The Uses of a Dead King

In 1191, after a ruinous fire and with royal encouragement, the monks of Glastonbury dug between two pyramids in their cemetery and found — sixteen feet down, in a hollowed oak — the bones of a large man and a woman with a golden tress of hair, beneath a leaden cross inscribed Hic iacet sepultus inclitus rex Arturius in insula Avalonia: "Here lies buried the renowned king Arthur in the isle of Avalon." Gerald of Wales, who saw the cross and handled the bones, tells the story twice, with the detail of a man half-persuading himself. The find was, by every modern reckoning, a pious and profitable fraud — and a political one: a dead, locatable Arthur could not return at the head of Welsh armies. A century later Edward I made the point explicit, translating the bones to a marble tomb before the high altar in 1278, in the middle of his Welsh wars, and later exhibiting "Arthur's crown" among the spoils of conquered Wales.

This unit reads the tradition's political economy directly: the exhumation accounts; the Plantagenet and later Tudor uses of descent-from-Arthur; the "Arthurian" pageantry of Edward III (who considered refounding the Round Table and instead founded the Garter) and the physical Round Table at Winchester, built in the thirteenth century and painted for Henry VIII. Against all this stands the thing power could never quite buy: the Breton hope, the stubborn popular refusal — recorded by Wace, mocked by preachers, alive in Malory's "some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead" — to let the king be finally dead. Movement II thus ends where Movement VI will begin: with return as the matter's deepest political and spiritual reflex.