The Search for the Holy Grail: Arthurian Lacunae in the England of Edward III

"And of course King [Edward] wants the Grail found," the Earl said, "we all want that. I want to see the damned thing in Westminster Abbey! I want the King of damned France crawling on his bloody knees to say prayers to it. I want pilgrims from all Christendom bringing us their gold. For God's sake. . . , does the bloody thing exist?"

Bernard Cornwell, Heretic ¹

Edward III (1343-77) "enthusiastically promoted the idea of himself as a new Arthur in the minds of his countrymen," ² often identifying himself with Arthur, reinforcing himself as Arthur's "heir," and "legitimizing his position by associating his reign with that of the most successful of his forebears." ³ Thus he followed in the steps of his grandfather Edward I, who had hoped to fulfill the prophecies of Merlin by uniting England, Scotland, and Wales as Arthur had done before him; who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and who attended the service of the reburying of Arthur's remains at the high altar of Glastonbury Abbey. His activities are well documented. ⁴ Edward III also visited Glastonbury; he commissioned the construction of a gigantic Round Table, and in 1348 he created the Order of the Garter, based on Arthur's fraternity of knights. This much is clear. What is less clear, however, is the role of another agent of Arthurian propaganda during Edward's tenure: the Holy Grail. What part, if any, did the Grail play in the king's Arthurian ambience? Was it foregrounded? Missing altogether? Or was it hovering about in the shadows?

Sometime in the late twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes wrote the story of the Grail. This unfinished work, with its castle and ailing king, bleeding lance, and platter of gold, impressed itself upon those who came to know it, fostering a host of authors who reworked its storyline. Writing ten years or so after Chrétien, Robert de Boron first connected the Grail to the vessel of the Last Supper, which he claimed was given to Joseph of Arimathea by Pilate to collect the blood of the crucified Christ. According to the Vulgate Estoire, Joseph brought it to England where (as reported by the monks) he founded the first Christian church and was buried within the confines of the abbey, near to what would become celebrated as King Arthur's tomb. Thus the religious Grail mixed with the historical and secular one, complicating the message behind successive retellings. As the legend grew and its theology developed, the two Grails overlapped in ways that would prove forever problematic.

I

Grail stories appeared throughout Europe in the high Middle Ages. Welsh translators and adaptors, for example, were obviously familiar both with the more sophisticated French romances and with Wales's own "Grail romance," the Peredur. Hailed as "the Grail legend without the Grail," this work placed Percevel in the court of the "fisher lord," where he sees a bleeding lance, accompanied not by the Grail, but by a severed head floating in a platter of blood. Copies of the French Estoire, the Queste, the Perlesvaus, Y Seint Greal, and the Prose Lancelot were available in Wales in the 1300s, as well as one complete manuscript of the Vulgate cycle. ⁵ Somewhere in the 1340s, France produced its only innovative Grail work, the Perceforest, where the knight Gallafur sees the Grail and thus is healed from leprosy. In Germany, Wolfram's early thirteenth-century Parzival was widely read, judging from its eighty-four extant manuscripts, as was the later prequel, the Younger Titurel, a late thirteenth-century romance containing both the history of the Grail and a description of the Grail temple. Two fourteenth-century goldsmiths, Philipp Colin and Claus Wisse, translated the continuations from Chrétien's Perceval and inserted them—however awkwardly—into Wolfram's Parzival. ⁶ The Italian romance, the Tavola Ritonda (probably from the second quarter of the fourteenth century) includes a minor Grail episode in its Tristan story. ⁷ The Dutch produced the Queeste vanden Grale, loosely based on the...