MEDIEVAL English Arthurian narratives do not in themselves make up a solid tradition, more a series of differently situated and shaped responses to disparate source materials. Their supposed common identity often cannot disguise wide differences. Sir Launfal and the Wife of Bath's Tale, for instance, contemporary romances of love and magic set in Arthur's reign, are worlds apart in ethos and literary conduct. But if we look beyond self-contained bachelor-knight romances to English narratives attempting a broader chronological treatment of Arthur's career, what might be called Arthurian biography, a much stronger sense of tradition and intertextuality emerges, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Malory, including the Brut books of Wace and La amon, Robert Mannyng's Chronicle, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure.

Within these texts, Arthur's story centres on the changing representation of military power, political organisation and right to rule; narratives of war provide the main discursive resources for this. A term like ‘war biography’ would best describe the treatment of Arthur in these texts, for the king and the conduct of the wars are inseparable. Less often noted, the representation of peace is also a persistent and significant Arthurian interest. However warlike their outlook, those writing the reign of Arthur were inevitably required by their material to construct imaginative sequences in which the establishment and breaking of peace, the alternations of peace and war – ‘blysse and blunder’ – were accounted for in terms intelligible and meaningful to their audiences.