Then Sir Lancelot rose up and told the hermit, and the hermit ordered
him to make ready and to do all as the vision had commanded. And Sir
Lancelot and seven of the other Knights went on foot from Glastonbury
to Amesbury, and it took them two days to compass the distance, for
it was far and they were weak with fasting. When they reached the
nunnery Queen Guenevere had been dead but half an hour, and she had
first summoned her ladies to her, and told them that Sir Lancelot had
been a priest for near a twelvemonth. 'And hither he cometh as fast as
he may,' she said, 'to fetch my corpse, and beside my lord King Arthur
he shall bury me. And I beseech Almighty God that I may never have
power to see Sir Lancelot with my bodily eyes.' 'Thus,' said the
ladies, 'she prayed for two days till she was dead.' Then Sir Lancelot
looked upon her face and sighed, but wept little, and next day he sang
Mass. After that the Queen was laid on a bier drawn by horses, and an
hundred torches were carried round her, and Sir Lancelot and his
fellows walked behind her singing holy chants, and at times one would
come forward and throw incense on the dead. So they came to
Glastonbury, and the Bishop of Canterbury sang a Requiem Mass over the
Queen, and she was wrapped in cloth, and placed first in a web of
lead, and then in a coffin of marble, and when she was put into the
earth Sir Lancelot swooned away.
'You are to blame,' said the hermit, when he awaked from his swoon,
'you ought not make such manner of sorrow.'
'Truly,' answered Sir Lancelot, 'I trust I do not displease God, but
when I remember her beauty, and her nobleness, and that of the King,
and when I saw his corpse and her corpse lie together, my heart would
not bear up my body. And I remembered, too, that it was through me and
my pride that they both came to their end.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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