“There was no Camelot in the early tradition by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon. These early Arthurian authors say that Arthur's capital was in Caerleon (Caerleon-on-Usk). The earliest reference to Camelot I could find comes from the French poet named Chretien de Troyes. At the beginning of his romance called Le Chevalier de la charrette ("Knight of the Cart" or "Lancelot"), Chretien said that Arthur was holding court at Camelot which was situated in the region of Caerleon. No other details were given. In about 1210, in Perlesvaus (Le Haut Livre du Graal), the writer said that Camelot belonged to Alain le Gros, the father of Perceval.”
the archetype of a rightly-ordered realm.
Camelot is absent from the earliest British sources (Gildas, Historia Brittonum, Annales Cambriae). It enters the record in the French romances and then flowers in English tradition.
“Camelot” first surfaces in Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (late 12th c.), where Arthur’s court is located there and the tale proceeds with the ease of something already known to the audience. Scholars treat this as the literary debut of Camelot as Arthur’s court.
Malory later folds Camelot into English geography and—at least once—equates it with Winchester, a move likely encouraged by the great painted “Winchester Round Table” already venerated in his day.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, a century earlier, had exalted Caerleon as Arthur’s court (Roman baths, amphitheatre, episcopal seat), and that prestige lingers beneath the French romance topography that gives us Camelot.
Scholars and seekers have proposed South Cadbury Castle in Somerset (Alcock’s excavations found substantial sub-Roman refortification in the 5th–6th centuries); others point to Camulodunum (Colchester), Caerleon, Carlisle/Carduel, Camelford, even northern forts along the old Roman lines.
The romances keep Camelot’s map intentionally soft so it can be anywhere the ideal of just kingship makes a stand.
Camelot is less a castle than a liturgical calendar of chivalry. Feasts, oaths, and visions happen here, above all at Pentecost, when the court gathers and the Grail’s current breaks into the visible world:
“On the eve of Pentecost, when the companions of the Round Table had come to Camelot and had heard mass… Then they began to talk about the young man whom Lancelot had knighted… When they had ceased speaking of this, they surveyed the seats placed about the Round Table… They saw that the letters said ‘Four hundred and fifty-four years are accomplished…’ ”
— The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. W. W. Comfort (from the Old French Queste del Saint Graal, c. 1220).
The City as Self: Camelot is the integrated psyche under a rightful sovereignty; Arthur is the solar will aligned to the Good; the Round Table is the harmonized faculties.
The City as Church: Camelot images the Heavenly Jerusalem
Under the myth: post-Roman Britain, fractured polities, warlords of late antiquity. A leader remembered as dux bellorum unites tribal retinues against Saxon advance—then vanishes into legend. The romance writers import that memory into a 12th–13th century courtly frame that champions knightly virtue, court love, Eucharistic symbolism, and monastic ideals (especially in the Cistercian-flavored Queste).
The city fails not because the ideal is false but because shadow gathers within: divided loves, divided loyalties, the slow corrosion of oaths.
“Jesu mercy, how may this be? said the king… Alas, me sore repenteth that ever Sir Launcelot should be against me. Now I am sure the noble fellowship of the Round Table is broken for ever…”
— Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)
Camelot is a legendary castle and court associated with King Arthur… absent in the early material, first appearing in 12th-century French romances.”
Malory’s identification of Camelot with Winchester was probably… inspired by the city’s prestige and the famous Round Table there.”