Tree-ring dates suggest that the Round Table was constructed in the second half of the thirteenth century, between 1250 and 1280, as the centrepiece for a great feast and tournament that took place at Winchester Castle in 1290.42 It was probably made in the town from English oak by the highly skilled carpenters who were one of England’s great assets in the medieval period. Visit the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, the roof of Westminster Hall or the great lantern at Ely if you want to see examples of their work, which was unrivalled anywhere in Europe.43 The purpose of the tournament was to celebrate, in Martin Biddle’s words, ‘the culmination of King Edward I’s plans for the future of his dynasty and of the English crown’. The construction of the Round Table and the holding of the tournament also had the effect of transferring, in popular imagination, Arthur’s fabled capital from Caerleon in Wales to Winchester in southern England. In other words, it was a major public relations coup.
It may seem improbable, but the impact of a round table on medieval sensibilities would have been considerable. Tables are important pieces of furniture. Around them take place meals and other social gatherings, and the shape of the table itself reflects the organisation and hierarchy of the gathering. Today many family dining tables are round or oval. This does not just reflect the fact that the shape is more compact and better suited to smaller modern houses; it also says something about the way modern family life is structured. In Victorian times, for example, long rectangular tables were the norm in middleclass households. This reflected the importance of the Master and Mistress of the house, who would have sat—or rather presided—at either end. Along the sides sat the children, poor relations and others. In medieval times dining arrangements in great houses were even more formal. The Lord and his immediate family would have eaten at a separate high table, probably raised on a dais at one end of the hall. Tenants, servants and others would have dined in the main body of the hall. The high table would have been separated from, but clearly visible to, all those present. To make the display even clearer, the Lord’s family and retinue would probably all have sat along one side of the high table, facing out over the hall for everyone to see. The Winchester Round Table broke all these rules, and it must have had a shocking effect on the people who saw it: in the late Middle Ages a round table was not merely an offence against protocol, it challenged the rigidly hierarchical system in which the understanding of political reality was enshrined.44
Sixty years after the tournament Edward III had the legs removed and the tabletop hung high on the wall, for everyone to see and wonder at. I believe that the effect of this removal from the ground to a more remote spot, high on the wall, was deliberate. Yes, it was more visible, but it was also removed, like an altar in church, visible but separate, and—I can think of no other word—Holy. Although it was still unpainted, there is some evidence that it may have been covered by a rich hanging or cloth.
The painting of the Round Table took place in the sixteenth century, in the reign of Henry VIII. Apart from some later touching up, to everyone’s surprise X-ray photos showed there to have been just one layer of paint. In other words, the design had not been built up over the century and a half or so between the time of Edward III and Henry. There were two known events attended by Henry at Winchester which could have led to the creation of the painting. The first was a visit he made in 1516; the second was a more grand state occasion, when the King came to Winchester with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1522. In a fascinating exercise in detailed art history, Pamela Tudor-Craig charted the history of Henry’s beard.45 This study was able to link the Round Table’s portrait of Henry as King Arthur to the period of his second, of three, beards, characterised as ‘square, relatively youthful and short-bearded’, that Tudor-Craig dated to the period June 1520—July 1522.
Clearly Henry was out to impress the Holy Roman Emperor. But there was more to it than that. Pamela Tudor-Craig points out that by this stage of his reign he had rid himself of Cardinal Wolsey, who had failed to gain approval for the annulment of Henry’s first marriage, and was
directing attention to historical research whereby the case for independence from Rome can be bolstered by the citation of ancient and national roots. The image of a seated king on the Round Table inWinchester Great Hall is not only a prime example of the interest in British history evinced by Henry VIII and his advisors: it is a card in the game of international diplomacy that engaged the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the French and English monarchies during most of Henry VIII’s reign. The Roman Emperor had Charlemagne, Francis of France claimed Julius Caesar. Henry VIII called out the Round Table presided over by King Arthur, his own imperial ancestor.46
During the Renaissance people in intellectual circles were inclined to question ideas that had been widely accepted during the Middle Ages, and the concept of a long-dead king whose courtiers slipped in and out of the realms of religion and magic began to lose credibility as a historical fact. But Arthur continued to exercise a degree of influence in certain circles, as Nicholas Higham explains:
Although it is quite easy to over-emphasise Arthur’s importance, he was successively used for political and cultural purposes by Edward IV, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, then James VI and I, variously as a source of dynastic legitimacy and imperial status, as a Protestant icon, as a touchstone of nationalism and the new identity of the realm with the monarch’s own person, and as a source of courtly ideals and pageantry.47
By the seventeenth century a population that had embraced Protestantism and accepted first Oliver Cromwell and subsequently parliamentary government, by which the Divine Right of Kings was repudiated, would not willingly have embraced Arthur, despite the pretensions to equality suggested by the Round Table. Instead, attention shifted towards the more historically verifiable King Alfred as England’s founding father. Alfred saw himself as a Saxon king, and from the eighteenth century onwards the Anglo-Saxons, rather than the semi-legendary Romanised British, became the preferred origin myth in England.
It is probably not stretching the truth to think of Alfred as the English or Anglo-Saxon Arthur. He is often represented in similar poses, looking noble, his head held proudly aloft. There is usually a large sword hanging from his belt or grasped in his right hand. He is portrayed as being rather more rugged than the somewhat fey image of Arthur. All in all, Alfred is seen as very English, and an altogether appropriate ancestor for someone like Queen Victoria.* Like Arthur, it would seem that Alfred acquired much of his reputation and many of his heroic legends after his lifetime.48
Ultimately it was the Renaissance that finished Arthur as a potent political symbol. Ironically, the freedom of thought engendered by that great change in intellectual attitudes liberated people’s imaginations, and Arthurian legends were given a new and wholly fictitious life. The Arthur of history was replaced by the Arthur of fiction. Today that Arthur is still thriving, and has contributed to a new genre of literature by way of epics such as Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and Idylls of the King, and the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, which owe more than a nod in Arthur’s direction. The world of Arthur has acquired a life of its own: the post-Industrial, pre-modern age has become an unlikely Avalon. It is, for me at least, a somewhat unsettling thought that one day Arthur might prove to be the most enduring character from British history.
*In Latin Geoffrey