Marhaus Defeats the Duke of South Marches and His Six Sons

Marhaus Defeats the Duke of South Marches and His Six Sons is an episode in the errant knight’s adventures in which a private vow of revenge becomes a test of allegiance to King Arthur. Lodged by an enemy of the Round Table, Marhaus faces the duke and six sons in a fight they insist he cannot refuse. His victory does more than settle the immediate challenge: the duke and his sons promise to end their hostility toward Arthur and seek the king’s grace at Whitsuntide.

The Lodging and the Duke’s Grievance

Marhaus, an Irish knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, is travelling south with a damsel when night overtakes them in a deep forest. They ask for shelter at a court, but the man there will not lodge them directly. Instead, he offers to take them somewhere they can be housed, while warning that they will learn the nature of the adventure when they arrive. Weary, Marhaus accepts, and the man brings them to a castle.

The duke receives Marhaus by torchlight, with young men gathered around him, and asks his name, origin, and allegiance. When Marhaus identifies himself as one of Arthur’s knights, the duke makes his hostility plain: he says he loves neither Arthur nor any member of the Round Table. He tells Marhaus to make himself comfortable for the night, because the following morning the duke and his six sons will fight him. Marhaus asks whether there is any alternative to facing all seven at once. The duke says there is not; he has made a vow that no knight of Arthur’s court who lodges with him, or comes within his power, will escape his revenge.

The grievance behind that vow is specific. The duke identifies himself as the Duke of South Marches and says that Gawaine killed his seven sons in a chance encounter. In response, he swore vengeance against Arthur’s knights. The encounter therefore places Marhaus in the path of a feud directed at the Round Table as a whole, though the stated cause is the duke’s loss of his sons to Gawaine.

The Fight Against Seven

On the appointed morning, Marhaus rises, arms himself, hears mass, breaks his fast, and rides into the castle court. The duke is already mounted, with his six sons beside him, each carrying a spear. At the first encounter the duke and two of his sons break their spears against Marhaus, while he holds his own spear upright and touches none of them. The four remaining sons then approach in pairs; they, too, break their spears without Marhaus striking them.

The balance changes when Marhaus rides at the duke and knocks both him and his horse to the ground. He then deals with the sons in turn. When some of them recover and move against him, Marhaus warns the duke to stop them, or he will do his utmost against them all. The duke sees that he cannot escape defeat and orders his sons to yield. They kneel and offer the pommels of their swords, and Marhaus accepts their submission. The fight concludes not with their deaths, but with their surrender and an agreement to abandon their hostility toward Arthur.

Submission and Return to the King’s Peace

The duke and his sons promise by common consent that they will no longer be enemies to King Arthur. They further undertake to come to Arthur’s court at Whitsuntide and put themselves in the king’s grace. Their promise gives the encounter a political consequence: Marhaus’s victory turns a household’s armed opposition to the king’s fellowship into a pledge of submission, to be presented before Arthur at a set time.

The episode is also one part of a broader sequence of Marhaus’s adventures. After leaving the duke’s castle, he and the damsel reach a tournament called by the Lady de Vawse. Marhaus performs so well that he brings down forty knights at different times and receives a gold circlet valued at a thousand besants. His subsequent renown at the tournament contrasts with the more consequential result of the castle fight: there he wins public honor; here he wins the duke’s and his sons’ promise to cease their feud and return to the king’s peace.