THE Golden Age of "Chivalry

Chivalry" was from the middle of the eleventh to about the beginning of the fifteenth century, or, to put it better, between the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Agincourt.

It was not till the twelfth century that Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table, which were the source of much romantic poetry in this period and afterwards.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the " Trouvères" of the North of France, who were the off

spring of the Troubadours" of Provence, travelled to England and sang in court and castle the doughty deeds of Alexander, Charlemagne, the Norman Roland, Havelok the Dane, Richard Cœur de Lion, Guy of Warwick and King Arthur and his Knights.

In 1205 Layamon, a Worcestershire monk, who was the first Englishman who wrote in his native tongue, finished his translation of the Brut d'Angleterre a Metrical Chronicle of England in Norman French-which the Norman writer Wace had founded on Geoffrey of Monmouth's prose stories of Arthur. Layamon introduced some Welsh stories, unknown to Geoffrey, and his poem reaches to 32,000 lines. Certainly he was the first to sing of King Arthur in English as distinct from pure Saxon Verse (see Early Philology of the English Tongues, p. 48, extract from Layamon). So we may call him the first English poet, Caedmon and Cynewulf in the seventh and eighth centuries being Saxon.

German Mediaeval poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is divided by Schlegel into three groups :—

(1) The Legends concerning Gothic, Frankish and Burgundian warriors, such as are treated in the thirteenth century in the Nibelungen-lied and in "The Hero Book."

These legends have usually, but not necessarily, an historical foundation.

(2) The Chivalrous poetry which took Charlemagne for its topic. In this, History gets more and more overlaid with fable and even at last with comic humour.

(3) The Stories of the British Arthur and the Round Table. Here the German singers have to do with a Christian King of Celtic origin in Britain, who was destined to represent the ideal of perfect chivalry and knightly virtue. But amongst these poems we frequently find love introduced, and some of these love poems have a plaintive Elegiac sadness of character, as in Tristram and Isolt. (His very name indicates this.) Often again the ideal knight, whether Arthur, Lancelot, Amidio of Gaul or Palmerine of England, is a glorified counterpart of some real men whose deeds are recounted in Froissart's Chronicle, e.g. The Black Prince or Sir Walter of Manny, or Sir John Chandos and, finally, this group has often a peculiarly allegorical character, especially in the San Graal Series, which embodies the conception of a Spiritual Knighthood. This resulted from the influence of the Crusades of the twelfth century, which Gibbon says were both a cause and an effect of Chivalry. Certainly the Crusades aroused the imagination, while the Crusaders also brought back from the East Persian and Arabian tales which are the creations of a more exuberant fancy than belongs to the peoples of the West. Of this third group The Arthurian legend became in the thirteenth century a prodigious favourite in Germany.

The name Arthur probably has the same signification as Pendragon, which means Caput Regum, Ardheer or Ardhreg (= The Arviragus of Juvenal) meaning summus Rex.

Cassibelan was chosen " Pendragon " at the time of Julius Caesar's invasion and we hear of both Arthur Pendragon and Uther Pendragon.