Were these stories known by most people or just the literate? Did people think of the stories like we think of modern day superhero franchises with constant retellings of old characters and stories in the modern day and similar things? Or would it be much longer before the varied and somewhat different versions and stories were collected into the single mythos we know today? Of course this is mostly in the areas where the legends would have been told like Britain and France.
And finally but slightly differently, in 500 years time will modern day Arthurian stories be “integrated” or included in the mythos? If I wrote a book that became extremely popular where, say, it was “Lady Lancelot” rather than Sir Lancelot, could I expect it to become a common way of telling the story in the future?
I’ve recently become interested in the legends after reading the Epilogue of the book “Templars: God’s Holy Warriors” by Dan Jones, where he makes joking reference to the Holy Grail. Since then I’ve become rather interested in how many of my friends actually thought Arthurian legends to be historical fact...
Part I:
I have previously written about the historical reception of King Arthur throughout the twelfth century HERE. That post is mostly concerned with the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which was written in the 1130s, and is one of the earlier versions of King Arthur that we would recognize, and certainly the work most responsible for popularizing the legend. In summary, while some of Geoffrey's contemporaries accepted the Historia Regum as historical fact to varying degrees, but the end of the 12th Century, it was largely dismissed as historical.
We do not really know whether this viewpoint was shared by other classes at the time. We know that versions of King Arthur became extremely popular throughout the 12th C. In my original post, I quote Chris Given-Wilson as stating "215 medieval manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniae still survive, a third of which are in continental libraries, and over a quarter of which are datable to the twelfth century." This is an extraordinary amount of copies, particularly when you consider that it is widely believed that we only have a fraction of manuscripts that were produced throughout the Middle Ages. However, we do not know for certain whether the majority of secular, aristocratic readers would have viewed Geoffrey of Monmouth as historical, or as literature, as they were not kind enough to leave behind book reviews.
And we know virtually nothing about how Arthurian legend was received by the peasantry and lower classes, or even to what extent the legend was disseminated. However, some of Geoffrey of Monmouth's contemporaries point out that the story was already being circulated orally. William of Malmesbury said, "It is of this Arthur that the Britons fondly tell so many fables, even to the present day; a man worthy to be celebrated, not by idle fictions, but by authentic history." By Britons, William of Malmesbury likely means native-born English who were not of Norman or Frankish descent, Welsh, Bretons, and perhaps even Irish and Scots. Geoffrey of Monmouth himself indicates that this was a story he had already known before committing it to paper:
While my mind was often pondering many things in many ways, my thoughts turned to the history of the kings of Britain, and I was surprised that, among the references to them in the fine works of Gildas [De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae] and Bede [Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum], I had found nothing concerning the kings who lived here before Christ's Incarnation, and nothing about Arthur and the many others who succeeded after it, even though their deeds were worthy of eternal praise and are proclaimed by many people as if they had been entertainingly and memorably written down. I frequently thought the matter over in this way until Walter archdeacon of Oxford, a man skilled in the rhetorical arts and in foreign histories, brought me a very old book in the British tongue, which set out in excellent style a continuous narrative of all their deeds...
Geoffrey of Monmouth may have been of at least partial native-English, Welsh, or Breton origin and had probably heard these stories many times in his youth. Here, he seems to actually express some disappointment that he could not find an exact origin of the stories or any proof that they were real. As for the book he claims to have gotten from the Archdeacon of Oxford, we have no idea whether there was an actual book, or if Geoffrey made up this detail in order to increase his credibility.
Furthermore, we know that Geoffrey of Monmouth's version of King Arthur was translated from Latin prose into French verse by Wace at the request of Henry II of England within 30 years of its original composition. Verse is important because it indicates that the work was meant to be sung, recited, or performed in some way. Marie de France, whose work also contains Arthurian references also states that she is recording Breton folk tales that she has heard. Therefore, I think it is safe to assume that, while we don't have anything explicitly stating broad access to Arthurian literature among the masses, and we definitely don't know what lower class people thought about it, peasants and commoners probably had at least some exposure to it.