Реферат: Synopsis For The Once And Future King

famine, and of war. It had been the country of trial by red-hot irons . . .”

For practical purposes, however, White’s idealized time is given the name of the twelfth

century: ” . . . If you happen to live in the twelfth century, or whenever it was,” he writes

in one place, and in another, “The Battle of Bedegraine was the . . . twelfth century

equivalent of total war.” Further, some of the events which he depicts as taking place in

Arthur’s reign occurred during the years 1066-1216: the evolution of legal writs and an

elementary form of trial by jury came about under the vigorous rule of Henry II;

Mordred’s ambition to massacre the Jews was systematically practiced under Richard I,

with the Jewish quarter of London being destroyed in 1215 under John. On the other

hand, the extravagance of dress which White describes when Arthur’s court “goes

modern” fits in well with the sumptuous costumes evolved under Edward III and Richard

II.

The Gramarye of this idealized century was inhabited by Normans (Galls), who had come

over with Uther, by Saxons, and by Old Ones (Gaels). The Normans, of whom Arthur is

one, comprise the chivalric aristocracy who with their Games-Mania and ritualized forms

of warfare act like fox-hunting squires of the nineteenth century.

By their unthinking brutality under Uther, the Norman/Galls have oppressed the

Saxons,who actually have preceded them in England, and have kept them as serfs in the

posture of a subject race (” Baron had been the equivalent of the modern word

Sahib! “). The Old Ones “Gaels” or Celts who were in England centuries before

either the Normans or the Saxons, have been harried to Wales, Cornwall, Scotland,

Ireland and Brittany. Merlyn gives Arthur a history lesson: “About three thousand years

ago,” he said,

“the country you are riding through belonged to a Gaelic race who fought with

copper hatchets. Two thousand years ago they were hunted west by another Gaelic

race with bronze swords. A thousand years ago there was a Teuton invasion by

people who had iron weapons, but it didn’t reach the whole of the Pictish Isles

because the Romans arrived in the middle and got mixed up with it. The Romans

went away about eight hundred years ago, and then another Teuton invasion of