ABSTRACT
Throughout Europe in the fourteenth century King Arthur was known as a great historical figure, ranked as one of the three heroes of Christendom with Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon among the Nine Worthies. The peoples of England and Wales naturally had a particular interest in him — the Welsh as an ancestral Celtic hero, the English as a great predecessor of their own kings. Wace’s poem provided a main source for the most widely circulated of all narratives about Arthur in fourteenth-century England. The chronicle of British and English history known as the Prose Brut was first compiled in Anglo-Norman in the last years of the thirteenth century and later rendered into Latin and English. In France, Jean Froissart, the contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, better known for his Chroniques, follows this tradition in his Meliador, described as ‘the last and the longest of the French Arthurian romances in verse’.
