Guinevere

In British legend, the wife of King Arthur. Her adulterous love affair with the knight Lancelot of the Lake led ultimately to Arthur's death.

In Welsh sources Guinevere was abducted by Melwas, king of the Summer Region, and taken to Glastonbury, in southwest England, where she was later rescued by Arthur. This legend was adapted in the early 13th-century by French poet Chrétien de Troyes, who assigned Guinevere and Lancelot their characteristic roles as lovers.

According to the 13th-century prose romances, when Arthur left England for Brittany in order to punish Lancelot, his nephew Mordred usurped the throne and attempted to marry Guinevere. Arthur and Mordred were killed in battle on his return and Guinevere, who had shut herself up in the Tower of London, went into a nunnery at Almesbury on hearing of her husband's death

In an earlier tradition, documented by the Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae/History of the Kings of Britain (around 1139), Guinevere married the usurper Mordred during Arthur's absence to fight the king of Rome. On his return, Arthur defeated Mordred at Camlan, a battle fatal to both leaders, while Guinevere fled from York, northeast England, to the nunnery of Julius the Martyr in Newport, south Wales.