The Pentecostal Oath
The Round Table is given a constitution — and the rest of the book records its breach.
At the first great feast of his reign, Arthur binds his knights by an oath, and Malory sets out its clauses:
Never to do outrage or murder. Always to flee treason. By no means to be cruel, but to give mercy to whoever asks for mercy, on pain of forfeiting their worship and lordship for ever. Always to give ladies, gentlewomen and widows their rights, and never to force them. And never to take up a battle in a wrongful quarrel, for love or for worldly goods.
It is a serious document. It binds the strongest men in the country to protect the people least able to resist them, and it is renewed every year at Pentecost — the knights swear it again, all of them, annually, which means nobody at that table can ever claim not to have known.
The book then spends eighteen further books showing them break every clause.
Gawain kills a lady in his very first adventure, three chapters after the oath is sworn: he strikes at a knight who is pleading for mercy, the knight's lady throws herself over him, and Gawain's stroke takes off her head. He is sent home in disgrace with the body tied in front of him.
Balin has already laid three kingdoms waste. Lamorak will be murdered four-to-one by men who then keep their seats. Lancelot will commit treason in the most literal sense the law recognised. Gawain will refuse mercy to Lancelot at the walls of Benwick and drag his king into a war that loses the kingdom.
The oath is not undone by Camelot's enemies. It is undone, clause by clause, by the men who swore it, and the institution that forbids the violence is the same institution that gathers the men capable of it into one hall and gives them nothing to do for most of the year.
The excellence and the failure are the same institution. A sworn brotherhood of the strongest men alive produces exactly the violence its charter forbids, and the loyalty that binds it is the seam along which it finally tears.
In the sources
- MaloryEnglish · c. 1415–1471
a charter, and the record of its breach
Sworn annually by everyone, and broken by the best. The book is the minutes of the violations.
“charged them never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason; also, by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy”
Le Morte d'Arthur, III.xv · read in place - The Gawain RomancesEnglish · late 14th–15th c.
the clause that was never written
Gawain keeps every article of the code for a year and fails anyway, because he conceals a girdle that he is told will save his life. No oath legislates against fear of death.
“For quat gome so is gorde with þis grene lace, While he hit hade hemely halched aboute, þer is no haþel vnder heuen to-hewe hym þat my3t”
Syr Gawayn and the Grene Kny3t, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - ChrétienFrench romance · c. 1135–1190
the oath audited from inside one conscience
Chretien's romances ask a different question: not whether the code is broken, but what keeping it costs the man who keeps it.
No validated quotationShown across Yvain and Erec as a structure rather than stated in a line.