Finding Arthur

In the vast corpus of texts treating the topic of Arthur’s rise and fall in the British Isles by far the most numerous are historical narratives composed many centuries after the historical Arthur may have lived, and far removed from the concerns of historical accuracy in the sense we understand it today. Chronicles that incorporate Arthur’s reign ultimately derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, written c. 1135, and a best-seller across Europe, which survives in at least 200 manuscripts.^[13] The Historia does not give a detailed account of Arthur’s death at Mordred’s hands – this was still to be written by the anonymous author of the Old French Vulgate Mort Artu (cited above), in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, Geoffrey’s work inaugurated a new era in chronicle writing in Britain which included Arthur’s reign, sufficiently appealing to become the source for Wace, who translated it into Anglo Norman French and added romance elements such as the institution of the Round Table, then into Middle English by Layamon. To better understand the genealogy and development of historical writing including Arthur’s reign out of Geoffrey’s Historia the following chronological table is useful:

This chronology shows how chronicles derived from Geoffrey’s Historia did not stop being expanded and added to with Wace, Layamon, or even those named authors of the thirteenth and fourteenth century we now know about (Castleford, Gloucester). It remained a live narrative project in the hands of not only professional historians (monks and scholars, or courtiers, and later heralds), who composed the first long Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB) and the author or authors of the Latin translation of the latter, but also numerous anonymous writers. Many were amateur compilers from the late fourteenth and fifteenth century who first translated ANPB into Middle English, and then added to the narrative, also altering parts of the legendary history pertaining to King Arthur’s reign.

The numbers in which the chronicle narrative of Arthur’s reign survived throughout the Middle Ages in England are overwhelming, and speak to a boom in readership and hence consumption of the story of Arthur (which takes up a considerable portion of the text) in Middle English.^[17] The ubiquity of the ‘historical Arthur’ of the chronicles attested to by not only the number of manuscripts in which MEPB survives (over 200), but also nuances or changes to Arthur’s narrative that appear therein, presents a competing view of Arthur in Britain – competing, that is, for modern scholars, since medieval readers and writers did not seem to share a concern for the boundaries of the fantasy Arthur of medieval romance that was in vogue across languages and territories. For the English-speaking audiences of the later Middle Ages, the Arthur of the chronicle tradition was a strong contender for the attention of both the upper classes, familiar with the sophistication of French romance, and the middle classes, like Thomas Malory, whose familiarity with both the lesser forms of English romance and the chronicle tradition has been long established.^[18] For the vast majority of the extant manuscript copies of the MEPB the presentational evidence shows them to be not deluxe objects, but rather predominantly family-owned books that were used, not just displayed as objects of pride for their owners. In other words, these are much smaller, less decorated (if ever) codices,^[19] visibly owned in the lower social strata, not the highest echelons of the aristocracy and royalty.^[20] As I have discussed elsewhere, members of the gentry and the bourgeois were the prime audience for this text, quite evidently also when first printed by William Caxton in 1480, just as Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur was also marketed by Caxton to ‘divers gentlemen’. Changes to historical accounts did continue to be made, too. At the other end of the Middle Ages, in England again, John Hardyng wrote a chronicle in verse in which he not only inserted the Grail Quest, but made Galahad the initiator of an order of the Grail, had him die and be buried in Glastonbury.^[21] It is important, therefore, to consider not only how much of anything written about Arthur might have been read as either history or fiction, or both, but also how much would one learn about Arthur, and where from in late medieval England.

Creativity was part and parcel of both historical and literary productions, and indeed Arthur featured prominently in chronicles, which were produced and disseminated in higher numbers than any other extant Arthurian romances in medieval England. As Edward Donald Kennedy reminds us in his recent contribution to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture:

The ‘lowly’ chronicles, as a friend once jokingly referred to them, were far more influential than well-known works like the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which survive in only one manuscript each; the chronicles were largely responsible for Arthur’s reputation in Britain.^[22]

Indeed, as Julia Boffey and Carol Meale, scholars of English medieval manuscripts, also remarked long ago, only twenty-five manuscripts that contain English Arthurian literary texts survive; ‘interestingly, out of them [of the twenty-five] eleven are known either to have been copied or to have been in circulation in the city’.^[23] In other words, not only do we have few, relatively speaking, literary texts in Middle English containing the Arthurian story produced in England, but out of those that survive, nearly half are concentrated in the capital and hence near the court. What this tells us is that Arthur’s figure would have been by far better known from historical writing, so widely spread to be ubiquitous in the town as in the countryside, judging by the quality, distribution, and social class background of owners and readers of chronicle manuscripts, than from Arthurian romances alone.

One might ask what purpose Arthur’s reign might serve at the other end of the Middle Ages in England – and hence why a prosification of Robert of Gloucester’s chronicle, particularly underlining Mordred’s act of treachery, proclaiming himself king, and the way in which Arthur chopped his head off, would be needed? The answer to this is easy. It is clear, from the evidence not only of the significant number of vernacular chronicles surviving from the period, but also from the changes to Arthur’s narrative discussed above, that historical writing was deemed useful by a broader readership than merely those involved in courtly politics or the monk-scholars employed to record historical events. I argue that the chronicles that included the story of Arthur, such as his rise and fall, his deposition at the hands of one of his own blood, were deemed useful tools to develop politically-inflected thinking around contemporary events taking place in the fifteenth century, by the upper and middle classes, who played important roles in events of national importance.^[24]

Indeed, when the anonymous compilers pondered on the sources they used, and mixed and matched the narratives they picked up, they were clearly alert to the possibilities posed by the material to shape contemporary understanding of recent events, and that must have been quite appealing. To this extent I agree with John Thompson’s overview of the post-medieval appeal of the Middle English chronicles:

[the Middle English Prose Brut chronicles’] significance, [in terms of the cultural mapping exercise that is the purpose of his essay] does not simply rely on the number and nature of their extant copies or their historical value as accurate documentary sources. Instead it depends on the meaningful and productive ways in which chronicle versions can be said to have expanded the imagined range and scope of the British history.^[25]

Thompson speaks of the overall capacity of the narrative of the Middle English Prose Brut in printed format to provide its medieval anonymous compilers ample opportunities to develop a repertoire for historical writing. However, Thompson dismisses, further in his chapter, the possibility that chronicle writing allowed for subtle nuancing; instead he considers that the medieval compilers of chronicles lacked a ‘sophisticated awareness of the contradictory historiographical impulses surrounding the English foundation myth they were charged with perpetuating’. While the original ‘contradictory historiographical impulses’ that led to the writing of ‘the English foundation myth’ may have been lost on fifteenth-century compilers of vernacular chronicles, the evidence I present in this article demonstrates that they nonetheless grasped the opportunity to interpret the events of Arthur’s reign from the perspective of their own fifteenth-century political experiences.

John Trevisa, the translator of the famous fourteenth-century text Polychronicon, by Ranulph Higden, into English, said ‘al men neodeth to knawe the cronykes’.^[26] In another, still relevant, context Matthew Fisher has reminded us that the other well-known English chronicler, Robert Mannyng, also a member of the Gilbertine order, and author of the more famous Handlyng Synne, a confessional manual translated from an Anglo-Norman French source, claimed, in his chronicle from the settling of the island by Brutus to Edward I’s death in 1307, that the book is ‘not for the lerid bot for the lewed’ (not for the learned, but for the unlearned).^[27] Fisher extrapolates from this, as well as the aims of that other literary giant, Geoffrey Chaucer, that writing for the ‘lewed’ (the unlearned) would have been part of a ‘larger rhetoric of accessibility’. Indeed, I would argue that such an intention was still very much valid and, one might add, much more democratically spread, in the fifteenth century, the period that saw a boom in the copying of the Middle English Brut chronicles.

Against the complexity of the relationships between and among vernacular chronicles in England in the later medieval period (not to mention in Scotland and Wales), the anonymous MEPB, originally translated from the ANPB, is therefore by far the most widespread prose narrative in English in medieval England – in fact, it is the best-selling secular narrative in medieval England, surpassing, in extant numbers (over 200 manuscripts), all other narratives of Arthur in the vernacular. If one knew about Arthur in fifteenth-century England, it would have been from a history book, not from a courtly or even what we now call a popular romance. MEPB speaks to us as Arthurian specialists not necessarily about new stories of Arthur, but rather about continuity, as well as acceptance of the role played by the writing of change into the seemingly unchanged story of time. While the story of Arthur may have been perceived as immutable in terms of the broad outline and, historically speaking, a lesson to learn from (alongside values to emulate), the medium of prose (versus that of verse, that dominated the Arthurian romances of the previous century in England and were traditionally seen as the medium for fiction) may have been just the kind of avenue through which one might try one’s hand at altering the way time is said to have passed, the story of time, so to speak.

The ‘Brut’ as the best-selling tradition of writing focused on history of the land and its inhabitants in medieval Britain provided opportunities to reflect on and engage with personal and collective experiences of time – and, at over 200 extant manuscripts, it did so on a grand scale. This is a Galfridian narrative that goes beyond history or literature by incorporating legends, miracles, prophecy, myth, and more. The material formats in which it survives indicate the variety of social classes, genders, and age groups that both had access to it and commissioned it.^[28] Its ownership and circulation further contributed, in a long-lasting way, to the development of the English language, English literary style, historiography and book history in ways that can no longer be ignored – but also to understanding the history of the moment through its reflection in the Arthurian past. This body of writing would have been an ideal vehicle to debate historical lessons in kingship and governance, treason and loyalty, as in the brief example from the Cambridge manuscript cited above.

How did, therefore, readers of the MEPB encounter Arthur? I wrote elsewhere about the numerous formats in which the narrative is found, and the irregular presentations the text received. Suffice to add that most extant copies of MEPB do not include headings for the chronicle, running heads, nor mention what genre the text belongs to in the opening lines.^[29] How did medieval readers even know where to locate Arthur’s exploits in the text, or, even more broadly, that the Brut would contain a narrative about Arthur? While to us the term ‘Brut’ is better known in association with the much earlier works by Wace (Roman de Brut) and Layamon (Brut), using this as a title would have helped correlate the link between MEPB and other Brut chronicles. As Elizabeth Bryan reminds us, the term ‘Brut’ was useless as a title because it indicated neither an author, nor the language or content of the text it might be appended to.^[30] However, the title did indicate, for avid consumers of Arthurian romance, a narrative derived from Geoffrey’s Historia, which would have naturally included the story of Arthur.

A discussion of Arthur’s presence in the MEPB requires, therefore, a context. Among the most important features that the narrative of MEPB presented to medieval readers as it does to modern scholars today is its length and variety of content. Classified by Lister Matheson in 1998 in the four categories listed above (see Table 1), the Common Version, the Abbreviated Version, the Extended Version, and the Peculiar Versions, MEPB might appear to the uninitiated modern scholar as a corpus with a fixed core. This would be presumed to reside in what Matheson called the Common Version, translated from the ANPB and hence also presumed to be unchanged in the part describing Arthur’s reign, which is ultimately derived from Geoffrey’s Historia. In reality, the Common Version, which accounts for c. 96 manuscripts, that is nearly half of the extant corpus, presents as many interesting developments, including in the part about King Arthur’s reign, as the other versions, which together account for the rest of the extant corpus (more than 106 manuscripts). In fact, the portion dedicated to Arthur seems to have elicited some interesting changes or even slight touches in presentation and labelling, possibly due to its positioning so evidently between romance and chronicle. In the extant manuscripts of MEPB the underlining of proper names and running heads across the top of folios often guided the reader to Arthur’s reign, as much as annotation in the margins of the Brut corresponding to the first settling of the land by Brutus and the foundation of the main cities. This Arthur of history was, therefore, a king to be read about with serious intent, judging by the diversity of forms of intervention found in the extant corpus of MEPB. To judge just from a few examples, this Arthur was ‘for everyone’, rarely, if ever, present in deluxe copies, but rather encountered in the books owned by the middle classes, often incomplete, with spaces left for initials and chapter headings that were never completed.^[31] In these and most copies of MEPB finding and reading about Arthur would have been a challenge if his reign were not signalled, sometimes in unusual ways – predominantly in fifteenth-century copies. In what follows I turn to how Arthur’s reign was ‘updated’ in fifteenth-century copies of MEPB, quite clearly in order to fit in or respond to contemporary political concerns entertained by its reading audiences.

Updating Arthur

In the past scholars assumed changes to Arthur’s narrative in the MEPB to be rarely found and subtle. A first example was discussed by Felicity Riddy from London, Lambeth Palace, MS 306, which contains a version of MEPB that Matheson classified later under the label ‘Peculiar’, though it is largely an abbreviated, almost annals-style, account of the story. In this version of MEPB Arthur dies not at Mordred’s hands, but possibly of old age, since he is said to have ‘regned well and worthely xxvj yere’, and ‘where he is beryed the story make no mencion’ (fols 6v–7r).^[32] The compiler of this version seems to have avoided, carefully, both the mention of Arthur’s death at Mordred’s hands and Uther’s poisoning. In what appears to be an evident comparison with the king at the time the chronicle was composed, the Lancastrian Henry VI, this compiler adds that the most recent king was ‘put downe from the crowne by all the comyns’, and not by the opposing faction, the Yorkists. In other words, the kings of legendary history do not die as a result of usurpation, and neither do those in the contemporary moment. The ‘commons’ can be blamed, if needed, for the deposition of the Lancastrian Henry VI, and there is, at least in this chronicle version, no reason to believe that history provides us with a precedent for usurpation of the kind Arthur’s story would have otherwise provided in this chronicle. Yet, unavoidably, this chronicle’s mention of Arthur living so long and reigning for so long undisturbed by internecine strife surely lives in the book of history as a veiled trigger for a perceptive audience’s memory that kings can be and have been deposed, even if not for the most noble of causes.

Elsewhere in the MEPB, however, Arthur’s reign is actually updated to incorporate the most recent, topical vocabulary, which is now used to emphasise the similarity between the lessons of history and the contemporary moment. In Harvard, Houghton Library, English MS 530, as I show elsewhere, the anonymous compiler clearly used new legal language in the phrasing of Mordred’s usurpation, and did so deliberately.^[33] In this much changed copy of the ‘Common Version’ of the MEPB Mordred is accused of having imagined and planned the king’s death, which, by fifteenth-century standards, signals specific language enshrined in the law since the middle of the previous century for the crime of high treason. Such wording would function as evidence of the planning of a crime even if actual evidence might be as flimsy as a verbal accusation from an enemy of the incriminated person. Accusations of planning or imagining the king’s death became increasingly common during the Wars of the Roses, evidently due to increased anxiety over the fate of the Lancastrian dynasty and the potential for plotting against the person of the king. Interestingly, the accusations reoccur elsewhere in the chronicle, at points associated with fifteenth-century events, which demonstrates that the scribe-compiler of this version of MEPB was thinking carefully through the parts of legendary history in his exemplar, and interpreted Mordred’s actions in the light of what fifteenth-century readers would have understood high treason to involve.

Updating Arthur’s narrative with elements pertaining to fifteenth-century politically-sensitive topics demonstrates not only the anonymous compilers’ intentions, to create a parallel, but also the avid interest they expected their readers to show in Arthur’s ‘history’ – its identification as an attractive, or at least interesting, lesson from the legendary past that could bear on the political present. In this context, we may better grasp the transformations of late medieval English Arthurian romance in Thomas Malory’s hands as an effort at nuancing the details of Arthur’s demise politically. Malory, a politically-involved member of the English gentry who participated in the Wars of the Roses, and was the recipient of so many of the propaganda messages put forward by the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, undoubtedly presents to his gentry readers an Arthurian story that is politically-inflected as much as the chronicles he was inspired by. This Arthur is ‘updated’ to provide a tool for the interpretation of contemporary fifteenth-century kingship and politics.^[34]

These examples show that the blurring of boundaries between history and fiction in English writing of the late medieval period was complete, yet adjusting Arthur to fit the expectations of fifteenth-century English readers took other forms as well. As an exemplary king, Arthur could attract a variety of political interpretations, depending on the political moment of the chronicle’s copying during the fifteenth century. In Trinity College Dublin, MS 498, which contains a late fifteenth-century Peculiar Version of the MEPB, continued to 1460, Arthur is introduced in a very brief paragraph:

How Arthur the son of Uter regnyd kynge of all Brutayne and of his worthynes and famous dedys Arthur whan Uter dyed was of age xv yere. He was crownyd at Wynchester. In the yere of grace cccc. Iiij^xx.xix he bare in his banner an Image of owre lady. In hasty tyme aftyr his coronacion he began to werre fyrst on Goddis enemyes. And so at the last he droffe Colgryn to the North and scomfy3t hym longe tyme in Yorke. (Trinity College Dublin, MS 489, fol. 80v; my emphasis)

To my knowledge a pictorial representation of Arthur carrying the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on his banner is not encountered elsewhere in the late medieval English chronicle tradition. Although the image is clearly taken from Geoffrey’s Historia, as with other types of interpolations in the story of Arthur, it demonstrates the interest taken by the scribe-compiler in searching further sources, possibly both Geoffrey’s Historia and Nennius’s Historia Brittonum – or the more recent chronicle of Peter of Langtoft, which appears in one fourteenth-century manuscript accompanied by individual illustrations for each king. Indeed, in London, British Library, MS Royal 20 A ii, a copy of Langtoft’s chronicle, Arthur is depicted standing, dressed in full armour (typical of the fourteenth century), with a shield covered with the image of the Virgin holding Jesus in her arms (fol. 4r). Arthurian heraldry, whether Arthur’s shield or shields belonging to his knights, is relatively rare in insular manuscripts (unlike Continental ones, particularly French ones).^[35] The detail of Arthur’s shield in the fifteenth-century Dublin manuscript suggests that Arthur is both made recognisable for those readers with a scholarly interest in other chronicles that mention his shield, sword, and other insignia, and that his reign still attracted attention, tout court, within the vast body of prose the MEPB presented to the scribes.

A final piece of evidence for the MEPB’s account of Arthur’s reign eliciting responses from fifteenth-century compilers was found by Matheson in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 84, a Peculiar Version.^[36] Matheson transcribed four main passages that were added to the chronicle, which include brief notices of the deaths of Longinus and Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to be buried at Glastonbury; a long account of the birth and childhood of Merlin, including his journey to King Vortiger’s court; the story of an exploit of King Arthur, in which Arthur destroys a pack of marauding wildcats that is terrorising the countryside of Cornwall; some minor alterations to the account of the end of Arthur, wherein Avalon is called ‘the Ile of Aples’, and the British hope of Arthur’s return is recorded, although in the next chapter it is specifically stated that Arthur died and was buried at Glastonbury in 546 A.D., after a reign of twenty-eight years. In this version of the MEPB the compiler felt the need to blend what we would now call the fictional elements of Arthur’s story, some evidently derived from the Estoire del Saint Graal,^[37] Welsh lore, and Arthur’s historical end, yet mythical return.

In short, Arthur’s reign stirred interest from late medieval audiences as much as it had done in the early years after Geoffrey’s Historia was written. It is clear that Arthur’s fate, and that of his kingdom, preoccupied late medieval English audiences, particularly from the point of view of succession and controversy over rightful inheritance. The nuances added in manuscript versions of the MEPB reflect this. A dramatic change that Matheson only observed in a few manuscripts and ascribed to a need to abbreviate the narrative, concerns four chapters after Arthur’s end and his passing of the crown to Constantine, which are excised in some copies of the text.^[38] According to Matheson, these chapters form the yardstick by which he classified the different versions of MEPB. Matheson classified the manuscripts in which these four chapters at the end of Arthur’s reign were missing as a subgroup of what he called the Abbreviated Version of MEPB. Ten years ago Edward Donald Kennedy identified this issue in a newly-discovered fifteenth-century copy of MEPB, the ‘Dartmouth College Brut’ (formerly Beeleigh Abbey), and suggested that the excision could indicate a reluctance, on the part of the scribe/compiler, to describe murders in cathedrals – as one of Mordred’s sons is, according to the narrative derived, ultimately from the Historia, killed in a cathedral, where he was taking refuge from Constantine, Arthur’s designated successor. Kennedy further assigned this interpretation to reminding audiences of the murder of Bishop Thomas Beckett which would justify God’s punishment of the Welsh.

Whichever way we read this, the interest manifested by compilers of the MEPB in including or excluding these key chapters in Arthur’s reign suggests that this section of the chronicle was read more carefully than previously believed, and with more care and interest in what perhaps can be considered more than the general relevance of Arthur’s rise and fall as a mirror for princes for fifteenth-century English kings and their subjects. Even more interestingly, what stands out in this situation is not just that four chapters usually occurring after Arthur’s death were omitted in copies of the Abbreviated Version, but that the gap was then ‘patched up’ with the inclusion of a chapter derived from Geoffrey’s Historia as follows:

[Constantine] drove that one of them vnto London and that othre vnto Wynchestir and thei entred the townes. in this same tyme deide Dannyell the Byshop of Bangoure a Religious man and in this same tyme was the Bisshop of Gloucestre made Archebysshop of Caunterbury. And after this Constantine sewed thes Mordrede sonnes. And beseged hym ate Wynchestre and toke it and entred the toune and this Mordred fledde into the churche called Amphibale and ate the highe altier he was take and slaine and that other fledde into an hows of ffreres and at the laste was take and slaine and this Constantine regned iiij yere and was slaine of Conan and his fellyship and buried at Stonehegge besyde Uter Pendragonnis. (London, British Library, MS Royal 18 A IX, fols. 36v–37r)^[39]

The story here complements, rather effectively, the story of Arthur’s succession, in a way that I believe fits even better with fifteenth-century debates over the rightful king of England. Closer scrutiny of the details reveals that the mention of the church of St Amphibalus in this passage recalls the story of Constans the monk, brother to Uther Pendragon and Aurilambros, and uncle to Arthur. Constans was tricked by Vortiger into abandoning his vows, importantly taken in the church of St Amphibalus, which led to his becoming a puppet king so that Vortiger would rule in his stead. The scribe-compilers of this paragraph quite likely wanted to signal the return of sin and corruption in the land after Arthur’s death. However, although Geoffrey goes as far as to attribute the demise of the Welsh to God’s punishment of Constantine’s crime, in this version of the MEPB this condemnation of the Welsh is not included, which seems to suggest that a link (that of a king who was too pious to rule but was persuaded to continue, leaving others in charge of the kingdom – like the Lancastrian Henry VI) to the historical present of the fifteenth century was more important than the fate of the Welsh.

Not noticed before, in British Library, MS Royal 18 A. IX, rubrication used for the capitulum marks and some letters on the page and chapter titles, is also used to underline the proper names Arthur, Mordred, Sandwich, as well as the word ‘traitoure’, written next to Mordred (in a way that is reminiscent of the first manuscript discussed in this article, Cambridge University Library, MS Ll. 2.14 above). Moreover, the word ‘traitoure’ is written starting with a capital, which, although not usually indicative of anything other than inconsistency in capitalisation in the usage of Middle English, seems to be deliberate here (fol. 36).^[40] In full circle, if we look at the passage with which this article started, my newly-discovered evidence of Arthur’s treatment in the MEPB indicates that aspects of his usurpation were particularly relevant to the fifteenth-century scribes who copied these chronicles – and clearly, also, their intended audiences.

All such evidence demonstrates that the adjustment of the text, now linking the death of one of Mordred’s sons to the church where Constans took his vows to be a religious man, was intentional. This revised version of the story of Constans would function as a parallel to developments in the life of the contemporary fifteenth-century king, the Lancastrian Henry VI, said to have been so pious that he was completely uninterested in political affairs – allowing others to rule in his name. Detractors of Henry VI’s uncle, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who was protector of the realm during Henry VI’s minority, claimed exactly that, which, in the eyes of contemporary readers of MEPB would make him the Vortiger of contemporary politics – with Henry VI his puppet king equivalent to Constans. During Henry VI’s minority public pressure exerted on Humphrey escalated to unprecedented levels, further fuelled by the vicious allegations of high treason – specifically imagining and planning the young king’s death – levelled against Humphrey’s wife, Eleanor Cobham. In the highly-charged political period of Henry VI’s minority Eleanor was quickly transformed, in the popular imagination, and through both rumours and then the allegations of treason, into a witch who was trying to get her husband the throne of England.^[41] Her historical trial and case remain, to the present day, a reminder of the power of words to change the course of history. The modified portion of the MEPB that we now see emerges across all versions of the chronicle in fifteenth-century copies emphasises Mordred’s status as a traitor and the association between the precedent set by Constans, the weak, pious king, Arthur’s compromised succession, and controversies surrounding Henry VI’s rule.

In conclusion, the widespread interest in Arthur’s narrative among English-speaking audiences demonstrated in this article also points to the position of this type of writing, be it in romance or historical form, on the cultural stage in England on the cusp between the Middle Ages and pre-modernity. The Arthur of romance and history captivated audiences from all social backgrounds. Furthermore, the uses of Arthur’s story for propaganda purposes, as encountered later in the Tudor period, and prefigured in the genealogical chronicles, which themselves contained versions of the Prose Brut, attest to the endurance, rather than waning, of Arthurian tradition at this key junction in history.