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In the twelfth century the shape of the new metaphysical civilization of Europe was becoming clear. Traffic had been eased; the Universities established; kingdoms and republics settled. Communication, physical and intellectual, was more convenient than it had been for centuries. Doctrines could be contrasted and corrected; tales compared and continued. Men began again to know what other men at a distance had said and done, and were saying and doing. No doubt this had been[5] to an extent, perhaps to a great extent, during the earlier centuries. The Dark Ages were not so dark as to blot out all. But then their light was, at best, somewhat accidental and occasional; now it can be prolonged and intentional. The courts begin to glow with colour; dance, in every sense, has time to return.

Certainly that dance, of whatever kind, was permitted only within general intellectual limits, but at first the limits were fairly broad. The early Middle Ages are founded on metaphysics, but they are hardly as yet built up into metaphysics. That comes about only when the profession of belief—though not, of course, belief, for of that there can be no surety—was enforced by law and power. The old Roman Empire had been based on a similar profession of belief. The incense dropped on the altars before the images of the serene and salutary Emperor meant something. But it almost flagrantly did not mean precisely what it professed to mean. The incense swung before the new altars did. Few in the old Empire can ever have been seriously challenged on the exact way in which they believed 25 the Emperor to be divine; but any in the new order might be at least questioned about his beliefs on Christ’s.[6] No doubt, in practice, the two things were not so unlike. It would not have done to be publicly blasphemous about the Emperor, and it is certain that there must have been a good deal of scepticism in the twelfth century. Men are not so made, as far as we have yet seen, that they can lose, over a continent and for centuries, the quality of disbelief. But the social tendencies were, on the whole, towards intellectual laxity and intellectual severity respectively. A conformity of thought and practice was desired and intended by a now highly organized institution. This intention was now carried and communicated by the new easing of traffic; and more and more, as time went on, the absence of conformity was either corrected in the confessional or penalized by the laws. The old Empire had, on the whole and except for that one important point of loyalty, left a man to think for himself, and did not much feel it mattered what he thought. The new Church felt that it mattered a good deal what he thought and consequently did not wish to leave him to think for himself. In 1184—before this very century was out—the Pope Lucius III declared the criminal nature of heresy; in 1215 Lateran defined the Faith; in 1233 the Inquisition was established; in 1252 the use of torture was permitted. In this horror the formalizing of the Middle Ages came into full being.

The earlier century had had a quality of its own. It was still ‘rash with theories of the right That stretched but did not break its creed’. It was still free to use its imagination in ways which would afterwards be checked or darkened or even elucidated—for example, courtly love, witchcraft, and the Holy Eucharist. All of these had their effect on the Arthurian myth. But the most important thing for the myth in that century was that it was then first seriously shaped. Geoffrey of Monmouth was born, and wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae. ‘No work of imagination,’ says Sir Edmund Chambers, ‘save the Aeneid, 26 has done more to shape the legend of a people than the Historia Regum Britanniae.’

Very little is known of Geoffrey, though at that something more than of his successor in the tradition who invented Galahad. This is as it should be; the discoverer of the King of Britain can be praised as the discoverer of the High Prince cannot be. The date of his birth is not known, but it must have been well before 1129 when he was a witness to a charter. He took priest’s orders in 1152, was made Bishop of St. Asaph, and died (it is said, at mass) in 1154. He wrote two books, and by general ascription one more. The first was the Prophecies of Merlin(); the second was the Historia; the third was a Vita Merlini().[7]

His own account is that he had begun the Historia when he was asked by his ecclesiastical patron, Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and by others, to furnish them with a translation of the British text of Merlin’s prophecies. This he did and published it. He then returned to the Historia, into which he inserted as a complete chapter the earlier book. The question of Merlin may be, for the moment, postponed. The Historia begins with the fable of the coming of the Trojan Brutus to Britain, and ends with the conquest of the country by the Saxons, or rather (after that) with the fore-telling by an angel to the last of the British kings that the Britons shall again reconquer the land ‘at the time of which Merlin prophesied to Arthur’.

It was, in fact, Geoffrey’s own book which was the first Return, and new conquest, of Arthur. The name, and the names of some of his companions and lords, had been widely enough spread. But now the tale suddenly grew into more than a fable; it became a fashion. He seems to have meant to create, among his other historiae, one splendid and popular figure, and he seems to have succeeded. It might have happened without him, but it did happen through him. He first—and if he were not the first, yet he was the first to do it for the courts, the authors, and the reciters of Western Europe—he first made Arthur a king. 27 He gave him magnificence and a court. The grey tales suddenly became a diagram of glory. The dim Captain-General of Britain was changed into a champion of splendour. It is in that shape that he now lives or dies.

The ‘History’ begins with the successes of Aurelius Ambrosius and his brother Uther over the Saxons. Aurelius is rebuilding cities and churches, and especially London, ‘a city that had not escaped the fury of the enemy’, when he is assassinated by a Saxon. Uther succeeds him. There appears in the sky a comet the tail of which is in the shape of a dragon, and from the dragon’s mouth emerge two rays of light, one directed towards Gaul, the other towards Ireland. The dragon and one ray are interpreted by Merlin to mean Uther’s son Arthur and his conquests; the other to mean his daughter, Arthur’s sister. Uther, in memory and premonition, causes two golden dragons to be made, one of which is set up in the cathedral church of Winchester and the other carried about with the army.

The first story of the birth of Arthur follows—one of the then popular stories of ‘magic and mystery’. Uther held a great feast in London in order ‘to put on his crown’: publicly to manifest his royalty. He was attended by his lords, among whom is Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and his wife Igerna. The king immediately fell deeply in love with Igerna and so markedly exhibited his love before all the court that the infuriated Gorlois withdrew from the court to his duchy, where he shut up his wife in the castle of Tintagel and himself in Dimilion. There he was besieged by Uther. But love was too strong for the king to await the result of the siege; he complained to his friend Ulfin of how near he was to death and on his counsel had recourse to Merlin. Merlin, ‘by his arts and achievements’, creates one of those grand substitutions which are very old in myth but were, in the developing tale, to find presently a wholly new significance when Lancelot came to the little castle of [Case][8] beyond Carbonek. The wizard’s arts turn Uther, Ulfin, and himself into the physical 28 likeness of Gorlois and two of his companions. So changed, but so still themselves, they came in the evening to Tintagel, surrounded on all sides but one by sea, and on that having a mass of rock with but one narrow entrance. There, ‘in the evening twilight’, Uther, wearing the appearance of the Duke, was admitted. He protested to the Duchess Igerna that he had left his other castle only from love of her and only for a single night; and she, believing and his wife, ‘never thought to refuse him anything’. On that night ‘the most renowned Arthur’ is conceived. In the morning new messages from Dimilion arrived, this time real and true; to bring news that Uther—or rather his army—had stormed the castle and that Gorlois was dead. They stood before the seeming Gorlois, bewildered and blushing with astonished shame. He, sitting by Igerna, declared that he would make peace with the king. He rode out, put off the magical likeness, became Uther again, stormed Tintagel, and eventually married Igerna. They lived ‘in no small love’, and besides Arthur had one other child, the princess Anne. Uther in the end dies while encamped at Verulam, through drinking from ‘a spring of very clear water’, which has been poisoned by the Saxons.

All this forms the eighth book of the Historia. The ninth is given up to Arthur. He was recognized as Uther’s son by the lords, and crowned by Dubricius, Archbishop of the City of the Legions, Caerleon, at the age of fifteen. He was then ‘a youth of such peculiar courage and generosity, of such a sweet temper and instructive[9] goodness, that he is greatly loved by all the people’. He was, in fact, at an earlier age, much like Shakespeare’s Henry V, and his subsequent actions are not at all dissimilar. The Saxons were still in control of half the country, and Arthur determined to make war on them, because (i) he wished to enrich his own followers with their wealth, (ii) that wealth, and the whole country, was his by right. The two are 29 not to be separated, and one might add a third, which is merely self-defence, since the Saxons are set on exterminating the whole British race. There is no need to go into details of the campaigns, in which Geoffrey’s own military invention describes some, but not all, of the battles given in Nennius. Duglas is there, and the Wood of Celidon, and Badon; others are at York, Lincoln, and Thanet, besides three in North Britain, and one by Loch Lomond against the Saxons’ Irish allies.

Britain thus liberated, the king proceeded to reduce Ireland and Iceland. The kings of Gothland and of the Orkneys submitted. Here the first period of conquest ceased, and the king reigned in peace for twelve years. His court became the centre of glory and fashion—fashion in every sense of the word. Geoffrey relates that not only did King Arthur introduce such high courtesy as was imitated in the manners of the most distant lands, but that no lord in the world thought himself of any worth unless his arms and clothes were made in the same style as those of the lords of King Arthur. Those lords are not, on the whole, those whom we later know, but three names are familiar. There is Lot, who is then the nephew of the king of Norway, and ‘consul of Londonesia’, a mature man, wise and valiant, to whom by Uther’s choice Arthur’s sister Anne had been married. He had two children by her, Wolgan and Modred. The other two lords who survived in later romances were Caius the king’s steward, and Bedver his brother—afterwards Kay and Bedivere.

During this period of peace the king married. His wife was Guenhumara, descended from a noble Roman family, and (inevitably and properly) the most beautiful woman in Britain. But the peace did not last. All the kings of Europe became terrified of Arthur, however their lords might copy his in dress and manners. They began to make preparation against what our simpler age would call his ‘aggressiveness’. Geoffrey, however, seems entirely to approve his hero, whom he causes to be full of delight at this fear, and to develop a design to conquer Europe. One cannot wholly separate this design from its final outcome in Arthur’s death, but neither can one attach any serious 30 moral value to it. Geoffrey is not writing in those terms. Arthur, according to him, began by conquering Norway, to which his brother-in-law had a kind of claim by the dead king’s nomination. When Norway and Dacia had been reduced, Arthur proceeded to Gaul. This was a more serious matter, for Gaul was under the government of Flollo, a Roman tribune, who held it from the Emperor Leo, as the city of Rome itself is held in the same way by the procurator Lucius Tiberius. The seat of the imperial power in Byzantium is not mentioned; the king is to be concerned with the west. By Geoffrey’s day, of course, the Empire was divided, and yet still theoretically one. But it was as if he had enough historic sense to remember that in his Arthur’s own supposedly historic day, it was not so. The king is not allowed to make war on the Emperor himself.

The tale relates how Arthur killed Flollo in single combat, occupied Gaul, and returned to Britain. There he held at Pentecost in the City of Legions a great solemnity. It is the climax and spectacle of his civil glory, though there are to be other military achievements. Caerleon was a noble city; kings from all parts of the world came sailing to it up the Severn. In it were two marvellous churches—St. Julius, to which a nunnery was attached which served it with a choir of virgins, and St. Aaron, to which belonged a convent of canons. The city was also renowned for a college of two hundred philosophers, learned in all the arts, who astrologically divined the future and made predictions to the king. The Archbishop of the City of Legions, Dubricius, was Primate of England and Legate of the Apostolic See; he was so holy that he could heal any sick person by his prayers. In this half-miraculous glory, the king, in the presence of all subordinate kings, consuls, and lords this side of Spain, was solemnly crowned and robed, in the metropolitan church of St. Aaron; the queen meanwhile being endued with similar state in St. Julius, the church of the Virgins. Afterwards the two royalties held their separate festivals in separate halls, as had been the custom in Troy, from which even more ancient and glorious city the Britons and Arthur, King of Britain, derive. 31 Caius, with a thousand young men in ermine, served the king’s meat; Bedver, with a similar number, his wine. The queen was similarly served. It is all a very high glory. The men are all celebrated for their valour, the women for their wit. Love encourages all to virtue, the women especially to chastity, the men especially to valour. But nobility in all things thrives in them all. The court of the great king is the centre and cynosure of the world.

What remains? One other thing, and then the end. There come to the feast of Caerleon twelve ambassadors, wise old men, to demand from Arthur his submission to Rome. In the council that follows the king and his lords prepare to match themselves with Rome. Troy has been named, and in the scene that old war seems again to take on a new being—the descendants of Brutus against the descendants of Aeneas. Hoel, king of Armorien, declares that the Sibylline prophecies foretold that the Roman Empire should be held by three natives of Britain; Brennus and Constantine are past, and now it is the turn of Arthur to hold the supreme dignity. Fate strengthens him. He appoints the queen and his nephew Modred to be his regents and prepares for war.

His opponent, Lucius Tiberius, procurator of Rome, gathers his own supporters. At a later moment he thinks of waiting for the aid of the Emperor Leo, but decides against it. But short of the imperial armies, the roll of Eastern kings reads like the list of the allies of Antony recorded in Virgil and in Shakespeare. Here are the kings of the Grecians and the Africans; of Spain and Libya; of Phrygia and Egypt, Babylon and Bithynia, Syria, Boeotia, and Crete; of the Parthians and Medes. The invasion begins, and after Arthur has shown his personal valour by killing a giant at St. Michael’s Mount, the armies engage under the golden dragon of Britain and the golden eagle of Rome. Many lords fall, including Caius and Bedver and Lucius Tiberius himself, whose body the victorious Arthur sends to the Senate with a message that this is the only tribute the Britons pay. He is about to cross the Alps for the final advance on Rome when news comes from Britain. The regents have violated 32 their oaths. Modred has seized the crown, and the Queen Guenhumara has married him. Arthur returns, defeats Modred at the head of a mixed army of Britons, Saxons, Scots, Picts, Irish, and all malcontents, pursues him to Winchester, and there defeats him again. The queen, repenting, flees to Caerleon, and takes the vows among the nuns of St. Julius. Modred falls back into Cornwall and is there killed in the final battle. Arthur is mortally wounded, ‘and being carried away to the isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds, he gave up the crown of Britain to his kinsman Constantine, the son of Cador Duke of Cornwall, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord five hundred and forty two’.

The Captain-General of the British kings, the leader of that cavalry force against the Saxons, had thus become quite another thing. He had been mythically raised into a grander throne than any of those old tribal chieftains, half his clients and half his patrons, had ever held. No doubt many elements had gone to the raising—all that Geoffrey had heard or read, all he knew of courts and cloisters, many fables and many facts. But unless there was once some intermediary tale which is now wholly lost (such as that book of the Archdeacon Walter Map to which he continually appeals, but in which no scholar now believes),[10] the new definition of Arthur was his alone. It was he, as things turned out, who determined what Arthur should be, and also what he should not be. He was to be a king and all but an emperor, but not a lover; a commander, not a knight-errant; central, not eccentric. His court and Table (but the Table has not yet come into being) were to accumulate to themselves all kinds of adventures, and finally the most terrible adventure of all, but there was then and has remained a curious respectability about it. It was (if you choose) a wish-fulfilment; it was, as Geoffrey frankly stated, the kind of court over which every king wanted to preside and to which every lord wanted to belong. 33 He was the world’s wonder, and it was proper that he should be, for he was entirely the kind of thing at which the world wanted to wonder—not perhaps in the five hundred and forty-second year of the Incarnation of our Lord, but certainly in the eleven hundred and thirty-ninth or thereabouts. The Historia Regum, as one might say, ‘caught on’. Geoffrey had taken up a fable and so shaped and told it that it now had the potentiality of myth. Other and greater writers were to change it again into something more tremendous. But none of them should have written without, in the end, saying to their books, as the lord Galahad said to Bors of Lancelot: ‘Salute me to my lord Geoffrey our father.’

And even the new figure of Arthur was not all. He gave us more—the name and supernatural strangeness of Merlin. It is true that in his account Merlin’s chief activities are before Arthur’s birth, and that he disappears from the tale at the point of the birth. He is there in relation to the king only to cause the magical substitution of Uther for Gorlois, and many other ways could have been found for the birth without that. But Geoffrey already had Merlin on his hands.

It seems likely that he invented him, as a person. Nennius had included a tale of a supernatural boy who had prophesied to Vortigern, the traitor British king who had called the Saxons over. Geoffrey took over and adapted this story. The name of Merlin may have come from the Celtic Myrddin. But Nennius knows nothing of Myrddin. He records that roughly at the time of Arthur, there were ‘Talhiarn Cataguen and Neirin and Taliessin and Bluchbard and Cian, all famous at the same time in British poetry’. Myrddin was a bard, but not a prophet, let alone a wizard, in the Welsh tales. There is a poem called the Dialogue of Myrddin and Taliessin, a lament over a battle between two Northern chieftains, which ends

Since I, Myrddin am next after Taliessin,

Let my prediction become common.

‘This is . . . the only thing in works not demonstrably 34 dependent on Geoffrey that suggests the possession of prophetic powers on the part of Merlin in all Welsh literature.’[11]

The supernatural boy of Nennius and the bard of Welsh poetry were now united by Geoffrey, who provided his combined figure with a birth of a new kind; new, that is, as far as the story went, but not unrelated to other fables of the time. Vortigern was in danger from both Saxons and Britons and determined to build himself a new castle, but the earth always swallowed up the foundations. His wise men advised him that he must discover ‘a lad who never had a father’, and sprinkle his blood over mortar and stones before they would be firm. Outside Carmarthen the king’s messengers heard a boy taunted by his companions with having had no father. They seized on the boy and his mother, who is found to be ‘a daughter of the king of Demetio’, who lived in Carmarthen among the nuns of St. Peter. In Vortigern’s presence the princess told her tale. She said: ‘Lord, it is true I do not know who his father was. Once, when I and my companions were in our rooms, there appeared to me the shape of a handsome young man, who embraced and kissed me, and when he had been with me a little while, he suddenly vanished, and I never saw him again. But I often heard him speaking to me when I was alone, though I could never catch sight of him, and after he had haunted me in this way for a good time, I conceived and gave birth to this child. This, lord, is indeed what happened. No other could possibly be his father.’ Vortigern again consulted one of his wise men who told him that other men had been conceived in this way. ‘For,’ he said, ‘as Apuleius reports, in speaking of the god of Socrates, there are spirits between the earth and the moon whom we call daemons. Their nature is both angelic and human, and they are able whenever they choose to take on the shapes of men and have intercourse with women.’

In the later Middle Ages Geoffrey of Monmouth would not have been able to write so; even in the next century it would have been dangerous. ‘Those who dwell between the earth 35 and the moon’ would have been too like ‘those who come in the air’ at the trial of St. Joan of Arc: diabolic and dangerous to souls. But here they are not so. The thing changed, but at present there was a certain casualness even as regarded witchcraft and magic. It was, in general, believed to happen sometimes, and then it was thought to be a peculiar and rather horrid religious perversion. But it was also thought (very sensibly) that belief in it was almost as dangerous as the thing itself. And then there were, as one might say, a kind of select class of refined sorcerers attached to the households of great lords, together with alchemists, astrologers, clairvoyants, and so on, who were not unlike the college of two hundred philosophers in the City of Legions, the foundation of which might be suspected to have something to do with Merlin. Even as late as 1280 the Abbot of Whalley employed a clairvoyant to discover the body of his drowned brother; it is true that, when this was discovered, he was excommunicated, but there the fact is. Merlin was something much greater than any such paid adept. He came from those other beings, faerie rather than diabolic, strange and comely, capable of high knowledge and sensuous delight.

It may perhaps be most convenient to pursue the subject of the birth and life of Merlin here. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a Vita Merlini, but in that the young wizard of the Historia has changed into a king and prophet of great age, the kind of figure with which the name of Merlin is more usually nowadays associated. He had not been so in the time of King Arthur, but this is long after the time of King Arthur. The king has been carried away in a boat by Taliessin who takes him ‘to the island of apples which is called Fortunate’ (‘Insula pomorum quae Fortunata vocatur’). Taliessin afterwards joins Merlin, and ‘takes occasion to consider the various nature of the creation’. The poem becomes largely a dialogue de natura rerum by the two masters, interspersed with certain non-Arthurian adventures of Merlin.

But the next great development in the myth of Merlin came with Robert de Borron. It was perhaps here particularly 36 affected by the general imagination of the time. Christendom, among its other formalizations of ideas, was formalizing the devil; that is, it was giving more and more attention to the devil. Neutral supernatural beings, ‘between the cold moon and the earth’, half human, half angelic, were disappearing in favour of the wholly angelic, evil or good. It was impossible that a good angel should wish to have intercourse with women; the text in Genesis about the sons of God seeing the daughters of men showed that. Any spirit who attempted it was bound to be evil. The next step was to say that evil spirits had attempted it. If so, they had failed. It was afterwards laid down by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum that the devil cannot procreate by means of a woman, for he cannot produce human seed. But these refinements were not known to de Borron, or if so, he ignored them for the sake of his poem. He imagined a council held in hell after the Redemption, where, sitting ‘in their own dimensions, like themselves’, the devils plotted to thwart it. They determined that the only method is to follow our Lord’s method. There must be an incarnation; flesh must be made amenable to their desires; a pure maiden must conceive and bear a son. There, as so often, the conspirators of malice can only follow the conspiracy of divine largesse; a true priest is necessary even for the Black Mass; a clean maid is necessary even for the incarnation of the devil. One of the demonic powers agreed to make the attempt. He finds a girl who had made but a single slip; once she forgot or neglected to say her prayers. The lightness (so to call it) of the fault marks her real spirituality; grosser natures would not have served. Through that frailty he was enabled to approach her; she miraculously conceived. When she knew it she went at once to a wise and holy man. By his interposition and the rites of the Church there was born at the proper time not Diabolus but Merlin. He inherited his spiritual father’s knowledge and power, but without malice. It is this figure to which, as we shall see, de Borron attributes the union of the tale of the king with the tale of the Holy Grail.

It was this Merlin who later survived, though in modern times his connexion with the Grail has been lost. He has, in fact, been remembered only for two things: (i) for his wizardry, (ii) for his end. There was indeed an Elizabethan play, once attributed to William Shakespeare and William Rowley, and now only to Rowley, which is called The Birth of Merlin. It is a poor thing, with a good deal of the usual Elizabethan humour about the child’s unknown father. His mother Joan is a peasant girl with no sign of spirituality about her; and neither she nor anyone else talks the sure Shakespearean style. (Shakespeare himself alluded to Merlin twice: Hotspur is made to speak of him in reference to Glendower:

I cannot choose; sometimes he angers me

With telling of the moldwarp and the ant,

The dreamer Merlin and his prophecies.

And at the end of one of the heath scenes in King Lear the Fool, after seven couplets, concludes: ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.’ Which, if we substituted some other name, is exactly such a prediction as Merlin himself might have made.)

Indeed the only English poets who have spoken almost worthily of that great master are Tennyson and Swinburne, and of the two Swinburne is for once the greater. It is he who carries on the strange birth, and he who even improved on the conclusion. Of the birth he says that Tristram, talking to Iseult on the deck of the ship bringing her to Cornwall, spoke of the king and the court, and of

the might of Merlin’s ancient mouth,

The son of no man’s loins, begot by doom

In speechless sleep out of a spotless womb;

For sleeping among graves where none had rest

And ominous houses of dead bones unblest

Among the grey grass rough as old rent hair

And wicked herbage whitening like despair

And blown upon with blasts of dolorous breath

From gaunt rare gaps and hollow doors of death,

A maid unspotted, senseless of the spell,

Felt not about her breathe some thing of hell

Whose child and hers was Merlin; and to him

Great light from God gave sight of all things dim

And wisdom of all wondrous things, to say

What root should bear what fruit of night or day,

And sovereign speech and counsel higher than man;

Wherefore his youth like age was wise and wan,

And his age sorrowful and fain to sleep; . . .

His conclusion may be left for the present. In the old French romances the end of the grand adept was unworthy of him. I do not say that this was not deliberate; I think it easily may have been, and meant to reduce the possessor of such supernatural wisdom to natural folly in the end. It is a tale told of all the great—of Solomon and Aristotle and Virgil—and whoever took it over for Merlin need not be supposed to be ignorant of what he was doing. The danger of an over-devotion to the study of sources is that we forget to attribute to those who used them a conscious intention in using them. Merlin is very old, and comes to dote on a girl named Viviane or Niniane. She was at first only twelve years of age; as the centuries went by, she grew older and lost her character, till we are left with the greedy and shallow harlot of Tennyson. He tells her a spell which can hold even him enchanted and imprisoned. And one day, in that mysterious forest—Darnantes or Broceliande—she casts him into sleep and puts the spell in motion. He has had his reward from her—or perhaps he has not, for in some versions he only dreams that he has had her, and it is illusion, but he lies content. There is a gracious version in a fifteenth-century English prose version of de Borron; which, after describing the enchantment, continues:

‘And after that she went and sat down by him and laid his head in her lap and held him there till he did awake; and then he looked round him, and him seemed he was in the fairest tower of the world, and the most strong, and found him laid in the fairest place that ever he lay before. And then he said to the damsel: “Lady, thou hast me deceived, but if ye will abide with me, for none but ye may undo 39 this enchantment”; and she said: “Fair sweet friend, I shall often times go out and ye shall have me in your arms, and I you; and from thenceforth ye shall do all your pleasure.” And she held him well covenant, for few hours there were of the night nor of the day, but she was with him. Nor ever after came Merlin out of that fortress that she had him in set; but she went in and out when she would.’