A consensus of MS. authority ascribes the best and largest part of the _prose_ romances,[47] especially those dealing with Lancelot and the later fortunes of the Graal and the Round Table company, to no less a person than the famous Englishman Walter Mapes, or Map, the author of _De Nugis Curialium_, the reputed author (_v._ chap. i.) of divers ingenious Latin poems, friend of Becket, Archdeacon of Oxford, churchman, statesman, and wit. No valid reason whatever has yet been shown for questioning this attribution, especially considering the number, antiquity, and strength of the documents by which it is attested. Map's date (1137-96) is the right one; his abilities were equal to any literary performance; his evident familiarity with things Welsh (he seems to have been a Herefordshire man) would have informed him of Welsh tradition, if there was any, and the _De Nugis Curialium_ shows us in him, side by side with a satirical and humorous bent, the leaning to romance and to the marvellous which only extremely shallow people believe to be alien from humour. But it is necessary for scholarship of the kind just referred to to be always devising some new thing. Frenchmen, Germans, and Celticising partisans have grudged an Englishman the glory of the exploit; and there has been of late a tendency to deny or slight Map's claims. His deposition, however, rests upon no solid argument, and though it would be exceedingly rash, considering the levity with which the copyists in mediaeval MSS. attributed authorship, to assert positively that Map wrote _Lancelot_, or the _Quest of the Saint Graal_, it may be asserted with the utmost confidence that it has not been proved that he did not. [Footnote 47: These, both Map's and Borron's (_v. infra_), with some of the verse forms connected with them, are in a very puzzling condition for study. M. Paulin Paris's book, above referred to, abstracts most of them; the actual texts, as far as published, are chiefly to be found in Hucher, _Le Saint Graal_ (3 vols., Le Mans, 1875-78); in Michel's _Petit Saint Graal_ (Paris, 1841); in the _Merlin_ of MM. G. Paris and Ulrich (Paris, 1886). But _Lancelot_ and the later parts are practically inaccessible in any modern edition.] [Sidenote: _Robert de Borron._] The other claimant for the authorship of a main part of the story--in this case the Merlin part, and the long history of the Graal from the days of Joseph of Arimathea downwards--is a much more shadowy person, a certain Robert de Borron, a knight of the north of France. Nobody has much interest in disturbing Borron's claims, though they also have been attacked; and it is only necessary to say that there is not the slightest ground for supposing that he was an ancestor of Lord Byron, as was once very gratuitously done, the time when he was first heard of happening to coincide with the popularity of that poet. [Sidenote: _Chrestien de Troyes._]