SIR THOMAS MALORY
(c.1410-1471)
Scott ftshfey
ALL CRITICS WHO attempt to write on the life and
works of Sir Thomas Malory must face a series
of severe challenges to the assumptions underlying their discipline. Questions about the connections between a work and the life of its author,
about an author's intentions, and about the
underlying structural patterns in a text are
familiar enough and still useful today, despite
changes in critical fashion and methodology. But
what happens when the identity of an author is
uncertain (a not uncommon occurrence in the
study of medieval literature)? More specifically,
what happens when the leading candidate for
writing the work under discussion here—Le
Morte Darthur, that chivalric romance of King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—
turns out to be a serial rapist, thief, and violent
criminal? Can the life usefully be related to the
work then? What can we say about intention
when the author often copied directly from older
works in French and English, sometimes expanding, sometimes conflating, but never working
within our modern notions of originality and
individual authorship? This last question is made
even more difficult because the printer of the
Morte Darthur, William Caxton, altered the text
as delivered to him, certainly in terms of organization, perhaps more radically still. Was Sir
Thomas Malory the sole author of the Morte
Darthur, or should we give part of the credit to
Caxton, who turned the manuscript of an author
dead for fourteen years into a printed book? After
a century and more of serious scholarship on
Malory and the Morte Darthur, provisional, and
occasionally more substantial, answers can be
given to these difficult questions. But new historical discoveries, new perspectives, and even new
technologies are constantly expanding our
knowledge of the knight-prisoner, Sir Thomas
Malory, and his great book, challenging modern
critics and readers alike to leave behind their
inherited ideas of literature and biography.
THE SEARCH FOR AN AUTHOR?
THE text of the Morte Darthur offers little in the
way of guidance as to its author. The various
prayers and authorial asides (usually placed at
the end of the major tales) tell us little more than
that he was called Thomas Malory, that he was a
knight and a prisoner when the book was being
written, and that he laid down his pen for the last
time in the ninth year of the reign of King
Edward IV, that is sometime in 1469-1470. William Caxton's preface to his first printed edition
of 1485 does not help, merely noting he set about
producing the book "after a copy unto me
delivered, which copy Sir Thomas Malory did
take out of certain books of French and reduced
it into English" (Works, ed. Vinaver, p. xv).
Serious research into the identity of Sir Thomas
Malory began just over a century ago, with the
publication by the American scholar George Lyman Kittredge of an article identifying the author
with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, a
Warwickshire knight who was active in the midfifteenth century and died in March 1471. At
almost the same time as Kittredge, an English
antiquarian, A. T. Martin, proposed an alternative
candidate, Thomas Malory of Papworth St. Agnes
in Cambridgeshire, a member of the local gentry
who died in the autumn of 1469. Kittredge's
arguments found favor in scholarly circles,
however, and as a result Sir Thomas Malory of
Newbold Revel "has probably attracted more attention than any other member of the fifteenthcentury gentry" (Carpenter, "Sir Thomas Malory
and Fifteenth-Century Local Politics," p. 31).
Unfortunately, this attention proved discomfort-
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
that any of the other Thomas Malorys known to
fifteenth-century history were either knights or in
prison. Various stories have been concocted to
try and overcome this problem, including Thomas
of Hutton Conyers being a prisoner of war in
Gascony (in southwestern France) in 1469 or
Thomas of Papworth St. Agnes being knighted
by Edward IV's brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, while escaping from the advancing forces
of his great enemy Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, better known to history as Warwick "the
Kingmaker." While these scenarios are of course
not impossible, there is absolutely no convincing
evidence that any of them actually took place.
Problems still remain with all candidates,
however, including Sir Thomas of Newbold
Revel, particularly over the question of how and
where any Englishman got access to the books
that Malory used in writing the Morte Darthur,
many of which were exceedingly rare. Also, it
must be noted that there is absolutely no real
evidence that Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel was
in prison at any time after 1460. The final prayer
of the Morte Darthur has usually been read to
imply that Malory was in prison in 1469-1470:
"I pray you all gentlemen and gentlewomen that
read this book of Arthur and his knights from the
beginning to the ending, pray for me while I am
in life that God send me good deliverance"
(Works, p. 726). Perhaps the Warwickshire knight
was in jail and no record has survived; or perhaps
by "deliverance" Malory means deliverance from
his earthly (and probably aged) body into heaven
and not from prison at all.
The seemingly straightforward issue of who
wrote the Morte Darthur turns out to be an
extremely complicated one that has resulted in
millions of words and many thousands of pages,
the arguments and counterarguments of which
cannot be adequately summarized here. Suffice it
to say, at this moment in time the knight from
Newbold Revel seems most likely to be the
author. Moreover, this is not just a matter of better documentation. Many scholars who argued
against his authorship did so because they could
not stomach the idea that the preeminent English
chronicler of Arthur and the Round Table, of Lancelot of the Lake and Tristram of Lyonesse, of
ing to the traditional view of the Morte Darthur
as the epitome of chivalric values, as it rapidly
became apparent to historians that Sir Thomas of
Newbold Revel was a distinctly unsavory character who had been accused of rape, attempted
murder, and repeated violent attacks on property
and persons through the early 1450s and who
spent much of that decade in prison for his
crimes. No new candidate for authorship really
came on the scene to help explain away this
incongruity until 1966, when William Matthews
of the University of California proposed that the
most likely author of the Morte Darthur was the
little-known Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers
in North Yorkshire, a younger son of a middleranking landowning family active from around
the 1430s to the 1470s. While Matthews's views
gained some supporters, his evidence for Thomas
of Hutton Conyers has proved flimsy and his
influence has largely been in encouraging new
attacks on Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel as the
author of the Morte Darthur. Since Matthews's
book there have been three contributions of note
to the debate: in 1973 Gweneth Whitteridge suggested that Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel was a
different man from Sir Thomas Malory of Fenny
Newbold who is referred to in court records as
the notorious criminal (though in this she does
seem mistaken); in 1981 Richard R. Griffiths
made an interesting new case for Thomas Malory
of Pap worth St. Agnes as the author; then in 1993
Peter Field, one of the most knowledgeable and
eminent living Malory scholars, published the
most thoroughly researched and argued case yet
that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was,
after all, the only possible candidate to be the
author of the Morte Darthur. And there the questions stands. What can be made of all this?
The fact is that after a century and more of
scholarly combat Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel
still seems in firm command of the field, with
almost all of his challengers ultimately proving
to have fatal weaknesses. All of those who have
championed alternative candidates have come up
against the immovable rock of the Morte Darthur itself, which tells us that its author was a
knight-prisoner when it was being written and,
most probably, completed. There is no evidence
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
Galahad and the Holy Grail, could be in life a
scoundrel of the first order. Even without new
historical research that has illuminated our
understanding of why small local landowners
like Sir Thomas were driven into a life of crime
and violence in mid-fifteenth century England, at
the beginning of the twenty-first century we need
little reminding that culture and civilization do
not always go hand in hand. We have learned to
understand the disjunction between the moral
work of art and the possibly immoral life that
produced it.
THE UNLUCKY KNIGHT: SIR THOMAS MALORY
OF NEWBOLD REVEL
THE name Malory means, in Norman French,
"unlucky" and, at his death, Sir Thomas Malory
of Newbold Revel may well have reflected that
he had experienced his fair share of the family
curse, much of it of his own making. Yet, at his
birth his prospects seemed good. The Malorys of
Warwickshire were a branch of a family that
could trace its ancestry back to the early twelfth
century and which may even had fought with
William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066. Sir
Thomas's ancestors had been based in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire until 1383 when Sir
John Malory inherited through marriage the
manor of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire and
promptly moved himself and his family there.
County worthies who had risen to prominence
through landowning, local office holding, and
aristocratic patronage, the Malorys were by the
time of Thomas's birth typical of the English
provincial gentry in the early fifteenth century.
They married their neighbors, sought election to
Parliament, acted as sheriffs and justices of the
peace, and negotiated their way through the factions of the great noblemen of the day. If we had
more private documents emanating from the
Malorys, they might appear very similar to the
Pastons, that Norfolk family whose letters give
us insight into the medieval worlds of business,
local politics, and gossip. Only if, as Peter Field
has argued, the Sir Robert Malory who was Prior
of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in
England from 1432 to 1440 was an uncle or near
kinsman, was the future Sir Thomas born into a
family that had any claims to real national connections.
Most biographies of Sir Thomas of Newbold
Revel date his birth sometime between 1390 and
1400, on the grounds that a Thomas Malory is
listed as serving in the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, in a document dating from 1415. It has proved alluring to historians
and biographers to imagine Malory seeing action
in the glory days of the Hundred Years War
between England and France in the year King
Henry V won one of the greatest English victories
at Agincourt. Unfortunately, it has also proved
rather difficult for partisans of the knight from
Newbold Revel as the author of the Morte Darthur, assuming as it does that, in an age when a
man was old by the age of forty, Malory began
an active life of crime and adventure in his fifties
and completed his great book at the age of
seventy or older. Field has argued recently that
this in fact a non-problem and that there is no
evidence that the Thomas Malory mentioned in
the Beauchamp muster role is in fact the young
Malory of Newbold Revel and has suggested a
more credible birth date of c.1416—a date that
also fits more neatly with the first certain reference to the Warwickshire man in 1439, when he
witnessed a property settlement of his cousin Sir
Philip Chetwynd.
The 1440s saw Malory living the life of the
provincial English gentry and following in the
footsteps of his father, John (who had died in
1433-1434), dealing in land, witnessing deeds
for his neighbors, and acting as a parliamentary
elector for Northamptonshire (implying he was
living here at this time and not in Warwickshire),
before being elected to Parliament in 1445 (and
perhaps again in 1449). Malory seemed to be
moving up in the world: he had been knighted by
late 1441; he acted on a parliamentary commission for assessing taxes in 1445 and in 1446; he
had married Elizabeth Walsh by 1448 when his
son and heir, Robert, was born. During this
decade he was certainly being courted by Henry
Beauchamp, the duke of Warwick, (an association that continued between Malory and the
Beauchamp affinity after the duke's premature
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
death in 1446) and possibly by Humphrey
Stafford, the duke of Buckingham, the two
premier nobles in the west Midlands and two of
the most powerful men in England. The only dark
cloud, but one that foreshadowed a coming storm,
gathered but did not burst in the autumn of 1443,
when Malory and his brother-in-law where accused of insulting, wounding, and imprisoning a
man from Northamptonshire and with stealing
goods worth £40 from him. The case never came
to trial and drops out of the historical record; it is
worthy of note however given Malory's career a
decade later.
The notorious career of Sir Thomas Malory
began on 4 January 1450 when he and twenty-six
other armed men allegedly lay in wait for the
duke of Buckingham in the Abbot's woods at
Combe in Warwickshire. What provoked him to
this act against a man that previously seems to
have been well-disposed towards Malory is not
known for certain, although the labyrinthine
struggles for local power and influence between
the various noble "affinities" (groups of men tied
to aristocratic patrons to provide political and, if
necessary, military support) provides the immediate context. By early 1450 the reign of the weak
King Henry VI was sending ripples of instability
coursing through the state and the country, allowing private feuds and factions to proliferate.
Malory seems to have taken full advantage of the
illicit opportunities offered. The charges come
thick and fast: the rape of Joan Smith of Coventry
in May 1450; extortion of money from monks in
the same month; a second rape of Joan in August
1450 followed by the theft of goods from her
husband and further extortion from locals around
Newbold Revel (a spree that was just possibly
interrupted by Malory's election to Parliament);
the rustling of cows, calves, and sheep in June
1451; deer-stealing and destruction at the duke of
Buckingham's park in July 1451; escape from
prison, by swimming the moat of his jail, two
days after his imprisonment by Buckingham; and
the robbing of Coombe abbey of money and ornaments (twice) immediately after his daring
escape. Then his luck seems to have run out, for
Buckingham and the law closed in on him, and
by early 1452 at the very latest he was firmly
held in Ludgate prison in London.
The next eight years of Malory's life were
spent in and out of (but largely in) London's
prisons, as he was moved between Ludgate, the
King's Bench, the Tower, and Newgate. He was
bailed out three times, all but the last with
disastrous consequences. In October 1452 he was
released on bail by what seems to be a group
representing the power brokers of Warwickshire,
but he swiftly abused their trust, since it was
most probably at this time that he allegedly raided
Lady Katherine Peyto's manor and stole her
oxen; by the spring of 1453 the call had gone out
for Malory's arrest and he was soon back in
prison. He was bailed for a second time in May
1454, this time backed by the major noblemen of
Warwickshire, including Buckingham, clearly in
an attempt to reintegrate the wayward knight
back into county society. Again, Malory rejected
their conciliatory gestures, exporting his criminal
dealings to Essex, where he sheltered his servant,
John Allen, who had been busy stealing horses,
while the two plotted to rob various innocent
citizens. When the plot went wrong and Malory
was captured and imprisoned in Colchester prison
the bold streak he had shown in escaping from
prison in 1451 surfaced again and he broke out a
second time on 30 October 1454. He was not on
the run for long however, and by November he
was behind bars in the King's Bench prison in
London.
A more determined effort to keep Malory safely
locked up appears to mark the next few years.
Record penalties were threatened against any
jailer who allowed him to escape, and when he
tried to take advantage of the general pardon issued by the Lord Protector, the duke of York,
(Henry VI having descended into incapacity and
madness) the court refused to recognize either
the pardon or Malory's securities for bail, a sure
sign that the powerful had run out of patience at
last and abandoned him to his fate. He was
transferred to the Tower of London and then,
"for more secure custody," to Newgate jail. During all this time his case never came to trial,
whether through the failings of the fifteenth
century judicial system or through political
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
machination we do not know. In any case, there
were certainly some who thought it better for
him to remain in prison indefinitely. For by this
time the political tension in England between the
weak Lancastrian government of Henry VI and
his ministers and the Yorkist faction led by
Richard, duke of York, his son, Edward, earl of
March, and Richard Neville, earl of Warwick,
had broken out into violence. In May 1455 the
two sides had clashed at St. Albans, in a minor
scuffle only remembered because it became
known as the first battle of the Wars of the Roses.
As someone who had links of patronage with
York and the Neville family, and who was seen
as an enemy of Buckingham (who remained loyal
to Henry VI), Malory may well have been
thought of as a potentially dangerous ally of the
Yorkists. Apart from October 1457 when the Nevilles managed to bail him out of jail for two
months, and a short spell in 1459 when he seems
to have been in Warwickshire, he remained in
prison probably until July 1460. In that month
the Yorkist lords won a major victory over the
Lancastrians at Northampton, killing Buckingham and capturing King Henry. The Tower surrendered to them, and the prisoners, including
Malory, were freed. In 1462 he was fully pardoned for his crimes by the new king and his
government. For in March 1461, after nine
months of fighting that had seen alternate Yorkist
and Lancastrian successes, the earls of March
and Warwick defeated the Lancastrians at the
Battle of Towton; Henry VI fled and March was
crowned as the first king of the House of York,
Edward IV. Unfortunately, we have no evidence
to say whether Malory was involved in this most
active phase of the Wars of the Roses.
The last decade of Sir Thomas's life is a curious mixture of a return to the ordinary, gaps in
the record, and mysterious reversals of fortune.
When Malory went back to Warwickshire after
his long, enforced absence he seems to have
reconnected himself to the routines of landowning society without too much trouble. We see
him once again dealing in land, arranging the
marriage of his eldest son, Robert, begetting
another son, Nicholas, and witnessing the marriage settlements of his kinsmen and neighbors.
The only excitement may have been in 1462
when a Thomas Malory is recorded as having
taken part in the expedition by Edward IV and
Warwick to capture the last remaining Lancastrian castles in northern England. Matthews
argued that this was more likely to have been
Thomas of Hutton Conyers than his namesake of
Newbold Revel; however, Field has recently
vigorously restated the case for the latter on a
wider study of the evidence than that undertaken
by Matthews. On a balance of probabilities, it
looks as if the new Yorkist government was cashing in on the favors owed by Malory of Newbold
Revel.
If it is the case that he was actively engaged in
Edward IV's successful northern campaign in
1462, then the last major documents to name him
become all the more surprising. For in July 1468
and again in February 1470 Malory was excluded
by name from the general pardon of Edward IV.
Here was a man whose political sympathies (such
as they were) had always seemed to veer towards
the Yorkists, suddenly placed among a list of the
most diehard Lancastrians. Perhaps Malory had a
change of heart—Peter Field talks of "a bad
conscience" (Life and Times of Sir Thomas
Malory, p. 173)—or he may have been implicated, rightly or wrongly, in a Lancastrian plot,
or been an innocent victim of the rapidly worsening relations between his patron, the earl of Warwick, and Edward IV (which would cause
Edward to be toppled from his throne in 1470
and Henry VI to be momentarily restored as
king). Whatever the truth may be, if we accept
Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel as the author of
the Morte Darthur, then we probably have to accept that he was imprisoned again in 1468 or
1469, probably in the Tower, even though there
is no record of it. It was during this period, in
"the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the
Fourth" (Works, p. 726), that the Morte Darthur
was written, or more likely completed—indirect
testimony to the fact that Malory cannot have
been kept in harsh circumstances and may even
have been comfortable. He was probably freed
again after the Warwick-led Lancastrian victory
in October 1470 and died on 14 March 1471.
Malory seems to have prospered under the short-
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
lived Lancastrian regime, since he was buried in
Greyfriars, Newgate, in London, one of the richest and most fashionable churches of the time.
The very day of his death Edward IV returned
to England and within two months he had killed Warwick and destroyed the hopes of the
House of Lancaster. Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, the unlucky knight, had found the
smallest piece of good fortune only in the hour
of his end.
one books with each book subdivided into
chapters. Comparison with the Winchester
manuscript now demonstrated that the Caxton
Morte Darthur had significant differences,
especially in the Roman war section, and that
several of the explicits (the formal endings to
each section of the manuscript) naming Sir
Thomas Malory, a knight-prisoner, as the author
had been dropped, along with innumerable
smaller changes. The looser format of the
Winchester manuscript and the existence of the
explicits led the most influential Malory scholar
of the twentieth century, Eugene Vinaver, to argue
that we should stop thinking of the Morte Darthur as a "whole book" (as the final explicit calls
it—because of the missing leaves at the beginning and end of the manuscript we do not know
if this is original or Caxton's). Instead, he argued
that Malory had written eight separate Arthurian
tales that had been yoked together by Caxton
into a single book; he even went so far as to drop
the famous title, Morte Darthur, from his standard
editions and replace it with the more neutral and
plural Works.
Few scholars today would take such a radical
position as Vinaver. There are various examples
of interconnectedness between the several parts
of the book, where Malory refers forward or back
to other stories, evidence that if he was not
always consistent in his structuring, he at least
did have an overarching vision for the work. The
title, Morte Darthur, has also proved resilient to
Vinaver's assaults, and not just because of its
familiarity. The defensiveness with which Caxton
introduces the title at the very end of his edition,
where he admits that the book actually includes
many other things than just the death of Arthur,
suggests that the unsuitable title was in the
manuscript he had in front of him and was not of
his invention. Recently, scholars have suggested
that the abbreviated version of the Roman War
episode in Caxton's edition may have been taken
from a revision of his original text by Malory
himself and that the Winchester manuscript
merely preserves the earlier version. There can
be no certainty about any of these interpretations,
but scholarly consensus seems to be moving
toward the position that while the finding of the
CAXTON'S MALORY
FOR four and half centuries after William Caxton
first printed his edition of the Morte Darthur in
1485 very little for certain was known about the
actual processes of composition of Malory's great
book. Then, amazingly, in 1934 a manuscript was
discovered in the library of Winchester College,
now housed in the British Library. Although
clearly not Malory's original (it is now thought
to date to about 1480), it suggested that Caxton's
printed version may well have differed significantly from what the author had written. Through
a brilliant piece of scholarly detective work,
helped by advances in photographic technology,
Lotte Hellinga has been able to prove by analyzing tiny smudges of printer's ink on the pages of
the Winchester manuscript that it was actually in
Caxton's workshop from C.1480-C.1489. It may
even have been there until 1498, though, surprisingly, neither Caxton nor his successor, Wynkyn
de Worde, seems to have printed directly from it.
Perhaps Caxton used the Winchester manuscript
as a backup to the manuscript he was using for
his own edition. Whatever may be the truth of
this, it needs to be stressed that neither the
Winchester manuscript nor Caxton's book can be
said to contain the more exact version of what
Malory actually wrote. There are several errors
and omissions made by the two scribes of the
manuscript that only a reading of Caxton can
correct. In addition, the opening and closing
pages of the Winchester manuscript are missing.
We are always at least one remove from Sir
Thomas's actual words.
In his preface Caxton had made it plain that he
had divided Malory's original work into twenty-
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
Winchester manuscript has enriched and complicated our understanding of Malory's work, it has
not completely overthrown it.
Yet the role of William Caxton in creating the
text we know today remains important, not least
because in his preface of 1485 he set out the
earliest critical responses to Malory's work. The
addition of that preface to nearly all modern editions of the Morte Darthur means that first-time
readers continue to approach the book through
Caxton's understanding of it. There are two major
aspects to this that can prove an obstacle to those
readers' full appreciation of Malory's achievement: firstly, Caxton underestimated Malory's
originality as an author; secondly, he interpreted
the Morte Darthur as an essentially moral book
with a didactic purpose.
Malory must never be judged by the standards
of originality we are familiar with today. In the
mid-fifteenth century innovation and invention
were not the prime qualities expected of an
author, but rather fidelity to older, authoritative
accounts and the drawing out of their true
significance. To be "original" in 1470 did not
mean to be new; it meant respect for, and use of,
the "original" texts that had been circulating for
centuries. Perhaps this distinction passed Caxton
by in 1485, however, for he was keen to stress
that Malory's role was merely as an abbreviator
and translator of French Arthurian romances. This
obscured the fact that Malory had indeed significantly changed the intent and character of his
originals as well as introducing new episodes
into the cycle, particularly the Tale of Sir Gareth
(though some critics perceive a lost source behind
this story) and the healing of Sir Urry by Lancelot in the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. Together with the suppression of Malory's
name in the explicits, this may have been a
deliberate ploy by Caxton to avoid mentioning
the name of a notorious enemy of the House of
York while a member of that dynasty still, albeit
just, sat on the throne in the person of Richard
III. Alternatively, it may have been part of
Caxton's self-fashioning as the premier arbiter of
vernacular literary taste in the 1480s: he presents
himself as actively presenting, organizing, and
printing the work; Malory has merely, and rather
passively, "reduced" his French material into
English.
Without knowing he was doing so, Caxton also
set up one of the big problems for Malory
scholars in the twentieth century. If the Morte
Darthur is a book concerned with "noble acts,
feats of arms of chivalry, prowess, hardiness,
humanity, love, courtesy, and very gentleness"
(Works, p. xv), then how could it have been written by Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel, a man who
had signally failed to show such qualities in life?
As we have seen, several scholars have sought to
evade the question by denying that the Warwickshire knight was the author. Others have tried to
answer it by arguing that the Morte Darthur is
not really a noble book at all, but a violent and
barbaric one in which chivalry is constantly
compromised. Caxton was simply misreading his
text when he recommended it to his readers on
the ground that if they took the correct lessons
from it "it shall bring you to good fame and
renown" (Works, p. xv). While such stark views
have not gained much general acceptance, it is
undoubtedly the case that Caxton's "moral" reading downplays the darker aspects of Malory's vision. The Morte Darthur presents less a series of
stories telling of the rewarding of the virtuous
and the punishing of the sinful, as Caxton seems
to suggest, than an analysis of the undermining
and gradual unraveling of the chivalric ideal
under the pressures of its own internal contradictions. It is not, as some have claimed, a glorious
rejection of the dirty politics of mid-fifteenth
century England, or a conduct book to help
Caxton's "noble princes, lords and ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen" (Works, p. xv) escape the
moral ambiguity of their times; rather, it provides
a mirror in which that ambiguity and corruption
can be seen more clearly. There are many original
and powerful insights in Caxton's preface, not
least his recognition of the historical quality to
Malory's imagination and an intuitive sense of
how his early readers would respond to the book.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the knight-author
and the merchant-printer had very different
agendas and priorities in their presentations of
the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table.
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
verse into prose in a literal way, sometimes word
for word. But he could also use his sources
merely as the starting point for his own imagination. Much of the Morte Darthur follows the
basic outline provided by the Vulgate Cycle
romances while changing the entire narrative
thrust of the stories, particularly by stripping
away the spiritual, supernatural, and ethical
concerns of the French authors for a more plain,
historical approach. Some of these changes were
the result of Malory's occasionally brutal abridgement of his sources, but in many cases was
clearly intentional, part of his desire to emphasize
the more heroic, political, and social aspects of
the Arthurian world. Finally, on more than one
occasion Malory claims that he is relying on his
French book when there is no evidence of any
such stories in the surviving romances. When he
wrote at the end of the Tale of Sir Lancelot and
Queen Guinevere that "because I have lost the
very matter of le Chevalier de Chariot I depart
from the tale of Sir Lancelot" (Works, p. 669), it
is difficult to know if Malory really had lost an
existing source or whether he simply invented it
to give the story he had told authority. If these
various and occasionally disingenuous responses
to his sources make the Morte Darthur look
something like the first novel in the English
language, it needs to be clearly stated again that
Malory would not have identified with the inventive, creative, self-aware literary personality the
modern novelist presents. Yet he undoubtedly
would have understood the practice of Daniel
Defoe and Jonathan Swift in using invented
sources as the basis of their novelistic writings.
Even some contemporary works, such as Umberto Eco's historical novel The Name of the
Rose, remind us that that tradition has never died.
While undeniably different from most twentieth
century novels the Morte Darthur stands in some
kind of genealogical relationship to them.
When Caxton wrote that Malory had "reduced"
his French sources into English he was noting a
very literal truth: the Morte Darthur is only a
fraction of the vast length of the Vulgate Cycle
and the English poems on which he drew. This
can sometimes lead to narrative confusion, for
Malory had a tendency to abbreviate his sources
THE SOURCES OF THE MORTE DARTHUR
IF Malory had a more creative response to his
sources than Caxton (and sometimes Malory
himself) suggests, it is still the case that the Morte
Darthur refers to a wide array of both English
and French sources and, at times, is directly reliant upon them. Malory calls upon his "French
book" consistently, both as a direct source and as
an authority for his statements. While there is,
and most probably never was, a single French
manuscript collection from which Malory
worked, painstaking scholarship has re-created
something of the library he must have had access
to at some point (or perhaps at different points)
in his turbulent career. It is not known for certain
where he found the manuscripts he used, or even
what particular form those manuscripts took, so
much has been lost in the intervening centuries.
Yet it has been shown that he certainly knew the
French romances the Suite de Merlin, the Prose
Lancelot, La Queste del Saint Graal, and La Mort
le roi Artu, all part of the so-called Vulgate Cycle
of Arthurian legends dating from the first quarter
of the thirteenth century. He also knew the massive Prose Tristan, another French romance dating from the years around 1240. These were his
main sources, but Malory supplemented and, on
occasion, replaced these continental works with
native English Arthurian material, specifically
with two poems titled the Morte Arthure or Morte
Arthur, one dating from around 1390 and written
using northern dialect and metrical form
(alliterative meter), the other dating from about a
decade later and having a more southern provenance, being in stanzaic meter. In addition, he
may well have used the English Chronicle of
John Hardyng, a historical account of the early
history of Britain dating from Malory's own
times. These English works were mainly used by
Malory in section 2 of the Morte Darthur,
referred to in Vinaver's edition as The Noble Tale
of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius, and in
the final section, The Most Piteous Tale of the
Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon.
Malory used his sources in three main ways.
Sometimes he does what Caxton claimed he was
doing: he translated and abbreviated his French
sources into English and his English sources from
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
too drastically on occasion. For example, he
mechanically conflated similar characters who
fulfilled very different functions in the French
romances, producing a narrative where "good"
characters become "bad" in a matter of pages
and for no apparent reason. A well-known
example of this is the Lady of the Lake, the magical fairy woman who gives Arthur his sword, Excalibur, at the beginning of his reign, and to
whom the sword is apparently returned by Sir
Bedivere at the king's death. Yet several hundred
pages before this the Lady of the Lake has been
beheaded by Balin le Savage with the words,
"this same lady was the untruest lady living, and
by enchantment and by sorcery she hath been the
destroyer of many good knights" (Works, p. 41).
The contradictions can be resolved by turning to
the French Vulgate Cycle which shows that, in
fact, there were several Ladies of the Lake, some
of impeccable and some of dubious virtue, and
Malory has failed to differentiate between them.
Yet do we, as readers, lose something by referring all the ambiguities, mysteries, and downright
strangeness in Malory to the judgment of the Vulgate Cycle, as if it were some ideal telling of the
Arthurian story that the Morte Darthur fails to
live up to? There has always been a tendency
among some readers, the seeds of which were
sown by Caxton himself, to see Malory as
something of a literary innocent, an unsophisticated Englishman adrift among the complexities
of the French books. Many years ago C. S. Lewis
called Malory the last of the misunderstanders of
the Arthurian tradition; but at the heart of Lewis's
sense of the Morte Darthur was the insight that
misunderstanding had been enormously productive of new interpretations, new visions. He noted
the "deep suggestiveness" of Malory's treatment
of Morgan le Fay and Queen Morgause, representatives of that dark family of Tintagel that
entangle Arthur as their mother, Igrayne, obsessed
his father, Uther Pendragon (Lewis, "The English
Prose Morte'" in Bennett, ed., Essays on Malory,
p. 25). What could be more mysterious and yet
more apt than the king's half sister and sworn
enemy, Morgan, appearing, as if from nowhere,
at the last battle of the Round Table to take her
brother away to Avalon?
Then Sir Bedivere took the king upon his back and
so went with him to the water's side. And when
they were there, even fast by the bank hoved a little
barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them
all was a queen, and all they had black hoods. And
all they wept and shrieked when they saw King
Arthur. . . . And so they set him down, and in one
of their laps King Arthur laid his head. And then
the queen said, "Ah, my dear brother! Why have ye
tarried so long from me?"
(Works, p. 716)
If we are content merely to note that the Morte
Darthur carelessly conflates two narrative traditions of Morgan, one positive, one negative, then
we miss the fact that in Malory's world moral
clarity is as rare as the Questing Beast pursued
by King Pellinore and Sir Palomides. By thinking Malory has merely made a mistake, that this
is not deliberate, then the mysterious bonds of
love and hate, kinship and sexuality that bring
Morgan le Fay and Arthur together throughout
their lives are severed, the "deep suggestiveness"
is lost.
Looked at on its own terms, as a text independent of the French romances that inspired it,
Malory's work achieves a unique and disquieting
effect that continues to excite the general reader
while the Vulgate Cycle lies in libraries undisturbed, except by the historian and the professional critic. Because his characters never fully
emerge from the half-light, are never assessed, as
their French counterparts are, in the harsh glare
of Christian ethics, it is not Arthur but mystery
that truly rules in Malory's Camelot. He created
a world in which it is perfectly possible that for
reasons mere mortals cannot fathom the Lady of
the Lake might well give Arthur Excalibur while
also being the killer of Balin's mother, or in
which Morgan le Fay seeks to both destroy and
save the king. Just as in the Greek myths, in the
Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, and the Icelandic
sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the supernatural is not outside the world, but talking, walking, feuding, and feasting in the same
spheres frequented by human beings. But since it
is super-natural, we should not expect it to obey
human rules. Equally, the human characters operate not within a world realistically represented
but one in which that reality is heightened;
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
Arthur's England resembles, but most definitely
is not, the kingdom ruled by Edward IV and cannot be judged as if it were. Malory may have
misrepresented his French sources, but he also
saw things they did not, imbuing the Arthurian
stories with an uncanny, subterranean power lurking just beneath their bright, ordered surfaces.
parts of his book (and may never have wished
to), he was working towards a unified whole.
Indeed, Vinaver, a medieval French scholar
before he began work on Malory, may have been
influenced by the fragmentary nature of the
French romances into seeing the same multiplicity at work in the Morte Darthur.
While the more mythicizing narrators of the
Arthurian story, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth
or the anonymous English Gawam-poet, sought
to provide Arthur with a pseudo-historical ancient
past—as with the story of the Trojan Brutus's
journey to Britain and the founding of the royal
line—Malory begins at the beginning: King Uther
Pendragon's illicit tryst with Igrayne of Cornwall
and the conception of Arthur. There is not even
any firm sense of the century in which events
start. Instead, he plunges us right into the middle
of Uther's war with the duke of Tintagel and the
king's sexual obsession with his enemy's wife,
Igrayne. Working largely from the thirteenth
century French Suite du Merlin and the Middle
English alliterative Morte Arthure, Malory shows
an historian's mind as he takes the reader on a
rapid journey through the early days of Arthur's
kingship, while laying down the foundations for
future adventure and tragedy in telling of the
king's incestuous fathering of Mordred with his
half sister, Morgause of Orkney, and the wounding of King Pellam by Balin le Savage. In these
opening pages of the Morte Darthur, magic coexists with the real and the everyday, public wars
and conquests sit alongside personal and private
concerns, and the individual is seen as part of a
larger whole. Despite chronological vagueness,
Malory's desire to blend all the elements of his
story and his unwillingness to let the magical and
spiritual dominate the quotidian and secular,
results in something approaching a "total history"
of an imaginary Britain in the early years of
Arthur's reign.
Yet Malory also shows in these early "tales"
his ability to ruthlessly alter the sources to suit
his own purposes. In almost all of the English
versions of the Arthurian story, from Geoffrey of
Monmouth onwards, Arthur had been engaged in
a European war with the Roman emperor, Lucius, when rebellion by his nephew (or il-
READING THE MORTE DARTHUR
IF he is to be judged by the standards current for
the last two centuries, then Malory was no
historian. If, however, we are to assess the Morte
Darthur within its own context as part of the
Arthurian tradition of the European Middle Ages
then his great work has some claim to be legitimately called a history. Caxton read it as such in
his preface (despite some personal doubts as to
the literal truth of the tales), setting Arthur
alongside such undeniably real figures as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and
Godfrey of Bouillon. But it is for its form and
style rather than its degree of truthfulness that
the Morte Darthur can most justly be classified
as an historical work. For Malory was the first
author since Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s
to attempt to give, in the space of a single book,
a connected account of the birth, life, and death
of King Arthur and the adventures that occurred
during his reign.
The great French Arthurian authors, Chretien
de Troyes and the creators of the Vulgate Cycle,
had left a series of interwoven and beautifully
crafted individual works, but they had not
brought them together into a single whole. The
English tradition had concerned itself with
episodes from the Arthurian story, either from the
king's life, such as his Roman war in the alliterative Mart Arthure, or from the lives of his greatest knights, as in the famous fourteenth century
poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This is,
of course, to reject the weighty authority of Eugene Vinaver and accept that Malory actually did
write a single Morte Darthur and not another
collection of "works." Yet, as we have already
noted, there is considerable evidence to suggest
that if Malory did not quite succeed in resolving
all the internal problems between the individual
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
legitimate son), Mordred, forced him to return to
Britain and the last apocalyptic encounter. This is
the version of the story Malory would have
encountered in the alliterative Morte Arthure
which he follows very closely, except that the
entire Roman campaign is dragged to the beginning of Arthur's reign, where it functions as the
final stamp on his rise to power, not as a hubristic
enterprise leading to ultimate catastrophe.
Although debate still rages about whether the
Winchester or Caxtonian versions of the Roman
war are more authentically Malorian, there is no
doubt that this episode unequivocally demonstrates Malory's ability to manipulate his sources
in pursuit of his independent narrative aims. If
Malory had the essentially secular and various
sensibility of the historian, he also had the skills
necessary to rework his sources and make them
serve his own ends.
The first parts of the Morte Darthur are
concerned largely, but not exclusively, with King
Arthur himself. Having got the historical introductions out of the way, Malory throws himself
into the adventures and characters of his favorite
knights, Gareth, Tristram, and, preeminently, Lancelot. The problems of finding an exact source
for The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney have already
been alluded to, but we know that Malory used
the Vulgate Cycle Prose Lancelot (severely
abridged) and the French Prose Tristan when
composing A Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot du Lake
and The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse. These
texts allow Malory to open out his Arthurian
world and the king and his court fade into the
background, the focus of the narrative now being
on the exploits and adventures of individual
knights and the nature of their heroic virtue. The
tales of Lancelot and Gareth seem particularly
paired together in this glad morning of Camelot,
both telling how young men leave the court to
find "worship" (meaning honor or glory), a term
that recurs again and again throughout the Morte
Darthur, being one of the highest aims of earthly
knights. Both undergo various adventures on an
outward trajectory away from the civilized world
of Arthur's court into the wilderness of forest
and plain, only to complete their geographical
and personal orbits by returning to fame and
honor. And at the end of The Tale of Sir Gareth
of Orkney the two knights are brought together in
a smiling snapshot of chivalric harmony such as
the Round Table was inaugurated to encourage:
"Lord, the great cheer that Sir Lancelot made of
Sir Gareth and he of him! For there was no knight
that Sir Gareth loved so well as he did Sir Lancelot; and ever for the most part he would ever
be in Sir Lancelot's company" (Works, p. 224).
Yet in a typically Malorian touch, this moment
of knightly fraternity is immediately undermined
by the possibility of discord, for as Gareth moves
to Lancelot, so he moves away from his own
eldest brother, Gawain: "he withdrew himself
from his brother Sir Gawain's fellowship, for he
was ever vengeable, and where he hated he would
be avenged with murder; and that hated Sir Gareth" (Works, p. 224). With loyalty to kin, even
unto the spilling of blood, one of the great binding forces in Malory's Camelot, such boldness on
Gareth's part already seems to augur dissension.
And, indeed, Malory may well have been able to
assume that his readers know the tragic and ironic
outcome of this placing of chivalric above family
loyalty. For many years later it is Lancelot
himself who is accidentally to kill Gareth while
rescuing Queen Guinevere from being burned
alive as punishment for her adultery. Gawain and
his brothers demand vengeance, as is their right,
and Arthur is drawn unwillingly into a war that
begins the unraveling and eventual destruction of
the fellowship of the Round Table. "And for Gareth," says Lancelot to Arthur and Gawain, "I
loved no kinsman I had more than I loved him"
(Works, p. 695): the irony, that neither Gareth nor
Lancelot recognize, is that despite all the ideals
of the Round Table, biological brotherhood
always remains more powerful than chivalric
brotherhood. Lancelot and Gareth may have
loved each other like kinsmen, but because they
were not kinsmen, they are naturally drawn into
opposing camps in life and in death. Throughout
the Morte Darthur older forms of social organization repeatedly break through and corrupt the
new chivalric codes of conduct that Arthur has
tried to impose. When infected by clannishness,
knightly loyalty can turn into faction; when
infused with the spirit of blood-vengeance,
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
abstract justice can lead to blood feud. It is
Malory's great grim theme: that which we think
makes us civilized, and raises us above our primitive ancestors, leads only to our eventual
destruction.
The issues raised in these early "tales" continue
to run through the massive central section of the
Morte Darthur, the Book of Tristram de Lyonesse—which in the Winchester manuscript occupies almost 200 of the surviving 480 folios—
and appear in the Tale of the Sankgrail, the
greatest of the Arthurian adventures, if not quite
the climax in Malory's telling. The story of Tristram follows Malory's style of magical, or
heightened, realism, with plenty of knights-errant
in forest clearings, jousting, disguises, spells, and
the like. It takes in a wide, almost epic, sweep,
from Tristram's birth, through his illicit love with
Queen Isolde of Cornwall (after their accidental
drinking of a love potion) and his banishment by
her husband, King Mark of Cornwall, to his lone
adventures and joining of the Round Table. Looking to the future and the next "tale" of the Morte
Darthur, the story also interweaves Lancelot's
fateful wooing of Elaine of Corbin and the birth
of Galahad, the perfect knight who will achieve
the quest for the Holy Grail.
Yet Malory the historian and Malory the social
analyst are as much in evidence as Malory the
romancer. For if the story of Tristram does give
the supernatural an important role, it also limits
it to a handful of episodes. Instead, the motivating force behind the actions of the characters
becomes personal (and often transient) allegiance,
which may begin with the medieval virtues of
loyalty and "worship" (as in Tristram and Mark's
original relationship as subject and lord) but
which degrades into hatred and envy. As in the
earlier Lancelot and Gareth episodes, abstract
values of fellowship or fraternity prove unable to
withstand the stresses placed upon them by
family-based affinities. In the story of Tristram it
is once again that most clannish of all Malory's
kin groups, the Orkney family led by Gawain,
who scrape away the veneer from the Round
Table by murdering Sir Lamorak, whose father
had killed their father. While Arthur is presented
by Malory as furious at such internal feuding, he
is powerless to prevent it; the king is himself
bound to Gawain's clan through the female line.
Malory offers a secular, historical analysis of the
forces undermining Arthur's rule from within,
and in doing so he also took his text into an
engagement with the outside world. For as Helen
Cooper has argued, "in so far as the Morte Darthur is a book about the state of England, the
Tristram offers one of the closest analogies to the
troubled fifteenth century. . . . [T]he Wars of the
Roses were fuelled by just such local factionfighting and private vendettas as the Tristram
shows getting increasingly out of hand"
(Archibald and Edwards, eds., A Companion to
Malory, p. 198).
This essentially secular and historical vision is
maintained in what might appear to be the most
obviously spiritual part of the entire Arthurian
corpus, the Tale of the Sankgrail. The Holy Grail,
the cup or bowl used by Christ at the Last Supper and brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, had been first introduced into the story
of Arthur by Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth
century and had been gradually turned into a
spiritual, otherworldly aspect of the legends in
France from the early thirteenth century. Although
Malory follows rather closely the French Queste
del Saint Graal, he changes almost the whole
meaning of the Grail Quest to fit it more closely
with the social and cultural conditions of Lancastrian and Yorkist England.
Unlike in the French romances, Malory's quest
is not one that seeks to criticize the secular ambitions of worldly chivalry by juxtaposing the
tainted knight, Lancelot, with his son, the virgin
knight Galahad. Malory is notably unanxious
about the effects of sexuality and of the desire
for "worship" among his knights. In the Morte
Darthur the Grail quest is not really the point at
which the heroes of earthly chivalry, exemplified
by Lancelot, find their limitations and are
surpassed by the pure, innocent knights, Galahad,
Perceval, and Bors. The kind of chivalry set up
by Arthur, himself a man tainted by incest and
child murder, is not shown as simply inferior to a
divine chivalry available only in heaven. Malory's
vision is subtler, in that he is again concerned
with dissecting and assessing the nature of
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
chivalry on this earth, its contradictions and its
glories. His favorite knight, Lancelot, becomes in
many ways the true hero of the quest, for, despite
the fact that his love for Queen Guinevere means
he cannot succeed, he will never give up seeking.
He may be unable and unwilling to convert his
undoubted physical preeminence into a spiritual
preeminence, but his persistence is nevertheless
rewarded with a fleeting sight of the Grail: " 'I
have seen,' said he, 'great marvels that no tongue
may tell, and more than any heart can think. And
had not my sin been beforetime, else I had seen
much more' " (Works, p. 597).
Malory's interest is in how near earthly chivalry
can reach spiritual perfection, not how far distant
it remains. The Round Table is doomed to be
broken up and is already fragmenting before the
search for the Grail is even begun. The oath
sworn by Gawain to begin the quest marks in
Arthur's eyes the beginning of the end:
"Alas!" said King Arthur unto Sir Gawain, "ye have
nigh slain me for the vow that ye have made, for
through you ye have bereft me the fairest and the
truest of knighthood that ever was seen together in
any realm of the world. For when they depart from
hence I am sure they all shall never meet more
together in this world, for they shall die many in
the quest."
(Works, p. 522)
Gawain has already amply demonstrated that
knightly fellowship is a weaker force for cohesion than blood. Now he unwittingly begins the
destruction of the unity of the Round Table by
his desire for "worship" (the double meaning,
religious and secular, is apposite in the Grail
quest). But Malory's Lancelot proves that even if
doomed to failure, even if exemplified by sinful
human beings, the chivalric values of the Round
Table are worth striving for and will be rewarded.
The Grail symbolizes the apogee of Arthurian
chivalry, not its ultimate failure. In the context of
mid-fifteenth century England, with its political
instability, treachery, and open bloodshed, this is
a plea to keep faith with the forces of secular
knighthood, never to forget that peace, loyalty,
and unity are worthy ideals. And for Sir Thomas
of Newbold Revel, knight-prisoner, it was
perhaps an apology for his actions, an assertion
that even sinful, criminal men could achieve
redemption.
If the Grail quest marks the high-water mark
of Arthur's kingdom, the flood of optimism occasioned by Lancelot's noble failure rapidly ebbs
away. The final two books of the Morte Darthur,
the Book of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere
and the Morte Darthur proper, follow the narrative outline provided by the French La Mort le
roi Artu and the English stanzaic Morte Arthur,
but Malory so consistently reshapes these sources
that in practice they provide little more than starting points for his imagination. The reader is
presented with a wholly Malorian picture of the
destruction from within of the honorable society
created by Arthur, with the final unleashing of
the forces barely held in check earlier in the
work. Rumbles of future disaster sound almost
from the moment the remnants of the Round
Table reassemble after the end of the quest for
the Grail, with the return of Lancelot and Guinevere to their adulterous affair and the beginning
of faction-led gossip. And it is this combination
of rumor, distrust, and faction that begins to
unravel not only the Arthurian fellowship, but
also an entire world order.
If the adultery of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere provides the occasion for the final tragedy
of the Morte Darthur, deep forces over which
they have no control find an outlet through their
behavior. Blood feud rears its ugly head almost
immediately when the queen organizes a banquet
for the Round Table knights at which one of the
company is murdered by a poisoned apple,
planted for Sir Gawain by a knight seeking to
revenge his kinsman, Sir Lamorak, killed by the
Orkney brothers in the Book of Tristram de Lyonesse. Suspicion immediately falls on the head
of the queen, from both Gawain and Sir Mador
de la Porte, the poisoned knight's cousin, who
demands justice from the king. Arthur is forced
to admit that he must be a rightful judge in the
matter and is therefore compelled to condemn
the queen's case to a trial by battle. She is
vindicated in this by a disguised Lancelot, but
the seeds have been sown. Justice is demanded
in increasingly strident and bloodthirsty terms
and in pursuit of private vendettas, not as the
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
abstract resolution desired by a civilized society.
Rather than rescuing Arthurian England from its
own violent impulses, the rule of law becomes
part of the corrosion eating away at the social
fabric.
The self-destructive aspect of chivalric society
finally boils to the surface when Lancelot is
discovered in the queen's chamber by the Orkney
brothers, led by Agravain and Mordred (in reality
Arthur's son), acting as the king's close kinsmen
and defenders of his honor. In the ensuing melee
Agravain and twelve other Round Table knights
are killed by Lancelot, and Mordred is seriously
wounded. In the aftermath Arthur admits to his
court the bind he is in: " 'And now it is fallen
so,' said the king, 'that I may not with my worship but my queen must suffer death,' and was
sore moved" (Works, p. 682). The commitment to
"worship" pulls the king and the entire Round
Table in two opposite directions. On the one hand
they are sworn to act in an honorable way to
each other, and to the poor and defenseless. On
the other hand they are constantly forced to
defend their personal "worship" when insulted by
others. The system works when the threat comes
from outside the inner circle of the Round Table,
from foreign kings or false knights. But now, at
last, the court is turned against itself, the enemy
is perceived to be within Camelot, and all the
latent contradictions of the honorable society are
revealed. When Gareth is killed by Lancelot
while attempting to rescue Guinevere from
execution the Round Table splits into two warring factions, each committed to preserving their
honor and maintaining justice. There is, however,
no longer any consensus about what these terms
might mean in an abstract or universalist sense.
What Gawain believes to be just is no longer
what Lancelot believes to be just; the social
values of the Round Table have become labels to
legitimate the private desires of its individual
members.
Some kind of resolution to this civil war is
achieved when a new and greater threat to the
very survival of Arthur's kingdom is announced.
Mordred has seized the queen and the kingdom
and has made himself ruler of England. Abandoning the war against Lancelot in France, the king
and Gawain return home to meet Mordred in a
series of apocalyptic battles, at which the last tattered remnants of the Round Table are destroyed.
A kind of cyclical closure is achieved: Arthur
kills Mordred but is himself mortally wounded,
ending the rhythm of illicit reproduction that has
haunted the Morte Darthur from its opening
pages; Excalibur is returned to the lake from
which it came; and the king disappears with
Morgan le Fay into a magical haze of uncertainty
and mystery analogous to that from which he
first emerged. The kingship is passed on to Constantine of Cornwall, but it is a kingship without
a future, and therefore without a history, symbolized by the retreat of Lancelot and Guinevere
into the celibate worlds of the hermitage and nunnery and by the abandonment of England for the
Holy Land by the remaining knights of Lancelot's
kin. The gilded bubble of Arthur's kingdom,
seemingly existing outside real historical forces,
poverty, plagues, taxes, and the quotidian necessities of living, has been punctured. The chivalric
dream of a world of endless tournaments, questing, feasting, and courtly love is exposed as no
more than a pretence when the real world finally
breaks in. As he lies dying on the battlefield
Arthur hears the crying of many people in the
darkness. The king sends the mortally wounded
Sir Lucan to investigate:
And so as he yode, he saw and hearkened by the
moonlight how that pillagers and robbers were come
into the field to pillage and to rob many a full noble
knight of brooches and bees and of many a good
ring and many a rich jewel. And who that were not
dead all out, there they slew them for their harness
and their riches.
(Works, p. 714)
The people may finish the honorable society off,
but Malory shows us how, in their heartlessness,
their selfishness, their love of personal gain, they
were only emulating their self-styled betters.
CONCLUSION
WE began this essay by asking how Sir Thomas
Malory of Newbold Revel could be related to Sir
Thomas Malory, author of the Morte Darthur. If
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
his great book now looks less like a chivalric
romance—clean, heroic, and virtuous—and more
like a pessimistic analysis of a flawed and
contradictory society, then we do indeed have a
point of contact between the man and his work.
Not perhaps on a personal or psychological level,
but in his relationship with the context of midfifteenth century English political life, Sir
Thomas of Newbold Revel can be glimpsed lurking behind his stories. Maurice Keen has pointed
out the very same irony built into late Lancastrian England as Malory had explored in the
Morte Darthur: "The social threat came rather
from the violence of the least deprived sectors of
society, lords, landowners and gentlemen; that is
to say, ironically, from those with whom the
principal responsibility for law enforcement and
the maintenance of order locally lay" (Keen,
English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 189).
The men expected to uphold the civilized values
of loyalty, justice, and chivalry, whether they be
Sir Thomas or Sir Gawain, were those doing the
most to undermine them.
In the context of an England in the midst of
the Wars of the Roses there is no paradox in Sir
Thomas of Newbold Revel being the author of
the Morte Darthur. One of the reasons the book
is worth reading is that Malory faithfully analyzes
those treacherous and violent years, while
simultaneously, like Lancelot in the Grail quest,
hoping and longing to catch even a fleeting
glimpse of a better world. As Queen Guinevere
is put on trial as an unwitting participant in the
long simmering blood feud between the families
of Orkney and King Pellinore, Malory notes,
"such custom was used in those days, for favour,
love, nor affinity there should be none other but
righteous judgement" (Works, p. 618). Idealistic
indeed, yet it is precisely because the Orkney affinity is so strong and so close to the king himself
that justice is enacted the way it is. And, almost
at the end of the Morte Darthur, as the opposing
armies of Arthur and Mordred close in on each
other, Malory gives a much-quoted criticism of
contemporary society:
of noble knights, and by him they all were upheld,
and yet might not these Englishmen hold them
content with him. Lo thus was the old custom and
usages of this land, and men say that we of this
land have not yet lost that custom. Alas! this is a
great default of us Englishmen, for there may nothing us please no term.
(Works, p. 708)
If this is a sign that towards the end of his life
Malory began to doubt his earlier allegiance to
the House of York and began to see the deposition of Henry VI as a betrayal of the rightful
king, it is an interpretation perhaps inspired by
his writing of the Morte Darthur. In one of the
most moving speeches in the entire book, the dying Arthur looks out over the battlefield, his gaze
finding only two of the Round Table left alive:
" 'Jesu Mercy!' said the king, 'where are all my
noble knights become?' " (Works, p. 713). Within
the reality of the story they are, of course, all
dead; in the reality of fifteenth-century England
they have realized that being a noble knight has
become meaningless. They either have taken up
a more selfish code of conduct, or spend their
time wondering where it all went wrong. Or in
the case of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold
Revel, both.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. MANUSCRIPT AND FIRST EDITION FACSIMILES. The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, ed. N. R. Ker, (London, 1976);
Le Morte Darthur: Printed by William Caxton, 1485, intro.
Paul Needham (London, 1976); Caxton's Malory: A New
Edition of Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur" Based
on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton's Edition
of 1485, ed. James W. Spisak (Berkeley, 1985).
II. COLLECTED WORKS. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory,
3d ed., 3 vols., ed. by Eugene Vinaver, rev. by P. J. C. Field
(Oxford, 1990).
III. SELECTED AND MODER-SPELLING EDITIIONS. The Morte
Darthur: Parts Seven and Eight, ed. D. S. Brewer (London,
1968); Le Morte D'Arthur, ed. Janet Cowan, intro. John
Lawlor, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1969); The Morte
Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, ed. P. J. C. Field
(London, 1978); Le Morte D'Arthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. Helen Cooper (Oxford, 1998).
IV. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCE. Tomomi
Kato, ed., A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory
(Tokyo, 1974); Bert Dillon, A Malory Handbook (London,
1978); Page West Life, Sir Thomas Malory and the "Morte
Darthur": A Survey of Scholarship and Annotated Bibliography (Charlottesville, N.C., 1980).
Lo ye all Englishmen, see ye not what a mischief
here was? For he that was the most kind and noblest
knight of the world, and most loved the fellowship
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SIR THOMAS MALORY
(Cambridge, 1991); Jill Mann, The Narrative of Distance,
the Distance of Narrative in Malory's "Morte Darthur"
(London, 1991); Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards, eds., A Companion to Malory (Cambridge, 1996);
P. J. C. Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, 1998).
D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., and Jessica Gentry Brogdon, eds.,
The Social and Literary Contexts of Malory's "Morte Darthur" (Cambridge, U.K., 2000); Catherine Batt, Malory's
"Morte Darthur": Remaking Arthurian Tradition (Basingstoke, U.K., 2001).
VII. FURTHER READING: INTRODUCTORY SURVEYS. J. A.
Burrow, Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English
Literature and Its Background, 1100-1500 (Oxford, 1982);
Derek Brewer, English Gothic Literature (London, 1983);
Boris Ford, ed., Medieval Literature, Part One: Chaucer
and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth, U. K.,
1983); David Wallace, ed., Cambridge History of Medieval
English Literature (Cambridge, U.K., 1999).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT. H. S. Bennett, The Pastons and
Their England (Cambridge, U.K., 1922); R. L. Storey, The
End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966); N. F. Blake,
Caxton and His World (London, 1969); J. R. Lander, Conflict
and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London, 1969);
Charles Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974); N. F. Blake, Caxton: England's First Publisher (London, 1976); George D.
Painter, William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of
England's First Printer (London, 1976); Charles Ross, The
Wars of the Roses (London, 1976); Anthony Goodman, The
Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society,
1452-1497 (London, 1981); Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign
of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461
(London, 1981); K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth
Century, intro. by G. L. Harriss (1981); Bertram Wolffe,
Henry VI (London, 1981); Norman Davis, ed., The Paston
Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling, 2d ed. (Oxford,
1983); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984); Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 13481500 (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1990); Christine Carpenter,
Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed
Society, 1401-1499 (Cambridge, U.K., 1992); Rosemary
Horrox, ed., Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of
Society in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994);
Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the
Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 (Cambridge, U.K.,
1997).
V. BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES. Edward Hicks, Sir Thomas
Malory: His Turbulent Career (Cambridge, Mass, 1928); A.
C. Baugh, "Documenting Sir Thomas Malory," in Speculum
8 (1933); William Matthews, The Ill-framed Knight: A
Skeptical Enquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory
(Berkeley, 1966); Gweneth Whitteridge, "The Identity of Sir
Thomas Malory, Knight-Prisoner," in Review of English
Studies, new series, 24 (1973); Christine Carpenter, "Sir
Thomas Malory and Fifteenth-Century Local Politics," in
Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980);
Richard R. Griffiths, "The Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Thomas Malory of Papworth St. Agnes,
Cambridgeshire," in Takamiya and Brewer, eds., Aspects of
Malory (Cambridge, U.K., 1981); P. J. C. Field, The Life
and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, 1993).
VI. CRITICAL STUDIES. Eugene Vinaver, Malory (Oxford,
1929); Roger Sherman Loomis, ed., Arthurian Literature in
the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959).
J. A. W. Bennett, ed., Essays on Malory (Oxford, 1963);
R. M. Lumiansky, ed., Malory's Originality: The Unity of
Malory's "Morte Darthur" (Univ. of Kentucky, 1965);
Charles Moorman, The Book of Kyng Arthur: The Unity of
Malory's "Morte Darthur" (Lexington, 1965); Edmund Reiss, Sir Thomas Malory (New York, 1966); Stephen Knight,
The Structure of Sir Thomas Malory's Arthuriad (Sydney,
1969).
P. J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory's
Prose Style (London, 1971); Elizabeth T. Pochada, Arthurian Propaganda: "Le Morte Darthur" as an Historical
Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill, 1971); R. R. Griffith, "The Political Bias of Malory's Morte Darthur," in Viator 5 (1974);
Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in "Le Morte Darthur" (New Haven, 1975); Larry D. Benson, Malory's
"Morte Darthur" (Cambridge, Mass, 1976).
Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer, eds., Aspects of
Malory (Cambridge, 1981); Muriel Whitaker, Arthur's
Kingdom of Adventure: The World of Malory's "Morte Darthur" (Cambridge, 1984); James W. Spisak, ed., Studies in
Malory (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1985); R. M. Lumiansky, "Sir
Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, 1947-1987: Author,
Title, Text," in Speculum 62 (1987); Felicity Riddy, Sir
Thomas Malory (Leiden, 1987); Marylyn Jackson Parins,
ed., Malory: The Critical Heritage (London, 1988).
Terence McCarthy, Reading the "Morte Darthur"
(Cambridge, 1988), repr. as An Introduction to Malory
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