A Table With No Head

The Round Table solves a problem every medieval court actually faced: where a knight sits at a feast announces his rank, and a table with a head and a foot guarantees an argument about who sits closest to the king. Robert Wace's Roman de Brut, written around 1155 as a French verse expansion of Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, is the earliest surviving text to give Arthur this solution, explaining that he had the table built specifically because his knights kept fighting over precedence at ordinary feasts, and a round table, with every seat equally distant from every other, removed the argument by removing the hierarchy. The English poet Layamon, adapting Wace's French into English verse around 1200, tells a more elaborate version in which a Cornish carpenter builds a table for sixteen hundred men after blood is spilled in a seating dispute, portable enough that Arthur can carry it with him and always have a court with no head wherever he stops. By the time Malory writes his fifteenth century Le Morte Darthur, the fellowship has taken on a spiritual dimension the earlier tellings do not have: the knights swear a yearly oath of conduct at Pentecost, and the table itself carries the Siege Perilous, a seat that kills any unworthy knight who dares to sit in it, left empty until the one knight destined to achieve the Holy Grail finally takes his place.