Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur’s Chronicler

Review by Eric Ormsby, New York Sun 2007

On July 31, 1485, William Caxton printed his magnificent edition of Thomas Malory’s “The Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur, of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, their marvellous Enquests and Adventures; th’Achieving of the Sangreal, and in the end the dolorous Death and Departing out of the World of them All”. They liked long compendious titles in those days, but this was too much even for Caxton. He called it simply, if clumsily, “Le Morte Darthur”, and it is by this enigmatic title that the greatest of English prose romances has been known ever since. Caxton’s title, which takes only one episode – the account of King Arthur’s death – as emblematic of the whole sprawling and intricate work, reflects the motley French sources on which the work is based, even as it transfigures them. And yet, as in Chaucer, the Gallic accents of “Le Morte Darthur” are no mere embellishments. Much of the power of the work comes from the vivid assertion of a distinctive English prose style still bewitched by French but struggling to free itself. As we read we seem to witness a rough vernacular forging a new eloquence in the first strength of its youth.

The name of its author – Sir Thomas Malory – hints at this tacit amalgam of two intertwined but warring tongues. According to one conjecture, Malory comes from the French “mal-auré,” which means “ill-fated.” Whether the derivation is correct or not, the knight who bore that name lived out his life beneath a troubled star. Puzzles about Malory abound; even the year of his birth is disputed. Only in recent decades has it been established that he was in fact Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire; but as scholars from the 1930s onward began to piece together the scattered facts of his life, some shocking revelations came to light.Malory himself states that he was in prison when he put the finishing touches to “Le Morte Darthur” in 1469. At the end of “The Tale of King Arthur” he appends the plea: “for this was drawn by a knight prisoner Sir Thomas Malleorre, that God send him good recover. Amen.” But it was not the charges of treason that startled; in the turbulent 15th century it was all too easy to find oneself abruptly on the wrong side. Rather, as the records revealed, Malory stood accused of attempted murder, horse-stealing, and rape.That the most eloquent exponent of chivalric virtue should be charged with such sordid crimes has proved deeply disturbing; and yet, even his scholarly biographer P.J.C. Field can write rather blithely of Malory’s “criminal career.” The devil can quote scripture, of course, and many consummate rascals have written sublimely. But such charges, and especially – given Malory’s reverent attitude to women – that of rape, seem implausible.

Now, in “Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler”, the Cambridge historian Christina Hardyment has constructed a meticulous and convincing defence of the unfortunate Malory. This is revisionist history at its best. Even if Ms. Hardyment’s valiant vindication of Malory turns out to be wrong in some details – on the charge of rape at least she is, in my opinion, completely credible – her panoramic depiction of 15th century England is thrilling. She gives us a compelling portrait of a singular genius, fleshing out conjecture with a sure command of historical fact and illumining the shadows of the life with apt allusion to the work. As she shows, “Le Morte Darthur” contains many sly autobiographical references. The portrayal of Lancelot – in all his conflicted nobility the most human of Arthur’s knights – may, she suggests, mirror the character of his creator, and this rings true.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Ms. Hardyment’s account lies in the way in which she establishes a resonant counterpoint between Malory’s reconstruction of the legendary King Arthur and his entourage of noble knights and “fairest ladies,” and the violent times in which Malory himself came to manhood. Malory’s was the age, after all, of the Battle of Agincourt, of the conquest of Normandy under Henry V, and of the tragic martyrdom of Joan of Arc. So when she detects the lineaments of Henry V, most admirable of English monarchs before Elizabeth I, in Malory’s recreation of Arthur, and clinches it with deft quotation from the work, she illumines both the epic and the age. For the English kings revered Arthur and took him as their model; even the beastly Henry VIII, decades later, revered his legendary predecessor. There is a circularity here that is as powerful as it is evocative.

Ms. Hardyment is especially fine at giving the feel and look and smell of the times. Malory‘s date of birth is unknown. Field set it around 1415; she argues for a considerably earlier date. But when she describes his baptism, of which we know nothing, she draws on contemporary accounts to recreate the rite and then links it with “Morte Darthur”:

The parish priest met the family party in the church porch, where the first part of the ceremony, the instruction, took place. The baby was not taken into the church until any devils that might already have crept into it in its unbaptised state had been exorcised. The elaborate church porches of medieval times were designed to provide shelter for such ceremonies. The priest first made a sign of the cross on Thomas’s forehead, and then asked his name, sex and baptismal state – babies thought to be on the brink of death were baptised from a flask of clean water that all midwives kept for this eventuality. No baby could be baptised twice, which is why Malory makes Merlin warn Arthur’s father, King Uther Pendragon, not to have the baby boy christened before he is handed over to his foster father, Sir Ector. And here she cites Malory, to electrifying effect:

And when the child is born let it be delivered to me at yonder privy postern unchristened. So like as Merlin devised it was done. And when Sir Ector was come he made fiaunce to the king for to nourish the child like as the king desired; and there the king granted Sir Ector great rewards.

I don’t know quite how Malory’s prose commands such majesty. I suspect it is because every sentence seems dictated by destiny. It’s easy, of course, to parody. (Joyce had great fun with it in “Ulysses” when he described some of Leopold Bloom’s shenanigans in high-sounding Arthurian prose: “And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopole a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him … “)

Parody is tribute, and Malory survives it swimmingly. Within a century, of course, Cervantes would deliver the quietus to chivalric literature; and yet, Malory endures. Not only “the once and future king” of T. H. White, but all quest literature, from “The Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter,” spring from his magical seed-bed. The great difference is that in Malory, unlike his imitators, the brutal squalor of the world exists side-by-side with its dazzling sorcery; Merlin is as much Realpolitik as he is wizardry, the knights of Camelot are as rough and thuggish as they are tender and visionary, and Malory’s style captures this unfailingly. Like his beloved King Arthur himself, he remains, and will always remain, the once and future king of English prose.

Thomas Malory is almost as much of a legend as the subject of his unique, and uniquely influential, chronicle. His Morte Darthur has influenced writers from Tennyson to Steinbeck and, via T. H. White, provided subject matter for Disney. His own life is a colourful mystery, its only known records implying that he was a rapist, cattle rustler, despoiler of churches, and spent long years of his life in prison. Prison, legend also has it, is where he wrote his chronicle, a victim of the English state with, like Bunyan or Milton, something very particular and wonderful to say about Englishness.

Christina Hardyment, in a work which is both scholarly and eminently readable, takes issue with this and with many other “known facts” about Malory. In her careful reading and interpretation of the available sources, Hardyment shows how Malory’s life was as much a hymn to chivalry as his chronicle, how his account of the lives and adventures of Arthur and his knights derives from his own experiences of fighting under Henry V and his attempts to preserve his honour and his estate during the perilous days of the Wars of the Roses.

Historical Novel Society/Sarah Brewer

This is a wonderful book, a source of scholarly speculation about Malory himself and a vivid account of the times he lived in. The new paperback edition is very welcome.