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was Le Morte d’Arthur.³⁰ The original title, given to it by the author himself, was The Book of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This title has the not inconsiderable merit of describing the contents to a T, but it is hardly marketable, which Malory’s astute publisher and editor William Caxton realised immediately. Caxton (c.1420—c.1492) was, of course, England’s first successful printer and publisher, working from his press inWestminster. It was he who gave Malory’s great work its mysterioussounding and slightly ominous title, which he lifted from the last tale in the book, ‘The Death of Arthur’, and it was his inspiration to translate it into French. Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur as a loosely connected cycle of tales. Caxton edited them together into a single text, which he published in 1485.³¹

      As we have seen throughout this chapter, the various authors of Arthurian tales had their own, sometimes complex, agendas and motives. This is true of Malory too. Le Morte d’Arthur was written some fifteen years before it was published. 1485 happened to be the year of the Battle of Bosworth, in which Richard III was killed and a new royal dynasty began under Henry Tudor (Henry VII). Bosworth signalled the final phase of the Wars of the Roses, which ended when Lancastrian forces under Henry VII defeated a Yorkist army at Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, in 1487. It was of course in the Tudor interest to portray the Wars of the Roses as being long, drawn-out and bloody, and Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur around 1470 as a tribute to an earlier and now vanishing age of heroism, honour and Christian chivalry. Like Bede and Gildas before him, he saw the past as providing an example to the present that could not be ignored. It was perhaps an accident of history that the Tudors should have shared his vision, if in an altogether more self-interested fashion.

      Just who Thomas Malory was is far from certain. There are four contenders, of which perhaps the most likely is a Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire. He was knighted in 1445, and elected to Parliament the same year, but he seems to have been an unsavoury character. In 1440 he was accused of robbery and imprisoning (although we know nothing about any consequent court case). Then in 1450 he was accused, along with several others, of lying in wait to attack Sir Humphrey Stafford, Second Duke of Buckingham and one of the richest men in England. Again, the allegations were never proved. After this Malory appears to have pursued a life of crime, which included cases of extortion with menaces and straight robbery. Then rapes start to appear on the list of offences he was accused of committing, along with yet more robbery and violence.

      Several attempts were made to catch him, and he spent some time in custody—sometimes managing to escape from it. Eventually the law caught up with him and in 1452 he was held in London’sMarshalsea Prison, where he is supposed to have written his masterpiece. He died on 14 March 1470, and was buried at Greyfriars Chapel near Newgate Prison, from which he had been released following a pardon from Edward IV in 1461. Towards the end of his life he appears to have acquired some degree of wealth, but we have no idea whether this was from his previous life of crime or from a patron such as Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (known as ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’).

      Was this unpleasant individual the author of the Morte d’Arthur? Certainly the events of his life were colourful, and the book itself is nothing if not colourful. But could a thug and a rapist be the creator of a work which espouses high ideals of honour and chivalry? Frankly, I cannot answer that question. But I earnestly hope that some other plausible candidate will one day be found. Meanwhile we must make do with the flawed Sir Thomas of Newbold Revell.³²

Malory used two main sources as inspiration for his work. Both were written in the past, and harked back to an age of heroic chivalry. In the mid-fifteenth century, when Malory was writing, most people must have been aware that the world around them was changing. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, we can appreciate that the medieval epoch (the Middle Ages) was in the process of dying.* A new period, and with it a new way of thinking about the world—ultimately a new cosmology—was coming into existence. It was a process that had been fuelled by the release of the knowledge contained within the libraries of Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. Archaeologists refer to this as the post-medieval period, but to most people it will be familiar as the time of the Tudors and the early Renaissance.

The first of Malory’s sources was English. It consisted of two Morte d’Arthur poems written in the previous century. Each was distinguished by a particular pattern of rhyming. The so-called Alliterative Morte Darthure was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, whereas the Stanzaic Morte Darthur was based on a Continental original, the Mort Artu of the so-called Vulgate Cycle of French romances† - which forms the second and more important of Malory’s sources. The Vulgate Cycle was a huge collection of Arthurian romances that was put together ‘by a number of authors and compilers, working c.1215—30 under the spiritual direction or influence or inspiration of Cistercian monastic teaching…It survives in many forms and many manuscripts, and occupies seven large quarto volumes in the only edition that aims at completeness.’³³ Derek Pearsall considers that the main aim of Chrétien de Troyes and the compilers of the Vulgate Cycle was to include the story of the Holy Grail as an integral part of the Arthurian epic romance. Malory followed, with many embellishments, where they had led.

      Perhaps Malory’s most memorable addition to the legend was the linking of the Holy Grail to the Holy Blood. This has recently been examined by the historian Richard Barber in a fascinating study.³⁴ He concludes that the linking of the Grail to the blood which dripped from Christ’s side during the Crucifixion was more than an act of literary creation by Malory. He can find no mention of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in Chrétien de Troyes or the copious works of the Vulgate Cycle, and comes to the surprising conclusion that Malory ‘was influenced by the cult of the Holy Blood at Hailes [Abbey], not thirty miles from his Warwickshire home, which was a famous pilgrimage site in his day. If this is correct, the Grail reflects Malory’s own piety, typical of a fifteenth-century knight.’ It would suggest too that there was another side to the otherwise unpleasant knight from Newbold Revell. We will see later that there is another lesson to be learned from Richard Barber’s remarkable observation.

      Malory was working with a vast and rich set of sources. Faced with such an embarras de richesses he could easily have produced an unwieldy and ultimately unreadable mess of a book. Had he decided to prune away all the excess, we would have been left with a skeleton plot, devoid of atmosphere or romance. As it was he took the middle path, and the result is a literary masterpiece of enduring greatness, even if sometimes the complex interweaving of narrative and ‘the almost narcotic or balletic repetition of the rituals of jousting or fighting is part of the dominant experience of reading’.³⁵ It can at times be very heavy going.

      We have seen that Malory’s printer and publisher, William Caxton, was an astute editor, but he was also an able businessman and bookseller, and he was aware that there was a public demand for an up-todate account of Britain’s most illustrious hero. He was also motivated by patriotism, and felt it was absurd that the most complete account of the Arthur saga should be contained in foreign sources. So he decided to do something about it, and wrote a fine Introduction which makes a persuasive sales pitch.

      Le Morte d’Arthur is one of the earliest printed books, and several copies of Caxton’s publication survive. The trouble with printed books is that the manuscripts on which they were based often perish, and we can lose sight of what the author intended to write, before the editors or censors made their changes. But in 1934 a manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur was found in the library of Winchester College. It was apparent that in his desire to present Malory’s work as a complete and continuous English account of the Arthur sagas, Caxton had removed most of Malory’s internal text divisions and introduced his own, which obscured the original eight sections. Скачать книгу