General Information about Enlighteners in the English literature

What’s the story about?
It tells the famous legend of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, the knights of the Round Table and their quest for the mystical Holy Grail. Malory worked from a late-14th-century French poem, adding some material from other sources, to produce his English prose translation.
In 21 books, the story covers the founding of Arthur’s kingdom and the institution of the Round Table; the various adventures of individual knights; the quest for the Holy Grail; the death of Arthur and the fall of his kingdom.
This page opens the third book. It starts, “In the begynnyng of Arthure, after he was chosen kynge by adventure and by grace…” People’s names and some place names are shown in red lettering, known as ‘rubrication’. Malory goes on to describe the wedding of Arthur to Queen Guinevere. Arthur tells Merlin, “I love Guenever the king’s daughter, Leodegrance of the land of Cameliard, the which holdeth in his house the Round Table that ye told he had of my father Uther.”
Despite the upheavals of Malory’s day, there was a strong revival of interest in chivalry and Britain’s past. The adventures of Arthur’s knights epitomised the self-same aristocratic values that were being eroded by the political opportunism of the War of the Roses. Loyalty had become an endangered virtue. In his narrative Malory compares the behaviour of its lords and ladies to that of contemporary nobility. He criticises the current reluctance to reward faithful service – an injustice he felt particularly keenly, no doubt, as he languished in jail.
Who was the real King Arthur?
A question many have asked, but none has answered with credible proof. Early accounts of the history of Britain are generously laced with legend and imagination. Disagreement remains about whether King Arthur, or a historical model for him, ever lived.
Nennius, a Welsh monk writing in the late-eighth century, compiled a history that describes a ‘dux bellorum’, a war lord, called Arthur who led the Britons in 12 battles against the Saxons some three hundred years earlier. The ancient annals of Wales date one of Arthur’s battles, the Battle of Mount Badon, to the year 518. But the description of that battle by Gildas, a chronicler writing less than 30 years after the event, makes no mention of Arthur.
It’s likely that the King Arthur handed down to the middle ages was largely a literary figure, echoing mythological traditions from Celtic Britain. He emerges as a fully-formed hero in the ‘Historia Regum Britanniae’, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the 12th century – a work condemned by a contemporary for being more fiction than fact.
Geoffrey’s history of the kings of Britain tells of Arthur becoming king at the age of 15 and conquering Scotland, Orkney, Ireland and Iceland. He introduces other elements of the legend too: Merlin, the powerful wizard; the beautiful Guanhamara, who becomes Guinevere; and the magical sword Caliburn, Excalibur.
Arthur’s legend was embellished by later writers, both English and European. In France, the story formed the perfect subject for a new literary form called the ‘romance’, a long poem written in the native tongue rather than Latin. The Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes were the most popular and probably formed the starting point for Malory’s work.