wicked king of the Summer Country,” or Somerset. After long seeking for a convenient opportunity, Melwas carries her violently away to Glastonia, or Glastonbury, a place chosen by him as being apparently impregnable because of the marshes around it. Arthur, discovering her retreat, besieges Glastonbury with a large army drawn from Cornwall and Devon. Before, however, he and Melwas engage in battle, the monks of the abbey, accompanied by Gildas, intervene; peace is made, and the queen is restored to her lawful husband. Of the many chroniclers who, either in prose or in verse, repeat and embellish Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, by far the most interesting, and the most important in their influence upon the literary development of Arthurian story, are Wace and Layamon. Both are poets, and their metrical _Bruts_ mark, as it were, the transitional stage between the Arthur of history and traditional legend and the Arthur of pure romance. Wace, according to Layamon, dedicated his poem, which was completed in 1155, to “the noble Eleanor, who was the high King Henry’s queen.”[88] This statement--and there is no reason to doubt its truth--affords another indication of the interest of the Angevin court in the literary exploitation of “the matter of Britain.” Geoffrey had already besought royal approval for his presentment of British legends, and had done his best to clothe his account of Arthur’s deeds in the highly-coloured rhetorical trappings that would commend it to courtly Norman readers. Wace went further. He took Geoffrey’s matter and dressed it up in a poetical form in French, thus giving it a much more widespread currency than a Latin prose chronicle could ever have done. Arthur becomes, in his _Brut_, the flower of chivalry, and his entire narrative is decorated in a way that would appeal to the imagination of all knightly Anglo-Normans. Nor is he without thought of the courtly ladies who took so lively an interest in tales of chivalry. Like Chrétien de Troyes and other romancers, he is at some pains to elaborate his descriptions of scenes of love. He takes delight in dwelling upon the accoutrements of warriors, and upon their individual exploits in the field. But it is not alone in such embellishments--the deliberate attempts of a courtly writer to please a courtly circle of readers--that Wace differs from Geoffrey. He adds to his narrative many details which indicate that he also had at his command an independent fund of Arthurian traditions. Wace’s literary celebrity is due, perhaps, most of all to the fact that he is the first Arthurian writer to mention the Round Table. “The Bretons,” he says, “tell many a fable of the Table Round,” but he does not explain whence such fables came, or where he heard them told.[89] He does, however, inform us that the Table was made round because each of Arthur’s knights thought himself better than his fellows, and Arthur devised this method of settling all disputes about precedence among them.