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"[…] And when he woke Lord Barnard's men Were standing at his feet And how do you like my bed, Musgrave? And how do you like my sheets? And how do you like my fair lady That lies in your arms asleep?"

Nic Jones — Little Musgrave

The traditional ballad of Musgrave and Lady Barnard, in Nic Jones' version.

A few variations exist (Musgrave is sometimes called Matty Groves) but that I always found poignantly cruel this depiction of the Lord killing his wife and her lover, and Nic Jones playing the characters and narrator with just the right amount of venom:

Great fanfare in the media across various countries about this "lost" Arthurian romance, "rediscovered", along with its "forgotten" hero, Segurant, the Knight of the Dragon. But if you don’t read French or Italian, it’s quite hard to figure out the theories at play about all these franco-italian texts from the end of the thirteenth century… In case it might be helpful, here is a working english translation (v 1.0) of our (long) article presenting the Matter of Segurant, in the Prophecies de Merlin, Rusticien’s compilations, etc.

You can find the PDF here, with various summaries of the stories involved, concordance tables, diagrams, etc. : https://sursus.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Understanding-Segurant_v1.pdf (110 p., 9mo)

The diagrams can be found separately here, for more convenient viewing: https://sursus.ch/understanding-segurant/ As well as a web Google Docs version here. (The definitive web version will be on the Sursus website) https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTF_YI-qDteMx-CZkKnguuFPSerY679aQXfV9LZLUI9Mpe7h6ehXEajQTLUQhS9Ma1Q6hq7l3QxHzIx/pub

It’s a work in progress and its 110 pages are probably full of howlers and obscure passages. Comments welcome, either here, by email ([email protected]), or on this Drive version of the PDF, where you can leave comments on the different pages (with a Google account): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EbaRAA-pENyM8UGzi8SIG7uSJw_4iWmY/view?usp=sharing

Cover for my (french) translation of La Folie Lancelot (13th century): during Lancelot's madness, where he attacks a shield suspended to a tree near a tent and attacks its occupants.

Might rework it a bit.

Cleaned those two gnomesona drawings for now

Finished this new illustration in this Guinevere and Lancelot series, wanted to use more or less the same setup with the columns and the light.

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In La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur, c. 1220), when Lancelot and Guinevere are caught in the act they are actually around fifty and their relationship has lasted for 20-30 years.