SIEGE PERILOUS

If you want to get rid of someone, make him vow to sit in this, the forbidden seat at the Round Table. The Siege Perilous would also be useful to suicide with the maximum dramatic effect. Nobody but Galahad could sit in this chair, and anyone else who tried it was devoured by a column of fire.

In the Vulgate, one knight, Sir Brumant l'Orguilleus, came all the way from France to sit in the Siege Perilous. He knew he had made a silly, boastful vow, and wept all the way to the Siege, but a vow was a vow. Lancelot, sitting in the chair next to the Siege Perilous, did not move away when the fire descended, and was not even singed by the holocaust that devoured Brumant.

The Siege Perilous was to be filled by Galahad 454 winters after the Passion of Our Lord. This gives us a date for the era of Malory's Arthur.