Henry
the Young King must have considered himself lucky to be born into the
world that witnessed such a flowering of literature. And although to
V.H. Galbraith he was the least educated of Henry II and Eleanor's
sons, there is a body of evidence suggesting that he did take
pleasure in listening to and reading literary works. One we can be
sure of, he lived long enough to become familiar with Chrétien de
Troyes's Sir Lancelot du Lac. Whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia
Regum Britanniae was the first work in which he could read
about King Arthur, Chrétien's Erec et Enide was the
first romance in which he got the appearance of Arhur's most beloved
knight, Sir Lancelot. It just so happened that Chrétien himself
worked for Henry's elder half-sister Marie, the countess of
Champagne, who took him under her wing, not
only comissioning his works, but also supplying him with material [or
plot] and interpretation. Henry must have heard about Lancelot first
in the afor…
The realm of Henry, England's forgotten king...