A Name That Arrives Late

Arthur has a court throughout every early telling of his story, but for more than a generation of retellings that court has no fixed name. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the twelfth century Latin history that gives Arthur his first developed literary form, places his court variously and never settles on one named seat the way later tradition would. The name Camelot itself is first attested in Chretien de Troyes's French romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, written in the 1170s, where it appears almost in passing, already assumed familiar to Chretien's audience rather than introduced as something new, which suggests the name may have been circulating in oral or now lost written tradition before Chretien wrote it down. Once established, Camelot spreads quickly through the following century of French and English Arthurian writing and becomes the fixed, expected name for Arthur's court by the time later prose cycles and Malory's own fifteenth century Le Morte Darthur take up the story, so thoroughly that it is easy to forget the name was ever absent from the legend at all.