The Rise of Arthurian Legends and the Plantagenet Empire

This is almost a guest-post, since it contains so much information provided by my frequent collaborator, Beparo.

When reading up on Wace's Roman de Rou, or A History of the Norman People, as some translate it, I was struck by the role that Wace had played in bringing the Round Table of King Arthur into existence, so to speak, by inserting it into his adaptive translation Roman de Brut, completed in 1155, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Kings of Britain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi).

So in the middle of this negotiation of how to bridge these two land groups together (an attempt that does extend back to Saxon migrations and the Viking raiding of the 9th century, make no mistake), we have this influx of mythology. Perhaps the claims to the Roman mantle of power are again at disposition? The papacy is definitely involved in this shuffle, as the troubles that Wace go into for backing Becket against Henry II remind us (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxvii).

The Round Table may have Welsh roots, perhaps. The Winchester Round Table is perhaps the most interesting aspect in that question. As Beparo put it,

It was almost certainly Edward I who commissioned it, ca. 1260?;  so, maybe a century after Wace had been making the rounds.  But Henry VIII had it renovated, and the current paint job (with the Tudor Rose conspicuously in the middle of the table) dates to his era.  I seem to recall somewhere coming across speculation this was done in advance of Charles V's state visit in May of 1522;  the monarchs visited Winchester, where Charles would have seen it.  Given the Habsburg claim to Roman imperial succession, the implicit message probably wasn't lost. 

Those speculators however may have gotten

... Charles V confused with Francis I.  The state visit of 1522 was preceded by another in 1520, which was part of the run-up to the Field of the Cloth of Gold---yet another of these complicated trans-channel exercises where everybody was trying to trump everyone else's claim to be the sole inheritor of the Roman imperial purple.

As Beparo reminds us, the notion of inheriting the Roman imperial purple, and the imperial control implied, had found its traces in the Welsh sources in the figure of the late-Roman general Magnus Maximus, whose traces as Macsen Wledig are found in the Mabinogion. (Not all traces in Mabinogion are this historically grounded; the backdrop of The Dream of Rhonabwy for example is more complicated to discern.)

This is interesting because the compilation process of the Mabinogion belongs into the 12th and 13th century, when the French tradition of romance (the literary genre, not the vernacular translation of Wace's) was in full swing and flowing back onto the English Isles. For example, Wace's Roman de Brut was translated into English between 1200-1220 by Layamon, a Parish priest from Worchester (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi). 

Of course, these back-and-forth connections between England and the modern day French shoreline reach back before the Conquest even. Wace himself is in some way linked to Duke Robert of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, who had attempted his own invasion of England and ended up with his fleet on Jersey instead, which connected Wace biologically to Turstin, the duke's chamberlain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxv). 

William brought Breton soldiers with him to Hastings (Ralph de Gael from Rennes; Apdx 40 and Saint Saveur le Victome, Apdx 89 in: Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, pp.xlvii-lxii)), who settled in the Welsh border marches, controlling Monmouth castle after 1080. This aristocracy has been suggested by Frank Stanton and others as the nobility from which men like Geoffrey of Monmouth hailed (discussed in: Brynley F Roberts, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cardiff, 1991). Perhaps even the name Arthur was more Breton than Welsh, after all.