Wace first introduces the notion of the Round Table in his Roman de Brut. Wace writes that King Arthur had it made so that all of the noble barons whom he attracted to his court would be equally placed and served and none could boast that he had a higher position at the table than the others. Layamon expands on this notion, describing a riot at which many nobles vie for place and precedence at Arthur’s table. A skilled craftsman then offers to make Arthur a table that will seat more than sixteen hundred and at which high and low will be on an equal footing because the table is round. It is also constructed in such a way that it can be transported when Arthur travels. Béroul’s Tristran suggests that the Round Table revolves like the earth.
      According to the prose rendition of Robert de Boron’s Merlin and the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle, Uther Pendragon, instructed by Merlin, established the Round Table to symbolize the table of the Last Supper and the Grail Table established by Joseph of Arimathea at the command of the Holy Spirit. Uther gives the Round Table to Guinevere’s father Leodegan, who in turn gives it to Arthur when he weds Guinevere. John Hardyng’s Chronicle also claims that the Round Table is made in commemoration of the Grail Table. In the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, the Round Table is said to represent the world, a significance supported by the fact that knights come to it from all the countries where chivalry exists. Malory says similarly that Merlin made the table round to signify the roundness of the world.
      Der Stricker suggests in his Daniel...

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Wace first introduces the notion of the Round Table in his Roman de Brut. Wace writes that King Arthur had it made so that all of the noble barons whom he attracted to his court would be equally placed and served and none could boast that he had a higher position at the table than the others. Layamon expands on this notion, describing a riot at which many nobles vie for place and precedence at Arthur’s table. A skilled craftsman then offers to make Arthur a table that will seat more than sixteen hundred and at which high and low will be on an equal footing because the table is round. It is also constructed in such a way that it can be transported when Arthur travels. Béroul’s Tristran suggests that the Round Table revolves like the earth.
      According to the prose rendition of Robert de Boron’s Merlin and the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle, Uther Pendragon, instructed by Merlin, established the Round Table to symbolize the table of the Last Supper and the Grail Table established by Joseph of Arimathea at the command of the Holy Spirit. Uther gives the Round Table to Guinevere’s father Leodegan, who in turn gives it to Arthur when he weds Guinevere. John Hardyng’s Chronicle also claims that the Round Table is made in commemoration of the Grail Table. In the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, the Round Table is said to represent the world, a significance supported by the fact that knights come to it from all the countries where chivalry exists. Malory says similarly that Merlin made the table round to signify the roundness of the world.
      Der Stricker suggests in his Daniel (written between 1210 and 1225) that the Round Table refuses a seat to anyone who has ever been guilty of villainy and therefore is not worthy to become a comrade to King Arthur. The fourteenth-century Icelandic Skikkju rímur attempts to explain how the Round Table grants equality to Arthur’s knights by suggesting that the king’s throne is round and is placed in the center of the floor with all the knights equidistant from it. The throne turns like the sun so that Arthur’s back is not to any one knight longer than to another.
      The Round Table has come to stand not only for the physical object at which Arthur and his knights sat but also for the order of knighthood and the code to which the knights committed themselves. The symbolic nature of the Round Table survives even into the youth groups of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The founders of one of those clubs, the Knights of King Arthur, saw the roundness of Arthur’s table and the equality it implied as representing "democracy under leadership" and thus an ideal structure for a club for boys.
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