Camelot is not so easy to trace: the name will not be found in the guide-books: but in Somersetshire, in a little parish, called “Queen’s Camel,” are the remains of vast entrenchments, said to have belonged to the tourney ground of Camelot. A little branch of the Yeo River (you will remember this name, if you have ever read Charles Kingsley’s “Westward, Ho”--a book you should read)--a little branch, I say, of the Yeo runs through the parish, and for irrigating purposes is held back by dykes, and then shot, shining, over the green meadows: hence, Tennyson may say truly, as he does in his Idyls of the King-- “They vanished panic-stricken, like a shoal Of darting fish, that on a summer’s morn Adown the crystal dykes at _Camelot_, Come slipping o’er their shadow, on the sand.” There are some features of this ancient fable of King Arthur, which are of much older literary date than the times we are now speaking of. Thus “the dusky barge,” that appears on a sudden--coming to carry off the dying King,-- “----whose decks are dense with stately forms, Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these Three queens with crowns of gold, and from them rose A cry that shivered to the tingling stars----” has a very old germ;--Something not unlike this watery bier, to carry a dead hero into the Silences, belongs to the opening of that ancient poem of Beowulf--which all students of early English know and prize--but which did not grow on English soil, and therefore does not belong to our present quest.[16] The brand Excalibur, too, which is thrown into the sea by King Arthur’s friend, and which is caught by an arm clothed in white samite, rising from the mere, and three times brandished, has its prototype in the “old mighty sword” which is put into the hands of Beowulf before he can slay the great sea-dragon of the Scandinavian fable. Now, these Arthurian stories, put into book by Geoffrey--a Latin book, for all the monks wrote in Latin, though they may have sung songs in English, as good father Aldhelm did--were presently caught up by a romance-writer, named Wace, who was living at Caen, in Normandy, and whose knightly cousins (some say father and titled baron) had come over with William the Conqueror,--the name being long known in Nottinghamshire. This Wace put these Arthur stories into Norman verse--adding somewhat and giving a French air, which made his book sought after and read in royal courts; and fragments of it were chanted by minstrels in castle halls.