More so than any other medieval monarch, Edward I loved to travel. Every corner of Britain, most of Europe, and even the Holy Land – there were precious few places that this particular English king had not visited. At first glance, therefore, his arrival in Winchester in September 1285 might seem unremarkable – a routine royal pit-stop, notable only for the promulgation of some law-and-order legislation. In actual fact, this was the occasion for a great chivalric festivity, long since forgotten, but which probably explains the creation of one of the most intriguing of all medieval artefacts – the Winchester Round Table.
The Round Table at Winchester – ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ – is justly famous. A giant disc of solid oak, eighteen feet in diameter and three-quarters of a ton in weight, it now hangs at the end of the Great Hall of what was once Winchester Castle. Obviously, the table has nothing to do with a real King Arthur (whisper it quietly – he never existed). Scientific analysis has proved that it was made at some point in the second half of the thirteenth century, and thus most likely dates from the reign of Edward I (1272–1307).
The current orthodoxy holds that the table was probably made in 1290, in connection with a two-day tournament that Edward staged in Winchester to celebrate the marriage of one of his daughters. A closer reading of the evidence, however, suggests that the true context of the table’s creation lies in the little-regarded royal visit of five years earlier. A glance at the names of those witnessing the king’s charters, for example, shows that in September 1285 Edward was surrounded by almost all his earls and most of his greater barons, but almost none of his bishops. Far from being a routine parliament, as historians have previously supposed, this was an exclusively secular assembly. Moreover, the unusual nature of the event finds powerful confirmation in the reliable (but hitherto overlooked) words of a contemporary chronicler. In his entry for 1285, the Worcester Annalist states laconically that ‘on the feast of the nativity of the Virgin [8 September] the king gave arms to 44 knights at Winchester’. In other words, Edward was involved in dubbing that day – creating new knights, en masse, surrounded by the greatest military men in his realm.
Creating a large number of knights at one time, while comparatively rare, was nothing new. Typically kings or other potentates would organize such grand ceremonies when they wanted to honour one especially important participant. (When, for instance, Edward himself was knighted by the king of Spain in 1254, the same accolade had been simultaneously bestowed on a crowd of lesser candidates.) Frustratingly, in the case of the Winchester ceremony, we know the names of only a handful of those present, and none of these men are important enough to have been the focus of festivities. Possibly the occasion was contrived in order to honour Edward’s nineteen-year-old nephew, John of Brittany, whose career on the tournament field appears to have begun around this point.
The king, however, clearly had other motives for organizing a mass knighting in the autumn of 1285. Earlier in the year he had ordered that all men in his kingdom with lands worth more than £100 a year should come before him to be knighted on 8 September – the same date, that is, on which the Winchester ceremony took place. This was quite unusual. English kings often decreed that their subjects with income above a certain level should take up arms, but normally they did so in order to raise money, reckoning that most men would rather pay a fine than actually have to bear the expense that knighthood entailed. In 1285, by contrast, Edward I seems genuinely to have wanted to increase the number of knights in his kingdom.
The reason for the king’s determination to dub on this occasion was his recent conquest of Wales. In 1282–83 Edward had driven huge armies into Snowdonia and extinguished its ruling dynasties, while much of 1284 had been spent touring the newly conquered territory (supervising, amongst other things, the construction of the mighty castles at Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon). The scale of the victory was awesome, but it had inevitably led the king to place huge demands on his English subjects, and sparked arguments about the extent of military obligation – several times in the course of the conflict Edward had tried to compel men to take up arms. By revisiting the issue in 1285 Edward hoped to draw a line under these arguments, and to establish a clear precedent for the future, namely that men of certain economic means ought to be knights as a matter of course.
The conquest of Wales also explains why the dubbing ceremony should assume an Arthurian air. Of course, in the thirteenth century Arthur was immensely popular all over Europe, and nowhere more so than in England. For the English, however, the legendary king presented a peculiar problem because of his British origins – ethnically, the man that everyone admired so much was Welsh. Edward I set about squaring this circle by appropriating Arthur for himself, effectively rebranding the British warrior as an honorary Englishman. In 1278, for example, just months after the conclusion of his first war with Wales, the English king visited Glastonbury, and ceremoniously reburied the body that the local monks swore blind was that of Arthur. Similarly, in 1283, the conquered Welsh sought to placate their new overlord by presenting him with a trinket which they claimed was ‘Arthur’s crown’. The following year, as part of his victor’s progress, the Edward held a celebratory tournament at Nefyn, which contemporaries described as a ‘round table’.
Edward, in short, was an Arthurian enthusiast, and for political reasons – because of his recent engagement with Wales – his enthusiasm was probably at its peak in 1285. On his return to London in May that year, the king celebrated his victory once again for the benefit of the citizens, processing from the Tower of London – still decorated with the mouldering heads of the defeated Welsh princes – to Westminster Abbey, where he presented some of the religious relics he had liberated from Wales at the high altar. This was the immediate context for his decision to hold a mass knighting in four months’ time: the order to the £100 landowners to come before him and receive arms was given just two days later.
Short of an explicit statement on a royal roll – and, alas, a comprehensive trawl of the surviving documents has revealed no such nugget – we cannot be entirely certain. We can, however, be fairly sure that, having issued the order that would lead to the great chivalric gathering in September 1285, Edward would have started to plan the ceremony itself. He must have soon settled on Winchester, with its royal castle and resplendent great hall, as a suitable venue. And it also seems very probable that, being in an Arthurian frame of mind, and keen to be regarded in the same light as the legendary British king, Edward also let it be known that for this occasion he required a special centrepiece. Most likely it was that summer that royal carpenters assembled in Winchester and began, on the king’s instructions, to build him a great round table.
The Later Life of the Round Table
The Winchester Round Table was originally built to serve as a functional piece of furniture – that much is clear from the holes on its reverse side left by its twelve lost legs. Quite when these were removed to transform it into a wall hanging is unclear, but it may have been as early as the mid fourteenth century. It was certainly displayed in this manner by the late fifteenth century, to judge from the comments of a contemporary chronicler, and in the sixteenth century it was painted with its current decorative scheme, giving it in the unfortunate appearance of a giant dartboard. For hundreds of years thereafter it remained largely undisturbed, no doubt because of its immense weight and size; only in 1873, when the entrance to the hall was remodelled, was it moved from one end of the hall to the other. In the 1970s, however, a restoration of the hall meant that the table had to be moved again, allowing for a thorough scientific analysis under the direction of Martin Biddle, which led to the conclusion that it had been made in the reign of Edward I. All they got wrong, it seems, was the date.
Further Reading
Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An archaeological investigation (Woodbridge, 2000).
Marc Morris, ‘Edward I and the Knights of the Round Table’, Foundations of Medieval Scholarship: records edited in honour of David Crook, ed. P. Brand and S. Cunningham (York, 2008).