Thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.

This praise occurs in Sir Thomas Malory’s late-medieval Arthurian compilation *Le Morte Darthur* (completed c. 1469–1470; first printed by William Caxton in 1485). The lines are spoken as part of an epitaph-like tribute to Sir Lancelot, voiced after the collapse of Arthur’s court and the deaths and dispersal that follow the final civil war. Malory frames Lancelot as the supreme knight of the Round Table whose personal virtues—courtesy, restraint, and gentleness in courtly society—stand in tension with his unmatched ferocity in battle. The passage participates in the chivalric ideal of balancing “prowess” with “courtesy,” even as the narrative shows how that ideal is strained and ultimately undone.

The sentence sets up a deliberate paradox: the same man is “meek” and “gentle” in the hall—among women, in the rituals of courtly sociability—yet “sternest” and most relentless against a mortal enemy in the lists. Malory uses this contrast to define chivalric excellence as a disciplined switching of roles: tenderness and humility where peace and honor require it, and uncompromising force where justice, loyalty, or survival demand it. Read within the tragedy of *Le Morte Darthur*, the tribute also carries an elegiac irony: Lancelot embodies the best of knighthood, but even such a figure cannot prevent the moral and political unraveling of Arthur’s realm.