Between Dartford and Rochester the Host of the Canterbury pilgrims calls on a guildsman who has told no tale, and the Carpenter offers one about a table. It is the story the joiners hand down from master to apprentice: how, after a bloody Christmas quarrel over who sat where, a Cornish carpenter promised King Arthur a table with no top, and had four weeks and only green oak to make it. Geoffrey Chaucer frames the tale among his pilgrims, with the Reeve heckling from the back and the Host demanding a moral, and lets a craftsman explain, plank by plank, how a marvel of the romances might have begun at the hearthside of a winter hall.
by Geoffrey Chaucer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
There were five of them in our company who rode together, in one livery, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer and a tapestry-maker, all of one great and solemn fraternity. I have described them elsewhere, and I will not do it again, except to say that their knives were mounted with silver and not with brass, that each of them looked fit to sit on the dais in a guildhall, and that their wives thought so too. It is a fine thing to be called madame, and to go first to the vigils, and to have your mantle carried behind you like a queen's.
From Southwark to beyond Dartford these five had told no tale. They had listened to all of them, and laughed at the right places, and once or twice at the wrong ones, and the Haberdasher had paid for everyone's ale at the Watering of Saint Thomas, which is a kind of tale in itself. But of stories they had told none, and our Host, who kept accounts of these things the way a reeve keeps accounts of barley, had noticed.
So when the Shipman had finished and the road ran on a while without anyone in it, the Host turned in his saddle and looked down the line of us.
"Sir Carpenter," he said. "You. Yes. You have a face that has never told a lie in its life, which means you have nothing to tell. Tell it anyway."
The Carpenter was a broad man, grey at the temples, with the forearms of his trade and a habit of looking at things before he looked at people. When the Host called him he was looking at a gate in a hedge by the road, I think at the hanging of it, which was poor.
"I am no tale-teller," he said.
"Nobody is," said the Host. "That is why we draw lots. Go on."
Behind us, at the very back of the company, where he always rode, the Reeve spoke up on his grey cob. He was a carpenter too, in his youth, before he took to cheating a lord in Norfolk, and the Miller had told a tale about a carpenter, and the Reeve had paid him back with a tale about a miller, and neither of them had yet forgiven the other.
"Let him tell one about millers," the Reeve said.
"I will tell one about a table," said the Carpenter.
The Host groaned. "A table."
"The Round Table," said the Carpenter. "King Arthur's. I had it from my master, Adam Strete of Cripplegate, who had it from his, who was a Kentish man, and he had it from his own master, and so back. I do not know how far back. It is a tale the joiners tell each other, because nobody else will listen to it."
"I will listen to it," I said, for I was curious, and besides it is my office on this road to listen.
The Carpenter nodded at me without much gratitude, as a man nods at the only customer in a shop, and began.
Here begins the Carpenter's Tale.
You will have heard how the Round Table came to be, because the clerks have it in their books and the clerks tell it every way but the right one. Some say Merlin made it for Uther, the king's father. Some say it was round like the world. Some say it seated a hundred and fifty, and some say sixteen hundred, and that it could be folded up and carried on a horse, and I will come to that.
This is how my master had it.
It was at Christmas in London, in the first years after Arthur was king. He kept a great feast, and men came to it from every land he ruled, and from some he did not: Britons and Scots and Irishmen, and men from islands that I have never seen named outside a book. And every one of those lords had his place at the boards, and every one of them thought his place should be higher.
You know what a hall is at a great feast. The high table on the dais, across the top. Then the long boards down the sides, and the nearer you are to the dais the better you are, and the nearer the door the worse, and the worst of all is the end of the lowest board, where the draught comes in and the dogs come in with it. Every man there knew where he was sitting to a hand's breadth. Every man there could tell you who was sitting a hand's breadth higher, and why he shouldn't be.
They began with bread. A lord at one board threw a loaf at a lord at the next. That is how the book has it, and I believe it, because I have been at guild dinners. Then they threw the silver bowls, with the wine still in them. Then they came to fists. Then somebody had a knife out, and then everybody had a knife out, and when the king came in from his chamber with a hundred men in harness behind him, the rushes on that floor were red, and not with wine.
"I know how that ends," said the Reeve, from the back.
"Then you know more than I want to," said the Carpenter. "The king punished it. The man who began it was dragged out to the fen and put in the water. His kinsmen lost their heads, and his kinswomen their noses. My master would not tell that part to apprentices, and I will not dwell on it either, except to say that it was a hard way to settle who sits where, and the king knew it, because he made them all swear on relics never to do it again, and then he went into Cornwall to be somewhere else for a while."
Now in Cornwall there was a carpenter.
My master said his name was Kenwyn, and that he came from up the river above Truro, where there was good oak, and where his father had cut it and his father before him. I do not know if that is true. The books do not give his name. The books never give the carpenter's name. They give you the name of every horse in the story.
Kenwyn heard of the Christmas fight, the way all Cornwall heard of it, and when the king came riding through, he went out and stood in the road. He did not kneel, my master said, because his knees were bad, and he did not ask leave to speak, because he did not know that he had to. He said:
"Lord, I hear your men fight over where they sit. I can make you a table they cannot fight at."
The king asked him how.
"Round," said Kenwyn. "So none sits at the top, because there is no top. Side by side all the way round, high and low. And I'll make it so it comes to pieces, and goes on carts when you ride, and goes together again wherever you halt, so you can carry your peace about with you."
The king asked him how long.
"Four weeks," said Kenwyn.
And here my master would always stop, and look round at the apprentices, and wait.
"Green oak," said the Reeve.
"Green oak," said the Carpenter.
Our Host looked from one to the other of them like a man who has walked into the wrong guild. "What of it?"
"Oak dries an inch a year," said the Carpenter. "Every boy in the trade knows it before he can sharpen a chisel. A board two fingers thick wants two years in the stack, under a roof, with the wind through it, before you dare put it in a table for a king. And this was four weeks. There was no seasoned oak in all Cornwall in boards of that size. There never is. Somebody has always bought it. So he had to fell it, and cleave it, and build it wet."
"And it warped," said the Host, pleased to be ahead of something.
"No. He was a good carpenter. Listen."
He felled one tree. That was the first thing, and my master said it was the wisest. One great oak on the bank of the river, so that all the timber in the table would be of one growth and one temper, and move together, as near as wood ever does. He cleft it, he did not saw it. You split oak with wedges and the board comes away along the grain, the way the tree grew it, and a cleft board twists less than a sawn one, because you have not cut across what the tree meant. Then he cut the boards into pieces like the felloes of a cart wheel, curved, each one a man's sitting-room wide, and he joined them edge to edge round a great ring, with oak pins driven through, and no iron anywhere, because iron in green oak goes black and eats the wood.
So far so good, and in that time I would have done the same and been proud of it.
But a round table is not a wheel. A wheel is a rim. A table is a top, and a top must be filled in, the middle as well as the edge, and a top that wide cannot be one board, or ten. So Kenwyn made the middle as a second ring inside the first, and a third inside that, and a round plank in the middle like the boss of a shield, and every ring was pinned to the next. Then he made the trestles to stand under it, folding ones, and the whole thing came apart into pieces two men could lift. He marked every piece with a knife, so that it would go together the same way every time, a cut for the first felloe, two for the second, and so on round.
How many did it seat? I don't know. Sixteen hundred is a clerk's number. Sixteen hundred men in a ring would need a field, not a hall, and the man at the far side would have to send a boy for the salt and wait till Easter. My master said that a joiner who could make a hundred sit at one table, and every man of them able to see every other, had done a great thing, and needed no clerk to multiply it.
In four weeks it was made. They carried it to the king in carts, and set it up in his hall, and the lords came in, and saw it, and saw that there was no top to it, and sat down.
And for that whole winter, my master said, there was peace.
Our Host said, "Well, that is a pretty ending. I have heard worse. Thank you, Sir Carpenter," and gathered his reins.
"That is not the ending," said the Carpenter.
"It sounds like the ending."
"It was winter," said the Carpenter. "It was a hall. There was a fire."
A hall has a hearth, and the hearth was in the middle of the floor, the old way, with the smoke going up to a hole in the roof. And when the king's servants set up the table, they set it where tables go, a little way off from the fire, so that the lords should be warm and not roasted. Which meant that one side of the table was nearer the fire than the other. All winter that side baked. The other side, by the door, stayed damp and cold.
Green oak drying on one side and not the other.
I need not tell the Reeve what happened. For the rest of you: wood shrinks as it dries, and it shrinks across the grain, not along it. And when one part shrinks and the part beside it does not, something has to give.
It gave at Candlemas, my master said, in the night. The whole hall heard it. A crack like a bone going, and the dogs got up and barked, and the steward came in with a light and found nothing, and went back to bed.
In the morning there was a split in the table. It ran from the outer edge in toward the middle, between two of the knife-marks, a finger wide at the rim and a hair wide at the end, and it ran through the place where one man sat.
Only one.
That evening, my master said, the knight whose place it was came in to sit, and saw the crack, and set his cup down beside it, and the cup tipped, as cups will, into the crack, and his wine ran down through the board into his lap.
The man next to him laughed.
I do not know the knight's name. I do not know the name of the man who laughed. My master did not know them. I am only telling you that it happened, and that from that night nobody wanted the place with the crack in it, because to be put there was to be put at the bottom of a table that had no bottom. And so the thing came back. It came back through the crack in the board, the way water comes into a ship.
"Then he should have mended it," said the Reeve.
"He did," said the Carpenter. "He tried to."
They sent to Cornwall for Kenwyn, and he came. He looked at the crack. He put his thumb in it, my master said, the way you would put your thumb in a wound. Then he went out to the yard and came back with a key: you know the thing, a piece of hard dry wood cut like two wedges set point to point, the shape of a moth with its wings open. You cut a hole that shape across a split, and drive the key in, and the split can never open further, because the wings hold either side.
He had chosen the wood well, for it was seasoned oak, out of some old church door, black as a stone. He had cut it out on the road. It was a good key.
He had the chisel set to cut the seat for it when a man in a furred gown came into the hall and told him to stop.
My master would never say this man's name to apprentices. He said it brought bad luck to a workshop, like whistling. I will say it, because I am not in a workshop. It was Merlin.
Merlin looked at the crack for a long time. Then he said that it was not to be mended.
Kenwyn said that if it was not mended it would open further every winter and in three years the table would be two tables.
Merlin said that was as might be. He said that the crack was a sign, that it had opened by no man's work, and that the seat it ran through was not to be sat in by any knight living, nor mended by any hand, until there came to the court the one knight in the world who was worthy of it, and he would know it when he saw it, and it would not harm him. And any other man who sat there, Merlin said, would come to grief.
"What sort of grief?" said our Host, who had stopped pretending not to listen.
"The books say different things," said the Carpenter. "Some say the earth opened and swallowed him. Some say he burned. My master said he had sat on a split board once himself, in a tavern at Aldgate, and the grief he came to was in his breeches, and was taken out with a needle by his wife."
The Host laughed so hard that his horse shied, and the Miller, who had been asleep, woke up and asked what he had missed.
But the king believed Merlin, my master said, because a king has to believe somebody, and he could hardly believe a carpenter. So the seat was left empty. They put a cloth over it, and later they put letters on the cloth, in gold, and the clerks gave it a name in French, which is what clerks do when they are frightened of a thing, and it has kept that name ever since. The Siege Perilous.
And Kenwyn was paid, and paid well, my master said, twice what he had been paid for making the whole table. He was paid to go home to Cornwall and leave it as it was.
"And that is the end?" said the Host.
"Nearly," said the Carpenter. "There is one more thing my master said, and I give it to you because he gave it to me, and I do not know if it is true."
He said that when Kenwyn went home he did not take the key with him. He left it on the board, under the cloth, in the empty seat. And the knights who came after, and who sat to either side of the place every day of their lives, never once lifted the cloth to see what was under it, because they were afraid to.
And my master said that is why, in the end, when the right knight came, he sat down in that seat and came to no grief. Not because he was the best knight in the world, though no doubt he was. But because he was the first man in all those years who lifted the cloth, and found the key there, and knew what it was for.
Here ends the Carpenter's Tale.
Nobody said anything for a while after that. Then the Host said, "Sir Carpenter, there is a moral in that, and I cannot for my life find it. Is it against clerks?"
"I don't know," said the Carpenter.
"Is it against knights?"
"I don't know."
"Then what is it for? Every tale is for something."
The Carpenter thought about it, looking at the road.
"My wife," he said at last, "is to walk second in the procession at the vigil of Saint Bartholomew this year, behind the wife of our Master of the guild. Last year she walked fourth. She wishes me to put in a word, at the next dinner, so that she walks first. I have not told her that our guildhall has a new dais, and that the boards of it were cut last winter."
"Green?" said the Reeve.
"Green," said the Carpenter.
The Host looked at him a long while, and then he began to laugh again, more quietly than before, and he did not ask for any further moral, and we rode on.
We came down toward Rochester in the afternoon. You could see the river from the hill, broad and brown, running out toward the sea with the tide. Where the old bridge had been there were stumps standing in the water, black and broken, with the weed hanging off them. The ice had come down the Medway in the great thaw six winters before and carried the bridge away, timber and all. Men said that two knights were going to pay for a new one in stone. Men had been saying it for some time.
While the rest of us waited on the bank, the Carpenter got down off his horse and walked to the water's edge, to where the nearest of the old piles came up out of the mud. He looked at it a long time. Then he put out his hand and laid it flat on the wood, the way a man lays his hand on a horse's neck, and kept it there.
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Galfrīdō Chaucērō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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