Mercey D. The Knights of the Round Table

Osprey Publishing, 2015. — 98 p. — (Myth 13). — ISBN 9781472856178.In a magical, timeless land named Logres - now known as the British Isles - the brave Knights of the Round Table served Arthur, the great king of legend and folklore. Questing far and wide across the land, these armoured warriors upheld the king’s chivalric values, righted wrongs, and maintained law and order. Together these knights formed the Order of the Round Table: an elite band of warriors from Logres and overseas.The Round Table symbolized Arthur’s desire for equality and fairness: although the knights seated at the table were proud and privileged warriors serving a powerful king, there was no head or foot of the table and therefore it lacked hierarchy and symbolized something other than the feudal system of lords and vassals. The 12th century writer Robert Wace explained that Arthur used this table to placate the nobles who served him, as none would agree to sit at a humbler place than his peers. The number of knights seated at the Round Table varies according to storyteller; most often 150 or 300 seats were at the table, although Robert de Boron placed just 50 knights around it and Layamon claimed 1,600 (at what would presumably be the world’s largest piece of furniture). Arthur’s Round Table was located at his court and castle of Camelot. Its first written appearance in Arthurian legend was in Wace’s Roman de Brut (completed 1155), which was an adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s earlier Historia Regum Britanniae. Wace noted that the Round Table was not his own