National Icon: The Winchester Round Table and the Revelation of Authority

Abstract

With its numinous aura the Winchester Round Table displays critical transitions in the conception of English royal authority at the turn of the medieval and early modern periods. (JW) A. TABLE OF CONTENTS 'Thys is the rownde table of kyng Arthur,' begins the inscription at the center of the expansive object, suspended high in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle. The object (Figure 1)-a tabletop eighteen feet in diameter, originally about three-quarters of a ton in weight1-is by now a familiar reference point in discussions of Arthuriana. From the late Middle Ages to the modern period, it has attracted the attention of a range of chroniclers, courtiers, poets, scholars, and publicists, from John Hardyng, William Camden, and Michael Drayton to Thomas Warton, William Savage, and contemporary commentators.2 Whatever its relation to an elusive King Arthur, the Winchester Round Table has for hundreds of years been a fi xture of the Arthurian establishment. In recent years the modern academy has also developed an increasingly established approach to questions about its material and conceptual origins. That approach has acquired particular authority with a meticulous research project conducted by Martin Biddle and others that began in the 1970s and that culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of King Arthur's Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation. Though the book, with its fascinating fi ndings, has deservedly reached a wide audience, perhaps it would be in order to indicate briefl y what seems to me its basic orientation to the Winchester Round Table-before I suggest some further points of view. From the perspective of this archaeological investigation the Winchester Round Table emerges primarily as an expression of political, chivalric, and imperial aims in late medieval and early modern England. The original circular table itself, evoking the legendary realm of early Britain, may have been made at Winchester in the late thirteenth century to celebrate the arrangements of that Arthurian enthusiast, Edward I, for the dynastic marriages of his children.3 The top of the table may have been hung in the Great Hall in the mid-fourteenth century by Edward III, as his plans for a new Round Table fellowship at Windsor evolved into the founding of the Order of the Garter.4 The tabletop was eventually painted (for the fi rst time) in the early sixteenth century, as Henry VIII invoked his authoritative royal predecessor to promote his drive for imperial power in Europe at large.5 This kind of emphasis on worldly programs has an indisputable point. Such programs play a fundamental role in the Arthurian legend since the twelfth century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth makes Arthur an imperial successor to the legendary founder of Britain, who dreams of a promise that his descendants will be sovereigns of the 'whole world.'6 There is no question that the sixteenth-century design of the Winchester table gives such an imperial agenda contemporary form. As shown in the close-up in Figure 2, at the center of the table is the composite Tudor Rose, an expression of national consolidation after the fi fteenth-century Wars of the Roses. The array of expanding bands from the interior circle to the perimeter is dominated by the imposing fi gure of Arthur, with one hand possessing a sword and with the other controlling an orb of sovereignty. And not only does the sixteenthcentury work portray Arthur with a contemporary type of imperial crown on his head. It gives the very face of Arthur features resembling those of Henry VIII himself.7 Henry, in effect, uses the primal fi gure of Arthur to authorize himself and his aims. The far-reaching investigation underlying King Arthur's Round Table is fundamental to any subsequent treatment of the Winchester table, and I am deeply indebted to it. The study offers a probing analysis of archival records, and it situates the table in a wide variety of historical contexts. …