Arthur’s commentary and thought process. The French Arthur explains himself thus: Et li rois lour respont atant: «Se la prisons vous desconforte, je ne m’en esmierveil pas, car a moi anuie elle ja tant de che seulement que la voi qu’il m’est avis que jou i aie esté un an entier. Et je ne sai comment il sera de mon issir ou de mon remanoir, mais tant vous di je bien que se on me metoit a kois ou de combatre ou de remaindre, je me combatroie anchois a grant meskiés encontre le millour qui soit que je ne remandroie ichi. Et vous fustes tout malvais, quant on le vous offri, que vous ne vous mesistes en l’aventure de Nostre Signour, car certes miex vausisse jou morir vistement que demourer longuement chi.» [At that the king answered them, ‘If the prison displeases you, I’m not surprised, for merely seeing it, I am so troubled by it that I think I’ve been here a whole year. I don’t know how it will turn out about my getting out or staying out, but I tell you this much, that if someone offered me a choice between fighting and staying, I would fight against great odds against the best there is before I would stay here. You were all wrong, when they offered it to you, not to put yourselves in Our Lord’s hands, for I would certainly rather die quickly than live a long time here.’] From La Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Roussineau, 372.3–14; The Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 8, p. 183.

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and the loss of that status that stems from their predicaments’ convinces him.24 He makes the ‘harde’ decision to do what the others would not and then could not do. Beverly Kennedy suggests that ‘Arthur’s willingness to undertake this “wrongfull quarell” confirms his Rationalist attitude,’ and that he predicts his own success and his subsequent opportunity to enact justice.25 This choice certainly also highlights the powerful pull of the outside, and the physical and emotional freedom that it allows. In this, he is at least temporarily alienated from his ‘outside’ identity, as a ruler whose governance presents itself as grounded in justice and honor via both his own coronation swearing-in and the Pentecostal Oath.26 However, he carves out a new version of this identity by using this apparent moral lapse to serve the greater good, for himself, for his fellow prisoners, and for the community affected by Damas’s ill treatment of his brother.27 His decision to fight frees not only himself, but the others in Damas’s jail as well: ‘And with that all the twenty knyghtes were brought oute of the durke preson into the halle, and delyverde hem, and so they all abode to se the batayle’ (109.20–22). There is thus at most a temporary moral lapse that effects good in the release of the prisoners and the later reinstatement of Outlake’s rightful property.28 These twenty men stay to witness Arthur’s resumption of his identity, which enchantment and prison briefly took away. The deliverance of these prisoners and their subsequent decision to watch Arthur perform his knighthood – the very knighthood that secures their freedom – puts them on the path to recuperating their own ‘outside’ identities. Of course, Arthur himself does not here experience prison for long, as he quickly chooses to accept Damas’s terms. He thus endures only limited 24

Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 94. Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, p. 44. See also Laura K. Bedwell’s discussion of this scene, in ‘The Failure of Justice, the Failure of Arthur,’ Arthuriana 21.3 (2011): 11 [3–22]. 26 Upon finally being accepted as rightful ruler, after repeatedly pulling the sword from the stone, Arthur is crowned and expresses his commitment to justice: ‘And so anon the coronacyon made, and ther was he sworne unto his lordes and the comyns for to be a true kyng, to stand with true justyce fro thensforth the dayes of his lyf’ (11.6–9). The charge to Arthur, and his acceptance of that charge, is quite clear. Upholding justice is the cornerstone of his kingship. 27 See Davidson, ‘Prison and Knightly Identity,’ p. 58. 28 Amanda D. Taylor points to the perversion of the expectations of trial by combat in this battle (Arthur fighting for Damas, Accolon for Outlake), though this is perhaps mitigated by Arthur’s restoration of justice following his victory, in ‘The Body of Law: Embodied Justice in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 25.3 (2015): 83 [66–97]. Maureen Fries similarly points to the ‘curious’ nature of this battle, which aligns Arthur with the ‘bad’ side, in ‘From the Lady to the Tramp: The Decline of Morgan le Fay in Medieval Romance,’ Arthuriana 4.1 (1994): 16, n. 12 [1–18]. 25

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‘public imposition of involuntary physical confinement,’ as Edward Peters defines imprisonment, though even in that short time we see the effects of imprisonment on him.29 Nevertheless, the fate of those who have lived and died while in Damas’s prison tells us much about the space and its use. Damas relies on his particularly cruel treatment – especially in limiting food – to intensify captivity. This coercion, however, produces results quite opposite to its stated goals. It functions to convince those imprisoned not to fight for him, and eventually renders them unable to do so, and thus unable to perform knighthood, as they cannot stand for lack of nutrition. The prison itself compounds the alienating effects of malnourishment. Twice, Malory tells us that this is a ‘durke preson’: when Arthur first wakes up there and then when he offers to fight and thus frees the others. Darkness thus provides our first and last glimpse of the prison, and it urges us to try to see into its shadows. This darkness surely occludes the jailed knights’ vision – as it does our own – and in this way limits their ability to look either in or out. The lack of light exacerbates the effects of confining walls, and oppresses those imprisoned. The restricted vision imposed by the darkness further shrinks the space allotted to these men and perhaps heightens their fear of the jailer. Like Arthur and Trystram, Launcelot also spends time in captivity, and his imprisonment likewise invites reflections about the triangulated relationship between himself, his captors, and the spaces in which he is held. Launcelot’s circumstances in each episode of imprisonment focus not only on his knightly identity, but also on the construction of his gender identity; both are examined and put under pressure by prison. Fairly early in his own titular story, Launcelot is imprisoned for the first time. Morgan le Fay and three other queens capture him while he sleeps under an apple tree – sleep may be his true nemesis – and use enchantment to imprison him in a ‘chambir colde’ in Castell Charyot (193.29). We learn little about the physical properties of his prison space itself beyond its chilly temperature, but we are assured of his regular nourishment, and are given a thorough explanation of his circumstances.30 It is the jailers themselves who clue Launcelot and the reader in on why he has thus been made captive:

29

30

Edward M. Peters, ‘Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds,’ in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, eds. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3 [3–47]. We see him receive supper from a fair damsel upon waking in prison (193.30), and dinner the next night (194.34).

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And on the morne erly com thes foure quenys passyngly well besene, and all they byddynge hym good morne, and he them agayne. ‘Sir knyght,’ the foure quenys seyde, ‘thou muste undirstonde thou arte oure presonere, and we know well that thou art Sir Launcelot du Lake, Kynge Banis sonne. And because that we undirstonde youre worthynesse, that thou art the noblest knyght lyvyng, and also we know well there can no lady have thy love but one, and that is Quene Gwenyvere, now thou shalt hir love lose for ever, and she thyne. For hit behovyth the now to chose one of us foure, for I am Quene Morgan le Fay, quene of the londe of Gore, and here is the Quene of North Galys, and the Quene of Estlonde, and the Quene of the Oute Iles. Now chose one of us, whyche that thou wolte have to thy paramour, other ellys to dye in this preson.’ (194.8–21)

The queens approach Launcelot in a manner that implies not the menace often with associated the jailer, but rather potential love.31 They look good and open their conversation with a courteous greeting. Nevertheless, they are firm as regards his imprisonment and their power over him, telling Launcelot that he ‘muste undirstonde’ that they hold him captive. This assertion of their control over him and his (im)mobility couples their courtliness with threat. This threat draws attention not only to the constriction imposed by the prison, but also explicitly evokes the world – particularly Launcelot’s world – outside these prison walls. At stake here is not just prison and the forced choice of a lover from among his captors, but also the presumably painful loss of Gwenyver’s love.32 This invites Launcelot – and the reader – to glance beyond the walls both temporally and spatially. The reference to Gwenyver recalls his past with her – whatever that may be at this point in the narrative – and indicates that the future, like the world outside, will disappear. Undoubtedly, this assaults Launcelot’s self-image as a knight errant generally, and as the queen’s knight in particular. In the Prose Lancelot, Malory’s source for 31

Morgan later takes Alysaundir le Orphelyne prisoner by first tending to his wounds and then giving him a drink that knocks him out for three days and allows her to transport him to her castle, where she holds him in order to ‘do hir plesure whan hit lykyth hir’ (510.16–17). Like Launcelot’s encounter with Morgan and her fellow queens, Alysaundir’s imprisonment is explicitly gendered, a point that is emphasized by his own declarations that ‘I had levir kut away my hangers than I wolde do her ony such pleasure’ (510.19–20). 32 The shared love between Launcelot and the queen is at this point in Malory’s version of the tale limited to rumor (particularly from the women, such as these queens, whom Launcelot meets during his adventures) and to the reader’s knowledge of the legend, knowledge which can easily be overlain atop Malory’s own relative silence on the affair until much later in the text.

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this episode, the three queens do not mention Guinevere or the loss of her love – indeed, they have not identified their captive as Lancelot; they imprison him because of his extreme good looks.33 Malory thus sharpens the alienating effects of prison enclosure. Launcelot, like others imprisoned, feels this sharply. His response considers his life on both sides of these prison walls: ‘That is an harde case,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘that other I must dye other to chose one of you. Yet had I lever dye in this preson with worshyp than to have one of you to my paramoure magré myne hede. And therefore ye be answeryd: I woll none of you for ye be false enchaunters. And as for my lady Dame Gwenyvere, were I at my lyberté as I was, I wolde prove hit on you or on youres that she is the trewest lady unto hir lorde lyvynge.’ (194.22–28)

Because he will not accede to their wishes, ‘they departed and leffte hym there alone, that made grete sorow’ (194.32–33). Like Damas’s many prisoners, Launcelot rejects the bargain that will ensure his liberty. Also like that situation, that promised freedom is diminished by the sacrifice that it requires. Launcelot deems the price too high because it involves tethering himself to one of these treacherous enchanters, which would be merely another sort of imprisonment. For Launcelot then, the world immediately outside this prison does not involve a return to his identity, but rather the assumption of a new one. That is not an outside he can stomach. His defense of Gwenyver also serves to define that life outside, where he performs knighthood on her behalf, by sending her vanquished knights or defending her. Neither captivity nor deliverance (in its offered form) affords him this life. Later, when the damsel bringing his food asks how he is doing, he replies that he was ‘in my lyf dayes never so ylle’ (195.1–2). Though we do not get further explanation of his illness, it speaks to the deleterious effects of imprisonment. Whether physically or emotionally, prison space causes dis-ease. He also indicates that he fears his captors: ‘sore I am of thes quenys sorserers crauftis aferde, for they have destroyed many a good knyght’ (195.6–8). The specific source of his fear recalls his earlier rejection of the bargain offered by these ‘false enchaunters.’ Together, these two claims highlight the specifically precarious nature of Launcelot’s knightly – and masculine – identity when entrapped by sorcery, and especially by women practitioners of it. His tale and his reputation begin 33

See Lancelot, ed. Alexandre Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz; Paris: M. J. Minard, 1978–83), 4.78.7–8.

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with the caveat that ‘in all turnementes, justys, and dedys of armys, both for lyff and deth, he passed all other knyghtes, and at no tyme was he ovircom but yf hit were by treson other inchauntement’ (190.8–11). This second threat to Launcelot’s greatness and success, namely enchantment, certainly invokes a specifically gendered fear. The enchantment that Launcelot faces explicitly comes at the hands of women. His fear of his captors’ ‘sorserers crauftis’ is fully realized in their past and ongoing destruction of good knights. Each moment that he languishes in prison he remains unable to be a good knight, to be the best knight. Launcelot’s imprisonment at the hands of these queens in love differs from Arthur’s and Trystram’s experiences because it lies entirely outside the realm of knightly battle. Trystram’s actions in a tournament land him in Darras’s prison, and Damas uses jail to force Arthur to fight for him. These ladies do not need or want a champion – it seems their enchantment might render battle and knightly service superfluous. They simply desire Launcelot, and wish to extract him from his presumed current love. The prison space thus mediates gender relations specifically. Being held and controlled by women might upset inscribed gender hierarchies on its own – especially because of their use of sorcery in imposing captivity on Launcelot – but it is particularly notable that these women depart from the text’s normative pattern of requiring and thus motivating men’s work. Armstrong’s discussion of the ways in which the Pentecostal Oath governs the role of women in the Morte as a whole does not quite fit here – a point that she concedes in analyzing Morgan and this episode. Armstrong rightly claims of the text in general that (e)ven as the Pentecostal Oath offers explicit protection to women in the ladies clause, it also simultaneously and deliberately constructs them as ‘feminine,’ in the chivalric sense – helpless, needy, rape-able. The threat of sexual violence – and the need to protect women from it – provides knight after knight with the opportunity to test and prove his prowess and knightly identity.34

She further explains that this very need to create a class of passive and needy women as an impetus for the performance of knightly masculinity means that ‘the masculine subcommunity is utterly and deeply dependent upon the feminine for definition.’35 The Oath thus articulates and legislates necessary relations between knights and ladies, with the women continuously providing opportunity for knights to be knights, and thus masculine. Morgan and her co-conspirators do not meet that requirement 34 35

Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 36. Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 37.

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and, as Armstrong later notes, they explicitly reject it, choosing instead ‘to resist their gendered identities by appropriating the behavior of the masculine, that which they are not.’36 This is an important point, though I would add that their method – sorcery – departs from a normative form of the masculine. Nevertheless, they certainly do not participate in the economy of needy women. Indeed, these women remove Launcelot from the chivalric exchange system. Confinement in and of itself renders him unable to undertake an adventure at the behest of a woman, and their requirement that he choose one of them as a paramour might further remove him from knightly activity as it would eliminate the ‘free agent’ status that undergirds knights’ ability to take on such quests. The help that he receives from Bagdemagus’s daughter at once deepens Launcelot’s problem – she is actively assisting him instead of the reverse – and restores gender order, as she delivers him from prison so that he may help her. This damsel promises to get him out this prison so long as he pledges to fight on her father’s side – against Arthur – in an upcoming tournament in return. Launcelot agrees to the terms, in particular because he deems her father, Bagdemagus, ‘a noble kynge and a good knyght’ (195.23–24). This bargain aligns with Launcelot’s preferred identity and allows him both to glance in on and to move beyond the prison walls freely. The porousness of the queens’ prison is thus a function of its inability to disorder gender norms entirely. Launcelot resumes his intertwined masculine and knightly identities once out of this enclosure, but imprisonment remains a central theme in his story. Upon escaping the snares of Morgan and her fellow sorceresses, and following through on his promise to the damsel who rescued him, Launcelot begins to develop a reputation as one who frees others from prison. Indeed, his first chance to deliver his fellow knights soon arises. He learns of Sir Tarquyn, a formidable knight who ‘hath in his preson of Arthurs courte good knyghtes thre score and foure that he hath won with his owne hondys’ (200.30–32). Launcelot soon encounters Tarquyn, who has just captured yet another of Arthur’s knights, Sir Gaherys. Launcelot and Tarquyn then do battle, and it is a fierce and gruesome fight. After two hours, Tarquyn offers to ‘delyver all the presoners that I have,’ as long as his opponent is not the man whom he hates above all others (202.15– 16). Unsurprisingly, Launcelot is the man he so detests, and for that very hatred he has embarked on this cruel path of death and imprisonment. He explains, ‘And for Sir Launcelottis sake I have slayne an hondred good knyghtes, and as many I have maymed all uttirly, that they myght never 36

Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 100. See also Armstrong’s discussion of Morgan as ‘The Lady Who Is Not One,’ at pp. 58–65.

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aftir helpe themself, and many have dyed in preson’ (202.26–29), and then reiterates his willingness to release the thirty-four captives he currently holds, as long as Launcelot is not Launcelot. Finding out that he has been up to now unwittingly complicit in the death, disablement, and captivity of so many knights further emboldens Launcelot. After another difficult battle, Launcelot defeats and kills Tarquyn. He then sends Gaherys to deliver the imprisoned knights and proceeds with his adventure. Gaherys’s efforts to complete Launcelot’s freeing of the imprisoned knights speak to the fastness of this prison and the conditions inside it. He must first fight the ‘yoman porter kepyng many keyes’ to gain entrance to the space of captivity (204.10). This porter does not speak, and is given no chance to choose whether he will allow or block entry, a marked change from Malory’s source.37 He thus resembles many of Malory’s porters, who, as Leitch has argued, often ‘are passive victims of action rather than agents in their own right.’38 His complicity in Tarquyn’s perfidy is assumed; indeed, his role as keeper of the keys makes him an active participant in the ongoing captivity of the enclosed knights. He becomes part of the building’s ability to keep its prisoners, to separate them from their world and their knightly identities. As such, he is dispatched, though he seems to get away with his life. Once Gaherys has the keys, ‘hastely he opynde the preson dore, and there he lette all the presoners oute, and every man lowsed other of their bondys’ (204.12–14). This last detail, the use of bonds, appears to be Malory’s addition. This glimpse into the prison reveals its particular harshness and its efforts to keep the jailed men from their knightly identities. The use of physical restraints limits their mobility even within the cell. The bonds indicate either Tarquyn’s own especially cruel imposition of his will or his heightened fear of these knights and their ability to escape – or both.39 Unsurprisingly, the doubly freed knights, sprung from prison and loosed from their bonds, immediately heap thanks on their apparent deliverer. Gaherys quickly credits Launcelot, and imparts their true deliverer’s wishes that they will reunite with him at Camelot; when they do they offer him due worship 37

In the Prose Lancelot, Gaheriez greets the boy guarding the entryway, and gives him the chance to hand over the keys – through the threat of violence, but a chance nevertheless – before attacking. See Lancelot, ed. Micha, 5.47. 38 Megan Leitch, ‘The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarves and Porters in Malory and the Middle English Gawain Romances,’ Arthuriana 27.1 (2017): 16 [3–27]. 39 They might, too, speak to prison practices with which Malory might be familiar as a man in bonds, as the witness to it, or in some less direct way. Jean Dunbabin indicates that chains were the ‘normal fate of captives of no great political importance,’ at least in the period studied, in Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1100–1300 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 121.

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and honor (221.16). This puts Launcelot back into place – outside the walls of captivity and free to help others. He is able to use his specifically masculine skills to undo others’ imprisonment, a feat that he could not perform for himself. These walls, walls that he does not linger to see, he can make porous by triumphing over Tarquyn. He is able to overcome the male jailer in ways that he cannot when facing the women who had ensnared and enclosed him, thus allowing Launcelot to assert his own identity in terms of knightly masculinity.40 Shortly after freeing these several knights of the Round Table from Tarquyn’s oppressive prison, Launcelot again provides deliverance for captives. After smiting a porter for blocking a bridge – a sure sign that this scene, too, focuses on Launcelot’s ability to move beyond and through obstacles – Launcelot approaches and enters a castle. Indeed, ‘streyte he rode into the castell,’ and he ties his horse up and notes that this is a good place for a fight (207.1–2). He is soon warned about this place by a large number of ‘peple in dorys and wyndowys that sayde, “Fayre knyghte, thou arte unhappy to com here”’ (207.6–7). Both of these spatial details (Launcelot’s nonchalant entry to the castle and the presence of so many onlookers in the liminal spaces around him) draw attention to borders. The reader, like Launcelot, does not yet know that a prison space lurks within these walls, but both should be attuned to the permeability exhibited here, by Launcelot as well as by the gazes of the onlookers. In this case, the jailers are two ‘grete gyauntis well armed all save there hedys, with too horrible clubbys in their hondys’ (207.8–9). These giants are positioned both within and without the knightly realm. Their castle marks them as (potential) members of the chivalric community to which Launcelot also belongs, but their perhaps grotesque size and their use of clubs mark them as other. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes that giants ‘are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.’41 Thinking about their spaces, and particularly their castle spaces, must incorporate 40

Launcelot again overcomes a male captor in Sir Bryan de les Iles, whom he defeats in battle in order to deliver his seventy prisoners (thirty of King Arthur’s knights and forty ladies, at 369.25–370.8). La Cote Male Tayle was among those imprisoned knights. Shortly thereafter, Launcelot again delivers La Cote Male Tayle, at 373.12– 374.16. La Cote’s captivity in Plenoryus’s tower lasts a very short time, and is not particularly arduous – he drinks wine and has his wounds searched. The only spatial detail afforded us here is the fact that it is the tower that holds the captives. 41 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses),’ in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 6 [3–25].

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an understanding of their monstrous bodies, which make them more fearsome as jailers (something we do not see) and – more important – shift the castle space out of the courtly and chivalric realms. The prison, already a fraught space across the Morte because of its unsanctioned use, is further othered by its giant proprietors. This becomes all the more apparent when it is later revealed that this is Tyntagil Castle. Tyntagil has, of course, proved its own porousness at the outset of Malory’s story, as Uther was able to infiltrate a space made safe (but not safe enough) for Igrayne and to conceive Arthur, as I discuss in Chapter One. That act, too, speaks to the duality of this castle: it is an act of disguise, unlawful entry, and ultimately rape that produces Arthur and his Round Table community. Malory, again, does not peer into the prison itself, but the sixty ladies and damsels whom Launcelot has freed thank him and speak to the conditions of their captivity. Here Launcelot has dutifully saved women from hardship and prison, thus reversing his own deliverance at the hands of a woman – sixty times over. The newly freed women explain: ‘the moste party of us have bene here this seven yere presoners, and we have worched all maner of sylke workys for oure mete, and we are all grete jentylwomen borne’ (207.18–20). Like the several men whose prison time has kept them from their knightly identity, these women suffer from being cut off from their status as ‘jentylwomen borne.’ For them, prison is a space of labor, work that they must perform in order to eat. Their quickness in referencing their status as gentlewomen acknowledges the split between their world within and beyond these prison walls. Even though now freed from that place and that life, their explanation shares with the previously discussed prisoners the inward and outward glances that oppress captives. It is no surprise, then, that upon emergence they praise Launcelot as having done the ‘moste worshyp that ever ded knyght in this worlde’ and promise to ‘beare recorde’ of this deliverance (207.21– 23). Their superlative description underscores the relief and joy felt upon the resumption of the lives outside prison defined by their class status. More important in terms of the space here, the specific treatment of the imprisoned gentlewomen, namely their forced labor, again distances both the castle and the giants from the chivalric world. While the several episodes discussed tell us much about prison, in ‘The Knight of the Cart’ the physical presence and structure of the castle as a prison figures especially prominently, and the reader really sees the building and its space used in this capacity.42 This tale relates 42

The discussion of the ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode is a revised version of a previously published article: Martin, ‘Castles and the Architecture of Gender.’

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Mellyagaunt’s abduction and imprisonment of Gwenyver, Launcelot’s rescue of her, and his time as captive. It is in this section of the Morte that the relationship between Launcelot and the queen is most explicit; they spend the night together in bed, and Gwenyver is accused of adultery (though not with Launcelot), prompting a second rescue. Over the course of this tale, the castle and the way it holds and encloses its captives – via its windows (and their bars), bedroom spaces, and prisons – frame and inscribe the characters and participate in constructing their identities. Launcelot traverses gardens, climbs a ladder, walks chamber to chamber, and falls through a trapdoor. Throughout, architecture plays a dominant role and weighs heavily in the identities of the episode’s three main characters, Gwenyver, Launcelot, and Mellyagaunt. Indeed, the shifting positions of these three as captives and captors within the castle space parallel changes to their relationships, to their identities – especially their gender identities – and to the space itself. Concrete spaces with seemingly inherent meaning are redefined by the actions performed in and around them. Ruth Evans explains that ‘[b]odies do of course take up space, but they also transform space, just as spaces transform them.’43 This duality, this constant interaction across the episode, must be explored in order to understand the function of prison space, and to fully grasp the characters’ identities. Jane Rendell poses important questions about the production of space, questions that certainly guide this discussion: if from an anthropological and geographical perspective space is socially and culturally produced and gender relations are socially, culturally, and spatially constructed, this raises two key questions: ‘how are gender relations manifest in space?’ and equally ‘how are spatial relations manifest in constructions of gender?’44

Investigating ‘The Knight of the Cart’ with these two questions in mind reveals a complex matrix of space and gender construction – one that lies below the surface in the above discussions of Trystram, Arthur, and Malory himself and jail, and begins to emerge in Launcelot’s early experiences with prison, both as a captive and as a deliverer. This complexity arises from the multivalence of the gender relationships 43

Ruth Evans, ‘Signs of the Body: Gender, Sexuality and Space in York and the York Cycle,’ in Women’s Space, Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, eds. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 24 [23–45]. 44 Jane Rendell, ‘Introduction: “Gender, Space,”’ in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), p. 102 [101–111]. Rendell draws on Lefebvre’s work in this introductory essay.

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and identities that form in response to castle space in the Middle Ages. As I discuss in Chapter One, the castle becomes a physical and visual manifestation of military, political, and economic power. Whitaker’s notion that the castle is ‘the centre from which the authority radiates’ invites us to consider layers of implicit and explicit gender coding.45 This power is for the most part within the male purview in the Middle Ages and in medieval romance. In ‘The Knight of the Cart,’ Mellyagaunt benefits considerably from his association with his castle. The idea that castles are male spaces and representatives of masculinity does not tell the whole story, however. Castles also bear various feminine significations. Murray argues that in Malory, ‘castles depart almost entirely from the battlefield and become the realm of queens, and proprietresses, female captives, inhabitants, and guests.’46 She assigns meaning to this association with women, indicating that castles may be ‘associated with women to illustrate the condition [decay] of society.’47 In this scheme, the link with women becomes a decidedly negative attachment; their more constant presence marks the spaces as feminine and thus problematic. Male power and masculinity itself thus relocate away from the castle, just as the knights roam the landscapes and the pages of the narrative. The castle becomes a spot of contested gender identity. Women’s places within the castle structure can also connote distinct and intentional ideas of enclosure. Within the male outer realm lie the lady’s quarters. Indeed, Hanawalt and Kobialka note that private and inside space in general is associated with women, while men’s pursuits take them to public, outside locations (‘streets, highways, fields, cities, oceans, battles, and council tables’).48 There is a sense that masculinity is dispersed geographically. Gilchrist also sees the gendering powers of space, indicating that there are specific and intentional ‘architectural mechanisms of segregation and enclosure,’ which regulate women.49 Richardson’s access analysis study, an archaeological investigation of the ease or difficulty with which one can gain access to certain areas within a structure, echoes Gilchrist’s arguments about gender separation and 45

Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ p. 74. Murray, ‘Women and Castles,’ p. 22. 47 Murray, ‘Women and Castles,’ p. 36. 48 Hanawalt and Kobialka, ‘Introduction,’ p. x. 49 Gilchrist, ‘Medieval Bodies in the Material World,’ p. 58. Gilchrist later argues that the enclosure of women also gives women visual access while remaining unseen. The spaces allotted for women protect them from viewers’ eyes while allowing them to gaze upon happenings within the castle community. Here again, the fluidity of space and meaning is evident. 46

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points out that women’s spaces are more difficult to reach.50 This deep enclosure functions to disempower women. The outer, more available parts of the castle are, in this analysis, designated male in both use and signification. Imprisonment, of course, tightens that enclosure, and moves a captive woman further away from the public spaces of the castle, and – more important – from the world beyond. Imprisoned men, as discussed already, are often moved to spaces that are quite interior and enclosed, and intentionally distant from their (male) outside worlds. This narrative interweaves space with three main characters – Launcelot, Mellyagaunt, and Gwenyver – each of whom produces and responds to social space in gendered terms. Over the course of ‘The Knight of the Cart,’ these three construct and reconstruct their gender identities in reference to their own and others’ spatial placement and movement, as well as to the immobility enforced by imprisonment. Gwenyver’s position – both her literal and gendered social position – is at once both simple and complex. Schulenburg argues that spaces are ‘cultural productions,’ as well as metaphors and symbolic systems, and that, as such, [o]perating as mechanisms for classification, spatial arrangements attempt to demarcate and reinforce the hierarchical ordering of society, to define and clarify social roles and relations, to maintain prevailing patterns of privilege or advantage, and to regulate social behavior. Spatial constructions are therefore fundamental statements of power, authority and privilege.51

As a captive, Gwenyver is enclosed and thus seemingly subject to her captor’s will and his deployment of space.52 However, this is not exactly and always the case. While her location might be interior and thus surrounded and ruled by outer masculine forces and space, the relationship between captor and captive creates a social space in flux. As power shifts between Gwenyver and Mellyagaunt, so does the nature of the space and Mellyagaunt’s ability to claim the space as a mark of his own masculine identity. Sue Best argues that 50

Richardson, ‘Gender and Space in English Royal Palaces.’ Schulenburg, ‘Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space,’ p. 185. 52 Elizabeth Grosz notes that even in their own residences, women’s enclosure participates in their subjection to men and male society: The containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, nor was even built for them, can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself: it becomes the space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition, the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self, the space of domestic abuse, the space that harms as much as it isolates women. In ‘Women, Chora, Dwelling,’ in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), p. 229 [210–21]. 51

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feminizing space results in both its being easily dominated and its creating anxiety about the ‘precariousness of its boundedness.’53 The bedroom prison that Gwenyver occupies for much of this episode brings to the foreground the anxiety that even the most enclosed female space can produce. Indeed, Launcelot’s ability to disrupt the boundedness of this room with acts that affect the gender of all three concerned parties demonstrates just how fragile this enclosure and its construction of gender can be. Furthermore, despite being captured by Mellyagaunt, who is driven by his own long-held love for her, the queen imposes restrictions on her captivity. Gwenyver appears to set the rules, saying, Sir Mellyagaunte, sle nat my noble knyghtes and I woll go with the, uppon thys covenaunte: that thou save them and suffir hem no more to be hurte, wyth thys, that they be lad with me wheresomever thou ledyst me. For I woll rather sle myselff than I will go wyth the, onles that thes noble knyghtes may be in my presence. (844.32–845.2)

Her order indicates her control not only over Mellyagaunt, as he is its recipient, but also over her knights, whom she explicitly protects in her statement. The resultant spatial arrangement of Gwenyver’s captivity complicates her enclosure somewhat. Gwenyver occupies a noticeably interior space, which connotes both femininity and boundedness. Her chamber lies beyond and within the chamber housing her wounded knights, who both protect and are protected by her. However, they also mark an additional barrier between Gwenyver and freedom, thus acting on her captor’s behalf as well as her own. Windows introduce an additional complication to the enclosure of the captive. The window provides visual (and, as is discussed below, physical) access – in and out – making it possible for the captive to see her savior (and then her lover) arrive, and thus acts as an architectural breach. Malory, like his sources, depicts Gwenyver in the window awaiting Launcelot’s arrival: ‘And more than an owre and an halff Quene Gwenyvere was awaytyng in a bay-wyndow. Than one of hir ladyes aspyed an armed knyght stondyng in a charyote’ (848.15–17). Gwenyver recognizes Launcelot by his shield and is emboldened by his presence. As Davidson argues women often do in the text, Gwenyver observes and reads the situation, and acts in response.54 Her glance to the world outside the walls of her prison is 53

Sue Best, ‘Sexualizing Space,’ in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 183 [181–94]. 54 See Roberta Davidson, ‘Reading Like a Woman in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 16.1 (2006): 21–33.

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quite literal – a marked change from other prisoners that is made possible by the architectural and social conditions of her captivity. At the same time, the window also serves as a frame. When in the window, Gwenyver is surrounded by the castle structure and becomes a visible part of its masculine significance because she is a captive of the castle’s proprietor. However, gender is neither so fixed nor so unilateral as this first glance might indicate. Gwenyver’s physical location and the fluidity of her boundedness mirror the constant realignment of dominance, both personal and spatial, in the tale. Gwenyver’s mandate that her men must remain with her exhibits an authority that eclipses boundaries imposed by gender and by the captor– captive relationship in its assertion of the queen’s agency over herself.55 She is the first captive to negotiate (successfully) the spatial details of her imprisonment, and in doing so she notes her sovereignty over her own body – perhaps most at risk, considering the ‘amorous’ intentions of her captor – claiming that she prefers suicide to being alone with Mellyagaunt. She is in this regard reiterating an earlier claim to the same effect: ‘And me I lat the wyte thou shalt never shame, for I had levir kut myne owne throte in twayne rather than thou sholde dishonoure me’ (844.3–5). Gwenyver’s likely reasonable concern for her body and the command it prompts her to make to the abductor, however, become meaningful only because of Launcelot’s physical presence – or the threat thereof. While Mellyagaunt does reassure her in one breath that ‘for your sake they shall be lad wyth you into myne owne castell,’ he stakes his claim in his next: ‘with that ye woll be reuled and ryde with me’ (845.3–5). The imposition of his will seems to depend on his castle as the location of her captivity. His reasoning, revealed shortly thereafter, belies a condition to his power: he can wield power over her at his castle because he owns it, but he gains more by its separating her from Launcelot. Indeed, Malory explains that ‘Sir Mellyagaunt charged the quene and all her knyghtes that none of hir felyshyp shulde departe frome her, for full sore he drad sir Launcelot du Lake, laste he shulde have ony knowlecchynge’ (845.15–17). Even when physically absent, Launcelot thus mediates the relationship between Gwenyver and Mellyagaunt. Indeed, Mellyagaunt has long awaited an opportunity to abduct the queen, and this opportunity 55

However, it might be the intersection of gender and captivity at play here. Dunbabin (admittedly speaking of a time centuries before Malory’s own) indicates that ‘[l]adies of the highest rank, unless they posed a very real threat to the captor powers, generally received fairly liberal terms as prisoners,’ in Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, p. 116.

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exists only in Launcelot’s absence: ‘And the booke seyth he had layn in awayte for to stele away the quene, but evermore he forbare for bycause of Sir Launcelot; for in no wyse he wolde meddyll with the quene and Sir Launcelot were in her company, othir ellys and he were nerehonde’ (843.4–7). The sovereignty and safety enjoyed by Gwenyver is thus a product of geographical space, as much as it is one of architectural space. The impact of Launcelot’s geographical proximity manifests itself even more clearly as the physical distance is collapsed. The degree to which Gwenyver is able to manipulate Mellyagaunt and her own circumstances depends entirely on Launcelot’s nearness; Mellyagaunt’s access to power over her is inversely proportionate to Launcelot’s proximity. Gwenyver sends warning to her knight, and when Mellyagaunt realizes this, he obeys her: and they were com to hys castell; but in no wyse the quene wolde never lette none of the ten knyghtes and her ladyes oute of her syght, but allwayes they were in her presence. For the booke sayth sir Mellyagaunte durste make no mastryes for drede of sir Launcelot, insomuche he demed that he had warnynge. (846.6–10)

Indeed, as Eugène Vinaver notes, Malory adds to his source material the mention of Mellyagaunt’s dread.56 Malory heightens the triangulation of the spatial and gendered relationships of these three characters by making Launcelot a part of the equation in this way. The importance of space – of distance, specifically, from Mellyagaunt’s perspective – becomes more apparent as Launcelot approaches and ultimately arrives at Mellyagaunt’s castle to save the queen. The situation intensifies as Launcelot’s physical immediacy prompts a further adjustment of the power structure. Like Gwenyver, Mellyagaunt focuses his attention both onto the prison space and outward to the world beyond. Both his captive and her presumptive deliverer draw his gaze. The specter of Launcelot functions as a threat to Mellyagaunt’s body and a reminder of the potentially porous nature of his castle prison and the impact of that porosity on his own identity. When Launcelot has ‘comyn to the gatis of that castell,’ his presence initiates a further transfer of power from the captor to the captive (848.33). The space of captivity, moreover, becomes a more neutral – and even neutered – space. Mellyagaunt puts himself into the queen’s hands: ‘Mercy, madame, for now I putte me holé in your good grace’ (849.8). Mellyagaunt 56

Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd ed., 3 vols., ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 1607. References to Vinaver’s commentary will be cited by his name and the book title Works.

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repeats and expands upon this transferal a few lines later, ‘all thys that ys amysse on my party shall be amended ryght as youreselff woll devyse, and holy I put me in youre grace’ (849.12–14). Launcelot’s presence has made the continued subjection of Gwenyver (such as it was) entirely untenable. He first reverses the captor–captive relationship, putting himself into her power. He then requests that she exercise control over Launcelot, something her position as his queen and lover makes possible: ‘Madame, I wolde no more,’ seyde Sir Mellyagaunt, ‘but that ye wolde take all in youre owne hondys, and that ye woll rule my lorde Sir Launcelot. And such chere as may be made hym in thys poure castell ye and he shall have untyll to-morn, and than may ye and all they returne ayen unto Westmynster.’ (849.16–20)

When she meets with Launcelot, now out of danger and in control, Gwenyver exercises her rule over him: ‘Ryght so the quene toke Sir Launcelot by the bare honde, for he had put of hys gauntelot, and so she wente wyth hym tyll her chambir, and than she commaunded hym to be unarmed’ (850.24–26).57 Gwenyver here takes him by the hand, brings him to her own room, and orders that he remove his armor. All three acts hint at his submission to her, remind us that Mellyagaunt has likewise acquiesced to her, and further suggest that the space itself has changed. The final act in particular could signify the gendering of the scene. When Launcelot removes the trappings of knighthood, he is dissociating himself from a primary marker of masculinity in the text.58 The enclosed space was previously an integral part of Mellyagaunt’s articulation of his masculine power over the abducted queen, but now she rules the space as well as him and Launcelot. Indeed, this reconstruction of space and gender confounds attempts to assess masculinity and femininity as strict binary opposites, each with its own domain. This scene – in particular its placement of the characters together on an increasingly narrow stage – certainly does highlight the ways in which women in romance narratives obtain agency over themselves and over knights. Armstrong’s analysis of the episode points to their primacy in the genre: 57

Siobhán Wyatt discusses Gwenyver’s willingness to excuse Mellyagaunt’s crime as a function of keeping it all private, in contrast to her later (very public) desire to have Launcelot kill Mellyagaunt in battle, in Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur: The Autonomy of Speech in Malory’s Female Characters (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 153. 58 See Elizabeth Scala, ‘Disarming Launcelot,’ Studies in Philology 99.4 (2002): 380–403, for a nuanced discussion of unarming and disarming in the Morte.

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In their eagerness to serve her, respectively, these two knights demonstrate the fictitiousness of the ideal of masculine dominance and independent agency upon which the social structure is predicated. So dependent is the chivalric community upon a subjugated feminine presence for support, its agents risk enslaving themselves to these figures.59

She adds, ‘Service to the feminine becomes an obligation that dictates a knight’s action, a service from which he can never be free.’60 Armstrong rightly notes that knights need women, but from a spatial perspective, the gender relationship is hardly unilateral. While Gwenyver is given the right to dictate Mellyagaunt’s behavior, and later performs her power over Launcelot, it is Launcelot’s appearance at the castle gate that renders this possible. Without his visible and physical presence, Gwenyver’s resources and power are decidedly limited. Her control over the situation – and indeed the castle itself – is the real fiction. It is for Launcelot, and not Gwenyver, that Mellyagaunt surrenders his position. Indeed, the two male characters have just as much impact on the production of social space. Likewise, their posturing in and around the architectural structure proves to have considerable influence on their respective gender identities. Malory makes specific efforts in his redaction of the story to make the location physically present – in architectural and geographical senses – on the page and on the landscape. This heightened attention to the castle consequently helps determine (and then re-determine) the relative masculinities of the competing knights. That Mellyagaunt derives the bulk of his masculinity from the castle itself seems especially clear in Malory’s version. The author points out Mellyagaunt’s ownership of the castle that becomes Gwenyver’s prison: ‘and this knyght had that tyme a castell of the gyffte of kynge Arthure within seven myle of Westemynster’ (842.34–843.2). Vinaver notes that the French models do not assign ownership of any castle to the episode’s abductor.61 Giving Mellyagaunt possession of the building that houses Gwenyver against her will increases his physical control of her. It also signifies a more specific relationship between the man and the space. As it is his domain, Launcelot’s maneuvering within, around, and through its walls affects not only the production of space but also the construction 59

Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 185. Armstrong notes John Michael Walsh, ‘Malory’s “Very Mater of the Cheualer du Charyot”: Characterization and Structure,’ in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985): 207 [199–226]. 60 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 185. 61 Vinaver, Works, p. 1606.

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of the owner’s gender identity. Indeed, the attention to the castle’s architectural features emphasizes the interrelationship between space and character. Furthermore, the rather precise geographical mapping of the castle – seven miles from Westminster, which serves as the locus of King Arthur’s authority throughout the episode – draws attention to the importance of distance (and proximity).62 The threat of Launcelot is all the more potent because he can easily traverse those seven miles and thus collapse the buffer and remove the agency that that space provides. When Launcelot arrives at Mellyagaunt’s castle, he effects a rearrangement of the relationship between Mellyagaunt and Gwenyver, as discussed above. Throughout the remainder of the episode, Launcelot’s presence and his particular location within the castle participates in the constant flux of both knights’ masculine identities. Mellyagaunt asserts his identity through his mastery and knowledge of his own castle space. This of course contrasts with the primary model for constructing male gender identity in the Morte – knightly performances – but proves Mellyagaunt’s only means of affirming his identity at this moment. Mellyagaunt displays his ownership of the castle on several occasions in the tale. While Gwenyver is his captive (and then guest, on her final night), he considers even the most private space in her chamber, namely her bed, his own. He marks it as his territory when he walks into the queen’s chamber and ‘therewithall he opened the curtayne for to beholde her’ (853.1). Though no longer technically a captive, Gwenyver here is treated as one. Mellyagaunt quite literally sharpens his inward glance on her as he peers into the most private enclave of the space of (former) captivity. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury claim that ‘Visual access to a space is, of course, a way of laying claim to that space.’63 More than laying a claim, Mellyagaunt is reminding the audience that the space is already his. He owns the castle, the bedchamber, and the bed itself. Sack’s theory of territoriality helps explain Mellyagaunt’s use of space here. As a reminder, Sack tells us that

62

Indeed, Westminster is mentioned five more times over the course of this episode, at 846.11, 846.35, 849.20, 854.32, 855.8. Vinaver notes that in the French the location is Camelot, not Westminster, a substitution ‘which is common enough in M[alory], [and] helps to substitute a realistic background for the fairy-tale setting of the original,’ in Works, p. 1607. Vinaver directs the reader to Stewart, ‘English Geography in Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur,”’ p. 206. Of course, Malory’s Winchester location for Camelot already does that for Camelot itself. 63 Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, ‘Introduction,’ in Women’s Space, Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, eds. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 8 [1–21].

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[t]erritoriality for humans is a powerful geographic strategy to control people and things by controlling area. Political theories and private ownership of land may be its most familiar forms but territoriality occurs to varying degrees in numerous social contexts. It is used in everyday relationships and in complex organizations. Territoriality is a primary geographic expression of social power. It is the means by which space and society are interrelated.64

Mellyagaunt does indeed exert his geographical and social power by pulling back the curtains, as it enables him to reassert control over this space, which Launcelot’s presence and the lovers’ night together have diminished. This act reveals Gwenyver’s bloodied sheets, and Mellyagaunt seizes the opportunity to accuse her of adultery with one of her knights. Upon arrival, Launcelot admonishes Mellyagaunt, even putting him on trial, as Christina Francis suggests,65 and in doing so calls into question who has a right to this bed, this territory: ‘Now truly,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘ye ded nat youre parte nor knyghtly, to touche a quenys bed whyle hit was drawyn and she lyyng therein. And I dare say,’ seyde Syr Launcelot, ‘my lorde Kynge Arthur hymselff wolde nat have displayed hir curtaynes, she beyng within her bed, onles that hit had pleased hym to have layne hym downe by her. And therefore, Sir Mellyagaunce, ye have done unworshypfully and shamefully to youreselff.’ (853.35–852.6)

Launcelot claims this space for Gwenyver, a claim that rests on her status as queen, on his own arrival to ensure her deliverance, and on its very use as a bed, a space demanding privacy and thus automatically exempt from the control that ownership affords. Mahoney explains that ‘Guenevere’s bed, with the curtains drawn, is emphatically her private space. In a sense, the bed-space is metonymy for the body,’ which means this act at least hints at rape.66 Launcelot’s claim that Arthur himself would only have breached the curtains for sexual activity bolsters this idea: this act is a prelude to sex. However, Mellyagaunt appears not to understand this chastisement, replying, ‘Sir, I wote nat what ye meane,’ and proceeds to make his accusation about the queen’s apparent adultery the night before (854.7). This response and the lack of understanding it betrays indicate 64

Sack, Human Territoriality, p. 5. Sack later explains that ‘enforcement of access’ is one of the key ‘tendencies of territoriality,’ at p. 32. 65 Christina Francis, ‘Reading Malory’s Bloody Bedrooms,’ in Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur, ed. David Clark and Kate McCune, Arthurian Literature XXVIII (2011): 14 [1–19]. 66 Mahoney, ‘Symbolic Uses of Space,’ p. 104.

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that Mellyagaunt does not consider this private or sacred space. While his action is deemed most inappropriate – this is the queen’s bed – from the chivalric perspective offered by Launcelot (whose motives are themselves questionable), Mellyagaunt’s territorial rights as the owner of the castle and all of its space deem it unobjectionable in his own mind. Mellyagaunt again situates his masculinity in terms of his ownership and manipulation of castle space when he offers to take Launcelot on a tour of the castle and grounds, asking if he would like ‘to se escurys of thys castell’ (855.11). As the tour guide, Mellyagaunt can both physically direct Launcelot’s maneuverings through his space and show off his home. Launcelot accepts the offer of a tour and ‘than they wente togydir frome chambir to chambir’ (855.13). Mellyagaunt’s agency over the space and his guest becomes more apparent as the tour is shown to be a ruse: ‘as he wente with Sir Mellyagaunce he trade on a trappe, and the burde rolled, and there Sir Launcelot felle downe more than ten fadom into a cave full off strawe’ (855.18–20). The tour proves a mechanism to entrap Launcelot. Malory has reduced and changed his source(s) in several telling ways in this scene. Notably, here it is Mellyagaunt himself who leads Launcelot into captivity.67 This places the agency squarely in Mellyagaunt’s grasp. Jesmok argues that Launcelot and Mellyagaunt are in fact doubles of a sort, and that Launcelot is ‘internally sequestered while Mellyagaunt acts out the part of the “other man” in Guinevere’s life, one who arrogantly takes possession of her as Lancelot never dares to do.’68 Making Launcelot a captive thus allows Mellyagaunt to reassert power over Gwenyver, although she is no longer his prisoner. Moreover, because the prison is within Mellyagaunt’s castle, as opposed to at a separate stronghold, Launcelot is ensnared both literally and figuratively within his opponent’s space. Furthermore, Launcelot is held in a lower prison chamber, as opposed to the bedroom that Gwenyver inhabits while she is held captive. This, too, highlights the ways in which space mediates the gendered relationship between the two knights. Launcelot is below and within; Mellyagaunt is above and free to roam and to perform on the masculine battlefield – the outer world. Perhaps most important, that outer world does not now include Launcelot. Mellyagaunt thus requires the imprisonment of his rival in order to maintain his own knightly identity. 67

As Vinaver notes, in the Prose Lancelot, it is a dwarf that leads Lancelot to the trap when he thinks he is en route to meet Gawain; in Works, p. 1610. 68 Janet Jesmok, ‘The Double Life of Malory’s Lancelot du Lac,’ Arthuriana 17.4 (2007): 87 [81–92]. Jesmok’s larger discussion of these two men focuses particularly on the ways in which Launcelot becomes like Mellyagaunt.

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In discussing Chrétien’s version of the story, Jerome Mandel describes Mellyagaunt as ‘especially perversive also in the Host– Guest relationship.’69 Malory’s version invites a rethinking of this idea as Mellyagaunt’s perversity is part and parcel of the performance of ownership. It is through this disruption of proper host behavior that Mellyagaunt temporarily holds the upper hand. Because Launcelot presumably will not be able to appear for their combat, Mellyagaunt, and not the queen’s knight, may garner the masculinity associated with knightly battle. While he is in captivity, Launcelot’s spatial separation from Gwenyver and from the Arthurian court where he is supposed to battle Mellyagaunt to clear the queen’s name – participating in combat and protecting the queen being his hallmarks throughout the Morte – troubles his masculinity. Mellyagaunt effectively smothers Launcelot’s masculinity through the manipulation of space. Yet this proves only a temporary access to masculine identity, and is perhaps more than anything else a stopgap. Because he has thus far avoided battling Launcelot and behaved in an unchivalric manner in abducting Gwenyver and then invading her most private enclave, Mellyagaunt’s gender identity is perhaps already called into question. His castle likewise proves unreliable in its production of his masculinity. The mutability of the castle as representative of Mellyagaunt’s masculinity is shown in Launcelot’s ability to escape from his imprisonment – like the other prisons discussed in this chapter, this one proves permeable. It is important to note that this escape, like Launcelot’s earlier escape from Morgan and company, is made possible through the machinations of a lady, who demands a kiss in exchange for Launcelot’s release. She first asks him to lie with her, but this he refuses, maintaining his secret devotion to Gwenyver and his veneer of chastity. On the day of the battle, she reduces her fee and he remits the kiss, after which ‘she gate hym up and brought hym untyll hys armour,’ and takes him to select a horse (857.4–5). As he was previously led by Gwenyver and by Mellyagaunt, Launcelot again relies on another to guide his movements. This dependence on a woman while imprisoned and his reluctance to accept her initial offer underscores the anxiety surrounding gender identity and the role that castles play in the construction and mediation of that identity. On the one hand, Launcelot is entrapped in prison and thus placed in a passive and perhaps feminine position, in need of assistance; on the other hand, he knows that his masculinity demands more than just a relocation. He must maintain his 69

Jerome Mandel, ‘Proper Behavior in Chrétien’s Charrette: The Host–Guest Relationship,’ The French Review 48.4 (1975): 688 [683–89].

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virtues and allegiances (problematic as they may be) in order to claim his masculine identity because that identity is so enmeshed in his relationship with Gwenyver. This escape certainly calls attention to the flexible relationship between the productions of space and gender, but it is Launcelot’s earlier penetration of the castle space that best highlights this phenomenon. After arriving at Mellyagaunt’s castle and thus quelling the immediate danger imposed by the castle and its owner, Launcelot receives from the queen an invitation to meet her secretly that evening: So Sir Launcelot had grete chere with the quene. And than he made a promyse with the quene that the same nyght he sholde com to a wyndow outewarde towarde a gardyne, and that wyndow was barred with iron, and there Sir Launcelot promysed to mete her whan all folkes were on-slepe. (851.5–9)

That this is a disruption of space and of Mellyagaunt’s own masculine ownership is made clear by the mention of the bars on the windows and by the requirement that the tryst occur while others are sleeping and thus unaware. Launcelot’s mode of entrance further hints at the complex relationship between space and gender. He breaks into the castle and thus disrupts the prescribed routes of access. Rather than reaching Gwenyver’s chamber through sanctioned entryways and passages – undoubtedly a difficult feat – Launcelot makes his way to the chosen window through the garden: Than Sir Launcelot toke hys swerde in hys honde and prevaly wente to the place where he had spyed a ladder toforehande, and that he toke undir hys arme, and bare hit thorow the gardyne and sette hit up to the wyndow. And anone the quene was there redy to mete hym. (851.33–852.3)

Malory seems particularly cognizant of how he shapes space – both horizontally through the garden, which is often considered women’s realm, and vertically up the ladder, a detail Malory adds.70 Launcelot is already creatively sidestepping the castle’s floorplan. Paul Strohm notes that ‘the peculiarity of medieval space involves the extent to which it is already symbolically organized by the meaning-making activities of 70

See Vinaver, Works, p. 1609. Vinaver notes that the Prose Lancelot provides no details, and that in Chrétien’s version it is a piece of wall that has broken off which allows Lancelot to reach the window.

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the many generations that have traversed it.’71 Launcelot is defying that organization, which marks Mellyagaunt’s control of the space and, by extrapolation, his masculinity. He is traversing space in ways that are as yet undefined and thus producing new meaning for the space he crosses and the space he enters. Launcelot is thus rewriting what Strohm refers to as ‘presignifications.’72 This becomes more apparent as he breaks into Gwenyver’s room: ‘he sette hys hondis uppon the barrys of iron and pulled at them with suche a myght that he braste hem clene oute of the stone wallys … And than he lepe into the chambir to the quene’ (852.14– 18). This is indeed a hyper-masculine act, both in its show of brute strength and in its redefinition of Mellyagaunt’s space, as he permeates space that recently held Gwenyver prisoner. Launcelot claims the castle, or at least this section of it, for himself by redrawing the paths of access and subverting the owner. Of course, what follows – the only concrete evidence of Launcelot and Gwenyver’s physical relationship in Malory – completes and complements this fresh production of social space. The enclosure and its imposed separation have been completely breached. The bedroom, which will be re-inscribed the next morning by Mellyagaunt as he peers into the bed, is for now Launcelot’s space. Following Evans’s assertion that ‘the question of sexuality makes the space itself deviant, mobile, and heterotopic: queer rather than fixed,’ the evening introduces a marked change in the room.73 Although Mellyagaunt will temporarily restore his organization of space and his masculine standing by entrapping the queen’s knight, in the end Launcelot triumphs. Once out of prison, Launcelot travels back to Westminster, where the battle will take place under Arthur’s sanctioning eye, and swiftly defeats Mellyagaunt. Because his capture and enclosure of the queen prove ineffectual, both the man and the castle are reconfigured in terms of their gender constructions. The movement, in Malory’s redaction, of all battle from Mellyagaunt’s lands to Westminster emphasizes this shift.74 Throughout ‘The Knight of the Cart,’ the physical presence of the castle and the ways in which it creates spatial relationships that both mirror and significantly influence gendered relationships manifest 71

Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4. 72 Strohm, Theory, p. 4. 73 Evans, ‘Signs of the Body,’ p. 29. 74 R. H. Wilson notes that this relocation makes sense because it is a judicial battle (as Gwenyver has been accused of treason in her apparent adultery) and not a battle to save the queen from captivity, in ‘The Prose Lancelot in Malory,’ University of Texas Studies in English 32 (1953): 13 [1–13].

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themselves quite openly. The interaction between and among the three primary players, and their manipulation of space and location, underscore the malleability of social space and the fluidity of gender identities. Rendell claims that space can be ‘gendered according to the “gender” associated with the different kind of activities which occur in them,’ but it is more precise to say that there is a two-way relationship in this episode, like other intersections of space and identity discussed throughout this book.75 Mellyagaunt’s castle space, like that of Darras, Damas, and Morgan’s coterie of queens, is gendered and re-gendered by acts in and around its prisons in particular, and that space likewise influences and helps construct characters’ gender identities. These prison spaces, as permeable and impermanent as they prove to be, reveal much about those on both sides of the walls. Likewise, the captive and captors alike tell us about the prisons and their places within the larger castle floorplan, physically and – perhaps especially – symbolically. I cannot, then, agree with T. J. Lustig’s claim that ‘Malory’s treatment of the prison scenes lacks specificity: dungeons are merely “deep” and imprisonment a matter for “sorrow.”’76 Imprisonment is, for those enclosed, a source of at times extreme alienation from one’s (predetermined and desired) identity. The jailers’ case tends to be the opposite: the majority of the identity that Malory allots to them derives from the act of imprisoning and from the (in)ability of their walls to hold. The prisons themselves hold not only sorrow, but also sickness and death, and provide space for meditation about all of these things, including one’s own standing in and out of the world. Prison and time spent in captivity thus provide a powerful – if, at times, bleak – lens through which to view and understand Malory’s characters and places. This chapter has traveled away from Arthur’s own castles, to places where his authority is breached and where he, his knights, his queen, and others experience – suffer – disjunction from their individual and communal identities, which are so intimately tied to the spaces that they inhabit and move between. Prison arrests that motion, and the resultant stasis elicits introspection both literal and figurative, as those imprisoned consider their place of enclosure and its effects on their bodies and their identities. The immobility and alienation imposed by captivity likewise invite its victims to look outside, to see the world they desire. Both the people and the places often reach points of crisis: prisoners by sacrificing 75 76

Rendell, ‘Introduction,’ p. 101. T. J. Lustig, Knight Prisoner: Sir Thomas Malory Then and Now (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), p. 101.

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physical or mental well-being or even life, or by compromising their beliefs at an ethical crux; captors through the examination of their own position and identity in relation to captives and castle; prison spaces via their leakiness, their inability to hold. As the following chapter exhibits, wartime, too, tests castles as physical and social spaces.

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Castles at War In a 2011 visit to Warwick Castle – home to the Beauchamp earls who loomed large in Malory’s formative years and then to Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, known by the moniker ‘Kingmaker’ because of his role in the civil wars that dominated Malory’s later life – I saw ‘The Mighty Trebuchet,’ heralded on the castle website as ‘the largest working siege machine IN THE WORLD!’1 The site goes on to exclaim, ‘The colossal catapult is an authentic recreation of one of the biggest and most deadly military machines of all time.’ I cannot verify the first claim, as I am no expert in medieval weapon re-enactment, though I will say it was big.2 The second claim seems patently false, even in the era of the ‘alternative fact.’ The massive death tolls caused by bombs in the last century tragically dwarf the abilities of the trebuchet and other siege engines. But it is not just the numbers of casualties that separate modern and medieval weaponry. Today’s high-tech weapons (such as drones, long-range missiles, airplanes) and military tactics (midnight raids and air strikes, for example) allow much more physical distance – and potentially psychological distance, too – than even the most powerful of medieval siege engines could afford. Malory’s Morte Darthur, written in a time of war and changing military tactics, examines the personal side of confrontations staged in and around castles. The proximity of combatants in the wars that close the Morte and the heightened attention to the castle invite a look at the effect of space on war and that of war on space. Wars include not just combat itself, but also communication in the form of both letters and conversations. We see allies huddle together and opponents negotiate from opposite sides of sieges. These battles thus play out as personal conflicts shaped by and trying to shape the spaces where they happen. Lynch argues that ‘[f]ights provide … the major places in Malory.’3 He further notes the use of combat to map the narrative. I find this especially relevant as the Morte moves back into full-scale war toward its end. 1



‘The Trebuchet Talk,’ Warwick Castle, accessed 5 February 2017, ; emphasis original. 2 I will also note that Wikipedia agrees with Warwick Castle’s official position, for what that’s worth. See ‘Trebuchet,’ Wikipedia, accessed 5 February 2017, . 3 Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 46; emphasis original.

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The Morte, like Malory’s own life, is more or less bookended by war: we have the early battles detailing Arthur’s accession to the throne and his assumption of power over a sizable empire, as detailed in Chapter One, and we end with a series of battles pitting Arthur against Launcelot, Mordred against Gwenyver, and finally Arthur against Mordred. The importance of castles during the narration of the early wars section should be – in part, at least – a guide to how we read castles at war in the end of the text. Michael Pearson and Colin Richards explain that ‘[s]tories and tales may be attached to such places, making them resonate with history and experience. The culturally constructed elements of the landscape are thus transformed into material and permanent markers and authentications of history, experience, and values.’4 The memories of early wars and the roles of castles in those conflicts linger and continue to guide how we read those castles – and perhaps all castles – when the text returns to war. The Morte suggests, however, that there is something more going on. In the closing pages of the text, and thus in the closing days of Arthur’s realm, the buildings and their spaces figure more prominently than they did in the wars of empire building. They transcend the symbolic assertion of Arthur’s power (or his opponent’s), although that significance still resonates and is tested. The military vocabulary of the castle meets the social space of the castle at war, and the conjunction of these two ideas vexes both. As the castles become more visible sites of battle, and as the story zooms in on the personal attachments to both people and places, identity struggles that are explicitly spatial emerge. This is apparent to the combatants in the text and to readers of the text, manifesting in the dissonance between Launcelot’s behaviors and the expectations of him as premier knight and proprietor of the besieged Joyus Garde and Benwick, in Gwenyver’s ability to hold the Tower of London, and in Arthur’s actions as he lands at Dover and battles Mordred’s troops. These final and fully emplaced battles, engaging castle spaces in ways that the earlier empire-building wars did not, test the theories of social space as well as the castle itself. The tension of the spaces rivals that of the battles that they host. This last chapter, then, traces the final acts of the king, the queen, and his knights across and beside castles. The first in this series of battles pits Arthur and Gawayne against Launcelot. The schism between Arthur and Launcelot of course originates in the revelation and publicization of the adulterous and treasonous 4

Michael Parker Pearson and Colin Richards, ‘Ordering the World, Perceptions of Architecture, Space and Time,’ in Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space, eds. Michael Parker Pearson and Colin Richards (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 4 [1–37].

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affair between the queen and the best knight, and widens in the wake of Gareth’s death by Launcelot’s hand as the latter saves the queen from death by fire.5 The slaying of Gawayne’s youngest and best brother shifts Gawayne from a neutral position to an adversarial one, as it sparks his desire for vengeance, the trait that follows him from his entrance into Arthur’s court almost to his deathbed. For Launcelot, both the schism and the ensuing battle are unwelcome, and he uses a combination of castle space and language to address the rift – and try to end it. In using his castles and their architecture in pursuit of peace even as war rages around him, Launcelot attempts both to alter the meaning of the castle space and to assert a new version of his masculine knightly identity via that space. The result is competing energies in and around that castle, and Launcelot’s efforts prove ineffective uses of space. In the sieges at Joyus Garde and then Benwick, the multiple ways in which architectural structures generally, and castles specifically, participate in the construction of gender identity seem fragmented and crucially altered by Launcelot’s refusals to join the battle. Although facets of masculinity – political, financial, martial, and sexual – usually cluster around the castle, and although war provides an opportunity to heighten this, when Launcelot holes himself and his loyal followers up within these castle walls, and when he speaks to his opponents from atop them, his gender identity is fractured and the text’s construction of masculinity becomes disjointed. The relationship between castle space and imagery on the one hand and gender on the other fluctuates during Launcelot’s extended periods atop the walls of his castles. Launcelot attempts to refocus attention on his linguistic and ethical masculinities, as opposed to purely physical versions of male gender identity, and does so in ways quite different – exaggerated even – from the corresponding scenes in either the French Le Mort le Roi Artu or the English Stanzaic Morte Arthur. In the process, the space itself comes under pressure. Launcelot’s departure from his active masculinity creates an energy (to return to Lefebvre’s term) at odds with that of the rest of the knights – those with him and those against him, both of whom query this behavior. His inaction competes with their understanding of both castles and war. Launcelot’s position as the premier knight of the Round Table is fairly secure throughout Malory’s Morte, even in the shadow of growing rumor (and perhaps evidence) of his adulterous relationship with the queen. He retains this status primarily through successive performances of physical 5

For a discussion of the relationship between these civil wars, honor, and chivalry, see Lisa Robeson, ‘Noble Knights and “Mischievous War”: The Rhetoric of War in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,’ Arthuriana 13.3 (2003): 10–35.

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masculine acts, and, as Chapter Two details, the community embraces him because of this prowess and uses it in defining the court. Each victory in combat testifies to Launcelot’s prominence via his insurmountable strength and skill in battle. The discussions of these triumphs, among other characters as well as by the narrator, further bolster his claim to the highest position. Throughout most of the narrative, then, he is both the superlative actor of knightly deeds and the regular subject of others’ speech. Together these produce (and reproduce) his reputation and gender identity. However, when pitted against his beloved King Arthur, and against Gawayne, Launcelot chooses not to participate in physical battle (or at least delays confrontation). He places the castle – and words – between himself and his new opponent. The castle, especially in wartime, has proven to be an integral part of its owner’s identity and authority, as we saw with Arthur’s rise to power in Chapter One and with Mellyagaunt in Chapter Five. According to Whitaker’s idea of the castle’s radiating authority, Launcelot himself should appear – and be – quite powerful as he speaks from the heights of his castle walls.6 He is the best knight, and is seen as owner and lord of a presumably strong and imposing castle. Moreover, his placement on the vertical plane, high above King Arthur, Gawayne, and the others on that side, seems ready-made to enhance his physical presence and to attest to his standing. However, this is certainly not the case, at least not according to the rubric of masculinity that has been established throughout the bulk of the Morte. Launcelot’s positioning above the castle proves detrimental to his masculine standing. The castle itself seems an unstable signifier, particularly in its liminal spaces, like on the walls, which provide the locus for the new brands of masculinity and knighthood that Launcelot endeavors to create. This new brand draws on existing elements of knighthood – the Pentecostal Oath and loyalty to the fellowship of the Round Table, for instance – but rejects performance of combat as the primary marker of masculinity. As an admittedly emotionally invested reader of the story, I understand Launcelot’s impulses. While throughout much the story his two loves – Queen Gwenyver on the one side and King Arthur and the Round Table ethos on the other – have more often than not worked in concert, maintaining both becomes untenable as the adulterous love affair becomes excessively public. It can thus be hard to read about Launcelot’s and Arthur’s struggles as the remaining pages become fewer and fewer. Yet I am also drawn to the seismic effects these events have on the society and, in particular, to the ways in which Malory’s version is different from 6

Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ p. 74.

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his source texts. Two things jump out: the increased focus on words (vs. actions), and the heightened attention to castle space. Looking at these moments, and especially at the relationship between language and space, allows us to see Launcelot’s radical, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to use and change existing ideas about castles simultaneously. Upon the schism of the Round Table into two factions, Launcelot and his followers secure themselves and the queen at Joyus Garde, Launcelot’s residence. Joyus Garde has a long history in the Morte – and an important future beyond this crucial encounter. It provides a sanctuary (and, presumably, a love nest) for Trystram and Isode far from King Mark. Launcelot himself brings the pair to Joyus Garde, that was his owne castell, and he had wonne hit with his owne hondis. And there Sir Launcelot put them in, to welde hit for theire owne. And wyte you well that castell was garnyshed and furnysshed for a kynge and a quene royall there to have suggeourned. And Sir Launcelot charged all his people to honoure them and love them as they wolde do hymselff. (537.29–34)

Here in Joyus Garde’s earlier life, it houses – indulges, even – the adulterous Trystram and Isode like a king and a queen. We learn later that their stay lasted almost three years, and it leaves an indelible mark on the castle. The story sticks to the space, as Pearson and Richards’s theory indicates. Indeed, as Launcelot and his loyal allies plan to bring the rescued Gwenyver to Joyus Garde, we are reminded of the castle’s past. Its ability to hold Trystram and Isode safely away from the dangers posed by Mark lends credence to the notion that it will protect Queen Gwenyver from King Arthur’s anger. Sir Bors provides this advice: for how ded the moste noble knyght Sir Trystram? By youre good wyll, kept nat he with hym La Beall Isode nere thre yere in Joyous Garde, the whych was done by youre althers avyce? And that same place ys youre owne, and in lyke wyse may ye do and ye lyst, and take the quene knyghtly away with you, if so be that the kynge woll jouge her to be brente. And in Joyous Garde may ye kepe her longe inowe untyll the hete be paste of the kynge, and than hit may fortune you to brynge the quene agayne to the kynge with grete worshyp, and peradventure ye shall have than thanke for your bryngyng home where othir may happyn to have magré. (880.33–881.8)

Bors suggests that the model provided by Trystram and Isode’s earlier stay will work for Launcelot and his own queen, and that this can be an honorable act, and one that will earn Launcelot worship. In this, he tries to

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distance the castle, and thus Launcelot and Gwenyver, from adultery. The idea here is that Launcelot’s actions will be ‘knyghtly.’ The later assertion that ‘he kepte her as a noble knyght shulde’ speaks to this attempted rewriting of the castle’s story, and the scrubbing clean of the relationship between the queen and her knight (885.20–21). It is also important to note that Launcelot had previously won this castle, undoubtedly through the prowess of his hands. Thus, it also represents his very knighthood, as opposed to his family or class status, as an inherited castle might. This, too, remains embedded in the fabric of the castle and any reading of it. He carries this status – owner by conquest – with him in the fight against Arthur, Gawayne, and company. Joyus Garde maintains these memories, and is shaped both by this remembrance and by the flurry of new activity. Malory’s Joyus Garde receives the specific geographic placement that typifies Malory’s treatment of the English landscape.7 Malory locates Joyus Garde at either Bamburgh or Alnwick, though not until the closing moments of the story when Launcelot’s body is interred there. Malory cannot pinpoint which of the two castles is Joyus Garde – a hesitancy that he blames on others: ‘Somme men say it was Anwyk, and somme men say it was Bamborow’ (937.29–30). Malory’s sources do not map Launcelot’s castle quite so clearly. The Stanzaic Morte offers no details, and the earlier French Mort presents a hazy location near the Humber River, and couples that with some less discernible places.8 Both options in Malory are situated in northeast England, though well north of the Humber: Bamburgh perches on the coast about twenty-four miles from the current Scottish border, and Alnwick rests seventeen miles further south and about six miles inland, on the River Aln. Bamburgh and Alnwick, as Field details, were Lancastrian castles that hosted Yorkist sieges in late 1462, and Malory is listed among the milites who participated.9 The political and even the geographical ramifications, however, interest me less than the architectural and spatial ones. Malory links Launcelot’s Joyus Garde to castles that he knows, that he perhaps envisions. My thought has always 7

See Stewart, ‘English Geography in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.’ In the French La Mort le Roi Artu, once Lancelot announces his plan to go to Joyous Garde, we learn (though not in all manuscripts) that the castle is located near the city of Longueles. As the action moves toward Joyous Gard, we see a mapping of the castle. Lancelot and company stay at Castle Kalec/Kalet en route, and later King Arthur’s army of knights travels via Castle Lamborc. All of these places bear an air of geographical mystery. See La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, 105–108; The Death of Arthur, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 7, pp. 72–74. 9 Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, p. 26. Armstrong and Hodges note that Malory’s involvement in those encounters would lodge the two castles in his mind, though they also rightly warn against reading too much into that, in Mapping Malory, pp. 170–71, and p. 201, n. 50. They further argue that this placement can align Launcelot both with and against Scotland’s rulers, at pp. 81, 84, and 123.

8



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Plate 6: Bamburgh Castle

been that he himself has one pictured in his mind, but cannot be sure which it is – not that the lack of surety belongs to the population at large, as he suggests. The two castles present different settings for the action, and especially for the conversations that aim to negotiate battle and space. Bamburgh Castle towers high above the small town on one side, and the shore on the other (Plate 6). It is imposing vertically, and makes it difficult but enchanting to think about communication from the walls, as will be detailed below. Alnwick, on the other hand, seems excellently suited to host a siege, as it provides ample space for Arthur’s troops and would more realistically permit the conversation (see cover image). As Joyus Garde – at whichever locale – transforms into a site for battle, Malory makes clear that this is a ‘stronge castell’ that is fully furnished with supplies and people (889.22). But Arthur feels confident that he is ‘bygge inowghe to dryve hym oute of the bygyst toure of hys castell’ (889.6–7). Arthur’s words recognize the symbolic nature of conquering and possessing castles. He is reading castles – and himself – as his early successes in war trained him to, and his words recall the rhetoric of those early battles.10 Indeed, this remains a constant for Arthur throughout the confrontations that close the Morte. 10

It is important to note that when faced with his very first military encounter upon becoming king, Arthur took himself ‘to a strong towre wyth fyve honderd good men with hym’ (12.16–17), and remained inside for fifteen days while his enemies began their siege. Quite different from Launcelot’s delayed exit from Joyus Garde, however, he then (on Merlyn’s advice and accompanied by several men) ‘came oute of his tour and had under his gowne a jesseraunte of double maylle’ (13.9–10), and spoke to the opponent with ‘no mekenes but stoute wordes on bothe sydes’ (13.14). Arthur’s aggression in response to their words leaves them angry, and certainly attests to his willingness and ability to undertake battle, as does his armor.

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Launcelot, however, nods in the direction of the symbolic resonance of holding a castle under siege, but prefers not to engage in battle, not to undertake the acts of keeping his property securely his. His stagnancy, though rooted in an understanding of the power of the castle, changes the castle’s meaning – or at least tries to. During fifteen weeks of siege, Launcelot refuses to let his men fight back. After this period of inactivity in the face of siege, ‘hit felle uppon a day in hervest tyme that sir Launcelot loked over the wallys, and spake on hyght unto Kynge Arthure and to Sir Gawayne’ (889.31–33). Here, as Vinaver notes, Malory turns to his English source, expanding it greatly.11 This expansion takes the form of an extended conversation, in addition to the added detail about being ‘on hyght’ on the castle ‘wallys.’ The spatial details emplace the conversation in a way that the Stanzaic Morte Arthur does not, and highlight the ways in which Launcelot uses the architectural details of the castle to his advantage. The vertical distance that he places between himself and his interlocutors suggests a hierarchy with him at the top, and forces Gawayne and Arthur to view the whole castle (beneath Launcelot’s feet) as Launcelot imparts his message. Launcelot may be trying to enact the castle’s significance – even weaponize it – as he tries to avoid battle. The walls also demarcate the boundary between the castle and the rest of the world, between avoiding battle and joining it. They allow him to be on the verge, and to try to use that liminality in his argument against this war. The message that he delivers atop those walls, on that border, evidences a desire to renegotiate the meaning of knighthood and the castle at war. Newman rightly notes the polyvalence of Lancelot’s words, describing each of these speeches as ‘an extraordinary mix of courtesy, humility, damage control, and Beowulfian boasting.’12 I think that we can understand them even better if we put them in place. More so than in much of the Morte, Malory here uses speech to peer into a character’s own thought process. Lynch notes that speech in Malory tends to be ‘closer to action than opinions,’ and that ‘[f]irst person utterance loses much of its subjectivity, lacking the sense of an interior personal being at a potential distance from the action in which he or she figures.’13 Launcelot’s appeal to Arthur and Gawayne breaks from that pattern. His long dialogue includes several attempts to use language to stop the battle, and he weaves in notions of himself, of his opponents, and of the communal bond and 11

Malory, Works, ed. Vinaver, p. 1635. In the French there is no such conversation, though we do see much of Lancelot within these castle walls. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur is more compact. See ll. 2110–52. 12 Newman, Medieval Crossover, p. 97. 13 Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 137.

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its ideals in an emotionally charged – and desperate – turn to words over action. He first uses his own reputation, claiming: My lordis bothe, wyte you well all thys ys in vayne that ye make at thys syge, for here wynne ye no worshyp, but magré and dishonoure. For and hit lyste me to com myselff oute and my good knyghtes, I shulde full sone make an ende of thys warre. (889.33–890.2)

Later (after offering to return the queen to her husband), he observes that ‘and me lyste to come oute of thys castell ye shuld wyn me and the quene more harder than ever ye wan a stronge batayle’ (891.18–20). In this second claim, he also points to the castle as the only thing preventing him from engaging and defeating Arthur, Gawayne, and their gathered troops. It also invites his audience (and the text’s audience) to view and consider the castle once again. Launcelot’s second tactic for avoiding this confrontation is to attest to his own loyalty to the king: ‘“God deffende me,” seyde Sir Launcelot, “that ever I shulde encountir wyth the most noble kynge that made me knyght”’ (890.6–7). In this, Malory’s text echoes his source poem, in which Launcelot closes his short speech with a request that neither Arthur nor Gawayne meet him on the field of battle. Malory reconfigures this idea to make Launcelot more introspective, more meditative on how this battle and potential combat against his king reflect on his knightly standing. Malory’s Launcelot evokes God’s help in avoiding that dreaded combat, in hopes of preserving their old ties. This sense of absolute loyalty follows Launcelot when he is at last forced to join the fray, where he forbids his men from approaching the king or Gawayne, and even sees to Arthur’s re-horsing.14 Third, Launcelot devotes considerable attention, particularly in his long speech, to the Oath that governs Round Table knights.15 In this speech he denies any impropriety in his relationship with Gwenyver and implicitly refers to two parts of the Pentecostal Oath. Launcelot claims that ‘my lady Quene Gwenyvere ys as trew a lady unto youre person as ys ony lady lyvynge unto her lorde’ (890.26–28). Readers must wrestle with this argument, as it skirts the truth at best.16 Launcelot persuades more readily 14

Hodges sees Launcelot refusal to fight Arthur or Gawayne directly as an effort to uphold the tenets of the Pentecostal Oath, in Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 149. 15 In this third method, I see much of what Crofts describes as Launcelot’s fatherly nature, in Malory’s Contemporary Audience, p. 134. 16 See, for example, Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision, p. 177; Ann Dobyns, ‘“Shameful Noyse”: Lancelot and the Language of Deceit,’ Style 24 (1990): 89–102; Peter R. Schroeder, ‘Lancelot as Casuist,’ in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. Edward D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2007), pp. 95–112. Schroeder provides a good overview of scholarly discussion on the matter.

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when discussing less fraught histories. In his defense of saving Gwenyver from burning, he seems to invoke the so-called ladies’ clause, which commands the knights ‘allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes soccour, strengthe hem in hir ryghtes’ (97.31–33). Here atop the walls of Joyus Garde, he tells the king, ‘mesemyth I had loste a grete parte of my worshyp in my knyghthod and I had suffird my lady youre quene to have ben brente, insomuche as she shulde have bene brente for my sake’ (891.5–7). He also calls this the queen’s ‘ryght quarell’ (891.10), which although not exactly an invocation of the Oath, certainly does resonate with the prohibition against ‘wrongefull quarell’ (97.34). It also suggests that those who fought against him to prevent his saving the queen participated in wrongful quarrel. That alone could justify their deaths.17 Later, he calls upon the ‘feyth that I owghe unto the hyghe order of knyghthode’ (891.29– 30). In each instance, Launcelot relies on shared belief in the Oath to mend the rift. Launcelot also references the Orkney clan’s unchivalrous dealings with Lameroke, thus calling into question Gawayne’s own enactment of the Oath. Each of these three tacks represents a marked shift from Launcelot’s previous model of acting first and (maybe) thinking later. Here he carefully meditates on and talks about the various aspects of his knighthood, all the while positioning them and himself in relation to his castle. His words fall on deaf ears, or at least uninterested and immovable ones. King Arthur has had enough of Launcelot’s ‘fayre langayge,’ as he calls it (890.8),18 and Gawayne of the ‘proude wordis’ (891.21).19 Both men thus mock (and in Gawayne’s case, even taunt) their former friend and ally and his deviation from the normative mode of settling quarrels, namely battle. As in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Launcelot is also called a ‘false recreayed knyght’ (891.13) and a ‘false knyght’ (892.15), but here in direct speech, as well as a traitor. Even his own knights speak disparagingly of his actions (or lack thereof). Bors, Ector, Palomydes, Safyr, Lavayne, and Urré all dislike the ‘grete rebukis’ (893.1) their leader has received. They tell him that they wish to ride out of the castle walls to battle, and furthermore claim that Launcelot himself ‘fare as a man that were aferde, and for all your fayre speche hit woll nat avayle you, for wyte you well Sir Gawayne woll nevir suffir you to accorde wyth Kynge Arthur. And therefore fyght for youre lyff and youre ryght, and ye dare’ (893.4–8). They, too, find his privileging of speech problematic. 17

This is, of course, complicated by the fact that Gareth and Gaherys did not actually fight, choosing to show loyalty to the king without taking up wrongful quarrel. 18 He uses the same terminology at 892.7; he also calls Launcelot ‘false and recrayde knight’ (891.23), and simply ‘recrayed knight’ (891.34). 19 Both phrases follow ‘fy on thy.’

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These are Launcelot’s best efforts to assert and maintain his knightly reputation through fair words, but they are of no avail. It is perhaps just too late in the game to refashion completely the construction of masculine and knightly identity. More seems to be at stake, though. Susan Bardsley points out that ‘[b]ecause illicit speech was so emphatically coded a feminine failing, men who spoke too much or in inappropriate contexts risked the charge of effeminacy, of possessing “lame tongues,” worn out by overuse.’20 The response to his hesitancy, to his use of words, suggests that his peers certainly see it as problematic and explicitly breaking masculine expectations. It is only with his hands, with his strength, that Launcelot – or any knight – can prove his worth and stake a claim to being ‘right.’ And so, again from on high, Launcelot tells his opponents that he will enter the battle, but will not fight directly against his two longtime friends. He succumbs, at least in part, to the tried-and-true methods of the Arthurian community of knights, agrees to prove himself in physical combat, but even then retains a hint of the liminality of the castle walls by refusing battle against Arthur or Gawayne. Then, with some intervention from the pope, Launcelot does hand Queen Gwenyver over to her husband and retreats, still a sworn enemy, to his lands in France. In the moment of the exchange, too, he tries to negotiate an end to the quarrel, as he offers to perform acts of penance to and for Gawayne and his lost brothers. Gawayne accepts no apologies and offers no forgiveness. Launcelot is here relying on speech, as he tried to do atop his castle walls. Kim concludes that this conversation, which includes a long speech by Launcelot and a cursory response by Gawayne, and in particular its appeal to the many weeping onlookers and the reader alike, proves a ‘triumph of Lancelot’s “fayre langayge.”’21 Kim further argues, ‘There is no evidence that such rhetorical skill is ever condemned in the Morte Darthur. Conversely, it is presented as another factor contributing to Lancelot’s ultimate overthrow of Gawain, which is after all a political, as well as a physical or moral, victory.’22 Here, away from the battlefield, and at Arthur’s own castle of Carlisle, perhaps language can function in this way, but it is impossible to escape the rejection of language both before and after this scene. The very real presence of war – loud, violent, and urgent – in the episodes at Joyus 20

Susan Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 104. 21 Kim, The Knight without the Sword, p. 98. Kurtis B. Haas also discusses Launcelot’s superior eloquence, in ‘Ciceronian Rhetorical Principles in Malory’s Last Book: The Exoneration of Sir Lancelot,’ Studia Neophilologica 71.2 (1999): 178 [174–82]. 22 Kim, The Knight without the Sword, p. 98.

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Garde and Benwick that sandwich the return of the queen overshadows eloquence as a valuable knightly virtue. At Launcelot’s castle in Benwick, then, we witness a reprise of the verbal wrangling, and a return to the castle walls. While in his version of the siege and battles at Benwick Malory does not alter or add nearly as much material concerning either Launcelot’s use of the castle walls or his preference for language over action, these elements are present. Thus, they repeat in a way the previous episode and emphasize the attempt to maintain masculine knightly identity while avoiding the stage on which this identity is usually performed and proven. As at Joyus Garde, Launcelot is reluctant to enter battle, and even to let his loyal knights fight for him. As with the previous encounter, both the opponent (in particular Gawayne, of course) and Launcelot’s own men are troubled by his inaction and say as much to him. Once again, Launcelot wants to rely on the building, to ‘kepe oure stronge wallis’ (907.16–17), and not his well-known physical prowess, for protection against those besieging him and his home. As before, he enters the battle only after talking to Arthur and Gawayne from his castle walls. This time, we first hear the words of Launcelot’s fellows, who point out to him (and to us) that Launcelot’s current method breaks the mold, and not in a good way. Galyhud tells him, Sir, here bene knyghtes com of kyngis blood that woll nat longe droupe and dare within thys wallys. Therefore gyff us leve, lyke as we ben knyghtes, to mete hem in the fylde, and we shall sle them that they shall curse the tyme that ever they cam into thys contrey. (906.30–907.3)

Galyhud here indicates what knights do, how knights are expected to act. Immediately after this, the seven brothers from North Wales reiterate the notion, saying, ‘Sir Launcelot, for Crystis sake, late us ryde oute with sir Galyhud, for we were never wonte to coure in castels nother in noble townys’ (907.7–9). Both comments indicate that Launcelot’s knights do not value this as a strategy that ‘makes perfect military sense,’ as Thomas J. Farrell rightly describes it.23 On the contrary, they draw attention to the sharp contrast between Launcelot and the norm. Knights are supposed to undertake battle. Both also invoke the castle specifically as a barrier between the speakers and knightly behavior – and thus between Launcelot and knightly behavior. They point to his hiding (‘droupe’), his inaction (‘dare’), and his cowering (‘coure’). These words imply more than 23

Thomas J. Farrell, ‘The Clash of Genres at the Siege of Benwick,’ Arthuriana 16.2 (2006): 90 [88–93].

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a simple aversion to battle – they suggest fear and cowardice. They also specifically note that Launcelot uses the walls and the castle in service of that cowardice. Malory adds this to his source. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur uses much of the same language, but does not emplace the cowardice: Galyhud that ay was goode To Launcelot he spekys thare, ‘Syr, here ar knyghtis of kynges blode That longe wylle not droupe and dare; Gyffe me leve, for crosse on rode, Withe my men to them to fare. Thoughe they be wers than outlawes wode, I shall them sle and make full bare.’ Off Northe Gales were bretherne seven, Ferly mekelle of strenghe and pryde, Not full fele that men coude nevyne Better dorste in bataile byde. And they sayd with one steven, ‘Lordyngis, how longe will ye chyde? Launcelot, for Goddys love in heven, With Galehud forthe lette us ryde.’

(2572–87)

The poem does mark the dissonance between knightly behavior and that of Launcelot, but does not position the castle itself between him and the war. Malory’s particular attention to the castle suggests an interest in space and its function. The castle becomes not a symbolic stand-in for Launcelot’s masculine, knightly standing, but a hindrance to it. Its military vocabulary cannot overwrite Launcelot’s (lack of) actions, which pervert and undercut that vocabulary. The words of his supporters seem harsh, but Launcelot does not take the bait. Rather he tries first to avert further confrontation through a peace treaty, which is quickly rejected at Gawayne’s counsel. The battle begins, but Launcelot again delays joining. It is the words of both Gawayne and his own loyal supporters that finally draw Launcelot from behind the walls. Gawayne taunts him, and as in the episode at Joyus Garde there is a shift from indirect to direct speech in Malory’s redaction.24 Daily for six months Gawayne continues to present himself to Benwick and Launcelot. Each time, he arrives armed, signaling his preparedness for battle and attesting to his own knighthood. The war rages, and many 24

For a discussion of direct speech in Malory, see Catherine LaFarge, ‘Conversation in Malory’s Morte Darthur,’ Medium Ævum 56.2 (1987): 225–38, esp. 236–37.

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die in the conflict. After this extended period, Gawayne, ‘armed at all pecis, on a noble horse, with a greate speare in hys honde,’ once more addresses Launcelot directly: ‘Where arte thou now, thou false traytour, Sir Launcelot? Why holdyst thou thyselff within holys and wallys lyke a cowarde? Loke oute, thou false traytoure knyght, and here I shall revenge uppon thy body the dethe of my thre brethirne’ (909.20–25).25 As in the previous episode, Malory adds the specific reference to the castle walls, which are styled again as proof of fear and cowardice. Indeed, Gawayne cites not only walls, but also holes, an even sharper rebuke, as it rhetorically nestles Launcelot deeper into the protection of the castle. Malory also adds the echo of Launcelot’s own troops, who again remind him of proper knightly behavior. ‘Sir, now muste you deffende you lyke a knyght, othir ellis be shamed for ever, for now ye be called uppon treson, hit ys tyme for you to styrre! For ye have slepte over longe, and suffirde overmuche’ (909.28–31), they tell him. These words emphasize, in their repetition, the harsh claim Gawayne has made against Launcelot, namely that he is a traitor.26 Like Gawayne’s language, their words hint at the implications of inactivity. Gawayne declares him a coward; his own men complain that he has slept and suffered too much. Sleeping has caused Launcelot some trouble in the past (imprisonment, an arrow to the buttocks, and a kissing beard come to mind), and here it seems to be a specific insult, or at least something en route to one. Spatially, it seems to push him even further within the castle, as it recalls not the public spaces abutting the ongoing war, but the private chambers deep within. His friends are clearly articulating the dissonance between what Launcelot 25

Malory is here expanding on the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (and there is no such delay in the French): Than it byffelle uponne a tyde, Syr Gawayne, that was hende and free, He made hym redy for to ryde. Byfore the gatis of the cyte, Launcelot of treson he becryed, That he had slayne his bretherne thre, That Launcelot myʒte no lenger abyde,

But he ever a cowarde scholde be. The lord that grete was of honoure, Hymselffe Sir Launcelot du Lake, Above the gatis uppon the toure, Comely to the kynge he spake, ‘My lord, God save youre honoure, Me ys wo now for yowre sake, Agaynste thy kynne to stonde in stoure, But nedes I muste thys batayle take.’ (2770–85) 26 For a discussion of Arthur’s thought in this scene, see Meredith Reynolds, ‘Interior Monologue in Malory,’ Arthuriana 24.3 (2014): 85 [79–98].

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is (not) doing and what a knight should do. An end to the sleeping and suffering can be found on the battlefield. The castle alone cannot support Launcelot’s reputation. Launcelot then goes to his castle walls to address the king and Gawayne. Here, unlike at Joyus Garde, Launcelot is already resigned to the necessity of joining the fight. Therefore, his speech gives his reasons for (reluctantly) leaving the castle and commencing battle, rather than attempting to dissuade them. However, some of the same themes are present. He alludes to his loyalty, addressing ‘My lorde Arthur, and noble kynge that made me knyght’ (910.3–4), and reminds us all about his abilities: ‘for and I would be vengeable I myght have mette you in myddys the fylde or thys tyme, and thereto have made your boldiste knyghtes full tame’ (910.6–8). With this sentence, Launcelot has both boasted about himself and indicated that he is not vengeful. Finally, he indicates what has pushed him over the edge. It is not seeing his men fall to the opponent, or the desire to prove his own worth. Instead his action is an effort to silence the negative talk circulating about him. He tells the king, ‘And now I may no lenger suffir to endure, but nedis I muste deffende myselff, insomuch as Sir Gawayne hathe becalled me of treson; whych ys gretly ayenste my wyll that ever I shulde fyghte ayenste ony of youre blood’ (910.10–14). Launcelot is finally baited into battle because the words against him are too troubling, and they cannot be countered with words. Bardsley’s thoughts on men and speech seem again to be relevant here. And indeed, Gawayne’s response is to tell him to ‘leve thy babelynge’ (910.16). In total, this speech atop the walls of Launcelot’s castle at Benwick is about five times as long as the comparable one in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. This again seems to testify to a desire to make words, and not brute strength or battle skill, Launcelot’s hallmark here. Edwards rightly argues of the final books in the Morte that ‘[t]hough talk is taking up more and more of this text, much of this talk is about the dangers of talk. That is, while the protagonists grow more and more expressive, their subject of conversation concerns the devaluation or danger of language.’27 Words do not suffice – and cannot be made to suffice as they are undoing themselves. As Gawayne says, Launcelot’s efforts really are just babbling. This is not a society accustomed to employing language – or castles – in such fashion, no matter how fair the language or how strong the castle might be. It proves impossible to re-envision the markers of gender identity; the dependence on physical acts of masculinity is both too 27

Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative, p. 171.

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embedded in the society and too essential to the story. In both locations, Launcelot must enter the field of battle, where he (of course) successfully demonstrates his masculinity via his knightly prowess. Malory’s inclusion of so much babbling, however, does demand more attention. The effects of showing Launcelot’s – and, I think, by extrapolation, everybody’s – inability to manipulate with words when only deeds have and will suffice are multiple. This confirms physical prowess as the primary mode of producing and assessing masculinity and underscores the inescapability of this model – the words basically fall on deaf ears. Launcelot’s placement on the castle walls when he chooses language – babbling! – over battle, and Malory’s emphasis on this location, call attention to his very between-ness. It is an interesting liminal space that he inhabits, seeing that Launcelot does not really lose his masculinity (his performance once he does step off those walls proves as much), but rather temporarily arrests it. Malory’s added emphasis on Launcelot’s spatiality, his drooping behind castle walls and addressing the enemy from above, brings the architecture to the forefront of the narrative. These walls matter: they affect gender construction and our understanding of knighthood, and are in turn affected by them, as social space theories predict. The once mighty and towering walls become something quite different beneath a seemingly new Launcelot, but that difference competes with the ways the rest of the knights endeavor to maintain the meaning of castle space in the midst of war. What these episodes indicate, then, is a relationship between castle space and war that is at once complex and maddeningly simple. The patterns established across this book both do and do not hold. Launcelot rejects – or tries to reject – the behavioral cues enforced by the space, and likewise tries to reshape that space. This duality, the simple and complex state of space in war, manifests itself again as the text moves to its next siege, Mordred’s attack on Gwenyver at the Tower of London. Throughout the Morte, Gwenyver both troubles and confirms admittedly reductive notions of a gender hierarchy in which the men lead public lives and the women are relegated to a more private role. As the queen, there is perhaps more public demand on Gwenyver than there is on women in general in the text. Earlier discussions in this book have shown that her role in the creation of the Arthurian ‘state’ and the fellowship is undeniable; the gift of the Round Table and the crucial development of the Pentecostal Oath in conjunction with her marriage to Arthur provide the primary markers of this role. Of course, many assign (perhaps partial) blame for her role in the dissolution of that same society, as well. Indeed, it is the clash of public and private in her relationship with Launcelot that sets in motion

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the unraveling of the kingdom, in Malory as well as in previous versions. Left in Mordred’s keeping as Arthur travels to France to wage war against Launcelot, Gwenyver needs to rely on her own resources as both queen and woman in order to protect her body and her spaces, particularly castles. Especially in military and political discussions, the castle can signify the lord’s power, as Chapter One details. It is emblematic of his masculinity in many ways. For women, the castle often becomes a means of enclosure, or of emphatically private existence, and the previous two chapters have detailed the protective and constrictive measures of that enclosure.28 This narrowing of space can reflect the Arthurian society’s – or any society’s – desire to restrict women both literally and figuratively. Whether enclosed by choice, by force, or something in between these extremes, a woman in the castle can feel the imposed architectural and geographical restrictions. In theory, the walls of the castle define her often small spheres of movement and influence. Gwenyver’s sphere of influence in the text is extensive, but castles do still restrict her throughout. At several crucial points late in the Morte, Queen Gwenyver is emphatically enclosed behind and within walls. Captured by Mellyagaunt, she is imprisoned at his castle, as the previous chapter shows. She is (rather silently) placed behind the walls of Joyus Garde while Arthur, Gawayne, and company set siege, and Launcelot hems, haws, and babbles atop its walls. Her silence separates her from the war and signals a distinct gendering of wartime experiences. After that battleground moves to France, Gwenyver encloses herself in the Tower of London. From within the Tower – an enclosure that she takes on for herself, it is important to note – she wields authority uncharacteristic not only of women in the text generally, but also of her own story. Her actions and the actions done unto her provide a stark comparison to that silent separation at Joyus Garde. I want to look closely at Gwenyver in the Tower, where she secures and defends herself from the besieging Mordred (Plate 7). What becomes clear is a surprising conflict between the expectations of an enclosed, female space and Gwenyver’s ability to maneuver within and around the gender and space restrictions that she faces. The walls do not narrow or limit Gwenyver, but rather enlarge her authority and force a reconsideration of gender roles at this moment in the text. The result is twofold: it represents a redefinition of the social space of the castle, one that to a large degree rejects seemingly ingrained notions of male hierarchy, but in doing so 28

See Gilchrist, ‘Medieval Bodies in the Material World,’ p. 58; Richardson, ‘Gender and Space in English Royal Palaces.’

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Plate 7: The Tower of London

the redefinition relies on existing ideas about castle space and meaning. Comparison of this scene with the previous sieges of Launcelot’s castles proves particularly interesting, as the ideas of space in these episodes both align with and push against each other. It is important to note that the version of these events in the Morte is considerably shorter than what we find in the French La Mort le Roi Artu, and represents a considerable reduction in the specific words and actions assigned to the queen. The French version shows Guinevere’s extensive deliberating and planning, at times with her trusted cousin and knight Labor in on the action. The role played by the retinue of knights defending the queen and the Tower is also considerably larger in the French version in terms of explicit presence on the page. In Malory, they have no explicit role. Omitting them sharpens the focus on Gwenyver’s role in this siege, though I do not suggest that we are to read Gwenyver as a lone (or even literal) combatant in Malory. In addition, the French Guinevere acts and talks much more overall. Indeed, Malory’s Gwenyver does not actually say anything – in direct speech, anyway. However, largely as a result of this distillation (which is how we – and Malory – also find the story in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur), Gwenyver’s role and thus her agency are proportionally increased. But just as important, the Gwenyver of Malory’s Morte does more literally as well as grammatically than does the queen in the Stanzaic Morte; she is not the ‘whyte as lyly floure’ queen of that earlier English version (2994). Malory more markedly notes Gwenyver’s ingenuity, as well as her ability to deceive Mordred in the protection of herself and her husband’s realm.

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Gwenyver reveals her own capacity for action when first acquainted with the news, which comes in the form of an order, that she is to marry Mordred, her husband’s son and nephew – these double lines of consanguinity with Arthur are definitely at the forefront of the condemnation of this act in Malory. Malory writes of Gwenyver’s ability to suppress her own feelings that ‘Quene Gwenyvere was passyng hevy. But she durst nat discover her harte, but spake fayre, and aggreed to Sir Mordredys wylle’ (915.12–14).29 This Gwenyver appears timid, presenting herself as an object even though she is the subject of these actions, and speaking fairly of and agreeing to a most abominable fate. However, the next lines show that this façade makes possible the bold undertaking that follows. Indeed, I contend that she here begins to act like a knight and a king as she protects her body (and her marriage, such as it is): And anone she desyred of Sir Mordred to go to London to byghe all maner thynges that longed to the brydale. And bycause of her fayre speche Sir Mordred trusted her and gaff her leve; and so whan she cam to London she toke the Towre of London, and suddeynly in all haste possyble she stuffed hit with all maner of vytayle, and well garnysshed hit with men, and so kepte hit. (915.15–20)

Gwenyver’s ruse works largely because of that initial timid appearance. It is that very ‘fayre speche’ and ready agreement that invites Mordred’s trust. But what follows is the queen’s transformation to a woman of action and military tactics. In fact, her actions mimic those of her beloved Launcelot at both Joyus Garde (a siege at which she was present) and Benwick (which is occurring approximately simultaneously). She takes the Tower – it is worth noting that it is perhaps legally somewhat ‘hers’ already, as Arthur is in fact still alive – and prepares to withstand assault with food and knights. Yet although her strategy may have been learned from watching Launcelot behind and atop the castle walls, it plays out quite differently from his in terms of the castle, space, and her own identity. Gwenyver’s taking and keeping the Tower set the stage for her further asserting her subjecthood. This particular brand of subjecthood blends conventions coded female and male. The very nature of the siege highlights this point. She must defend herself and her castle against both military and verbal – and perhaps ‘romantic’ – onslaught: 29

This is not the first time that Gwenyver has hidden her true emotions behind an agreeable face. In the lead-up to the poisoned-apple episode, for example, she refuses to betray the hurt and anger she feels toward Launcelot.

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And whan Sir Mordred wyst how he was begyled he was passynge wrothe oute of mesure. And shorte tale to make, he layde a myghty syge aboute the Towre and made many assautis, and threw engynnes unto them, and shotte grete gunnes. But all myght nat prevayle, for Quene Gwenyver wolde never, for fayre speache nother for foule, never to truste unto Sir Mordred to com in hys hondis agayne. (915.20–26)

Mordred’s attacks are both military (the assaults, the engines, and the great guns) and interpersonal (in the form of speech both fair and foul), and he proves ineffective at both. The twofold nature of this assault appears to repeat the sieges undertaken by Arthur and Gawayne pages earlier at Joyus Garde and then Benwick, but it is a repetition with variation. Though much condensed, this conflict provides considerable contrast, and these differences can tell us much about the manipulations of space and identity in this episode. Malory’s Morte does not provide specifics of either of the sieges upon Launcelot’s castles;30 it focuses on conversations and then individual combat. Here at the Tower, the opposite occurs. Malory gives no close-up descriptions of encounters between knights on opposite sides, but rather sticks to the wide-angle view of Mordred’s men attacking the Tower itself. Malory emphasizes particular siege tactics and the large weapons used to deploy them. The ‘engynnes’ and the ‘grete gunnes’ (regardless of whether these ‘grete gunnes’ are cannons or catapults31) are not the implements of close encounters between combatants, but rather those of large-scale attacks that focus on buildings first and people second. This makes sense because 30

We do see Arthur actively engaged in siege at Moyseslonde (Metz) during the Roman War campaign. Malory tells us: ‘And anone the kynge lette cry asawte unto the towne, and there was rerynge of laddyrs and brekynge of wallys, and the dyche fylled that men with lytyll payne myght entir into the cyté. The payne that the peple had was pyté to se!’ (185.19–22). Arthur’s quick success brings out the duchess, who begs for and receives from Arthur the safety of the women and others innocent in the clash. There Malory (following but condensing his source, the Alliterative Morte) pays specific attention to the weapons of siege warfare and their rapid success. 31 For a discussion of these ‘grete gunnes’ as siege engines (and not gunpowderenabled cannons), see Dhira Mahoney, ‘Malory’s “Great Guns,”’ Viator 20 (1989): 291–310; and Dhira Mahoney, ‘Malory’s “Great Guns” Revisited,’ Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 44 (1992): 236–40. In making her argument, Mahoney points out that Malory’s own life spans the military use of both (older) siege-engine technology and (emerging) gunpowder technology and cannons. K. S. Whetter points out that Malory likely saw or participated in the 1460 siege of the Tower of London, in which cannons were used by both sides, in ‘The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur,’ in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 266 [261–70].

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we do not expect to see Gwenyver herself drawn out of the castle to engage with Mordred in battle of any sort, as Gawayne, Launcelot’s allies, and many readers look for at Joyus Garde and Benwick. The result is that the castle itself receives the attention of both the assault and the narrative. The castle’s defensive properties come to the fore, and prove up to the challenge presented by Mordred. Like no other place in the Morte, here the castle relies (successfully) on much more than its ‘military vocabulary’ and the idea of strength. Mordred’s onslaught actively tests the Tower’s defenses, and those defenses prevail. The castle thus protects the queen, as does her use of language. Comparing this scene to the sources likewise draws attention to Malory’s specific use of the castle and Gwenyver’s rhetorical skill. The French version offers a much starker contrast. In the Mort Artu, Guinevere does speak once from atop the castle walls: et vint en haut as querniax de la tor et dist a Mordret qui estoit desouz et qui bien s’estoit aperceüz que a la reïne avoit il failli: ‹‹Mordret, Mordret, malement avez moustré que mes sires vos apartenist, qui me vouliez avoir a fame, ou ge vousisse ou non. Certes mar le pensastes; que ge vueill bien que vos sachiez ceste chose vos metra a mort.›› [She then appeared on the battlements of the tower and said to Mordred, who was below and had seen the queen had eluded him, ‘Mordred, Mordred, you shamefully betrayed your relationship with my lord, by trying to marry me against my will. You should never have had such a thought, for I want you to know that this will lead to your death.’]32

Her spatial positioning here is in the vein of Lancelot’s as he avoids battle with his king, but Guinevere’s words do quite the opposite: she sparks conflict by leveling accusations and threats at Mordred. Her choice of words thus better resembles Gawayne’s verbal attacks on Launcelot in Malory. The queen then retreats to a (presumably secure) room in the Tower, asks for advice about how to proceed, and is reassured that her collection of knights will be able to protect her and the Tower. This Guinevere is thus quite literally moved away from the battle site and the siege that follows – a siege that is very carefully depicted by the writer, who first describes attackers (unsuccessfully) using ladders to breach the castle wall, and later discusses the extensive damage the Tower receives 32

La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, 142.29–33; The Death of Arthur, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 7, p. 93.

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from catapult use.33 War and the castle in war consequently remain primarily within men’s domain in this French version. Indeed, even Guinevere’s words are focused not on war, but on Mordred’s heinous treatment of King Arthur and herself. The Stanzaic Morte Darthur, Malory’s direct source for his text, shows an interest in the nature of siege warfare similar to both the earlier French text and Malory. The poem quickly covers the movement to London and the ensuing attack by Mordred: The quene whyte as lyly floure, With knyghtis fele of her kynne, She went to London to the towre, And speryd the gates and dwellyd therin. Mordred changed than hys coloure, Thedyr he went and wold not blynne; Thereto he made many a shoure But the wallys myght he nevir wynne.

(2994–3001)

The queen protects herself through enclosure, shutting and barring the castle gates. Mordred begins to attack with ‘many a shoure,’ projectiles designed to breach the defenses. Later, the poet provides more information about the weapons used: Mordred had than lyen full longe, But the towre myghte he nevir wynne With strength ne with stoure stronge, Ne with other kynnes gynne.

(3034–37)

The assault specifically involves both hard battle (‘stoure stronge’) and siege engines (‘other kynnes gynne’). The ‘stoure’ perhaps focuses, if briefly, on individuals fighting, while the siege engine certainly takes the wider view. Malory obviously adopts this poem’s plot line and its general sentiments, though he moves the mention of specific military implements to the initial description of the siege and removes even this whisper of person-to-person combat. This particular edit represents a further distillation of the episode to a battle between Gwenyver and her castle on the one hand, and Mordred and his implements of destruction on the other. The Tower’s sturdy walls not only keep the queen safe, but also seem to reject the threat outright. Malory states simply that ‘all myght nat 33

Malory notably dispenses with this last detail about the damage to the castle, and thus increases its military strength.

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prevayle,’ a phrase grammatically linked backward to the siege (the ‘But’ that precedes it connects to the previous discussion of the weapons of war) and forward to Mordred’s own use of language to infiltrate castle and queen. Gwenyver’s successes are thus twofold in that neither words nor weapons can defeat her. Indeed, these several comparisons – both to the earlier sieges in Malory and to the parallel scenes in the sources – also reveal Malory’s Morte to be particularly invested in language here. Gwenyver’s manipulation via speech, earlier successful in allowing her escape to London, continues to outperform Mordred’s linguistic skill. Mordred thus fails against Gwenyver, though perhaps it should be noted that he is monstrously successful in his use of intimidating speech against the bishop – whatever that is worth for him. Following the bishop’s intervention, Mordred resumes his attack on the Gwenyver, and here the focus is on words alone: Than Sir Mordred soughte uppon Quene Gwenyvere by lettirs and sondis, and by fayre meanys and foule meanys, to have her to com oute of the Towre of London; but all thys avayled nought, for she answered hym shortely, opynly and pryvayly, that she had levir sle herselff than to be maryed with hym.34 (916.19–23)

In this final set of attempts to secure Gwenyver as his wife, the attention is not at all on the military siege – I suppose the Tower as provisioned by Gwenyver has already withstood that sufficiently. Mordred is again trying to use his words – foul and fair – and again it is to no avail. Even in these few words of narrative, we can see a Gwenyver who is poised and in control. In both public and private responses (‘opynly and pryvayly’), she rejects his overtures. Her two modes of delivery seem to reflect her personal and political control over the situation – over herself and over the Tower. Conquest of Gwenyver and the Tower would constitute a symbolic coronation and assertion of Mordred’s supremacy over the land and over his uncle/father, King Arthur.35 As Rushton notes, London is one of three primary centers of royal power that Malory associates with Mordred in this section of his Morte (along with Canterbury, where he is crowned, and Winchester, to which he moves).36 If the Tower can be considered the ultimate representative of royal authority within London (in Malory’s 34

In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, it is in this return to the siege after the bishop’s intercession that we hear about ‘stoure stronge’ and ‘other kynnes gynne’ (3036, 3037). 35 See McCracken, The Romance of Adultery, p. 86. 36 Rushton, ‘Malory’s Idea of the City,’ p. 111.

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time and in the text), then Gwenyver’s successful keeping of it certainly suggests that she and not Mordred represents rightful rule. Gwenyver thus protects her body and her state, functioning like men in the text in both cases. She is emboldened by the strength of the Tower’s walls. Because the nature of the defense against the siege engines and other machines of war is not described, we are left with little more than the walls. These walls allow Gwenyver to blur the society’s gender lines. This blurring has a correlative effect on the space in which it happens. As the castle facilitates Gwenyver’s push beyond the normative constructs of the feminine, so do she and her successes force a reconsideration of the nature of the castle space itself. As this book has shown, the castle is routinely divided – or blended – into areas for politics and other public matters (communal and ritual activity, for example), areas for private and domestic affairs, areas for imprisonment, and areas for war and defense. While there can be a gendered element to these spaces, they have throughout proven permeable. This Tower space and its meaning split under Gwenyver’s watch: she is enclosed and protected, but also a participant in war, which is generally within the male purview and place. Unlike at Joyus Garde, where she is manifest only when she arrives and when she is transferred back to Arthur, here she is in the metaphorical vanguard, fending off Mordred’s words and weapons. Contrary to Murray’s claim that castles in the Morte ‘depart almost entirely from the battlefield and become the realm of queens and proprietresses, female captives, inhabitants, and guests,’ in this episode the male battlefield collides with the queen’s female habitat.37 Gwenyver functions as proprietress, but as such she is also an active agent of war and political intrigue. To follow through with Murray’s list, she is indeed even something of a captive here. Although this is largely a position of her own making – especially in the most literal interpretations – she is a prisoner of Mordred’s will and power as well. I cannot help but think of the Tower of London itself being very much a prison in Malory’s imagination, too. More to my point, though, the castle’s ‘male’ and ‘female’ functions and sites are now integrated. The space and the queen have reconstructed each other (and themselves). Anne Longley details the ways in which Guinevere becomes a lord to Lancelot in the French Prose Lancelot, and in particular cites this as an 37

Murray, ‘Women and Castles,’ p. 22. For an excellent discussion of gender roles in relation to battle, see Corinne Saunders, ‘Women and Warfare in Medieval English Literature,’ in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, eds. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 186–212.

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‘anomaly.’38 This carries over to Malory’s version – indeed, I find that the diminished attention, especially early in the narrative, on the physical, intimate nature of their relationship in Malory underscores even more the fact that she is a lord to him. However, that version of female lordship is governed primarily by the chivalric expectations implicit across much Arthurian and other romance literature. That relationship (at least insofar as it does not cross the lines to a sexual one) follows an established pattern of women inspiring and instigating knightly endeavors.39 On this occasion, however, as Gwenyver takes and holds the Tower of London against a (male) siege to the building and to her person, she moves into a female lordship that functions independently of conventions, codes, patterns, etc. Indeed, she is defying the socio-political gender hierarchy that dominates Malory’s Arthurian world, and in doing so participates in the reconfiguration of space. The Tower, to which the story will not return as it details the ultimate destruction of the Arthurian world, is left with this mark. If we return again to Whitaker’s idea that the castle is ‘the centre from which the authority radiates,’ then here Gwenyver is the authoritative core; she is the center of this center.40 Quite opposite to Launcelot’s inability to manifest his power exclusively through the castle walls and language, Gwenyver succeeds – she wins this battle (or is winning when Arthur’s arrival at Dover shifts Mordred’s priorities and terminates the siege) and remakes the castle in war as a result. Gwenyver’s triumph seems in part to result from her very status as a woman; she can win a battle without donning armor because she is not expected to do so. What could serve as an erasure of Launcelot’s gender standing looks very different on the queen. The castle’s strength and her rhetorical skill embolden each other, make each other possible. Gwenyver’s effect on our reading of the Tower of London, however, does not serve as the final word on castle spaces in war in the text, though it is the last real siege. The remaining battles shift slightly away from the castles themselves. The castle walls will not again mark the boundary between enemies – or between behavior deemed knightly and masculine and that deemed counterproductive to the chivalric project. The conflicts between Arthur’s troops and Mordred’s do, however, occur in the shadow of castles, quite literally in the case of Dover. This final ‘civil’ war remains intimately connected to castles and even marks a return to emphasizing 38

Anne P. Longley, ‘Guinevere as Lord,’ Arthuriana 12.3 (2002): 60 [49–62]. Armstrong helpfully explains how ‘the construction of masculine identity occurs at the intersection of knightly prowess and romantic love’ in Malory, in Gender and the Chivalric Community, p. 37. 40 Whitaker, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight,’ p. 74. 39

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the castle as a symbol of power that a king needs to wield the authority that Gwenyver’s own battle suggested was still possible. Furthermore, it is perhaps the distance from the castles themselves, especially at Salisbury Plain, that best illustrates the state of the Arthurian kingdom and community in its demise. As Malory’s Morte Darthur comes to its close, Arthur and Mordred are pitted against each other for rule over the people and land of England. That land certainly includes castles that can signal authority and perform all the functions necessary for a healthy and successful realm. These claimants to the throne must compete on these two planes – the spatial and popular – in order to assert kingship. As King Arthur and his troops return from battling Launcelot in France, Mordred is able to amass considerable support from the people, through all sorts of ‘myschyff,’ as Malory terms it (916.34). Malory comes down hard on these ‘newfangill’ people of England who so easily desert their rightful king (917.14). However, some of these same people switch sides as Arthur drives Mordred’s army back from the shores and castle of Dover – itself no small feat considering the geography – first to Barham Downe and Canterbury, and ultimately to Salisbury. It is my contention that Malory is prioritizing the victories over space more emphatically than does his source material in order to highlight the importance of holding and maintaining property, in particular castles. Malory privileges the man who has rule over places, who is able to redefine those spaces and confirm his royal authority through the articulation of victory and power over spaces. There is here a shift in the way Malory presents castles in war, a shift that resembles not the most recent conflicts involving either Launcelot or Gwenyver, but rather the empire-building wars that open the text. At Dover, however, Malory attends more to the social space of the castle than we saw early in the Morte. Mordred’s slipping grip on places (first he loses the Tower of London to the queen, and then he incurs these successive east-to-west defeats) and Arthur’s correlating reacquisition of castles and land underscore the primacy of ownership and control of space in the narrative. Likewise, Malory’s heightened attention to Arthur’s ability to rein in – and reign over – space (and thus people) comments on the importance of spatial consumption and dominion of space(s) and place(s) across this fictive Arthurian world. This is quite apparent at Dover Castle. It is there that Arthur literally returns to England, and there that he cements his figurative return to kingship, a necessity more urgent now than at any time since the beginning of the text. As they move toward Dover and toward each other, Mordred and Arthur have both suffered troubling

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losses, as the chapter has thus far detailed. Arthur and his troops proved unable to defeat Launcelot at either Joyus Garde or Benwick. Mordred’s efforts to besiege the Tower of London and claim the queen were likewise fruitless. Cherewatuk rightly argues that Malory ‘defines royal power through the grammatically parallel equation of property and the queen.’41 Certainly neither of these claimants to the throne has asserted his royal power through this formula. This underscores the political implications of the confrontations at Dover and beyond. The geographical location and physical landscape of Dover and its castle serve to heighten its crucial role in this competition over the land (and thus the people). Historically the city of Dover has played a central role in a good number of international – or at least inter-European – conflicts undertaken by the English, as a result of its position just over twenty miles from Calais, France. It is thus a point of departure and a point of entry for armies (and, of course, navies) travelling between the British Isles and the European mainland. Its importance continued even through the Second World War, when it served as a command center, hospital, and more. This is just a recent example in Dover Castle’s centuries as the ‘key to England,’ and the site’s importance was certainly well established by Malory’s own day.42 Its prominence is further heightened (pun totally intended) by the cliffs on which it sits. The physical placement of Dover Castle, which is perched high above both shore and town, makes it a dream location for defense – and a nightmare for any besieging troops. Gaining it from either land or sea is a formidable task – even walking up to the castle from the town is no small matter. Thus, it would seem that Mordred has the upper hand going into this episode. Here he does not have to do the besieging – just the defending – and he is positioned well above the arriving Arthur. However, as we know, things do not play out in Mordred’s favor. Arthur wins despite the topographical disadvantage that he faces. Malory tells us: And so as Sir Mordred was at Dovir with hys oste, so cam Kyng Arthur wyth a greate navy of shyppis and galyes and carykes, and there was Sir Mordred redy awaytyng uppon hys londynge, to lette hys owne fadir to londe uppon the londe that he was kynge over. Than there was launchyng of greate botis and smale, and full of noble men of armys; and there was much slaughtir of jantyll knyghtes, and many a full bolde barowne was layde full lowe on bothe partyes. 41 42

Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance, p. 120. See Goodall, ‘The Key of England.’

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But Kyng Arthur was so currageous that there myght no maner of knyght lette hym to lande, and hys knyghtes fyersely folowed hym. And so they londed magré Sir Mordredis hede and all hys power, and put sir Mordred abak, that he fledde and all hys people. (917.15–26)

Malory notes that Mordred was prepared with troops to prevent his uncle/father/king from landing, but that absolutely nothing could stop the courageous king from accomplishing this feat, from winning the shores of Dover. The detail Malory gives us here is apparently his own invention. He differs from his sources in his attention to Arthur’s successful landing at the coast as the critical fact of the battle. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur does mention the difficult ‘stoure’ or battle, and gives considerable detail concerning that fight, but there is nothing so specific about the landing, which is quick, or the competition over space: Forthe to Dover þan gan he ryde, All the costys wele he kende; To erlys and to barons on ylk syde Grete yiftis he yaffe and lettres send, And forsette the see on ylke syde With bold men and bowes bente. Fro Yngland that is brode and wyde, Hys owne fader he wold deffend. Arthur that was mykelle of myght With hys folke come over the flode, An hundredth galeyse that were well dyght, With barons bold and hye of blode. He wende to have landyd as it was ryght At Dower ther hym thoght full gode, And ther he fande many an hardy knyght That styffe in stoure agaynste hym stode. Arthure sone hathe take the land That hym was leveste in to lende. Hys fele fomen that he ther found, He wende byfore had bene hys frend; The kynge was wrothe and weliney wode, And with hys men he gan up wend. So strong a stoure was upon that stronde That many a man ther had hys end.

(3042–65)

Grave battle continues following this seemingly easy landing on the shores. Shortly thereafter, the narrative briefly relates that Gawayne dies

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and is buried. The poem then follows this campaign closely as it eventually moves west across the English landscape. Dover itself is just one piece among many in this version. Malory reduces the actual battle description and shifts the focus to the spaces themselves. The difference from the earlier French Le Mort le Roi Artu is even starker. That text largely mutes the importance of Dover and eliminates it as a site of battle altogether: Ci endroit dit li contes que, quant li rois Artus se fu mis en mer por aller el roiaume de Logres por destruire et por essillier Mordret, il ot bon vent et fort qui tost l’ot porté outre a tote sa gent, si qu’il arriverent souz le chastel de Douvre; et quant il furent arrivé et il orent des nes ostees leur armes, li rois fist savoir a ceus de Douvre qu’il ouvrissent la porte et receüssent leanz; et cil si fisent a grant joie. [Here the story says that, when King Arthur put to sea to go to Logres and destroy and ruin Mordred, he had a good and strong wind, which soon took him and his army across the sea, and they landed beneath the castle of Dover. When they had landed and taken their armor off the ships, the king instructed the people of Dover to open the gate and receive him, and they did so with great joy.]43

Here in the Mort Artu, there is no battle at all. The castle gates of Dover are immediately and welcomingly opened for the king by his subjects, who are delighted that he is alive (which is contrary to the reports – rumors – that Mordred had spread in order to ease his seizure of the crown). The French text does not make Dover or its castle a point of competition. Malory’s version thus indicates that, for him and his text, control over space(s) once again factors prominently into the assigning, asserting, and confirming of kingship. While, as Lisa Robeson reminds us, ‘Mordred attempts to legitimate his usurpation in two ways: by justifying his actions by appealing to the commonweal and forcing the formal rituals of succession,’ he cannot prove his fitness for that role because he is fatefully unable to quell the rising power of the true king and his return to England.44 Malory’s Arthur is thus able to resume his position of legitimacy through the collection of spaces. Mordred’s army moves west leaving Dover for Arthur – and for Gawayne’s death and interment. In Chapter Three, I discussed at length the manifold implications of this burial ritual. It both reasserts Arthur’s rule over Dover (and thus England) 43

La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, 171.1–9; The Death of Arthur, in Lancelot–Grail, ed. Lacy, vol. 7, p. 113. 44 Lisa Robeson, ‘Malory and the Death of Kings: The Politics of Regicide at Salisbury Plain,’ in The Arthurian Way of Death, eds. Karen Cherewatuk and K. S. Whetter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009): 143 [136–50].

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and clears a path for the recovery of the fellowship itself, as it reunites Launcelot with Gawayne. In this late moment of the Morte, the energy that is deployed around and within Dover Castle includes Arthur’s resumption of power through battle – decisive battle – and Gawayne’s death and burial. The act of burial serves as a ritual, much like Mordred’s attempts to legitimize his usurpation of the crown, to make manifest Arthur’s ownership and control over the castle. The space has been changed, having been marked by the body of the fallen knight who is Arthur’s right-hand man at this point in the text. The impact on the space of Dover Castle is evidenced especially by the very visible skull. This act and this token redefine the space as one that belongs to Arthur and to his rightful rule, and affirms the specific king–subject relationship between Arthur and the people of Dover. This relationship is then extrapolated beyond the walls of this castle, largely because of the importance of castles – and especially this castle – on the physical and political landscape of the Morte. King Arthur’s authority does seem to radiate from this architectural stronghold. As the battles move successively to the west, Arthur is winning the competition over land, seemingly encompassing southeast and south-central England in their entirety. Indeed, control over space, first castle and then geographical space, seems much more important than the gathering of loyal followers. Mordred is in flight, but still manages to keep large chunks of the population on his side: ‘Than Sir Mordred araysed muche people aboute London, for they of Kente, Southsex and Surrey, Esax, Suffolke and Northefolke helde the moste party with Sir Mordred. And many a full noble knyght drew unto hym and also to the kynge; but they that loved sir Launcelot drew unto Sir Mordred’ (920.10–14).45 Mordred thus amasses a large body of specific supporters, while Arthur’s followers are just vaguely mentioned, not listed (‘and also to the kynge’). However, it is Arthur who is asserting his rightful kingship by pushing Mordred’s army westward.46 It is via the accumulation of land, property, and castle that Arthur (unsurprisingly, of course) asserts his prominence in the land and in the text. 45

Armstrong and Hodges speculate that Malory chooses these southern regions as Mordred’s source of support because of the southern locations of the several battles leading up to the final clash, locations that are predetermined by Malory’s sources (and accepted by Malory), in Mapping Malory, p. 190, n. 66. 46 Indeed, it is as the rightful king that Arthur has the authority to offer Mordred anything in their truce (namely Cornwall and Kent now, and all of England upon Arthur’s death); he apparently senses that rule over these two areas might appease Mordred for the time being. These negotiations are much more drawn out in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur; The French text’s Arthur does not attempt such a truce.

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The final battle of the Morte moves even further away from the siege warfare that began the decline of the kingdom. Following tradition, Mordred and Arthur have their final encounter at Salisbury Plain. Though perhaps more attentive to the geography here than his sources are, Malory only hazily maps the location for what is intended as a truce meeting, but fatefully becomes a battleground: ‘And anone Kynge Arthure drew hym wyth his oste downe by the seesyde westewarde, towarde Salusbyry. And there was a day assygned betwyxte Kynge Arthur and Sir Mordred, that they shulde mete uppon a downe besyde Salesbyry and nat farre frome the seesyde’ (920.2–6). These downs between Salisbury and the seaside are not attached specifically to any castle. The uncertain distance between the city of Salisbury and this point of meeting – soon to be battleground and graveyard – unhinges battle from castle space or architecture and the military vocabulary they imply, and thus takes me away from my central line of inquiry. Furthermore, Salisbury’s castle, at Old Sarum, was by Malory’s time long abandoned and in ruins (Plate 8).47 There is thus no castle there, only the ruins as a reminder of what once was, and repurposed stones scattered around (New) Salisbury and perhaps elsewhere. Yet, I think it is worth putting this final act of war in conversation with (or beside) the ideas of castles and space that have been more obviously germane to the book’s goals. Robert Rouse perceptively reminds us that [r]uins are things too, and thus inherently untimely, comprised as they are of competing temporal narratives: the moment of the origin of the building; multiple moments of memorable events associated with the place; the moment of its abandonment; the moment of the writer describing the ruin; the moment of the reader; and so on.48

The decommissioned and deconstructed castle, though presumably not visible to the (dying) combatants or the barrage of looters who come in after the battle, can – and I think should – still resonate for the reader, as it might have for the writer. The ruins of Old Sarum speak to its past as a military stronghold and administrative center, and thus recall the similar apex of Arthur’s reign. These same ruins also reflect the current state of the Arthurian kingdom and fellowship. The divided armies have killed each other – killed themselves – leaving Bedivere alive, Lucan literally 47

Old Sarum has a long history, beginning as an Iron Age hillfort and more or less ending with the movement of the cathedral (to what is now Salisbury) in the early thirteenth century and the abandonment and demolition of the castle a century later. 48 Robert Rouse, ‘Reading Ruins: Arthurian Caerleon and the Untimely Architecture of History,’ Arthuriana 23.1 (2013): 44–45 [40–51].

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Plate 8: Old Sarum

spilling his guts in the king’s cause, and Arthur caught between his once and future statuses. Like the stones of the castle at Old Sarum, the fallen knights’ armor and adornment is being taken away for other use.49 The Arthurian fellowship itself has become but a quarry, a thing or place to mine for its material value – its ethical and social value now diminished or gone entirely. The ‘pyllours and robbers’ slay the wounded so that they can more readily steal from them (924.16). Kevin Whetter points to this last act as ‘the most disturbing aspect of this scene’ and rightly claims that it ‘heightens the somber mood of the battle and of the close of the Morte.’50 This lawlessness echoes the ruins, bereft of an administration, and the realm itself, moving forward without its king, his sword, or his mighty fellowship. These distant ruins tell the story of a king and his fellowship that depended upon its cluster of castles. This will not be the last castle that we see – or do not see – in the Morte, as the text takes us with Launcelot back to Dover and eventually 49

P. J.C. Field notes that Malory’s own experience at the Battle of Towton (1461) is a likely influence on both the bloodiness of this battle and the inclusion of the looters, in ‘Malory and the Battle of Towton,’ in The Social and Literary Contexts of Malory’s Morte Darthur, ed. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., and Jessica G. Brogden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 68–74. 50 Whetter, ‘The Historicity of Combat,’ p. 261, n. 4. Whetter also rightly claims that here ‘Malory no longer presents the glory to be won in war, merely the destruction,’ in ‘Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur,’ in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, eds. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 179 [169–86].

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on to burial at Joyus Garde, but this is the last gasp of the Arthurian world as truly and fully King Arthur’s. What remains is more death, more attention to burial, more reminders that it is through death and not life that the final marks are made on these castles. This culminating battle, staged away from the castle and its many functions – political, communal, ritual, domestic, penal, and military – reminds us that this final series of conflicts both vexes and maintains the established ideas about castles both in and out of war. The battles in this chapter have variously used and interrogated previously determined notions of castle space, essentially scattering or fragmenting those notions and seemingly leaving king and reader alike without a castle home.

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Afterword: Beyond the Castle Gate David Spurr argues that ‘[a]rchitecture, as the art of building, gives concrete form to the external world according to the structures of imagination; whereas literature, as the art of written language, gives symbolic form to the same world.’1 Spurr uses this similarity to explain his decision to discuss them together, to examine architecture resounding in the modern literature he studies.2 Likewise, my aim throughout this book has been to see how castle architecture participates in our understanding of the world and the people of the Morte. The castle, both imagined and concrete, creates and maintains the book’s society. That same society constructs the social space of the castle. Through actions both regular (swearing the Pentecostal Oath, or returning upon the completion of a quest, for example) and sporadic (a tumble from the window, an imprisonment far from the comfort of home), Malory’s characters define the castle – and implicitly tell the reader about it. At the intersection of space and society we can learn how and what it means to be in Malory’s Arthurian world. When my husband and I drove away after visiting Bamburgh Castle, one of Malory’s possible Joyus Gardes, we were forced into the ditch by an approaching truck. This pause allowed one more opportunity – if unexpected and perhaps unwelcome – to look back at the castle as a whole, as a single unit. From that vantage point Bamburgh was both magnificent and compact, and differently so from how it had been as we approached hours earlier. It now contained discrete rooms and areas, each serving their individual purposes. I had contemplated the parts in situ (indeed, that was the very purpose of the visit), but distance rendered the distinctions between them invisible, fuzzy. I could not easily differentiate the walls from the keep, for example, though I had not long before stood between the two, thinking of Launcelot walking to the walls to speak to his king (though, admittedly, Alnwick Castle makes much more sense to me as the setting for that conversation and battle). The castle was now an assemblage that encompassed and blurred these several parts. 1

David Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 3. 2 He also considers architecture and literature nearly ‘unlimited’ in their potential, and more so than other arts. I do not feel the need to push the argument quite so far.

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This book has roamed – as investigator, tourist, interloper – through the castles of Malory’s text to make sense of them and, especially, to use the castle spaces to make sense of the text. The result is a collection of fragments, bits and pieces of understanding gleaned from the multiple uses and abuses of castle rooms and walls and windows. Stepping back to look at these fragments together, it seems that sometimes they meet, hinting at assemblage, but other times – maybe more often – they overlap, they interfere, and they leave gaps. The wide-angle view suggests that the fluid nature of space – its mutability and permeability – holds the castle and its community in a precarious position. The clearest assemblage manifests in the quite literal assembly of the Round Table knights within Arthur’s court and, indeed, many of the other functions of the castle are in some way in service of that community and its operation. The community becomes the political body, for example, and the rituals enacted across castle space create the bonds that hold the society together. Indeed, even in studying the moments most antithetical to the success of the Round Table or of Arthur’s kingdom more broadly – the wars upon its dissolution, to be sure, but also the fraught domestic acts and the imprisonment of its members away from their community – I found the communal often underfoot, tangled up in much of what happens in Malory’s castles and how his characters understand themselves individually and as a collective. In many ways, then, castle space writ large serves and becomes essential to Malory’s chivalric project. Moreover, that world of the Morte stretches far beyond the gates of Arthur’s castles. As the king, queen, knights, and others travel from Camelot, Caerleon, and so forth, they encounter many spaces, both built and natural. The forests, fields, and waterways, the churches, hermitages, and pavilions encountered across the pages of the Morte function as social spaces, too. Like castles, they are understood in conjunction with the behaviors that they host – though the interaction between humans and the natural world demands and focuses attention differently from that between people and architectural constructions. When Malory’s characters set out from the castle, they work their way through these places, shaping the world around them and likewise being shaped by it. Each of these many spaces participates in a comprehensive understanding of the community and the individuals who comprise it. I leave this book, then, knowing that there are many spaces yet to be explored, within, beyond, and between castle gates.

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Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Upton, Dell. Architecture in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. van Ness, Akkelies. ‘Measuring Spatial Visibility, Adjacency, Permeability and Degrees of Street Life in Pompeii.’ Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space. Eds. Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 100–14. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel. Castles and Warfare in the Middle Ages. Trans. M. Macdermott. Mineola and New York: Dover Publications, 2005). [Originally published as Essai sur l’architecture au Moyen-âge. Paris: Bance, 1854.] Walsh, John Michael. ‘Malory’s “Very Mater of the Cheualer du Charyot”: Characterization and Structure.’ Studies in Malory. Ed. James W. Spisak. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985. 199–226. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Robert T. Tally, Jr. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 [2007, French original]. Wheatley, Abigail. The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England. York: York Medieval Press, 2004. Whetter, K. S. ‘The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur.’ Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field. Ed. Bonnie Wheeler. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. 261–70. —— ‘On Misunderstanding Malory’s Balyn.’ Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes. Eds. K. S. Whetter and Raluca Radulescu. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. 149–62. —— ‘Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur.’ Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare. Eds. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. 169–86. Whitaker, Muriel. Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984. —— ‘Otherworld Castles in Middle English Arthurian Romance.’ The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality. Eds. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1984. 27–45. —— ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Castles of Delight.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature 9.2 (1976): 73–84. Wilson, Robert H. ‘The “Fair Unknown” in Malory.’ PMLA 58.1 (1943): 1–21. —— ‘The Prose Lancelot in Malory.’ University of Texas Studies in English 32 (1953): 1–13. Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. ‘Adultery and the Fall of Logres in the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin.’ Arthuriana 7.4 (1997): 16–46.

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Wolfthal, Diane. In and Out of the Marriage Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Wyatt, Siobhán Mary. ‘“Gyff me goodly langage, and than my care is paste”: Reproach and Recognition in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth.’ Arthuriana 25.2 (2015): 129–42. —— Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur: The Autonomy of Speech in Malory’s Female Characters. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the Sword. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Zuesse, Evan M. ‘Meditation on Ritual.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43.3 (1975): 517–30.

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Acknowledgements This book grew out of a comment Dorrie Armstrong made as I worked on my first book. In looking at the story of Gareth, I indicated that vertical space and physical placement in and around the castle mattered, and she suggested that I expand that discussion. I didn’t really do that there – it turns out I needed much more space. So much thanks and blame I thus owe her. Seriously, though, the gratitude that I owe Dorrie extends far beyond the fact of this book, and my words are not good enough to show it. Since that seed was planted, my debts to other scholars have multiplied. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who found this book worthwhile and gave such insightful commentary with intelligence and kindness. I owe much to the many wonderful scholars – Arthurians, space theorists, and many more – whose work inspires me every single day. Many people have invited me onto panels to talk about this work in progress, and many more have listened and offered brilliant feedback on this project over the last far-too-many years. In particular, I would like to thank Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Elizabeth Archibald, Catherine Batt, Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, Louis Boyle, Karen Cherewatuk, Kevin Grimm, Amy Kaufman, Alex Kaufman, Ryan Naughton, Richard Sévère, Fiona Tolhurst, Bonnie Wheeler, and Kevin Whetter. (This is not nearly everyone.) What good there is in this book came about because of that feedback. What remains flawed is on me. Thank you to Arthuriana for publishing an early version of part of Chapter Five – and allowing me to reprint it here – and for letting me work on the journal. It is an immense pleasure. I must also acknowledge the J. Randall Leader Prize committee for liking that article; it was both humbling and motivating to be recognized in such a way. I owe much also to both universities who have let me teach and have supported this work in various ways. The University of Indianapolis, its Shaheen College of Arts and Sciences, and the English Department have given a better welcome than I deserve, I am sure. They have made me and my work feel valued in so many ways. Thank you to my colleagues for being my colleagues. At McNeese, I was fortunate to be awarded two Juliet Hardtner Women in Arts & Humanities Endowed Professorships that helped fund research and conference travel necessary for this book.

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My deep thanks go to Mr. and Mrs. William D. Blake and to Mr. Hardtner Klump for their generous donation and their support of work by women in the humanities, and to the McNeese Foundation for their stewardship of those awards. The libraries at both UIndy and McNeese, and especially the interlibrary loan programs, made this work possible. I have been so fortunate, with this book and the previous, to work with the wonderful people at Boydell & Brewer. I am awed by the scholarship that comes out of the press, and can never quite understand how I have now found my place there twice. Caroline Palmer is a gem, as both editor and person. Her support of this project from its early stages has meant a huge amount. I am so thankful that she, too, loves a good castle. Thank you most of all to my friends and family, all of whom make it (any it) worthwhile. To my mother and father, Liz and the late Don Martin, I will always owe everything. You were and are the best parents. Kaitie and Chuck and Trish and now Ryan: it is an honor to call you family. There is never enough time. I am lucky to have my Haney family so close; they have helped make this place my home. Lastly and mostly, my endless thanks and love to Barney. As promised, he has taken care of me and our marriage, and he has made me the happiest me I could ever be. He has driven me to the ends of England to see the castles I talk about in this book, and documented it all in photos and stories we’ll never stop telling each other. His unwavering enthusiasm for this project and for me doesn’t make sense. He is my favorite.

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Index Accolon 56, 198 Ackerman, Felicia Nimue 81 n.44 Adtherpe 10 Aggravayne 53, 54, 88, 104, 105–6, 107, 154, 159 n.46, 166, 174, 177, 190 Alfred, King 47 Alliterative Morte Arthure 34–36, 38–43, 46 n.51, 184 n.102, 246 n.30 Alnwick Castle 30, 232–33, 261 Alysaundir le Orphelyne 104, 203 n.31 Amesbury Abbey 138, 183 Angwysshaunce of Scotland 43, 45 Archibald, Elizabeth 60, 95–96, 100, 106, 147, 155 n.30, 156 Armitage, Ella S. 4 n.9 Armstrong, Dorsey 17 n.57, 26 n.12, 27 n.14, 36 n.31, 43, 45, 51, 63 n.7, 69 n.17, 75 n.31, 81 n.44, 88, 107 n.101, 134 n.34, 152, 154, 155 n.29, 205–6, 216–17, 232 n.9, 251 n.39 Arthur, King  and Gwenyver 50, 54–56, 57, 62, 74, 109, 120, 131, 137, 145–50, 173 and Launcelot 98–101, 127, 129, 188, 230, 236, 241 and Morgause 53–54, 85–86, 153–55, 159 birth 153 castle ownership 24–25, 32, 34–35, 40, 46–47, 71, 79, 135, 228, 256 conception 1, 25, 144 coronation 46, 91, 116–17

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in battle 21, 32, 34, 52, 64, 73, 132, 148, 190, 228, 246 n.30, 252–58 in prison 192, 196, 198–202, 205 kingship 25, 33, 38–46, 49–50, 51, 57, 60, 110, 116–17, 256 reign 8, 30–31, 35–37, 46, 52–53, 136 wedding 54, 56 Atkinson, Stephen C. B. 97, 99 n.77, 99 n.78 Bachelard, Gaston 17, 143 Bagdemagus 64–67, 103 daughter 206 Balan 52, 70, 72, 73, 131, 144 n.4 Balyn 33, 47, 48, 50, 52, 59, 66, 67–75, 76, 82, 90, 91, 96, 130, 131, 138, 144 n.4, 190, 193 Bamburgh Castle 30, 232–33, 261 Ban, King of Benwic 32 barbican 27 Bardsley, Susan 237, 241 Barrett, John C. 15, 29 Bartlett, Jennifer 184 n.102 Basso, Keith H. 21, 107 Batt, Catherine 39, 67, 83, 101, 137, 150 n.15, 166–67, 176 n.83 battlements 27, 247 Bawdwyn of Bretayne 43, 86 Beauchamp earls 19, 227 Beauchamp, Henry, 14th Earl and 1st Duke of Warwick 19 Beauchamp, Richard, 13th Earl of Warwick 19 bed 16 n.48, 28, 84, 149, 173, 174, 182, 188, 198 Elayne of Corbyn’s 164–65, 167, 168, 169–71

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Gawayne’s deathbed 133, 135, 136, 229 Gwenyver’s 164–65, 169, 174, 176–77, 210, 218–20, 223 Igrayne’s 150–51 Morgause’s 154, 159–61 bedroom 16 n.48, 28, 141, 148, 154, 159, 161–67, 169, 176, 178, 182, 184, 185, 210, 213, 220, 223 Bedwell, Laura K. 201 n.25 Bell, Catherine 115 Bender, Barbara 12 n.33 Benson, C. David 137, 183, 185 Benson, Larry D. 137 n.43 Benwick 1, 14, 21, 228, 229, 238– 42,245, 246, 247, 253 Best, Sue 213 Bewmaynes see Gareth Bible, The 123, 124 Biddle, Martin 48, 61 n.4 Blamour 140 Bleoberys de Ganys 63–64, 140 Blew Knyght (Sir Persaunte of Inde) 85, 89 Bliss, Jane 156 n.37 Blyaunte 172 Bodiam Castle 3 border see boundary Bors 64 n.9, 94, 135, 140, 168, 175, 177 n.86, 231, 236 Bors, King of Gaule 32 boundary 27, 44, 45, 71, 75, 78, 90, 91, 108, 124, 130, 146, 149, 165, 166, 178, 179, 181, 188, 194, 199, 208, 213–14, 232, 234, 251, see also margin(al) Bovaird-Abbo, Kristin 81 n.44 Brandsma, Frank 17 n.57 Brink, Jeanie R. 73 n.28 Bromell la Pleche 168 n.68 Brown, R. Allen 1, 3–4, 6, 19 n.62, 21 Brusen 164, 167, 169–70 Buc, Philippe 116 n.4 burial 52, 53–54, 131–32, 134–35, 136–38, 139-40, 255–56, 259

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Cador 42, 43 Caerleon 32, 79, 85, 154–55, 262 Camelot and Arthurian ideology 47, 109–12, 125, 140, 146 and Round Table fellowship 61, 65, 68, 108, 113, 119, 128 and Winchester 32, 47–48, 61, 119 as power center 48–54, 56, 69, 74, 196 Saint Stephen’s Church 52, 54 Candlemas 116 Canterbury 109, 249, 252 Canterbury Cathedral 124 Carlisle 46, 95–97, 107, 237 Carsten, Janet 146 Casey, Edward 13, 15 n.45, 91, 112, 125 Castell Blanke 172 Castell Charyot 202 Castle Rising 5 Caughey, Anna 26 Cawsey, Kathy 157–58 Caxton edition 36 n.30, 97 n.73, 109 n.105, 135, 191 n.4, 191 n.7 Caxton, William 135 Cenacle 123 Cherewatuk, Karen 88 n.55, 89, 136, 156 n.35, 161, 162, 168–69, 178, 253 child(ren) 29, 48, 52, 103, 143, 144, 151–53, 155, 156–8, 162, 163, 168, 171 n.76, 182 christening 152–53 Christian(ity) 42 n.44, 88, 111, 116–17, 122 n.13, 124, 127 n.24, 128, 130 Christmas 35, 116 Clark, David Eugene 127 n.24 Clarrus 140 Clason, Christopher R. 182 Claudas 32–33, 168 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 208 Collgrevaunce 97 n.73, 178 n.91, 179, 182 Cooper, Helen 158

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Corbyn (Corbenic) 163, 172, see also Elayne of Corbyn Cornwall (region) 30, 43, 152, 256 n.46 Cornwall, Duke of 13, 25–27, 29, 30, 150 coronation 46, 91, 116–18, 201, 249 Coulson, Charles 3 n.5, 7–8, 24 n.5, 36 counsel 42, 44–45, 50, 55 n.64, 64, 84, 105, 107, 147, 239 crenellation 4, 7–8 Cresswell, Tim 16 n.52, 23, 71 Crofts, Thomas H. 68 n.16, 70 n.19, 107 n.100, 235 n.15 Damas 193, 198–202, 204, 205, 224 Daniell, Christopher 136 n.41 Darras 193, 194–96, 197, 205, 224 Davidson, Roberta 192, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201 n.27, 213 Davis, Philip 7 n.21 de Certeau, Michel 11 death 24, 27, 45, 51, 52–54, 73, 90, 105, 117, 127–28, 130 n.28, 131–40, 150, 153, 156, 158, 159, 162, 166, 173, 174, 179–82, 183, 195, 196, 199–200, 206–7, 224, 227, 229, 236, 247, 255–56, 259 Dichmann, Mary 39 Dobyns, Ann 235 n.16 Dolorous Stroke 54 n.62, 73 door(way) 15, 28, 69, 78, 82, 107, 144–45, 152–53, 160, 163–64, 173, 178–82, 183 trapdoor 210 Douglas, Mary 186 n.108 Dover Castle 21, 132–36, 138, 139, 140, 190, 228, 251–56, 258 drawbridge 82 Dunbabin, Jean 207 n.39, 214 n.55 Dynadan 90, 104, 194, 197 Easter 116 Ector (foster father to Arthur) 151–3

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Ector de Marys (brother to Launcelot) 47, 93, 139–40, 236 Edwards, Elizabeth 113, 174, 185, 241 Elayne of Ascolot (Fayre Maydyn) 172–3 Elayne of Corbyn 163–72, 175 Ellis, Deborah S. 67 Elyne le Blanke 64 n.9 Evans, Ruth 210, 223 Ewayne 43 Excalibur 56, 71, 147, 198, 258 explicit (in manuscript) 191–92, 195 n.17 Fair Maiden (Fayre Maydyn) of Ascolot 172–73 Fairclough, Graham 28 Faulkner, P. A. 6, 7 feast 34, 35, 36–37, 40–41, 60, 64 n.9, 76–77, 79, 84, 85, 87–88, 89, 110, 116–21, 124, 128, 130, 136–37, 144, 145, 168, 184, 185–86, see also food feminine 26, 147, 173, 205, 211, 213, 216, 217, 221, 237, 250 Field, P.J.C. 17 n.57, 18–19, 34, 36 n.30, 75 n.31, 76 n.33, 97 n.73, 105, 109 n.105, 122 n.13, 157 n.41, 163, 190 n.3, 191, 194 n.15, 232, 258 n.49 Finke, Laurie A. 159 n.45 Fisher, Kevin D. 16, 131 n.29 Fitzhenry, William 167 food 77, 78, 82, 122, 126, 143, 184, 186–87, 198, 202, 204, 245, see also feast fortification 3, 4–7, 24, 27 Foucault, Michel 189 n.1, 196 n.19 Francis, Christina 219 Fries, Maureen 201 n.28 Fyleloly 98, 102 Gahalantyne 103, 140 Gaherys 53, 54, 88, 104, 105, 154, 159, 160–62, 206–7, 236 n.17 Gaheriet (French) 135

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Gaines, Barry 18 n.59 Galahad 47, 66, 73, 74, 94 n.69, 96, 99, 100, 102 n.85, 108–9, 111, 112–13, 120–21, 130, 153, 163–64, 165, 166, 168, 169 Galyhodyn 140 Galyhud 140, 238–39 Gareth 53, 54, 59, 66, 74–91, 95, 104, 105, 106, 116, 131, 144 n.4, 154, 155, 161 n.50, 162, 184, 191, 229, 236 n.17 Garlon 73 gate (of the castle) 10, 27, 72, 82, 172, 217, 248, 255, 262 gatehouse 3 n.5, 27, 188 Gawayne 50–51, 53, 54, 55–56, 64, 74, 76, 78, 79 n.41, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90, 93, 103 n.87, 105–6, 110, 118, 126–30, 131, 132–37, 138, 139, 144 n.4, 148, 154, 159–60, 162, 182 n.97, 186, 228–29, 230, 232, 234–41, 243, 246, 247, 254, 255–56, see also Launcelot and Gawayne Gaylord, Alan 185 n.104 Geltner, G. 193 gender 14, 26 n.12, 51, 63 n.7, 146, 154 n.27, 166 n.62, 167, 202, 203 n.31, 205–6, 210–24, 229–30, 241–43, 245, 250–51, see also feminine, masculine, women’s space geocriticism 17 Geoffrey of Monmouth 34, 41 n.41 geography 1, 2, 14 n.40, 16, 17, 23, 30, 37 n.34, 43, 45–46, 47, 49, 67, 71, 74, 75, 79, 85 n.52, 104, 111, 119, 129–30, 138, 139, 156, 163, 164, 210, 211, 215, 217, 218, 219, 232, 243, 252, 253, 256, 257 giants 33, 208–9 Gibson, Angela 101 n.81, 162, Gilchrist, Roberta 28 n.17, 211–12, 243 n.28

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Goodall, John 6, 7, 8, 138, 253 n.42 Goodrich, Peter H. 153 n.25 Gordon, Bruce 52, 131–32 grail 66, 74, 100, 112, 121–27, 128–29, 130, 131, 164, 185 grail quest 54 n.62, 73, 94–95, 96, 99, 108, 111, 120, 122, 127, 128, 130 n.28, 184, 187 Grene Knyght (Sir Partholype) 80, 85, 89 Grimes, Ronald L. 115, 119, 120 Grosz, Elizabeth 212 n.52 Gryfflette le Fyse de Du 64, 148 Gryngamoure 82, 83 Guinevere see Gwenyvere Guy, Alfred E., Jr. 101 n.84 Gwenyver, Queen and authority 54–57, 192 and Launcelot 1, 9, 94–95, 99, 105, 107, 163–65, 168–72, 173, 178–84, 203–4, 216–17, 222– 23, 230, 231–32, 236, 237 and Mellyagaunt 159, 193–94, 210, 212–16, 217–19 and Mordred 14, 228, 242–52 and ‘Poisoned Apple Episode’ 186–88 marriage 36, 50, 54, 62, 74, 120, 131, 146, 173, see also Arthur and Gwenyver Haas, Kurtis B. 237 n.21 hall (great hall) 35, 37–42, 48–49, 50, 77–8, 83–84, 93, 94, 96, 108, 110, 122, 124–25, 128, 129–30, 140, 152 n.24, 161 n.50, 184, 186, 201 Hanawalt, Barbara A. 2, 125, 211 Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr. 177 n.88 Hardyng’s Chronicle 46 n.51, 48 n.56 Harleus le Berbeus 73 Harris, E. Kay 176 Harvey, David 14, 16 n.50, 18, 138 Hervyse de Revell 64 Hillier, Bill 1, 59, 63

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Hillner, Julia 193 n.12 Hodges, Kenneth 17 n.57, 27 n.14, 30 n.20, 36 n.31, 43, 45, 51, 69 n.17, 74, 75 n.31, 77 n.35, 134 n.33, 134 n.34, 151 n.16, 152, 161–62, 182 n.97, 185 n.103, 232 n.9, 235 n.14, 256 n.45 Hoffman, Donald 26 n.12 Holbrook, Sue Ellen 48 Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost) 116, 123–24, 128 Hugh-Jones, Stephen 146 Ider 43 Igrayne 25–26, 28–29, 57, 150–53, 154, 155, 166, 167, 209 Ygerne (French) 25, 26, 28 Ihle, Sandra Ness 122 n.12 illness see sickness Ingham, Patricia Clare 27 n.14 Ironsyde (Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys) 79 n.41, 82, 85, 89 Isode, La Beall 10, 183, 195 n.18, 197, 231 Jesmok, Janet 166, 220 Johnson, Matthew 9 Jones, John Paul III 102 Joyus Garde 1, 13, 30, 138–40, 183, 228, 229, 231–33, 236, 237–38, 239, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247, 250, 253, 259, 261 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 156 n.36 Kapelle, Rachel 156–57 Kaufman, Amy 54 n.63, 171 Kay 64, 75, 77–79, 86, 92, 104, 105, 148 Kees, Susan 24 Kelly, Kathleen Coyne 166 n.62 Kelly, Robert L. 70 n.22, 135 n.36 Kennedy, Beverly 68 n.16, 107 n.100, 153 n.25, 168, 176 n.84, 201 Kennedy, Edward 46 n.51 Kim, Hyonjin 78 n.37, 237 King, D. J. Cathcart 6

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Kisor, Yvette 164 n.58 kitchen 28, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80–82, 84, 86, 89, 90, 184 ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode 176 n.84, 209–24 Kobialka, Michal 2, 125, 211 Korrel, Peter 106–7 Kynge of the Hondred Knyghtis 32 Kynge of the Lake 64 Kynke Kenadoune (Kyng Kenadowne) 75, 88 La Cote Male Tayle 104, 208 n.40 Lady Lyle of Avilion 69 Lady of the Lake 70–71 LaFarge, Catherine 239 n.24 Lambert, Mark 95–96, 97 n.75, 105 n.95, 235 n.16 Lameroke 90, 104, 159–63, 167, 236 Lancelot see Launcelot Lancelot (French prose text) 203–4, 207 n.37, 220 n.67, 222 n.70, Larrington, Carolyne 67, 70 n.21, 76 Last Supper 111, 123 Launcelot 1, 13–14, 34, 36, 43, 47, 64 n.9, 66, 103–4, 107, 113, 160, 162, 173–85, 187–88, 190, 192, 194, 206–9, 228, 230–33, 243, 244, 245, 246, 251, 253, 258, 261 and Elayne of Ascolot 172–73 and Elayne of Corbyn 163–72, 175 and Gareth 78, 80, 86, 88, 89, 90 and Gawayne 126–28, 131, 133–38, 229, 234–42, 247, 256 and Mellyagaunt 9, 210, 212, 213–23 and Morgan 202–6 and Urry 97–102 death and burial 138–40 premier status 59, 80, 91–95, 99, 100, 102, 112, 167, 229 see also Arthur and Launcelot, Gwenyver and Launcelot Lavayne 47, 102, 130 n.28, 236

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law 29, 39, 70 n.19, 107, 117 n.7, 119, 178, 185, 192–93, 209, 245, 258 Lawrence, Denise L. 15 n.47 Lefebvre, Henri 11–12, 15, 17 n.53, 102, 110, 134, 146, 210 n.44, 229 legal see law Leitch, Megan G. 18 n.58, 67 n.14, 83, 107, 161 n.50, 165, 170, 176, 178, 207 Lestoire de Merlin  see Merlin Lexton, Ruth 18 n.58, 32 n.23, 39 n.36, 44, 75, 76, 83–84, 89, 97, 107 n.100, 117 n.6, 117 n.7, 136 n.40, 156 n.38, 178 n.90, 182 Liber Regalis 118 Liddiard, Robert 3, 7–8, 24 n.5, 27, 42 n.43 Little Bretayne, King of 43, Lodegreauns, King (father of Gwenyver) 61, 109, 145 London 32, 50, 147, 185, 245, 248–50, 256, see also Tower of London Lonezep 90, 104 Longley, Anne P. 250–51 Lot, King 32, 52–53, 131, 147, 153 n.25, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160 Lourau, René 35 love 25–26, 64, 83, 88, 94, 109 n.104, 118, 138, 139–40, 143, 144, 146, 149, 154, 158, 159–61, 163, 169, 170–71, 173, 175–76, 178, 182–84, 185, 203–4, 205, 213, 230 Low, Setha M. 15 n.7 Lucius, Emperor of Rome 34–35, 37, 39–40, 43, 44, 45, 46 Lustig, T. J. 224 Lynch, Andrew 67, 70 n.22, 199 n.22, 227, 234 Lynet 79–82, 88, 161 n.50 Lyoness 82–84, 86–88, 131, 161 n.50 Madore de la Porte 103, 187 Mahoney, Dhira 18 n.58, 77 n.35, 219, 246 n.31 Maledysaunte 104

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Mandel, Jerome 221 margin(al) 43, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74, 76, 77–91, 108, 141, 149, 155, 193, 199 Mark, King 63–64, 160, 183 n.101, 195 n.18, 231 marriage 26, 29, 36, 48, 50, 54–55, 61–62, 74, 84, 87–90, 118, 120, 131, 143, 146–9, 150, 152, 161 n.50, 168 n.68, 173, 182, 242, 245, see also wedding Marshall, Peter 52, 131–32 Martin, Molly 18 n.58, 76, 83, 87 n.53, 90, 126 n.23, 139 n.52, 159 n.48, 165, 195 n.18, 209 n.42 Massey, Doreen 12, 110, 138 May Day 103, 157–58 McCarthy, Terence 25, 144, 175 McClune, Kate 71, 87 n.54, 156 McCracken, Peggy 174 n.80, 249 n.35 McDowell, Linda 12 n.33, 13, 112, 128 meal see feast and food Mellyagaunt 9, 159, 164, 174, 189 n.1, 193–94, 210–23, 230, 243 Merlin (Lestoire de Merlin, French prose text) 26, 32, 111, 117 n.7, 151 n.17, 152, 154 Merlyn 28, 29, 51, 54 n.62, 55, 66, 70, 73, 109–10, 111, 151–53, 155–56, 158, 173 n.78, 223 n.10 Moore, J. Cameron 101 n.84 Moore, Rowan 16 n.48 Mordred 46 n.51, 57, 66, 95, 103–8, 132, 134, 135–36, 138, 144, 153–59, 166, 168, 174, 176–77, 181–82, 190, 195, 228, 242–57 Morgan, Hollie L. S. 161 Morgan le Fay 53, 56–57, 152, 153 n.25, 193, 198, 202–6, 221, 224 Morgause 53, 54, 85–86, 153–55, 158, 159–63, 167 Morris, Rosemary 26 n.11 Mort le Roi Artu, La (Mort Artu) 106, 139, 176, 180, 186, 229, 232, 244, 247, 255

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INDEX

Moslund, Sten Pultz 124–5 Muckerheide, Ryan 107 n.100 Murray, Susan 18 n.59, 147, 211, 250 Nabur 157 n.41, 158 Natter, Wolfgang 102 Naughton, Ryan 79 Nero 52, 73 Neville, Richard, 16th Earl of Warwick 227 New Year 35 Newbold Revel 18 Newman, Barbara 124, 234 noise 134, 172, 177–78, 179, 183, 185 Norman Conquest 6 n.16, 24 Norris, Ralph 68 n.16, 76 n.33 nourishing 79, 143, 151–53, 158, 168, 184, 194, 202 Okely, Judith 149 Old Sarum 257–58 Olsen, Corey 175–76, 177 Ostrau, Nicolay 18 n.58 Outlake 199, 201 Palomydes 10, 104, 194, 196–97, 236, Parsydes 105 Partholype (see Grene Knyght)  80, 85, 89 Patryse 131, 186 Pearson, Michael Parker 228, 231 Pellam, King 73, Pelles, King 164, 166 Pellynor 50–51, 52, 54 n.62, 55, 61, 64–65, 66, 108, 110, 112, 118, 155 n.30, 156 n.32, 159 Pentecost 63, 75, 76, 79–80, 85, 92, 94, 95, 113, 116–25, 128, 130, 131, 184 Pentecostal Oath 51, 62–63, 79, 82, 85, 116 118-20, 134, 140, 147, 150, 167, 201, 205, 230, 235–6, 242, 261 Percyvale 105, 108, 112, 195 n.18 Persaunte of Inde (Blew Knyght) 85, 89

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289

Perymones (Rede Knyght) 85, 89 Peterborough Chronicle, The 24 Peters, Edward M. 202 Peverley, Sarah 77 n.35 Piotrowski, Andrzej 10–11 Platt, Colin 3 n.5 Plenoryus 64 n.9, 208 n.40 Pochoda, Elizabeth 71 ‘Poisoned Apple’ episode 105, 144, 184–88, 245 n.29 portcullis 27, 82 postern 151–53, 160, 3 n.5 prayer 65, 100–1, 136–37, 139, 191–92 pregnancy 29, 151 Priamus 64 n.9 Pugh, Ralph 193 n.11 Queste del Saint Graal, La 121, 124, 126, 127, 128 n.25, 129 Radulescu, Raluca 101 Raguin, Virginia Chieffo 218 Raharijoana, Victor 24 rape 26, 29, 62, 140, 150–51, 153, 154, 163, 166–67, 173, 205, 209, 219 Rapoport, Amos 13 n.38, 16 n.48, 38 n.35, 112 n.112 Rede Knyght (Sir Perymones) 85, 89 Rede Knyght of the Rede Laundys (Sir Ironsyde) 79 n.41, 82, 85, 89 Rendell, Jane 210, 224 residence (castle as) 4, 6–7, 8, 143, 188, 231 Reynolds, Meredith 240 n.26 Richards, Colin 228, 231 Richardson, Amanda 28 n.17, 186, 211–12, 243 n.28 Ricoeur, Paul 12 n.32, 110 n.108 Riddy, Felicity 63, 77 n.35, 89, 95–96, 113, 191, 194 n.16, 200–1 Robeson, Lisa 229 n.5, 255 Roland, Meg 17 n.57 ‘Roman War’ episode 34–46 Rome 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 43, 45–46, 92 Rose, Gillian 11–12, 110, 134

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290

INDEX

Ross, Kristin 12–13 Round Table (physical table) 14, 41, 48–49, 61–62, 110, 119, 129, 145 Rouse, Robert 17 n.57, 47, 85 n.52, 257 Royns, King 33, 50, 55, 69, 71, 72 Ruff, Joseph R. 77 n.35 Rushton, Cory 17 n.57, 47, 57, 103, 144 n.4, 159 n.44, 249 Sack, Robert David 129–30, 169, 218–19 Saint Stephen’s Church 52, 54 Salisbury 252, 257 Sanders, Arnold 76 n.33 Sanders, Donald 188 Sandwich 46 Saracens 34 Saunders, Corinne 29, 250 n.37 Scala, Elizabeth 216 n.58 Schroeder, Peter R. 235 n.16 Schulenburg, Jane Tibbets 43–44, 212 Segwarydes’s wife 64 Selyvaunte 172 servant(s) 39, 78, 187 Sévère, Richard 111 n.109 sex 26, 29, 84, 107, 144, 149–50, 153–55, 158, 161 n.50, 162, 166, 173, 174, 176, 182–83, 219, 223, 229, 251, see also love, rape Sharp, Joanne P. 13, 112, 128 Shichtman, Martin B. 159 n.45, 173 sickness 153, 192, 194–96, 197, 204, 224 siege 5, 26, 227, 229, 232–34, 238, 242, 243–44, 245–51, 253, 257 siege engine 227, 246, 248, 250 Siege Perilous 100, 108–13, 120–21 Simmel, Georg 49–50, 72, 93 Sklar, Elizabeth 163 n.57 Smith, Jonathan Z. 115 Soja, Edward 12, 16, 111 Sparks, Corey 191 Spearing, A. C. 192 Spurr, David 261 Stansbury, Sarah 218

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Stanzaic Morte Arthur 106, 134, 138, 139, 175, 176–77, 179, 181, 186, 229, 232, 234, 236, 239, 240 n.25, 241, 244, 248, 249 n.34, 254, 256 n.46 Stewart, George 48 n.54, 218 n.62, 232 n.7 Strohm, Paul 222–23 Sturges, Robert 176 Suite du Merlin 33, 52, 53 n.61, 55, 62, 65, 69 n.18, 70, 73 n.27, 74, 145, 148, 154, 157 n.41, 158, 200 n.23 Summers, Joanna 192 n.8, 195 n.17 sword in the stone Arthur’s 116–17, 120, 201 n.26 Balyn’s/Galahad’s 47, 73–74, 100, 116, 121 Tally, Robert T., Jr. 17 Tanaguin 180 Tarquyn 206–8 Taylor, Amanda D. 201 n.28 Terrabyl, Castle 26, 27 territoriality 35, 115, 129–30, 169, 170, 175, 179, 188, 218–19, 220 Thompson, A. Hamilton 5 n.13 Thompson, M. W. 19 n.62 Thompson, Michael 37 throne (physical seat)  37–38 Tiller, Kenneth 122 n.12, 126, 138 Tintagel see Tyntagil Torre 50–51, 55, 56, 64–65, 118 tower 3 n.5, 4, 27, 42, 43, 157 n.41, 164, 189, 208 n.40 Tower of London 14, 228, 242, 243–44, 245–53 Toy, Sidney 4, 5 treason 62, 67 n.14, 107, 148, 174, 178, 182, 200, 223 n.74, 228–29 Tristan see Trystram Tristan en Prose 160 n.49, 165 n.59, 194 n.15 Trystram 30 n.20, 36, 64, 88 n.56, 89–90, 102 n.85, 112, 162 n.54,

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INDEX

183, 192, 194–98, 202, 205, 210, 231 Tuan, Yi-Fu 14–15, 132–33 Tyntagil 13, 27, 29–30, 150, 152, 209 Upper Room 123 Upton, Dell 9–10 Urry 90, 95–102, 105, 113, 130 n.28 Uryence, King 53, 64, 198 Uther, King 13, 25–31, 61–62, 145, 150–53, 155, 167, 209, Uwayne 53, 74, 93 van Ness, Akkelies 15 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 4, 5 vision 76, 83, 122, 126, 139 n.52, 165, 172, 185, 189 n.1, 202, 208, 211 n.49, 215 Vyllyars 140 walls (castle) exterior 1, 2, 4, 13, 15, 27, 28, 40–41, 93, 141, 193, 217, 222, 223, 229, 230, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238–42, 243, 245, 246 n.30, 247, 248, 250, 251, 261 interior 107, 163, 188, 217 prison 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203–4, 206, 208, 209, 213, 224 Walsh, John Michael 217 n.59 ‘War with the Five Kings’ episode 64, 147–50 Warwick Castle 19, 227

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291

Watlyng Street 46 wedding 55, 62, 87–89, 91, 131, 150, 161 n.50 West Wales, Duke of 43 Westminster 90, 95 n.70, 104, 118, 216, 218, 223 Westphal, Bernard 16–17 Wheatley, Abigail 18 n.59 Whetter, K. S. 68 n.16, 246 n.31, 258 Whitaker, Muriel 18 n.59, 20, 36, 50, 61, 107, 135, 146, 211, 230, 251 William, King 24 Wilson, Robert H. 76 n.33, 223 n.74 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott 154 n.26 Winchester 32, 33, 47–49, 57, 61, 119, 218 n.62, 249 Winchester Manuscript (BL Add. MS 59678) 36 n.30, 66, 97 n.73, 109 n.105, 185, 191 n.4 window 9–10, 76, 83, 93 n.68, 101, 165, 172, 173, 208, 210, 213–14, 222, 261, 262 Wolfthal, Diane 182 women’s space 28, 107, 167, 212, 213, 243, 250 Wyatt, Siobhán Mary 81 n.44, 216 n.57 Wynne-Davies, Marion 143–44, 150 n.15 Ygerne see Igrayne Zuesse, Evan M. 137

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ARTHURIAN STUDIES

I ASPECTS OF MALORY, edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer



II THE ALLITERATIVE MORTE ARTHURE: A Reassessment of the Poem, edited by Karl Heinz Göller



III THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, I: Author Listing, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last



IV THE CHARACTER OF KING ARTHUR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, Rosemary Morris



V PERCEVAL: The Story of the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Nigel Bryant



VI THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, II: Subject Index, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last



VII THE LEGEND OF ARTHUR IN THE MIDDLE AGES, edited by P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford and E. K. C. Varty



VIII THE ROMANCE OF YDER, edited and translated by Alison Adams IX THE RETURN OF KING ARTHUR, Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer X ARTHUR’S KINGDOM OF ADVENTURE: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur, Muriel Whitaker XI KNIGHTHOOD IN THE MORTE DARTHUR, Beverly Kennedy



XII LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome I, edited by Renée L. Curtis



XIII LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome II, edited by Renée L. Curtis



XIV LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome III, edited by Renée L. Curtis



XV LOVE’S MASKS: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems, Merritt R. Blakeslee



XVI THE CHANGING FACE OF ARTHURIAN ROMANCE: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in memory of Cedric E. Pickford, edited by Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern and Kenneth Varty



XVII REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS IN THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES AND LYRIC POETRY OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE: Essays presented to Kenneth Varty on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, edited by Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy

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XVIII CEI AND THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND, Linda Gowans

XIX LAƷAMON’S BRUT: The Poem and its Sources, Françoise H. M. Le Saux XX READING THE MORTE DARTHUR, Terence McCarthy, reprinted as AN INTRODUCTION TO MALORY XXI CAMELOT REGAINED: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849, Roger Simpson XXII THE LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR IN ART, Muriel Whitaker

XXIII GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG AND THE MEDIEVAL TRISTAN LEGEND: Papers from an Anglo-North American symposium, edited with an introduction by Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey XXIV ARTHURIAN POETS: CHARLES WILLIAMS, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds

XXV AN INDEX OF THEMES AND MOTIFS IN TWELFTHCENTURY FRENCH ARTHURIAN POETRY, E. H. Ruck

XXVI CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES AND THE GERMAN MIDDLE AGES: Papers from an international symposium, edited with an introduction by Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey XXVII SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: Sources and Analogues, compiled by Elisabeth Brewer XXVIII CLIGÉS by Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell XXIX THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR THOMAS MALORY, P. J. C. Field

XXX T. H. WHITE’S THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, Elisabeth Brewer

XXXI ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, III: 1978–1992, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Caroline Palmer XXXII ARTHURIAN POETS: JOHN MASEFIELD, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds XXXIII THE TEXT AND TRADITION OF LAƷAMON’S BRUT, edited by Françoise Le Saux XXXIV CHIVALRY IN TWELFTH-CENTURY GERMANY: The Works of Hartmann von Aue, W. H. Jackson XXXV THE TWO VERSIONS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR: Multiple Negation and the Editing of the Text, Ingrid TiekenBoon van Ostade

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XXXVI RECONSTRUCTING CAMELOT: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition, Michael Glencross XXXVII A COMPANION TO MALORY, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards XXXVIII A COMPANION TO THE GAWAIN-POET, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson XXXIX MALORY’S BOOK OF ARMS: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur, Andrew Lynch

XL MALORY: TEXTS AND SOURCES, P. J. C. Field



XLI KING ARTHUR IN AMERICA, Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack



XLII THE SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, edited by D. Thomas Hanks Jr

XLIII THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Elizabeth Edwards XLIV GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND THE ARTHURIAN TRADITION, edited by James P. Carley

XLV THE KNIGHT WITHOUT THE SWORD: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry, Hyonjin Kim



XLVI ULRICH VON ZATZIKHOVEN’S LANZELET: Narrative Style and Entertainment, Nicola McLelland

XLVII THE MALORY DEBATE: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda XLVIII MERLIN AND THE GRAIL: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian romances attributed to Robert de Boron, translated by Nigel Bryant XLIX ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY IV: 1993–1998, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Elaine Barber L DIU CRÔNE AND THE MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN CYCLE, Neil Thomas

LII KING ARTHUR IN MUSIC, edited by Richard Barber



LIII THE BOOK OF LANCELOT: The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles, Bart Besamusca



LIV A COMPANION TO THE LANCELOT-GRAIL CYCLE, edited by Carol Dover



LV THE GENTRY CONTEXT FOR MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Raluca L. Radulescu

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LVI PARZIVAL: With Titurel and the Love Lyrics, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, translated by Cyril Edwards



LVII ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P. J. C. FIELD, edited by Bonnie Wheeler

LVIII THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL, translated by Nigel Bryant



LIX THE GRAIL LEGEND IN MODERN LITERATURE, John B. Marino LX RE-VIEWING LE MORTE DARTHUR: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, edited by K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu LXI THE SCOTS AND MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN LEGEND, edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan LXII WIRNT VON GRAVENBERG’S WIGALOIS: Intertextuality and Interpretation, Neil Thomas

LXIII A COMPANION TO CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert LXIV THE FORTUNES OF KING ARTHUR, edited by Norris J. Lacy

LXV A HISTORY OF ARTHURIAN SCHOLARSHIP, edited by Norris J. Lacy

LXVI MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England, Thomas H. Crofts LXVII MARRIAGE, ADULTERY AND INHERITANCE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Karen Cherewatuk LXVIII EDWARD III’S ROUND TABLE AT WINDSOR: The House of the Round Table and the Windsor Festival of 1344, Julian Munby, Richard Barber and Richard Brown LXIX GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH: THE HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN: An edition and translation of the De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], edited by Michael D. Reeve, translated by Neil Wright

LXX RADIO CAMELOT: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922– 2005, Roger Simpson

LXXI MALORY’S LIBRARY: The Sources of the Morte Darthur, Ralph Norris LXXII THE GRAIL, THE QUEST, AND THE WORLD OF ARTHUR, edited by Norris J. Lacy LXXIII ILLUSTRATING CAMELOT, Barbara Tepa Lupack with Alan Lupack

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LXXIV THE ARTHURIAN WAY OF DEATH: The English Tradition, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and K. S. Whetter LXXV VISION AND GENDER IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Molly Martin LXXVI THE INTERLACE STRUCTURE OF THE THIRD PART OF THE PROSE LANCELOT, Frank Brandsma LXXVII PERCEFOREST: The Prehistory of King Arthur’s Britain, translated by Nigel Bryant LXXVIII CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES IN PROSE: The Burgundian Erec and Cligés, translated by Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol J. Chase LXXIX THE CONTINUATIONS OF CHRÉTIEN’S PERCEVAL: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending, Leah Tether LXXX SIR THOMAS MALORY: Le Morte Darthur, edited by P. J. C. Field LXXXI MALORY AND HIS EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARIES: Adapting Late Medieval Arthurian Romance Collections, Miriam Edlich-Muth LXXXII THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE GRAIL: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and its continuations, translated by Nigel Bryant LXXXIII EMOTIONS IN MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN LITERATURE: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders LXXXIV THE MANUSCRIPT AND MEANING OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialisation, K. S. Whetter LXXXV PUBLISHING THE GRAIL IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE FRANCE, Leah Tether LXXXVI MALORY’S MAGIC BOOK: King Arthur and the Child, 1862– 1980, Elly McCausland LXXXVII A NEW COMPANION TO MALORY, edited by Megan G. Leitch and Cory J. Rushton

LXXXVIII ARTHURIANISM IN EARLY PLANTAGENET ENGLAND: From Henry II to Edward I, Christopher Michael Berard

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Molly A. Martin

Cover image: View of Alnwick Castle from the lake. Photo courtesy of Alnwick Castle. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Space

The book also traces the mutual development of space and identity in the text, looking at Malory’s Arthurian community in and around castle space, both as individuals and as a group; for example, it considers Arthur’s political success through his use of space, and shows how crucial Camelot and its hall are to the fellowship of knights. Overall, the volume suggests a better understanding of the community’s central organising body, the Round Table, and offers important rereadings of a number of episodes and characters.   MOLLY A. MARTIN is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Indianapolis.

Castles

Castles play an integral part in Malory’s Morte Darthur; Camelot, Tintagel, Joyous Gard, and Dover, for example, are the crucial backdrop to the action and both host and shape the story as it moves through them. But despite this, Malory’s castles have received limited scholarly attention. As the first monograph to look extensively at either castles or space in Malory, this book aims to fill that gap. It reads the Morte through its castles – their architecture, structural and symbolic significance, and geographical locations, together with their political, communal, ritual, domestic, and martial functions.

and i n M a l ory ’ s M o r t e D a r t h u r

Arthurian Studies SERIES EDITOR: Norris J. Lacy

Castles Space and

in Mal or y’s Mo rt e Dart hur

7

Molly A. Martin