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With its numinous aura the Winchester Round Table displays critical transitions in the conception of English royal authority at the turn of the medieval and early modern periods. (JW)
A. TABLE OF CONTENTS
'Thys is the rownde table of kyng Arthur,' begins the inscription at the center of the expansive object, suspended high in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle. The object (Figure 1)-a tabletop eighteen feet in diameter, originally about three-quarters of a ton in weight1-is by now a familiar reference point in discussions of Arthuriana. From the late Middle Ages to the modern period, it has attracted the attention of a range of chroniclers, courtiers, poets, scholars, and publicists, from John Hardyng, William Camden, and Michael Drayton to Thomas Warton, William Savage, and contemporary commentators.2 Whatever its relation to an elusive King Arthur, the Winchester Round Table has for hundreds of years been a fi xture of the Arthurian establishment.
In recent years the modern academy has also developed an increasingly established approach to questions about its material and conceptual origins. That approach has acquired particular authority with a meticulous research project conducted by Martin Biddle and others that began in the 1970s and that culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of King Arthur's Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation. Though the book, with its fascinating fi ndings, has deservedly reached a wide audience, perhaps it would be in order to indicate briefl y what seems to me its basic orientation to the Winchester Round Table-before I suggest some further points of view.
From the perspective of this archaeological investigation the Winchester Round Table emerges primarily as an expression of political, chivalric, and imperial aims in late medieval and early modern England. The original circular table itself, evoking the legendary realm of early Britain, may have been made at Winchester in the late thirteenth century to celebrate the arrangements of that Arthurian enthusiast, Edward I, for the dynastic marriages of his children.3 The top of the table may have been hung in the Great Hall in the mid-fourteenth century by Edward III, as his plans for a new Round Table fellowship at Windsor evolved into the founding of the Order of the Garter.4 The tabletop was eventually painted (for the fi...