In the dying years of the Roman Empire, a vassal king in the distant territory of Wales rallied his forces to shake off Roman rule. When the Saxons, too, turned their eye on his kingdom, that Welsh king joined with his northern confreres to beat them back. Eventually, he founded a model kingdom 800 years ahead of its time, complete with knights, metal armor, and even an early form of parliament.
His name was King Arthur, and unfortunately he did not exist, at least in a recognizable way. But the late medieval writers who crafted his legend would have had cause to rejoice this week. Digital archivists at the Cambridge University Library have just recovered a new fragment of their work, hidden in plain sight for centuries. It had been used as the binding for an Elizabeth property register.
How a 13th-century story became the cover of a 16th-century book
Stories of King Arthur were all the rage in the 1200s. After the self-described historian Geoffrey of Monmouth popularized Arthur’s legend in the 11th century, the setting of the Round Table spread across the Channel. What had once lived in the realm of pseudo-historical tracts and Welsh oral tradition reached the courts of France.
The defining stories of early French Arthuriana were poems. Marie de France, one of the most famous female French authors in history, wrote short, often satirical verse set in Arthur’s court. At the same time, the daughter of Eleonore of Aquitaine, Marie de Champagne, commissioned the first stories of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere’s forbidden love and of the Grail Quest.
These stories captured the imagination of the French and English nobility, culturally bound from the Norman conquest of England in 1066. In about 1200, an anonymous coalition of authors adapted them into what may be the first European fantasy blockbuster: the five-book series known as the Vulgate Cycle.
The Vulgate Cycle and its various additional texts are so numerous that the English translation comes in a 10-volume set. Photo: WorthPoint
The Vulgate Cycle
Novels were a new concept in Europe. But the magical quests, epic sagas of family strife, and heart-rending character arcs of the Vulgate Cycle were so successful that they endure even today. If you’ve heard of the Lady of the Lake, of Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair triggering the downfall of Camelot, of the Holy Grail being the cup that caught Christ’s blood on the cross, then that’s the Vulgate Cycle at work.
By the 16th century, though, stories of the Round Table were passé, especially in England. In the same way that a 21st-century scrapbooker might dismember an old novel, Elizabeth bookbinders yanked out a handful of pages from a copy of a Vulgate book. The copy they used dated to about 1300. They needed to bind a register of property deeds, and parchment was precious. So they folded up the Vulgate pages and sewed them into a new cover. There, the pages sat for half a millennium.
Recovering the story
In 2019, archivists at Cambridge University were sorting through the records of an estate in Suffolk when they realized that the cover of the property register contained fragments of a much older text. But it would be impossible to unfold the fragments without damaging the cover it comprised, an important historical artifact itself. More advanced methods would be needed to read the cover text, and in 2023, Cambridge began a new program to do so.
Digital imaging specialist Amelie Deblauwe and photographer Blażej Wladyslaw Mikula helped digitize the new text. Photo: Cambridge University Library
Just this week, the Cambridge Digital Library released the first results from this project. Archivists used multispectral imaging (MSI) to scan the whole text without unfolding the cover. MSI breaks images down into color categories, allowing conservationists to deblur old writing or even recover the traces of erased text.
CT scans probed through the folded layers of parchment. Finally, new techniques in digital image manipulation allowed the team to “unfold” the text and read it.
The wizard Merlin greeted them.
Merlin’s magical shenanigans
Nowadays, images of Merlin are dominated by two pop culture phenomena. Either he’s a spry old wizard in a blue hat who ages backward (as portrayed in TH White’s The Once and Future King and its Disney adaptation, The Sword in the Stone), or he’s Arthur’s 20-something best friend, as in the BBC TV show Merlin.
The medieval Merlin was a lot stranger. He was born speaking like an adult, the child of a human woman and a demon. He could disguise himself however he wished and was prone to prophesying the downfall of those around him. (Personally, if my wizard advisor handed me a sword inscribed with the words, “With this sword, Sir Lancelot shall kill the man he loves most, and that man shall be Sir Gawain,” I wouldn’t let anyone named Lancelot or Gawain anywhere near my peaceful Round Table.)
An illustration from a different manuscript of the Vulgate Cycle shows Merlin playing harp with his apprentice Viviane, the future Lady of the Lake. Merlin falls in love with the teenage Viviane and pursues her until she traps him in a cave. Photo: Norris Lacy
On one occasion, Merlin arrived at Camelot disguised as a blind harpist: “While they were rejoicing in the feast, and Kay the seneschal brought the first dish to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, there arrived the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands. He was wearing a silk tunic girded by a silk harness woven with gold and precious stones, which glittered with such brightness that it illuminated the whole room.”
This is the excerpt that made up one of the two pages sewn into the cover. So far, the Cambridge Digital Library has only released the above passage, which agrees with other copies of the Vulgate Cycle. They are currently working to produce an annotated version of the whole text. Medieval scribes often edited or even rewrote the stories they copied, so it’s possible this text could differ substantially from other manuscripts.
A medieval action hero
Dev Patel starred as King Arthur’s nephew Gawain in David Lowery’s 2021 surrealist Arthurian film The Green Knight. Photo: A24
Although nowadays Arthur and Merlin are probably the most famous characters from the Arthurian canon, medieval readers had a favorite knight, and it wasn’t Lancelot. It was Arthur’s hot-headed, charismatic nephew Gawain.
Arthur has a relatively idyllic childhood in the Vulgate Cycle. A kindly knight raises him alongside his own son. But the children of his elder sister Morgause are less lucky. From a very young age, they fight alongside their father in wars against the Saxons. In addition to the Merlin episode, the property register cover text also includes a scene from this plot arc, in which Morgause’s eldest son Gawain rides his beloved horse Gringolet into battle.
A 1910 illustration of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight featuring Gawain on his horse Gringolet, a recurring character in many Arthurian stories. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
This is one of the final snapshots of Gawain as a teenager in the Vulgate Cycle. Soon after, one of Arthur’s knights kills his father in battle. The young Gawain vows revenge, and although he later joins the Round Table, his vendetta against his father’s killer spirals into a vicious blood feud that contributes to the fall of Camelot.
Of course, that’s the version in other manuscripts. In the property register folio, none of that ever happens. Merlin dazzles Arthur’s court, and Gawain rides victorious into battle. The rest is left to the reader.
