Sir Thomas Malory, Le morte d'Arthur, Introduction

Sir Thomas Malory

The Death of Arthur

Since he seems to have spent a large amount of his life in prison, Sir Thomas Malory had a lot of time on his hands. He used it reading about King Arthur. What he read was mainly the vast cycle of prose romances in French called the Vulgate Cycle, though he also read the prose Tristan, and the alliterative Morte Arthure. Having read these compendious works, he translated them into what was for him modern English, and in doing so, abridged them. His work, Le Morte d’Arthur, was completed in 1469, shortly before Malory died; shortly afterwards, William Caxton, the English pioneer of printing, published a printed version of the Morte. It has remained in print, somewhat patchily at first, ever since.

Life

Very little is known about Malory, as about most medieval authors. All Malorys, it transpires, descended from a common ancestor, Anquetil Malory, who accompanied the Normans to England and whose son Robert became seneschal to the Earl of Leicester. Knighthood and, in particular, crusading, must have formed a solid background to his early life, since it seems that a close relative—either uncle or cousin—of Malory’s was a Hospitaller, and not merely a knight, but the Prior of the English chapter.

But Malory’s careeer was somewhat checkered, and he was accused of a variety of crimes: on January 4, 1450, Malory and twenty-six others ambushed the Duke of Buckingham at Coombe in Warwickshire; on 23 May, Malory allegedly raped Joan Smith, the wife of Hugh; on 31 May, Malory and John Appleby used threats and extortion to get 100 shillings from Margaret King and William Hale; on 6 August, he raped Joan Smith again, and stole goods from her husband valued at £40; on 31 August, Malory and Appleby extorted 20 shillings from John Milner at Monks Kirby; on 4 June, 1451, Malory and five others stole livestock and a cart belonging to William Towe and William Dowde of Shawell—he was pursued by a posse of sixty yeomen led by the Duke of Buckingham; on 20 July, he carried off six does and did £500’s worth of damage to Buckingham’s park at Caludon. This time, Malory was caught and thrown into prison, but he escaped and, on 28 July, stole ornaments worth £86 from Combe Abbey.

Malory was finally captured in 1452, and spent the rest of his life, except for brief reprieves, in prison. He was never brought to trial—in fact, his trial was deferred several times. In May 1455, he was transferred from Ludgate to the Tower of London, which at that time was used for detaining aristocratic prisoners. Here, he had access to a library that was quite extensive for the time, and it was here that he most likely read the French book that was the source of his only work of literature, Le Morte d’Arthur, which he completed in 1469. He died on 14 March, 1471, and was buried at Greyfriars, Newgate, what P. J. C. Field calls “the most fashionable church in London” (132).

Sir Thomas Malory: Criminal?

P. J. C. Field, Malory’s most recent and most competent biographer, maintains that the only charge that carried any significant weight against him was that of raiding Combe Abbey, and indeed, this is a perplexing act. For the others, Field observes,

The number of people involved, the variety of the allegations, and . . . their timing suggests that they were not wholely invented; but their comprehensiveness makes it plain that someone looked for people with grievances against Malory and organised them into court, and presumably encouraged them to make the most of their grievances. (106)

Most of the crimes have simple—if conjectural—explanations. Edward Hicks argues, for example, that the ambush laid for the Duke of Buckingham might have been occasioned by Malory’s siding with Sir Baldwin Mountford in a dispute over the latter’s inheritance, in which Buckingham took the other part (Hicks 31-32), and though Field does not comment on what might have motivated him, he does suggest that Malory might have had private, rather than political motives. The charges of extortion and theft from Combe Abbey and Monks Kirby Priory may, Hicks further suggests, be attempts to recover property Malory felt had been unlawfully taken from him (Hicks 43-51), but Field adds that

when an arable farmer is accused of extorting a modest sum on a single occasion from someone whose surname means Miller, we may guess not at a mediaeval protection racket but at a disagreement over a bill for grinding corn, in which the farmer may not have been wholely in the wrong. (106)

The charges of rape pose something of a problem. Hicks suggests that Joan Smith “played the part of Potiphar’s wife” (Hicks 57), whereas Kittredge argued that “perhaps she was forcibly removed from the dwelling while it was ransacked [by Malory and his followers]. That would have been raptus” (Kittredge, qtd. in Hicks 52). Field, on the other hand, refuses to succumb to that wishful notion, writing that “the rape charges plainly involve rape in the modern sense,” but adds the curious detail that the charge was pressed “not by the alleged victim but by her husband,” under a statute “whose purpose was to make elopement into rape despite the woman’s consent” (Field 106).

It seems odd that Malory should rape the same woman on two separate occasions, and that the husband should be the one to press charges. Field does not extrapolate, but does this perhaps hint at a romantic liaison between the knight of Newbold Revel and a lady whose husband, feeling the sting of having been cuckolded, and under pressure from political enemies of Malory, exaggerates charges brought against him? Add to this the political intriguing that Field posits for the whole of Malory’s adult life (when outside prison), and a very romantic figure emerges—more so, perhaps, than the irredeemable criminal pictured by previous biographers.

Authorship Controversy

Great authors attract great controversies, and Malory is no different. Thus, several authors have claimed that the knight whose life is outlined above did not write Le Morte d’Arthur, and they give details of the lives of several other individiuals named Thomas Malory whom they suggest wrote the book. P. J. C. Field considers all of these rival claimants in the first two chapters of his biography. Of the nine candidates for authorship, one “is certainly Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel under a different appellation” (6); the second, an M.P. for Bedwin and Wareham, Field suggests was the same person (94-96); the third was a fiction “created by John Bale” (7) the sixteenth-century antiquarian; a further four Field discounts on the grounds either that they were not knights, or did not have sufficient social rank or income to have been granted knighthood; and this leaves two: the subject of the book, and Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire, favoured by William Matthews. Field builds a convincing case that this latter candidate was not a knight, and therefore also not the author of the Morte. In the second chapter, Field argues persuasively that the four documents cited by Matthews as referring to Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers actually refer to Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel. All this depends, of course, on likelihood, rather than categorical proof. The whole book is such; but all the evidence is so circumstantial that the matter can hardly be decided otherwise. There are no certain answers, but Field has demonstrated that the body of evidence points beyond all reasonable doubt away from Matthews’s conclusion.

Historical Background and Sources

Malory lived during a period of civil war, called the Wars of the Roses. This was a dispute over the succession to the throne of England, and was fought between members of the York family, whose badge was a white rose, and the family of Lancaster, whose badge was a red rose. Malory seems initially to have been on the side of the Lancastrians, but he seems to have switched sides, which perhaps explains the leniency of his treatment in the Tower during the reign of the Yorkist king Edward IV. He actually obtained a pardon from the Yorkists in 1460, but it was the Yorkists who later threw him back into the Tower, sometime in the 1460s. If this sounds confusing, it’s because the Wars of the Roses were confusing. Civil wars often are.

The Wars of the Roses finished in 1485, when the Yorkist king Richard III was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian who became Henry VII. In 1485, the first printed edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published by William Caxton, the man who brought the printing press to England. The book was immensely successful. It was said to have been the favorite book of King Henry VIII, Elizabeth I’s father. Le Morte d’Arthur is divided into twenty-one books, and follows the story from Uther Pendragon’s rape of Igraine of Cornwall to the deaths of Lancelot and Guenevere. For the main, Malory used the Vulgate Cycle as his source; but he also inserted an account of Arthur’s war with Rome which he got from the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the story of Tristan and Isolde from the French Prose Tristan.

Le Morte d’Arthur

Malory’s book is much more than a translation and adaptation of the “French book” (as he calls it). His selection of incident, his unique use of dialogue as a means of characterization, and his good humor, all mark him as no mean literary genius. He wrote nothing else, nor did he need to, for Le Morte d’Arthur is the climax and the paragon of medieval Arthurian literature. He took a sprawling, sometimes incoherent and self-contradictory work, combined it with several others, and created a single, seamless story, comprehensive in its scope, penetrating in its treatment.

The book begins with Uther’s seduction of Igraine; it continues through the sword in the stone incident, and tells how Arthur got a new sword from the Lady of the Lake; it tells of the noble knights of the Round Table, paying particular attention to Sir Lancelot, Sir Gareth, and Sir Tristram; it then relates in some detail the story of the Quest for the Holy Grail. When the knights return from that quest, their best are gone, and Camelot begins to sink towards its final doom.

Everything we think of as being typically Arthurian is here: the sword in the stone, the sword in the lake, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, the enmity of Morgan le Fay, the incestuous son of Arthur, Mordred; the quest for the Holy Grail.

Malory’s style is fresh and lively, and he stands so close to the modern English period that he can be read without translation. However, you will probably need a glossary to help you with a few odd words. On the whole, though, you should just plunge in to Malory. Try to enjoy his book without getting bogged down in the precise meanings of words.

La Mort d’Arthur, by James G. Archer

The Text

In 1485, the same year that King Richard III’s death began the era of the Tudor monarchs, the pioneer of English printing, William Caxton, printed a volume that he entitled Le Morte Darthur. According to Caxton’s preface to this volume, he had been asked to print a history of King Arthur by certain “noble jentylmen.” Jealous of his reputation, Caxton had at first been cautious, since “dyvers men holde oppynyon that there was no such Arthur, and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables.” Reassured that there were numerous proofs of his historicity, Caxton eventually agreed, and printed “a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayd King Arthur and of certeyn of his knyghtes, after a copye unto me delyverd, whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of Frensshe and reduced it into Englysshe.”

Le Morte Darthur was a success; so much so, in fact, that Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, printed it twice. It was said to have been a favorite of King Henry VIII; in fact, Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth I, wrote what is perhaps, after Caxton’s preface, the earliest criticism of Le Morte Darthur:

In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons; as one for example, Morte D’Arthur, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points—in open manslaughter and bold bawdry; in which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts . . . . This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the court and Morte D’Arthur received into the prince’s chamber. (132-33)

Ascham’s condemnation is principally interesting, since it provides an accurate index of exactly why modern readers still find Le Morte Darthur interesting reading and, perhaps, The Schoolmaster less so.

As with most medieval literature, Malory’s book was largely forgotten about during the rise of the Puritans after the English Civil War and during the Protectorate (1642-59). It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, with the rise of the literary movement known to modern scholars as Romanticism, with its emphasis on the exotic and attractive nature of the past, that Le Morte Darthur began to be reprinted. By the end of the nineteenth century, editions of Malory were being produced, in specially expurgated editions (cutting out, perhaps, the “open manslaughter and bold bawdry”) for children. All editions were based on Caxton’s 1485 printed edition, since Malory’s original manuscript was lost.

In 1934, however, a staggering discovery was made by W. F. Oakshott, in the library of Winchester College, Cambridge. He found a manuscript in which all the personal names were written in red ink, and all these names were Arthurian. On closer inspection, this manuscript turned out to be of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. However, the Winchester Manuscript, as it came to be called familiarly, was different in a number of respects from whatever manuscript Caxton had used; either that, or Caxton had heavily revised some of the sections himself. Quickly, the prominent Arthurian scholar, Eugène Vinaver, was appointed to edit the Winchester Manuscript. His edition, Works, was published in 1948, and subsequently revised several times, most recently in 1993 by P. J. C. Field. On a close inspection of the manuscript, particularly what Vinaver called the collophons (i.e., the segues from one story to another), Vinaver concluded that Malory had actually written not one “hoole book” of King Arthur, but eight separate tales. The impression that it was a single book was one gained by extensive cutting and editing by Caxton. This was a controversial conclusion to reach, and it has been hotly debated by Malory scholars. In Malory’s Originality (1964), R. M. Lumiansky published a volume of essays, each of which demonstrated how each of the “separate” tales was really an integral part of Malory’s whole artistic design.

Recent opinion seems to have turned against Vinaver’s division of Malory’s text. In a recent volume dedicated to the matter, most scholars came to the conclusion that Vinaver’s divisions were unwarranted by the physical appearance of the Winchester manuscript. Masako Takagi and Toshiyuki Takamiya point out that, although the Winchester manuscript is not divided into books and chapters, as Caxton’s edition is, it nevertheless contains large capital letters that roughly correspond in location with the beginning of chapters in Caxton. Examining the vocabulary of that portion of the Winchester Manuscript that differs most from Caxton’s edition—Arthur’s war against the Roman Emperor Lucius—Yuji Nakao concludes that Caxton was indeed himself responsible for revising this section. Helen Cooper’s objections to Vinaver’s edition are more serious even than these. Vinaver’s edition, she points out, is inadequate in a number of ways. Sometimes, Vinaver privileges a reading derived from a French source. Although this makes sense if W or C are obviously corrupt, he also does this when they offer very plausible alternative readings. Furthermore, Vinaver’s division of the text into tales has no warrant in the manuscript. Vinaver, moreover, pays no attention to the large capitals, largely ignoring them in his division of the text. Caxton, on the other hand, carefully follows both colophons and large capitals in the division of his text into chapters. Where there is no large capital in W to justify a chapter break in C, the breaks “accord with the strongest punctuation mark used within the text, a double slash [//]—a mark approximately equivalent to a modern paragraph break” (264). Another feature of the Winchester Manuscript is the marginalia—the scribes have chosen to editorialize at various points in the action. Vinaver notes these in his endnotes, but does not feature them as part of the page layout. Thomas Hanks, Jr., pointed out that the lack of modern punctuation was a vital part of the medieval reading experience, and perhaps ought to be reflected in modern editions.

Some of these shortcomings were rectified by Stephen H. A. Shepherd, whose 2004 edition of Le Morte Darthur reproduced the double slashes of the Winchester Manuscript (as paragraph breaks), as well as the marginalia and large capitals. He even found a way of incorporating the red ink used for personal names, reproducing the red ink in blackletter type. Compare the various different medieval and modern texts of Le Morte d'Arthur by clicking here.