The Last Tournament

A late Arthurian idyll depicts a king who orders a tournament awarding a necklace taken from an eagle-borne infant; the contest exposes fractures in courtly honor as knights compete under mixed motives. Lancelot presides with private disquiet while younger knights and rivals like Tristram perform triumphs and affronts; a maimed churl reports a Northern Round Table of renegades and a foreboding rise of lawlessness. The pageant's rules are mocked, courtesy decays, and the poem traces the moral erosion of chivalric ideals through ceremonial spectacle, private jealousy, and impending violence, suggesting the waning of a high age of knighthood.