Before the close of the twelfth century the Arthur of popular legend, and of the chronicles, had been transformed into a purely romantic hero. The British king, soon after the appearance of Geoffrey’s _History_, becomes the centre of the most profitably worked of the cycles of mediæval romance. Much of his individuality is, inevitably, lost in the process; and that loss implies, no less inevitably, a gradual obscuration of the primitive British environment which originally surrounded him. The paramount chief of early Britain, whose prowess and conquests form the prime epic theme of Geoffrey and of Layamon, appears as the king of no known realm, numbering among his retainers heroic figures drawn from the uttermost limits of the mythical world. Exalted, as a world conqueror, to a level with Alexander and Charlemagne, he becomes, like them, largely lost to sight among the crowd of fabulous characters called up around him by the professional romancers. The Arthur of the romances is no more than a _primus inter pares_. He does, indeed, stand above his knights by virtue of his royal dignity,--he is still “King Arthur,” and the head of a great Court. But our interest in his own personality diminishes with the increasing accumulation of exploits attributed to his knightly retinue. The glory of the king is dimmed by the general brilliance of his Court. It is as though the Round Table, originally founded to put an end to all claims of precedence among his knights, had had the result of bringing Arthur himself into the unvalued “file.” Knightly heroes, of whom little, or nothing, had been heard before, enter the Arthurian circle, and perform feats which interest us far more than anything done by the king. In early Welsh tradition, and in Geoffrey’s chronicle, Kay and Bedivere and, later, Gawain, alone figure as warriors whose deeds are at all worth mentioning by the side of Arthur’s. In the romances, Kay and Bedivere play quite subordinate parts, while Gawain becomes much more prominent, only, however, to find his high station challenged, and frequently usurped, by newcomers such as Tristram and Perceval and Lancelot.