“The Death of King Arthur and the Waning of the Feudal Age” contains a discussion of La Mort Artu in terms of the rapidly changing social and philosophical ethos of thirteenth century France. Although Arthur's kingdom is, politically speaking, a model of the feudal world, its values and institutions—the judicial duel, entrapment in flugrunte delicto, system of vendetta and private war—no longer function to insure the unity of the realm. More importantly, the crisis that besets Logres extends to the basic pattern of feudal organization, vassalage, and to the feudal notion of state. Mordret's manipulation of fealty for personal gain points to a fatal flaw within the system as a whole: that the barons can only relate to the ultimate source of power, Arthur, through individuals like Mordret; their singular position in a vertical hierarchy of command gives them sovereignty over its lower echelons. In short, the collapse of Arthurian kingship is the direct result of Arthur's and Gauvain's unawareness of and inability to make crucial distinctions between state‐right and kin‐right, between public and private loyalties and policies: categories that are becoming increasingly important with the reconstitution of the Capetian monarchy and the revival of Aristotelian notions of the state. Only Lancelot is able to distinguish personal and clannish interest from general social interest; because he is willing to sacrifice both Guinevere and the right of his family to avenge his death for the sake of the common good he stands as a new type of individual within the Arthurian world. He seems much closer to the citizen of the modern state than to the subject of the feudal monarchy. Arthur, on the other hand, represents the old king at the end of his reign. His fatigue, blindness and madness reflect, two centuries after the beginning of the end of feudalism in France, the weariness of the feudal world.

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