made by the Kaffirs to surprise Graham’s Town, and 10,000 men attacked it, but they were repulsed by the garrison, which numbered not more than 320 men, infantry and artillery, under Lieut.-Colonel (afterwards General Sir) Thomas Willshire. In 1822 the town was chosen as the headquarters of the 4000 British immigrants who had reached Cape Colony in 1820. It has maintained its position as the most important inland town of the eastern part of the Cape province. In 1864 the Cape parliament met in Graham’s Town, the only instance of the legislature sitting elsewhere than in Cape Town. It is governed by a municipality. The rateable value in 1906 was £891,536 and the rate levied 212d. in the pound.
See T. Sheffield, The Story of the Settlement . . . (2nd ed., Graham’s Town, 1884); C. T. Campbell, British South Africa . . . with notices of some of the British Settlers of 1820 (London, 1897).
GRAIL, THE HOLY, the famous talisman of Arthurian
romance, the object of quest on the part of the knights of the
Round Table. It is mainly, if not wholly, known to English
readers through the medium of Malory’s translation of the
French Quête du Saint Graal, where it is the cup or chalice of the
Last Supper, in which the blood which flowed from the wounds
of the crucified Saviour has been miraculously preserved.
Students of the original romances are aware that there is in these
texts an extraordinary diversity of statement as to the nature
and origin of the Grail, and that it is extremely difficult to
determine the precise value of these differing versions.[1] Broadly
speaking the Grail romances have been divided into two main
classes: (1) those dealing with the search for the Grail, the
Quest, and (2) those relating to its early history. These latter
appear to be dependent on the former, for whereas we may
have a Quest romance without any insistence on the previous
history of the Grail, that history is never found without some
allusion to the hero who is destined to bring the quest to its
successful termination. The Quest versions again fall into three
distinct classes, differentiated by the personality of the hero
who is respectively Gawain, Perceval or Galahad. The most
important and interesting group is that connected with Perceval,
and he was regarded as the original Grail hero, Gawain being,
as it were, his understudy. Recent discoveries, however, point
to a different conclusion, and indicate that the Gawain stories
represent an early tradition, and that we must seek in them
rather than in the Perceval versions for indications as to the
ultimate origin of the Grail.
The character of this talisman or relic varies greatly, as will be seen from the following summary.
1. Gawain, included in the continuation to Chrétien’s Perceval by Wauchier de Denain, and attributed to Bleheris the Welshman, who is probably identical with the Bledhericus of Giraldus Cambrensis, and considerably earlier than Chrétien de Troyes. Here the Grail is a food-providing, self-acting talisman, the precise nature of which is not specified; it is designated as the “rich” Grail, and serves the king and his court sans serjant et sans seneschal, the butlers providing the guests with wine. In another version, given at an earlier point of the same continuation, but apparently deriving from a later source, the Grail is borne in procession by a weeping maiden, and is called the “holy” Grail, but no details as to its history or character are given. In a third version, that of Diu Crône, a long and confused romance, the origin of which has not been determined, the Grail appears as a reliquary, in which the Host is presented to the king, who once a year partakes alike of it and of the blood which flows from the lance. Another account is given in the prose Lancelot, but here Gawain has been deposed from his post as first hero of the court, and, as is to be expected from the treatment meted out to him in this romance, the visit ends in his complete discomfiture. The Grail is here surrounded with the atmosphere of awe and reverence familiar to us through the Quête, and is regarded as the chalice of the Last Supper. These are the Gawain versions.
2. Perceval.—The most important Perceval text is the Conte del Grael, or Perceval le Galois of Chrétien de Troyes. Here the Grail is wrought of gold richly set with precious stones; it is carried in solemn procession, and the light issuing from it extinguishes that of the candles. What it is is not explained, but inasmuch as it is the vehicle in which is conveyed the Host on which the father of the Fisher king depends for nutriment, it seems not improbable that here, as in Diu Crône, it is to be understood as a reliquary. In the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the ultimate source of which is identical with that of Chrétien, on the contrary, the Grail is represented as a precious stone, brought to earth by angels, and committed to the guardianship of the Grail king and his descendants. It is guarded by a body of chosen knights, or templars, and acts alike as a life and youth preserving talisman—no man may die within eight days of beholding it, and the maiden who bears it retains perennial youth—and an oracle choosing its own servants, and indicating whom the Grail king shall wed. The sole link with the Christian tradition is the statement that its virtue is renewed every Good Friday by the agency of a dove from heaven. The discrepancy between this and the other Grail romances is most startling.
In the short prose romance known as the “Didot” Perceval we have, for the first time, the whole history of the relic logically set forth. The Perceval forms the third and concluding section of a group of short romances, the two preceding being the Joseph of Arimathea and the Merlin. In the first we have the precise history of the Grail, how it was the dish of the Last Supper, confided by our Lord to the care of Joseph, whom he miraculously visited in the prison to which he had been committed by the Jews. It was subsequently given by Joseph to his brother-in-law Brons, whose grandson Perceval is destined to be the final winner and guardian of the relic. The Merlin forms the connecting thread between this definitely ecclesiastical romance and the chivalric atmosphere of Arthur’s court; and finally, in the Perceval, the hero, son of Alain and grandson to Brons, is warned by Merlin of the quest which awaits him and which he achieves after various adventures.
In the Perlesvaus the Grail is the same, but the working out of the scheme is much more complex; a son of Joseph of Arimathea, Josephe, is introduced, and we find a spiritual knighthood similar to that used so effectively in the Parzival.
3. Galahad.—The Quête du Saint Graal, the only romance of which Galahad is the hero, is dependent on and a completion of the Lancelot development of the Arthurian cycle. Lancelot, as lover of Guinevere, could not be permitted to achieve so spiritual an emprise, yet as leading knight of Arthur’s court it was impossible to allow him to be surpassed by another. Hence the invention of Galahad, son to Lancelot by the Grail king’s daughter; predestined by his lineage to achieve the quest, foredoomed, the quest achieved, to vanish, a sacrifice to his father’s fame, which, enhanced by connexion with the Grail-winner, could not risk eclipse by his presence. Here the Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper, is at the same time, as in the Gawain stories, self-acting and food-supplying.
The last three romances unite, it will be seen, the quest and the early history. Introductory to the Galahad quest, and dealing only with the early history, is the Grand Saint Graal, a work of interminable length, based upon the Joseph of Arimathea, which has undergone numerous revisions and amplifications: its precise relation to the Lancelot, with which it has now much matter in common, is not easy to determine.
To be classed also under the head of early history are certain interpolations in the MSS. of the Perceval, where we find the Joseph tradition, but in a somewhat different form, e.g. he is said to have caused the Grail to be made for the purpose of receiving the holy blood. With this account is also connected the legend of the Volto Santo of Lucca, a crucifix said to have been carved by Nicodemus. In the conclusion to Chrétien’s poem, composed by Manessier some fifty years later, the Grail is said to have followed Joseph to Britain, how, is not explained.
- ↑ The etymology of the O. Fr. graal or greal, of which “grail” is an adaptation, has been much discussed. The Low Lat. original, gradale or grasale, a flat dish or platter, has generally been taken to represent a diminutive cratella of crater, bowl, or a lost cratale, formed from the same word (see W. W. Skeat, Preface to Joseph of Arimathie, Early Eng. Text Soc.).—Ed.
