Unit 1: Selection Vocabulary 3

“Masters,” quoth he, “in churches, when I preach,
I am at pains that all shall hear my speech,
And ring it out as roundly as a bell,
For I know all by heart the thing I tell.
My theme is always one, and ever was:
'Radix malorum est cupiditas.’

Indulgences of pope and cardinal,
Of patriarch and bishop, these I do
Show, and in Latin speak some words, a few

If any man be here in church right now
That’s done a sin so horrible that he
Dare not, for shame of that sin shriven be

Of avarice and of all such wickedness
Is all my preaching, thus to make them free
With offered pence, the which pence come to me.

For, when I dare not otherwise debate,
Then do I sharpen well my tongue and sting
The man in sermons, and upon him fling
My lying defamations, if but he
Has wronged my brethren or—much worse—wronged me.

Arthur’s victory is only temporary, since the Anglo-Saxons eventually do conquer Arthur’s Britons (thus making Britain into Angle-land, or England).

By the end of the Middle Ages, Arthur’s fifth-century foot soldiers had become knights on horses; his fortified hills had become grand castles; and his court had become Camelot, a chivalric utopia.

By the end of the Middle Ages, Arthur’s fifth-century foot soldiers had become knights on horses; his fortified hills had become grand castles; and his court had become Camelot, a chivalric utopia.

They can transcend almost any sort of border; witness the revival of the legend in the twentieth century in variations ranging from the feminist (most notably, in the novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley) to the musical (starring Richard Burton, in the Broadway version).

In the History of the Britons, which Nennius compiled sometime early in the ninth century, there’s no doubt about the identity of the hero: it is “the warrior Arthur.”

His notoriously disorganized material didn’t help, either; the cleric himself described his approach as “making one heap” of all he found.