So we have seen that a British chieftain, winning a great battle in the year 500, became in time celebrated throughout Europe as the greatest king of romance. So far it was mainly the French who had made him famous. Layamon, an English priest, had written a poem in English concerning Arthur shortly after 1200, and told of the founding of the Round Table, but it was to be a considerable time yet before any English writer was to attempt what the French had already done. Chaucer told none of the Arthurian stories, though he placed the scene of his _Wife of Bath's Tale_ at King Arthur's court. An unknown English poet wrote _Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight_ somewhere between 1350 and 1375. It is not until we come to the _Morte Darthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, finished in 1469 or 1470, that we reach the next great step in the history of the legends since the time of Chrétien de Troies. But in Malory's story Arthur steps forth resplendent, the kingly figure that we have to-day. Little is known concerning Sir Thomas Malory. He seems to have been a knight and country gentleman of Warwickshire, a member of Parliament in the reign of Henry VI, and later a soldier on the side of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses. As a result of the victory of the party of York he had to retire from public life when Edward IV came to the throne, and lived quietly at his Warwickshire estate. He was familiar with life at court and with men-at-arms and he knew how popular the stories of King Arthur were becoming in England. So, being a man of education, he set to work to make a collection of the legends, using as his chief sources the French romances. Malory showed considerable originality in carrying out his plan. He made Arthur the central figure, taking the story of Merlin as an introduction to the birth of Arthur, instead of as a separate legend, and ending his account soon after the death of the king. He omitted a number of the older legends that had little to do with Arthur, many of them good stories, such as that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He made the England of his Arthur something like the England he knew, and his people became real and living instead of fanciful figures out of a far-distant past. His descriptions are vivid and lively and his style so engaging that his work of the fifteenth century is much read to-day. Three characters stand out from all the rest, Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, and these three became in all stories and poems subsequent to Malory's time the main figures of the legends. Matthew Arnold attributed to Homer three great epic traits, swiftness, simplicity, and nobility. It is these three characteristics that have made the _Morte Darthur_ so deservedly famous.