Round Table

The Round Table solves a problem every medieval court actually faced: where a knight sits at a feast announces his rank, and a table with a head and a foot guarantees an argument about who sits closest to the king. Robert Wace's Roman de Brut, written around 1155 as a French verse expansion of Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, is the earliest surviving text to give Arthur this solution, explaining that he had the table built specifically because his knights kept fighting over precedence at ordinary feasts, and a round table, with every seat equally distant from every other, removed the argument by removing the hierarchy. The English poet Layamon, adapting Wace's French into English verse around 1200, tells a more elaborate version in which a Cornish carpenter builds a table for sixteen hundred men after blood is spilled in a seating dispute, portable enough that Arthur can carry it with him and always have a court with no head wherever he stops. By the time Malory writes his fifteenth century Le Morte Darthur, the fellowship has taken on a spiritual dimension the earlier tellings do not have: the knights swear a yearly oath of conduct at Pentecost, and the table itself carries the Siege Perilous, a seat that kills any unworthy knight who dares to sit in it, left empty until the one knight destined to achieve the Holy Grail finally takes his place.

A vast round tabletop, nearly eighteen feet across and painted with the names of twenty four knights around a central Tudor rose, has hung on the wall of the Great Hall at Winchester Castle since at least the sixteenth century, and for centuries visitors were told it was Arthur's own table, brought to Winchester because the city was once identified with Arthur's Camelot. Modern dendrochronology, tree ring dating carried out on the tabletop's oak in the twentieth century, settled the question the legend itself never could: the timber dates to around 1290, more than seven hundred years too late for any historical figure behind the Arthur legend, and far too late even for Malory's own fifteenth century telling of the story. Scholars now read the table as a genuine medieval artifact, but a different one than the legend claims: most likely built for a royal tournament held by Edward I, a king known for staging elaborate Arthurian-themed pageantry to bolster his own reign's prestige, with the painted names and Tudor rose added later, probably under Henry VIII, who had it repainted to link his own dynasty to Arthur's legendary one. The table's own history, from unmarked medieval furniture to Tudor propaganda to modern tourist attraction, is in its own way as layered as the legend it was built to serve.