Arthur’s Attempt to Kill the May-born Infants is a royal response to Merlin’s warning that a child born on May Day would destroy him. Arthur orders the children gathered and sent away by ship; most perish when the vessel is wrecked, but Mordred survives. The episode exposes the human cost of trying to escape a foretold ending and establishes the child who will later claim Arthur’s kingdom as the survivor of the king’s own attempt to avert that fate.

Prophecy and the King’s Order

The episode is introduced as the story of how the children born on May Day were sent for and how Mordred was saved. Its stated cause is Merlin’s prediction to Arthur: the person who would destroy the king would be born on that day. In response, Arthur commands that the May-born children of lords and ladies be brought to him, under penalty of death. The danger is presented as a prophecy, while the measure taken against it is an order imposed on families throughout the realm.

The Ship and Mordred’s Survival

Many sons of lords are found and delivered to the king. Among them is Mordred, sent by King Lot’s wife. Arthur has the children put aboard a ship at sea; some are only four weeks old, and some younger. The ship is driven to a castle, where it is wrecked. Most of the children are lost, but Mordred is cast ashore and found by a good man, who raises him until he is fourteen. The man then brings him to court, where his story is taken up later in the narrative.

The outcome reverses the intention of the order: the children are exposed to danger in the hope of preventing the foretold destroyer’s rise, yet Mordred survives while the others do not. His survival is not presented as the result of a royal plan; it comes through the wreck, his rescue, and his upbringing away from Arthur’s immediate care.

Political Cost and Foreshadowing

The loss angers many lords and barons, who blame Merlin more than Arthur. Their displeasure does not immediately become open resistance: the account says they keep silent through a mixture of fear and affection. The act therefore leaves a political grievance beneath the outward quiet of the realm, showing that the king’s response to prophecy reaches beyond the children themselves and strains relations with their families.

The episode’s irony rests on the difference between the threat Arthur tries to forestall and the consequence his order actually produces. Mordred, the child singled out by the prophecy, survives the mass sending and eventually reaches Arthur’s court. Later, he presumes to rule England and seeks to marry the queen, his uncle’s wife, setting the prophecy’s warning against the king’s own household and kingdom. The account does not say that Arthur’s order causes Mordred’s later actions; instead, the survival of the child gives the earlier attempt its grim retrospective significance.