The Story of the Grail was the earliest account of the Quest for the Holy Grail, telling us about Perceval who was raised by his mother in a Welsh forest. When the boy encounters some knights, he realizes he wants to be one. He travels to the court of King Arthur and in his knight’s armour, he sets out for adventure.

Perceval is invited to stay in the castle of the Fisher King, where he witnesses a mysterious procession. At each course of the meal, young men and women are passing before him with magnificent objects: a bleeding lance, candelabras and then there is this beautiful girl with an elaborately decorated ‘graal’, containing a single Mass wafer which sustains the wounded father of the Fisher King.

Perceval doesn’t question his host about the Grail and that’s the reason why the next morning he wakes up alone in the woods. The Grail Castle has disappeared. Later he learns the right question would have healed the king. Now he vows to find one day the Castle of the Grail again.

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What is the Grail?

The tale of Perceval is one of the great myths of the world, with an extraordinary symbolism. It was a part of the awakening of Europe from the Dark Ages, now the Catholic Church had all the pagans and barbarians either converted or driven back. Towns started to grow, universities were created, there was an increase in wealth and now the techniques of building with stone were established, people started building their Cathedrals for real. Chivalry and courtly love were born, and a romantic literature in the vernacular language.

Chrétien didn’t tell us what was the exact nature of the Grail, and perhaps some of the appeal of his story precisely came from the mystery surrounding the object and its whereabouts. Some scholars are saying the Grail derived from Celtic myth, being something like a life-restoring cauldron which even can raise the dead, or a Vessel of Plenty, or a magical platter that symbolizes otherworldly power and sometimes even decides who has to be the next king.

Most scholars claim that the Grail hadn’t yet acquired the holiness of later Grail romances, but I don’t agree on that. Chrétien’s Grail was a dish or bowl that didn’t contain a salmon or a pike, but a single Mass wafer. The mystical fasting of the Fisher King’s crippled father remind us of the countless saints who were said to have lived on a wafer a day. Chrétien definitely intended the Mass wafer to be a significant part of the ritual. Maybe, as ‘the first modern European novelist’, at the end of his story he would have unveiled the true identity and the Secret of the Grail. But he died before he could finish his work.

It was around the period the first Grail romances were written that the Church of Rome was beginning to add more mysticism to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. So, the Grail could have been from the very beginning a purely Christian symbol. Twelfth century wall paintings present images of the Virgin holding a bowl that radiates tongues of fire. They possibly could have been the original inspiration for the Grail legend.

The word ‘grial’ seems to be an Old French adaptation of the Latin ‘gradalis’, and this simply means: a dish. After the cycle of Grail romances was established, late medieval writers explained the word as being ’sangréal’ – which is French for ‘royal blood’ – that became ’san graal’, Saint Grail… or Holy Blood. This is called ‘a false etymology’, but I am not convinced it is that false. French or English authors tend to forget that Chrétien says he was working from a source book given to him by Philip of Alsace, son of Thierry… who brought the Holy Blood to Bruges.

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Where is the Grail?

Thierry of Alsace claimed the county of Flanders against William Clito and was supported by cities such as Bruges, Ghent, Lille and Saint-Omer. He won the battle and in 1128 set up his government in Ghent. In 1139, in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem he married Sybilla of Anjou, daughter of the King of Jerusalem. She was pregnant when when Thierry left Flanders for the Second Crusade and got attacked by Baldwin IV of Hainaut, but she led the counter-attack and pillaged his county. In the Holy Land, Thierry participated in the Siege of Damascus, led by his wife’s half-brother Baldwin III, King of Jerusalem.

A legend says that on Christmas Day 1148, some Templars found a stone jar in the Holy Grave, while in the presence of Thierry and his wife – but Sybilla was at the moment fighting of Baldwin of Hainaut. However, the Knights Templar were convinced the jar contained the Holy Blood of Christ. According to the legend, Sybilla was a leper and suffered from terrible attacks of fever. When the Holy Blood was respectfully poured from the jar into an octagonal bottle and the ends sealed with two golden roses, for just a moment she held the precious relic in her hands. In a vision she then saw ‘a New Jerusalem of the West’, and it was the city of Bruges. The next moment, Sybilla was miraculously cured, as were all the lepers surrounding her.

Sybilla made the solemn pledge to turn Bruges into a Holy City. In 1150 she and Thierry, the abbot of Saint Bertin and the Flemish crusaders reached Bruges, where the masons had just finished the basilica of  Saint-Basilius on the Burg Square. From now on, the Holy Blood would be called upon for the most various reasons.

The oldest document concerning the Sanguis Christi dates from 1256. It’s possible the Holy Blood in reality arrived much later in Bruges, but the legend is very precise about the date, what makes it possible that there arrived at least something in Bruges on April 7, 1150. Whether it was truly the Holy Blood of Christ doesn’t really matter. Much more important is what the Templars who had given the relic to the Count of Flanders, wanted it to be.

Strange enough, on the third pilgrimage of Thierry, Sybilla was at the side of her husband. But after arriving in Jerusalem, she separated from Thierry and became a nun at the Convent of St. Lazarus in Bethany. There she supported the election of Amalric as Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. She died a few years later in Bethany. Thierry died in 1168 and was buried in the abbey of Watten, near Saint-Omer.

The son of Thierry and Sybilla, Philip, married Elisabeth of Vermandois. The marriage remained childless, and when Philip discovered Elisabeth was committing adultery, he had her lover beaten to death. Baldwin IV, the leper King of Jerusalem, was childless too. In 1177, Philip went on crusade and was offered the Kingdom of Jerusalem, because he was the closest male relative to Baldwin. But Philip refused, saying he was there only as a pilgrim. His wife died in 1183 – it’s interesting to see how Chrétien depicted adulterers – and in 1190 the Count of Flanders took the cross for a second time and was stricken by an epidemic passing through the crusader camp. Philip of Alsace died the next year and was buried in the abbey of Clairvaux, founded by St Bernard who wrote the rule of the Templar Order.

Chrétien dedicated Perceval, the Story of the Grail to his patron, saying he sowed the seed of the tale in such good soil that its greatness was ensured. And there is something of a prediction in this claim, or better: the hint of a plan, a strategy. The poet states that his labours will not be in vain, because he want to follow the count’s wishes. And thus, from a book given to him by his patron, he will put into verse ‘the best story ever told in a royal court’… that could have turned out as the Story of the Holy Blood brought to Bruges by the father of Philip, if Chrétien had been able to finish the work.
 

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The Glastonbury Connection

Saint Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury, as a young boy studied under the Irish monks who lived in the ruins of the abbey and had a vision of the abbey being restored. In 943 he built a small cell against the old church of St Mary, and he went here to study, do his handicrafts or play the harp. In the scriptorium he worked as a silversmith; he probably was the artist who drew the famous image in the Glastonbury Classbook of Christ with the kneeling monk beside him.

As the abbot of Glastonbury, Dunstan started rebuilding the abbey. He also established the Benedictine monasticism. But in 995, when King Edwy came to the throne, he found the young monarch fornicating with a young girl and her mother. Dunstan forced the King to renounce the girl, and then realised he had provoked Edwy. He fled to the sanctuary of his cloister, but the King followed him and plundered the abbey. Dunstan managed to escape, fled England and crossed the channel to Flanders. There he was received by Count Arnulf and lodged in the Mont Blandin abbey near Ghent. The exile of Dunstan ended in 957, when Edwy had to flee for his brother.

Still in the lifetime of Dunstan, Glastonbury Abbey got associated with King Arthur and the legends of the Holy Grail. The abbey got rich and powerful and in 1191, at the time Chrétien left his unfinished Grail romance, an abbot discovered in the cemetery a hollowed oak trunk, containing two skeletons. Above it, under the covering stone, was a leaden cross saying here, on the Isle of Avalon, was interred King Arthur. The other skeleton had to be Guinevere, of course.

It is possible that the book Philip had given to Chrétien in order to write his Grail story, was a book that belonged to Dunstan and was brought by him to Ghent. Glastonbury would soon become a center of Arthurian lore and Grail legend, while the one and only real Grail was in Bruges. The Holy Blood of Christ, or the secret of the bloodline, was brought there by the Templars, perhaps only partly in 1150 (as a document?) and partly a century later, as a relic you can see, the center of a Procession. The Grail Castle then was the ‘Burg’, which is the Dutch word for ‘castle’, where the Chapel of the Holy Blood was.

In his article Bruges: the Grail City? Philip Coppens argues that Chrétien de Troyes wrote about a royal tradition concerning a precious relic, carried in a procession. Did his patron asked the poet to write a romance that displayed his relationship to the Holy Blood or the Holy Grail of Bruges?

Read also:

The story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes

The Holy Blood of Bruges, a New Jerusalem

Mysteries of the Mystic Lamb