“This much shall I offer you if it may please the king’s good grace, and you my lord Sir Gawayn.  And first I shall begin at Sandwich, and there I shall go in my shirt and barefoot, and at every ten miles’ end I will found and cause to make a house of religion, of what order ye will assign me, with a whole convent, to sing and to read day and night, in especial for Sir Gareth’s sake and Sir Gahers; and this shall I perform from Sandwich unto Caerleyell.  And this, Sir Gawayn, me thinketh, were more fairer and better unto their souls than that my most noble lord Arthur and you should war on me, for thereby ye shall get none avail.”

But Gawayn answered him with hard words ending thus:—­

“And if it were not for the Pope’s commandment I should do battle with my body against thy body, and prove it unto thee that thou hast been false unto mine uncle, King Arthur, and to me both, and that shall I prove upon thy body, when thou art departed from hence, wheresoever I find thee.  Then all the knights and ladies that were there wept as they had been mad, and the tears fell upon King Arthur’s cheeks.  Then Sir Lancelot kissed the queen before them all, took his leave, and departed with all the knights of his kin.”

He went to his estates over the sea; but Gawayn gave Arthur no rest till he had made ready an army and crossed the sea to make war on him.  Modred, in Arthur’s absence, seized the kingdom, and would have wedded the queen by force, had not the Archbishop of Canterbury threatened to curse him with bell, book, and candle.  When Modred defied him, the archbishop departed, and “did the curse in the most orgulous wise that might be done.”

But Arthur, receiving tidings of Modred’s conduct, returned to Dover, where the usurper met him, and “there was much slaughter of gentle knights.”  Here Sir Gawayn was mortally wounded, and Arthur " made great sorrow and moan.”  Two hours before his death, Gawayn wrote a letter to Lancelot, telling him of Modred’s crime and beseeching him, “the most noblest knight,” to come back to the realm:—­

“And so at the hour of None, Sir Gawayn betook himself into the hands of our Lord God, after that he had received his Saviour.  And then the king let bury him within a chapel within the castle of Dover, and there, yet to this day, all men may see the skull of Sir Gawayn, and the same wound is seen that Sir Lancelot gave him in battle.”

In the “Passing of Arthur” Tennyson has kept mainly to the original, though he omits Arthur’s command to Sir Bedevere to pray for his soul.

The king, overcome by his enemies, receives his deadly wound, and sails away in the barge, with the three queens, to the island valley of Avilion.  But, according to Malory, Sir Bedevere finds him on the morrow, lying dead in a little chapel on a rock:—­