Le Morte d'Arthur Sir Thomas Malory

Authorship

The exact identity of the author of Le Morte d'Arthur has long been the subject of speculation, owing to the fact that at least six historical figures bore the name of "Sir Thomas Malory" (in various spellings) during the late 15th century.[3] In the work, the author describes himself as "Knyght presoner Thomas Malleorre" ("Sir Thomas Maleore" according to the publisher William Caxton). Historically, this has been taken as supporting evidence for the identification most widely accepted by scholars: that the author was Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire,[4][5] son of Sir John Malory.

According to the timeline proposed by P.J.C. Field; Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel inherited the family estate in 1434, but by 1450 he was fully engaged in a life of crime. As early as 1433, he had been accused of theft, but the more serious allegations against him included that of the attempted murder of Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, an accusation of at least two rapes, and that he had attacked and robbed Coombe Abbey. Malory was first arrested and imprisoned in 1451 for the ambush of Buckingham, but was released early in 1452. By March, he was back in the Marshalsea prison and then in Colchester, escaping on multiple occasions. In 1461, he was granted a pardon by King Henry VI, returning to live at his estate. After 1461, however, few records survive which scholars agree refer to Malory of Newbold Revel. In 1468–1470, King Edward IV issued four more general pardons which specifically excluded a Thomas Malory. The first of these named Malory a knight and applied to participants in a campaign in Northumberland in the North of England by members of the Lancastrian faction. Field interprets these pardon-exclusions to refer to Malory of Newbold Revel, suggesting that Malory changed his allegiance from York to Lancaster, and that he was involved in a conspiracy with Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick to overthrow King Edward. William Matthews, having given evidence of this candidate's advanced age at the time of the Northumberland campaign and living much further to the South, interprets this record as referring to his own proposed candidate for authorship. Field proposed that it was during a final stint at Newgate Prison in London that he wrote Le Morte d'Arthur,[6] and that Malory was released in October 1470 when Henry VI returned to the throne; dying only five months later.[4] This Warwickshire knight was widely accepted as the author of the Morte until the publication of Matthews' research in 1966.

This identification was widely accepted through most of the 20th century based on the assumption that this candidate was born around 1416. The 1416 date was proposed by Field, contradicting the original record of this knight's military service record by Dugdale.[7] In 1966, Matthews published original research demonstrating that Malory of Newbold Revel had in fact been an officer under King Henry V in the famous Agincourt campaign by 1414 or 1415; confirming Dugdale's original record and placing this knight's birth around 1393. Some late 20th-century researchers cast a doubt that this would make the Newbold Revel knight far too old to have written Le Morte: in prison in his mid-70s to early 80s, when, in Matthews' words, "the medieval view was that by sixty a man was bean fodder and forage, ready for nothing but death's pit."[8] Because no other contemporary Thomas Malory had been shown to have been knighted, the question remained unresolved.

The second candidate to receive scholarly support as the possible author of Le Morte Darthur is Thomas Mallory of Papworth St Agnes in Huntingdonshire, whose will, written in Latin and dated 16 September 1469, was described in an article by T. A. Martin in the Athenaeum magazine in September 1897.[9] This Mallory was born in Shropshire in 1425, the son of Sir William Mallory, although there is no indication in the will that he was himself a knight; he died within six weeks of the will being made. It has been suggested that the fact that he appears to have been brought up in Lincolnshire may account for the traces of Lincolnshire dialect in Le Morte Darthur.[10] To date, this candidate has not commanded the attention of scholars as the Newbold-Revel knight has.

The most recent contender for authorship emerged in the mid-20th century: Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers and Studley Royal in Yorkshire. This claim was put forward in 1966 in The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory by William Matthews.[11] Matthews' primary arguments in favor of the Yorkshire Malory were the northerly dialect of the Morte; the likelihood that this is the Malory who was excluded from the pardon by Edward IV in 1468; and the fact that the Newbold Revel knight was far too old to be writing the Morte in the late 1460s. Matthews' interpretation was not widely accepted, primarily because he could not find evidence that the Yorkshireman was a knight. Cecelia Lampp Linton, however, has provided extensive detail about the Malorys of Yorkshire and offered evidence that Thomas of Yorkshire was a Knight Hospitaller, a militant of the Catholic Church.[12] She has also examined the provenance of some of the known sources of the Morte and has demonstrated that this Malory would have had ready access to these documents. Accepting Linton's evidence would remove the primary objection to his authorship, making the contradictions presented by the Newbold Revel knight irrelevant. The Morte itself seems to be much more the work of a knight of the church than a secular repeat offender, as evidenced by Malory's own conclusion (rendered in Modern English): "... pray for me while I am in life that God send me good deliverance, and when I am dead I pray you all pray for my soul; for this book was ended the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth by Sir Thomas Maleore, knight, as Jesus help him by his great might, as he is the servant of Jesus both day and night."[13]

Sources

As Elizabeth Bryan wrote of Malory's contribution to Arthurian legend in her introduction to a modern edition of Le Morte d'Arthur, "Malory did not invent the stories in this collection; he translated and compiled them. Malory in fact translated Arthurian stories that already existed in 13th-century French prose (the so-called Old French Vulgate romances) and compiled them together with Middle English sources (the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur) to create this text."[14]

Within his narration, Malory refers to drawing it from a singular "Freynshe booke", in addition to also unspecified "other bookis".[15] In addition to the vast Vulgate Cycle in its different variants, as well as the English poems Morte Arthur and Morte Arthure, Malory's other original source texts were identified as several French standalone chivalric romances, including Érec et Énide, L'âtre périlleux, Perlesvaus, and Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (or its English version, Ywain and Gawain), as well as John Hardyng's English Chronicle.[16] The English poem The Weddynge of Syr Gawen is uncertainly regarded as either just another of these or possibly actually Malory's own work.[17] His assorted other sources might have included a 5th-century Roman military manual, De re militari.[18]

Publication and impact

Le Morte d'Arthur was completed in 1469 or 1470 ("the ninth year of the reign of King Edward IV"), according to a note at the end of the book.[19] It is believed that Malory's original title intended was to be The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, and only its final section to be named Le Morte Darthur.[20] At the end of the work, Caxton added: "Thus endeth this noble & joyous book entytled le morte Darthur, Notwythstondyng it treateth of the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd kynge Arthur; of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, theyr meruayllous enquestes and aduentures, thachyeuyng of the sangreal, & in thende the dolorous deth & departynge out of this worlde of them al." Caxton separated Malory's eight books into 21 books, subdivided the books into a total of 506[21] chapters, and added a summary of each chapter as well as a colophon to the entire book.[22]

The first printing of Malory's work was made by Caxton in 1485, becoming one of the first books to be ever printed in England.[23] Only two copies of this original printing are known to exist, in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the John Rylands Library in Manchester.[24] It proved popular and was reprinted in an illustrated form with some additions and changes in 1498 (The Boke of Kyng Arthur Somtyme Kynge of Englande and His Noble Actes and Feates of Armes of Chyvalrye) and 1529 (The Boke of the Moost Noble and Worthy Prince Kyng Arthur Somtyme Kyng of Grete Brytayne Now Called Englande) by Wynkyn de Worde who succeeded to Caxton's press. Three more editions were published before the English Civil War: William Copland's The Story of the Most Noble and Worthy Kynge Arthur (1557), Thomas East's The Story of Kynge Arthur, and also of his Knyghtes of the Rounde Table (1585), and William Stansby's The Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur King of Britaine (1634), each of which contained additional changes and errors. Stansby's edition, based on East's, was also deliberately censored.[25] Thereafter, the book went out of fashion until the Romanticist revival of interest in all things medieval.

The British Library summarizes the importance of Malory's work thus: "It was probably always a popular work: it was first printed by William Caxton (...) and has been read by generations of readers ever since. In a literary sense, Malory's text is the most important of all the treatments of Arthurian legend in English language, influencing writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck."[20]

The Winchester Manuscript

An assistant headmaster at Winchester College, Walter Fraser Oakeshott discovered a previously unknown manuscript copy of the work in June 1934, during the cataloguing of the college's library. Newspaper accounts announced that what Caxton had published in 1485 was not exactly what Malory had written.[26] Oakeshott published "The Finding of the Manuscript" in 1963, chronicling the initial event and his realization that "this indeed was Malory," with "startling evidence of revision" in the Caxton edition.[27] This manuscript is now in the British Library's collection.[28]

Malory scholar Eugène Vinaver examined the manuscript shortly after its discovery. Oakeshott was encouraged to produce an edition himself, but he ceded the project to Vinaver.[27] Based on his initial study of the manuscript, Oakeshott concluded in 1935 that the copy from which Caxton printed his edition "was already subdivided into books and sections."[29] Vinaver made an exhaustive comparison of the manuscript with Caxton's edition and reached similar conclusions. Microscopic examination revealed that ink smudges on the Winchester manuscript are offsets of newly printed pages set in Caxton's own font, which indicates that the Winchester Manuscript was in Caxton's print shop. The manuscript is believed to be closer on the whole to Malory's original and does not have the book and chapter divisions for which Caxton takes credit in his preface. It has been digitised by a Japanese team, who note that "the text is imperfect, as the manuscript lacks the first and last quires and few leaves. The most striking feature of the manuscript is the extensive use of red ink."[30][31]

In his 1947 publication of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Vinaver argued that Malory wrote not a single book, but rather a series of Arthurian tales, each of which is an internally consistent and independent work. However, William Matthews pointed out that Malory's later tales make frequent references to the earlier events, suggesting that he had wanted the tales to cohere better but had not sufficiently revised the whole text to achieve this.[32] This was followed by much debate in the late 20th-century academia over which version is superior, Caxton's print or Malory's original vision.[33]

Caxton's edition differs from the Winchester manuscript in many places. As well as numerous small differences on every page, there is also a major difference both in style and content in Malory's Book II (Caxton's Book V), describing the war with the Emperor Lucius, where Caxton's version is much shorter. In addition, the Winchester manuscript has none of the customary marks indicating to the compositor where chapter headings and so on were to be added. It has therefore been argued that the Winchester manuscript was not the copy from which Caxton prepared his edition; rather it seems that Caxton either wrote out a different version himself for the use of his compositor, or used another version prepared by Malory.[34]

The Winchester manuscript does not appear to have been copied out by Malory himself; rather, it seems to have been a presentation copy made by two scribes who, judging from certain dialect forms which they introduced into the text, appear to have come from West Northamptonshire. Apart from these forms, both the Winchester manuscript and the Caxton edition show some more northerly dialect forms which, in the judgement of the Middle English dialect expert Angus McIntosh are closest to the dialect of Lincolnshire. McIntosh argues, however, that this does not necessarily rule out the Warwickshire Malory as the possible author; he points out that it could be that the Warwickshire Malory consciously imitated the style and vocabulary of romance literature typical of the period.[35]