All four volumes of White's series are concerned with the workings of Force Majeure: the idea that any dispute can (and will) be settled by means of physical force. When (in The Sword in the Stone) the Wart meets Mr. P., the despotic perch, he sees Force Majeure in action: Mr. P. will eat anyone he pleases, whenever he has the urge. When (in The Queen of Air and Darkness) Arthur institutes a new kind of warfare and is able to "harness Might so that it works for Right," he is sure that he is forging a new idea that will forever change the way men think of battle. In The Ill-Made Knight, Arthur's Round Table effectively destroys the notion of Force Majeure and convinces the strongest knights in the realm to use their strength only in the name of God. However, after godliness has been attained by the Round Table's representatives, "those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better." Arthur's final attempt at curbing Force Majeure — an all-inclusive Law that will "make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down" — is the subject of The Candle in the Wind. Arthur thinks that the combination of "Customary, Canon, and Roman law" into "a single code which he hoped to call the Civil one," will finally end the bloodshed that Lyo-lyok, the goose who taught him about boundaries as a boy in The Sword in the Stone, found so horrifying.
Arthur's idea is a fine one and worthy of a king who so codified masculine aggression that it became an instrument for doing right. However, Arthur's civil law — like the sin of his sleeping with Morgause — eventually "comes home to roost" and forces its very inventor to apply it to the two people he loves most: Lancelot and Guenever.
