was a very successful one. It was presented to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the imperious and flamboyant new queen of England’s Henry II, in 1155. This puts the work at the heart of European courtly culture, for the court of Henry II (1154-89) and the glamorous divorcee Eleanor was the most exciting in Europe. Henry’s power extended over most of France as well as England, and the court and literary language of his kingdom was French.’26 Wace added much new and important material to the Arthur story, including the Round Table, and he renamed Arthur’s magical sword—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Caliburn—Excalibur.
It was another author-cum-translator, a rural priest nearWorcester named Layamon (‘lawman’), who took the Arthurian tradition, or Brut as it was now known, and transferred it to Middle English verse around 1200. Layamon’s Brut stands as an extraordinary work of literature in its own right. It takes a different course from the courtly vision of Wace. Layamon was inspired by strong feelings of patriotism. He clearly loved traditional Anglo-Saxon battle poetry, heroism and what Pearsall calls ‘kingliness, steeped in religious awe’.27 Pearsall sums up the differences between Wace and Layamon thus: ‘Throughout Wace is calm, practical, rational, with an eye for the realities of war and strategy; Layamon is aggressive, violent, heroic, ceremonial and ritualistic.’28
Post-Galfridian writers on Arthur take the romance forward wholly in the realms of fiction. Arthur was hugely popular in Anglo-Norman circles in France, where his exploits were further elaborated in verse by Chrétien de Troyes, a prolific author of Arthurian romance. Between 1160 and 1190 his works included Lancelot ou Le Chevalier de la charette, Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion, and the unfinished Percival ou Le conte del graal. Chrétien may have used Breton verbal sources in the composition of his works, which were important because they lifted Arthur and his court out of a narrowly British context.
It was Chrétien who introduced the quest for the Holy Grail, but at this stage in the development of the story the Grail was still just the mystical chalice that had been used by Christ in the Last Supper. It had yet to acquire its connection with the Holy Blood, a fascinating process to which I will return later. Effectively, Chrétien made Arthur a figure of heroic romance who transcended nationality. Derek Pearsall notes: ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth gave shape and substance to the story of Arthur, but it was Chrétien who invented Arthurian romance and gave to it a high-toned sensibility, psychological acuteness, wit, irony and delicacy that were never surpassed.’29
It is not my intention to provide a history of the Arthurian literature which thrived on both sides of the Channel in the medieval period,* nor can I attempt to cover the wealth of creative writing he has given rise to in more recent times, ranging from Tennyson’s cycle The Idylls of the King to T.H. White’s novel sequence The Once and Future King. However, one author, Sir Thomas Malory (d.1470), must be mentioned if we are to understand how the Arthurian legends were subsequently used in Britain.
Malory’s great work, written in English, 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
