ARTHURIAN STUDIES LXVI

MALORYSCONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

THE SOCIAL READING OF ROMANCE INLATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

This book seeks to place Malorys Morte Darthur more firmly in its culturaland historical context. Its composition, in the mid to late fifteenth century,took place at a time of great upheaval for England, a period beginning withthe loss of Bordeaux (and the Hundred Years War) and ending with the riseof Richard III. During this time the Morte was translated from numerousFrench sources, copied by scribes, and, finally, in July 1485, printed byWilliam Caxton. The author argues that in this unique production historyare reflected the ideological crises which loomed so massively overEnglands ruling class in the fifteenth century; and that the book is in factinseparable from these crises.

THOMAS H. CROFTS is Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee StateUniversity

ARTHURIAN STUDIES

ISSN 02619814

General Editor: Norris J. Lacy

Previously published volumes in the seriesare listed at the back of this book

MALORYSCONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

THE SOCIAL READING OF ROMANCE INLATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Thomas H. Crofts

D. S. BREWER

Thomas H. Crofts 2006

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislationno part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,

published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The right of Thomas H. Crofts to be identified asthe author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2006D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 085 5

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer LtdPO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

1 The Text at Hand 11

Introduction: a note on a note on editions 11Canons of probability 14The Malory canon 23

2 Caxtons Preface: Historia and Argumentum 31

Introduction: locating fifteenth-century historiography 31Earlier medieval historia 33Caxtons preface 40Argumentum, exemplarity and ideology 51Conclusion 59

3 Malorys Moral Scribes: Balyn in the Winchester Manuscript 61

Introduction: exemplarity and fifteenth-century literary production 61Visual features of the Winchester manuscript 62Visual effect and cultural authority 67The emergence of Balyn 71The adventure of Balyn 78

4 Usurpation, Right and Redress in Malorys Roman War 94

Introduction: the history of the Roman War 94Fifteenth-century Froissart: textual history and local correspondence 96Local memory: bear and boar in Arthurs dream 97Right and redress in Froissarts Chroniques: an exemplum 100Arthurs war council: chronicle and re-legitimization 104Taking the exemplum: Arthur answers the ambassadors 110The conclusion of Malorys Roman War 114

5 No Hint of the Future 121

Introduction: memory and the book 121Contingencies of fifteenth-century prose 123May in Malorys Prose Morte 125Return and/or arrival 137The last fight 144The myrmidons of death 148Conclusion 151

Epilogue: Two Gestures of Closure 152

Bibliography 159

Index 169

Illustrations

The illustrations are placed between pages 82 and 83.

Plate 1 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 21r

Plate 2 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 23r

Plate 3 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 29v

rhText BoxDisclaimer:Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

for Judge Thomas H. Crofts, Sraka

Pop

The publishers are grateful to the Vinaver Trustfor generously providing a subvention towards

the production costs of this volume

Acknowledgements

Professor Donald W. Rowe guided this project in its dissertation form at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, and his gift for finding the goddes foison intexts has remained its inspiration. Thanks also to the rest of my dissertationcommittee, Keith Busby, Sherry Reames and Susanne Wofford, for their manyand valuable helps.

Matthew Hussey, Michael LeMahieu, Elizabeth Rivlin and John Tiedemanneach read chapters of this book in manuscript; for their precious time, meticu-lous care and sage suggestions I am eternally grateful. Keith Busby and LoganWhalen helped me avoid mesfait sur mesfait in the realm of Old French; for thisand for their general encouragement I owe them much. For advice and insight atkey moments I am also indebted to Matthew Stratton, Jack Opel, K. S. Whetter,Cory Rushton, Amanda Hopkins, Sandra Ihle and Peter Field. Thanks also to mygraduate assistants Lori-Beth Baker and Annalee Kodman whose proofreadingand schlepping of books were a wonder.

I would also like to thank my chair Judith B. Slagle and my other friends andcolleagues in the Department of English at East Tennessee State University, whoprovided encouragement and guidance in many forms, and especially KarenCajka and Robert Sawyer whose generosity of spirit and sound advice helpedme keep it together in the closing stages of writing this book.

Versions of chapters two and three have appeared in Re-Viewing Le MorteDarthur (D. S. Brewer, 2005) and the Revue Belge de Philologie et dHistoire, vol. 83,no. 3 (2005), respectively, and I am grateful to their editors for allowing me todevelop these pieces here. Thanks also to Jacques Lezra for allowing me to quotefrom the manuscript of a forthcoming article.

A grant from the Research Development Committee at East Tennessee StateUniversity provided vital funds for travel and research; it is a pleasure for me tothank the committee members here. I also gratefully acknowledge a bequestfrom the Eugne Vinaver Trust Fund which helped to cover this books produc-tion costs. Many thanks as well to my editor Caroline Palmer at Boydell &Brewer for her very great patience and encouragement, and to my two anony-mous readers for their invaluable suggestions. Any remaining errors or infelici-ties are entirely mine.

Last but far from least I thank my parents Tom and Mary Locke, and my sisterEllen, for their unflagging cheer and support, my wife Molly who kept me frombeing completely disparbeled, and my sons Rex and August for their total genius.

Abbreviations

Aspects of Malory Aspects of Malory, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer,Arthurian Studies I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981)

C William Caxtons Le Morte Darthur (1485)Companion A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G.

Edwards, Arthurian Studies XXXVII (Cambridge: D. S.Brewer, 1996)

EETS, o.s./s.s./e.s.

Early English Text Society, original series / supplementaryseries / extra series

The Malory Debate The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, ed.Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda,Arthurian Studies XLVII (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000)

Mort Artu La Mort le Roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe Sicle, Troisime dition,ed. Jean Frappier (Genve: Droz/ Paris: M.J. Minard, 1964)

Prologues andEpilogues

The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B.Crotch, EETS, o.s. 176 (London: Oxford University Press,1928)

W BL MS Add. 59678, the Winchester manuscriptWorks The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols, ed. Eugne Vinaver,

rev. P. J. C. Field (London: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Unless otherwise indicated, Works is the edition used in this study. Citations ofWorks, as of all edited medieval texts here, silently adopt editors emendations.Citations which indicate line numbers place them after the page number, sepa-rated by a point.

Introduction

This book seeks to place the production of Malorys Morte Darthur in both itsmanuscript and printed form in the context of political and literary culture inthe second half of the fifteenth century. That historical context will be definedhere by especial consideration of the social practice which underwrites all partic-ulars connected to literary production, that is, reading. Texts come before us,Fredric Jameson writes, as the always-already-read; we apprehend themthrough sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or if the text isbrand-new through the sedimented reading habits and categories developedby those inherited interpretive traditions.1 Thus, all reading is social reading:one is never quite alone when one is doing it. This is true not only of our reading,of course, but also that of Sir Thomas Malory and his contemporaries. Theobjects of my inquiry, then, include the things both written and read by Maloryand his contemporaries: books (not only texts but codices), political events(whether witnessed in the fifteenth century or chronicled from earlier times),literature (both fifteenth-century English and that of earlier periods and otherlanguages). By way of introduction I would like, first, to offer a historical anec-dote which demonstrates the immediacy of the relationship between literaryculture and social practice in Malorys time; after this, I will indicate somethingof the critical methods which inform the chapters that follow.

The Battle of Nibley Green

At the very time Malory was finishing his book, two prominent families, theTalbots and the Berkeleys, were entering the final and bloodiest stage of theirfifteen-year dispute over the ownership of some manor houses inGloucestershire. The families had many times seen each other in court, wherethe matter had finally, in 1469, been decided in favor of the Berkeleys. However,Thomas Talbot, the nineteen-year-old 2nd Viscount Lisle, now rejected apeaceful solution by sending the following note to William, the thenmiddle-aged 12th Lord of Berkeley, on 19 March 1469:

William, called Lord Berkeley I merveile yee come not fourth with all your cartsof gunnes, bowes, with oder ordinance, that yee set forward to my manor ofWotton to beate it doune vpon my head. I lett you witt ye shall not nede to comesoe nye, for I trust to God to mete yee neere home with Englishmen of my one

1 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1981), p. 9.

nation and neighbors; whereas yee by subtile craft have blowen about in diverseplaces of England that I should intend to bringe in Welshmen for to destroy andhurt my one nation and country; I lete the wit, I was never soe disposed, nornever will bee; And to the proofe heerof, I require the of knighthode and ofmanhode to appoint a day to mete halfe way, there to try between God and ourtwo hands all our quarrell and title of right, for to eschewe the shedding ofchristen mens bludd, or else at the same day bringe the vttirmost of thy power,and I shall mete the: An answere of this by writinge, as yee will abide by,accordinge to the honour and order of knighthood. Thomas Talbot, ye viscontLisle.

Talbots invocation of the order of Knighthood seemed implausible to LordBerkeley, who, the same day, responded dexterously with, I marveile greatly ofthy strange and leude writinge, and further,

As for the determininge betweixt our two hands of thy vntrue clayme and mytitle and right of my land and true inheritance, thou wottest right well that thereis noe such determinacion of land in this realm used: And I ascertaine thee thatmy lyvelode, as well as my manor of Wotton, as my castle of Berkeley, beeintayled to mee by fyne of record in the kings courts, by the advyse of all theJudges of this land in that daies beinge; and if it were soe That the matter might bedetermined by thy hands and mine, the kinge our soveraine Lord and his lawesnot offended, thou shouldest not soe soone desire but I would as soone answerethee in every point that belongeth to a knight; ffor thou art, God I take to record,in a false quarrell, and I in a true defence and title; And where thou desirest andrequirest mee of knighthood and of manhood to appoint a day and that I shouldbee there with all the power I could make, and that thou wouldest meete meehalfe way, I will thou understand I will not bringe the tenth part that I can make,and I will appoint a short day to ease thy malitious heart and thy false counsailethat is with thee.2

In Berkeleys eyes, whatever claim to the honor and order of knighthood Talbotmight have had is vitiated on the one hand by his desire to enact fanciful andillegal forms of judicial combat, and on the other by the suggestion that thehonor and order of knighthood necessitate the violation of the kings law as ifknighthood were something other than service to a sovereign lord. Talbots ulti-matum nevertheless led to the Battle of Nibley Green, which occurred on theday following this exchange of letters, and in which 150 men, including Talbothimself, were killed.

Certainly Talbot wished to defy the kings law, but that law was taking awaylands to which he believed he had a hereditary right; and, no less considerably,the kings civil law was at this time very rarely enforced. It is hard to say whichside was the less orderly: the one which rested in the arbitrary rectitudegranted by the kings court, or the one which sought to maintain an ancient rightin the face of a royal administration which was in general corrupt and so enfee-bled as to be unable to enforce court decisions. Such complications could onlyimperfectly be laid to rest by things like the Battle of Nibley Green. Accordingly,

2 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

2 The Berkeley Manuscripts, 3 vols, ed. John Maclean (Gloucester, 1883), vol. III, pp. 2678.

the Talbot-Berkeley model of conflict resolution continued to be observedamong the lesser nobility and country gentry; private interest everywhereinfringed on law and order. As Charles Ross has observed of this period,

The weakness and partiality of [Henry VI and his] council had placed little curbon powerful offenders. The growth of faction was accompanied by recourse toprivate war . . . and the outbreak of civil war, which in one aspect at least may beseen as an escalation of private feuds, had served only to make matters worse.Riot, oppression, vendetta and gangsterism flourished under the umbrella ofcivil strife and armed rebellion. The first few months of Edward IVs reign prob-ably saw a higher level of disorder than any other period in the entire fifteenthcentury.3

The gentry was no less vulnerable to this effect than the nobility, of course, aswitnessed by the letters of such families as the Pastons and Stonors, and by indi-vidual members of that class like Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, whowas extending the offices of knighthood to include harrying deer parks, robbingchurches, rustling cattle, attempting the assassination of the Duke ofBuckingham and raping Joan Smyth (cum ea carnaliter concubuit).4 The fact thatSir Thomas of Newbold Revel was indeed part of the problem is not an argu-ment for or against his authorship of the Morte. It is, however, entirely appositeto any historical discussion of that books production. While the shape ofMalorys book is in part prescribed by its French and English sources, thatprescription was itself a contingency of the social reading of romance inMalorys time. Malorys book is one example of this reading. Other examples ofthe cultures reading of romance are legible in behaviors of historical people andin the texts which document them (just as a collective reading of chivalry isfound not only in Froissarts Chroniques but, as argued below in Chapter 4, inthat texts reception and production history). In placing Malorys book in thiscontext, we will notice some things writ relatively large, such as that late medi-eval romance storytelling is showing the strain of having to answer the politicalclaims of chronicle history. But we will also begin to see other things whichtouch on Malorys book at the level of the lived or at least the recorded expe-rience of its audience. Behavior, in other words, is also an act of reading: whetherit is a reading of law or of literature it is always a reading of historical possibili-ties within a cultural code.

Accordingly, even in the relative sobriety of the elder lords response, there ison Berkeleys part recognition of naturalness in the exchange proposed byTalbot, whose fieriness got him the posthumous nickname the English Achilles.Despite his comparative sobriety, Berkeley showed up at Nibley Green and not

INTRODUCTION 3

3 Charles Ross, Edward IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 395.4 See P. J. C. Field, The Malory Life Records, item 32, in Companion, pp. 115130; 121. Else-

where, Field elucidates the rape charge as follows: Although the rape charges plainly involverape in the modern sense rather than (as some have wanted to believe) abduction or assault,when one charge came up in the Kings Bench, it was pressed not by the alleged victim but byher husband, and under the statute of 6 Richard II, a statute whose purpose was to makeelopement into rape despite the womans consent: The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 106.

only fit the battle outrance, but pursued Talbot retainers to Wotton Manor andrushed the gates of the great manor-house and ransacked for the deeds andmanorial rolls. . . . The deeds were found and William returned triumphantly toBerkeley carrying with him the Lisle arms ripped down from the wall.5 TheBattle of Nibley Green may have been a performative anachronism, but it wasnot cynical or insincere. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, such exchanges involvemore than one kind of prize: at stake are forms of capital both economic (ormaterial) and symbolic. Bourdieu illustrates this principle of exchange byconsidering, for example, that

a piece of land will sometimes take on a symbolic value disproportionate to itseconomic value, as a function of the socially accepted definition of the symbolicpatrimony. Thus the first plots to be relinquished will be the land least integratedinto the estate, least associated with the name of its present owners, the landwhich was bought (especially by a recent purchase) rather than inherited, theland bought from strangers rather than that bought from kinsmen. When a fieldendowed with all the properties which define strong integration into the patri-monial estate is owned by strangers, buying it back becomes a question ofhonour, analogous to avenging an insult, and it may rise to exorbitant prices.

The happy relevance of Bourdieus real-estate prices to the Talbot-Berkeleydiscussion will not distract us from the fact that the rule of symbolic capitalwould apply whether the contested object were real estate, livestock or a newpan. Each may have a symbolic price. In the Berkeley-Talbot example the pricewas both symbolic and material, and it was exorbitant.

The terms in which the Nibley Green affair was negotiated express a socialreading of romance cognate equally with Malorys book and William Caxtonschivalric project. The theater in which Talbots honour found its fatal expres-sion was a world (however waning) in which noble and dyvers gentylmenwere happy (and relatively free) to defend their own interests, and, in doing so,to take their cue from chivalric literature. It is a sort of powerlessness beforechivalric imperatives, we observe, that Talbot conjures in his letter to Berkeley.The fictive possibility of a joust, as raised by the viscount, is the performance of anot-wholly-fictive cultural code. No modern notion of the delusional can bebrought to bear in a critique of Talbots unrealistic behavior. Even if weacknowledge that Talbot used an imaginary code of honor in pursuit ofself-interested ends, we still cannot regard his letter any more than his death as disingenuous. Talbot was acting out a historical psychodrama, a realization ofself on the aristocratic stage; but Talbot certainly did not invent that stage. Menmake their own history, Marx writes,

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circum-stances chosen by themselves, but circumstances directly encountered, given,and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighslike a nightmare on the brain of the living.6

4 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

5 Jonathan Blow, Nibley Green, 1469: The Last Private Battle Fought in England, History TodayII (1952), pp. 598610; 610.

6 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Robert C.Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton &. Co., 1978), p. 595.

It is such a tradition that weighs on Malorys Le Morte Darthur. And it is bystudying the cultural, literary and textual transmissions of that nightmare thatwe can hope to place the Morte in its fifteenth-century context.

Critical Methods

The unique production history of the Morte Darthur which was translated andadapted from numerous sources, copied (at least twice) and, some fifteen yearslater, printed by William Caxton is itself a series of social readings. Medievaltexts are the collective work of numerous hands, and each stage in a texts trans-mission may have equal claim on a readers attention. Chapter 1 investigates thechanging preoccupations of textual study, and the effect modern textual criti-cism has had on our understanding of Malory. The bibliographical emergenceand critical reception of Malorys text (in both its chirographical and printversions) are in fact an abiding focus of this book as a whole.

For all students of literature, however, there is also the fact of the criticaledition; it too must be read. Apart from the text(s) found within it, the criticaledition is a complex of erudition and error, pleasure and preoccupation anexperimental combination of theory and practice. The present Chapter 1, then, isalso in constant negotiation with Eugne Vinaver, whose master edition stillbreathes all the fluency, erudition and subtlety though none of the crapulence of the dragon in John Gardners Grendel, mystifying even as it explains. It isVinavers edition of the Winchester manuscript, called Works of Sir ThomasMalory (1947, 1967, 1990), which institutes the modern double life of Malorysbook; and that doubleness is a great topic in Malory studies today. Accordingly,Vinavers editorship is also an object of our reading. Jerome McGanns Critique ofModern Textual Criticism includes the following notes toward this reading, whichare worth quoting at length:

Vinavers edition appeals to our longing to read texts which come as clearly anddirectly from the authors hand as possible. His critical scrupulousness,however, reminds us of the special authority which Caxtons editorially medi-ated text will always possess. In this way, paradoxically, Vinavers edition showsthat for an editor and textual critic the concept of authority has to be conceived ina more broadly social and cultural context. Authoritative texts are arrived at byan exhaustive reconstruction not of an author and his intentions so much as of anauthor and his context of work. Even in those cases where the rule of authorialintentions seems determining or even regulative, we must see that it will havebeen so only in the event, that is to say, only after an editor has weighed a greatmany other factors which bear upon his understanding of the received texts. Incultural products like literary works the location of authority necessarilybecomes dispersed beyond the author. When, therefore, Vinaver speaks of theaim of any critical edition being to approach as closely as possible the authorsoriginal work, he assumes an editorial concept of poetic authority which cannotreally be maintained through an analysis.7

INTRODUCTION 5

7 Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993),p. 84.

Analysis of Vinavers edition is vital to the project at hand, that of reading LeMorte Darthur as a social text, that is to say a text determined by a collectivehistory and a collective investment in the practice of historiography. (My refer-ences to Malorys text follow the convention of citing Vinavers three-volumeWorks, unless otherwise stated.)

Reading also has less tangible, but nevertheless intelligible, objects, such asdesire, law and history; objects, that is, which emanate from the matrix ofculture, preparing the way for things like manuscripts, and also for occasionslike Nibley Green, the career of Anthony Woodville and the demand forCaxtons Malory, which is the subject of Chapter 2. But how, asks FredricJameson,

do you go about historicizing such mental categories or conceptual opera-tions? A first step in this direction has been taken when you come to understandthat they are not the result of purely philosophic choices or options in the void,but are objectively determined.8

Accordingly, readers of Malory must try to apprehend, to the fullest extent thatthey are legible, indications of such determination as they arise in Caxtons prac-tice of producing, maintaining and transmitting texts and textual traditions. Anaccount of Caxtons work is necessary, that is, to historicizing the bibliographicalproduction of Malorys text. Unlike the manuscript witness, the Caxtonincunable particularly the preface is laden with explicit statements about thebooks social and political relevance, its intended audience, its awareness of thegeneric interplay between history and romance, and the rhetorical negotiationswhich attend printing such a book as the Morte Darthur in 1485. Caxton, as weknow, declares himself openly on most of these topics, but Caxton, as we alsoknow, must be sifted as carefully as Brownings Duke of Ferrara, or NabokovsHumbert Humbert, when it comes to facts. The result of such care on our partwill, I think, be a deepened understanding of what Malory meant to hiscontemporaries.

Who are those contemporaries? Who are Malorys audience? Caxton adroitlyblurs lines of class distinction as he addresses his audience of many noble anddyvers gentylmen and al noble lordes and ladyes wyth al other estates, of whatestate or degree they been of.9 Caxton, by directing his generically aristocraticbook to both gentry and noble, makes it hard for us to know what class distinc-tions were asserted, or were being performed (whether anachronistically orotherwise), by his (and Malorys) audience. Important studies by RalucaRadulescu, Hyonjin Kim, Richard Moll and others go a long way toward clari-fying this matter, and their studies of book ownership, reception and demandindicate the solidest ground for consideration of fifteenth-century literaryculture as productive of, and negotiating, class distinctions. Malorys text is thussocial in another sense: not only collaborative, but as an index of the desires ofa specific collective audience, whatever social estate or degree they been of.Caxtons edition, with all its trappings, shows us what is also true of Malorys

6 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

8 The Political Unconscious, p.109.9 Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 92, 94.

text, that Le Morte Darthur is the answer to a specific occasion, a specific desire,but it is not necessarily a straight answer.

The Winchester manuscript, while not as discursive about itself as Caxtonsbook, also bears information about its supposed audience. Both the bibliograph-ical text (the manuscript as a physical witness) and the lexical text (the semanticcontent) of BL MS Add. 59678 contain social information. The section called TheTale of Balyn le Sauvage, or the Knight with Two Swords, as I will show inChapter 3, allows the modern reader (as it did the contemporary reader) to iden-tify its intended place in the social realm. The bibliographical text, for example,is composed in this case not only of the scribally transmitted letter of the tale,but also of the illustrations and commentary which appear in the margins,which are also scribally produced but of less certain origin. The marginalia in theWinchester manuscript which are especially concentrated in the front sectionsof the book, where Balyn appears may be read as corresponding to specificlate medieval reading habits among the nobility, habits which overwhelminglybegin to be shared by the gentry.

The lexical text of Balyn, which transmits the narrative, must, at least provi-sionally, be read separately. The lexical text is always subtly altered or manipu-lated in its material (bibliographical) form. Reading the Balyn narrative in theWinchester manuscript we discover many things which correspond to the infor-mation yielded by the bibliographical text. But we are also free to discoverplaces where the two texts diverge. The Tale of Balyn, by virtue of its particularnarrative, has a mind of its own, one might say, which is not totally accommo-dated by its scribal presentation in Winchester. The narrative is one in whichthe intentionality of chivalric practice is at odds with historical cause and effect,in which the traditional patterns of romance yield not the elegance of the heroswiser return, but the heros anonymous death in a remote place. Balynsunheimlich end is unsettling to traditional expectations of romance, and theextent to which it was re-authored by the Winchester scribes proves a remark-able object lesson in the linguistic and visual reading of medieval texts. The endresult is a text even more plural and multi-authored than Malorys text mostlya set of translations, after all already was. Scribal agency, then, no less thanCaxtons editorial agency, is partially constitutive of social reading, of social textproduction.

Turning to the political realm, Malorys book emerged in a culture whoserapid cycles of challenge and overthrow had largely exposed the mysteries ofdivine-right monarchy and the myth of genealogically determined succession.Parliament was, as Leslie Coote puts it, a place where people go when all islost.10 Force is always an option. God no longer makes kings, the Kingmakermakes kings, and does so by being able to spill the right amount of blood at theright moments. As the Battle of Nibley Green showed, this state of affairs accom-modated extra-legal enactments which were both fanciful and highly expedient.It was in the dawn of this much-simplified model of political domination thatMalory flourished, in an England waking up in the uncomfortable knowledgethat humanity, as Foucault writes,

INTRODUCTION 7

10 Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), p. 197.

does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universalreciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs eachof its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domi-nation.11

That the Morte Darthur, in the face of this, still wishes to assert the value of thesemysteries is the source of its vast melancholy. But Malory is too fine an observerof power to ignore the implications of historys rampant parataxis.

Parataxis, as a principle of syntax, is one of Malorys poetic strengths. Conti-guity, as Felicity Riddy notes, has its own tantalizing and minimal way ofsuggesting coherence,12 and Malory makes the most of this. But parataxis canalso be a historiographical principle. In Chapter 4s discussion of the uses ofchronicle, I suggest that rival claims to a throne are made with reference to thesame chronology but with the clock variously turned back to the desiredmoment, to the desired forebear. Foucault continues,

An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but thereversal of a relationship of forces, usurpation of power, the appropriation of avocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination thatpoisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked other.13

Like a paratactic sentence, history presents a series of points which receive theiremphases from the outside, by a reader, an interpreter, a social code (hegemony);emphases will always be made, but no piece of the chain can be subtractedwithout falsification of the whole. Nietzsche called the history of the wholechain wirkliche Historie, or effective history. Understanding history to meanhistoria, that is, written history, effective history might also be called impossiblehistory since it cannot be written, or even conceived, except in a numberless setof particulars, or else in an unhistorical abstract totality. But when Maloryde-interlaces his French sources, when he organizes his fiction in the chroniclestyle, he allows his readers to see the minimal coherence which, in the powerstruggles of late medieval England, generally sufficed.

It is at the very end of Malorys book that the reader is alerted to the fact thathe has just read a hoole book.14 One way of conceiving the books wholeness isas it accounts for itself in The Piteous Tale of Kyng Arthur Saunz Guerdon,which Felicity Riddy describes as enacting the death-wish of a class.15 AsRiddy suggests, the death-drama of Arthur may be described in psychoanalyticterms. The historical blindness which, in one way or another, plagues the centralprotagonist of Malorys book, may be described as an occasion of cathexis: at theend of his career, Arthur, pathologically unable to read his own history, is sweptinto a sequence of events engendered by misrecognition and irrational response.

8 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

11 Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76100; 85; a translation of Nietzsche, La Gnalogie, LHistoire, inHommage Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), pp. 14572.

12 Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), p. 142.13 Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 88.14 Works, p. 1260.15 Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War, Companion, p. 72.

Mortes closing sequences enact a complex pattern of returns, in which, for atime, the old perfection of the Round Table is glimpsed. The death-sequence,however, is crafted so that none of these returns is completed. As in Balyn, allefforts to return to ease the heart violently fail to restore the lost balance.Hence, the earlier units of Malorys compilation defer their logical and necessaryconclusions by giving way to other, succeeding units. This non-recognition ofthe necessity of death, or of its finality, recalls Freuds evocation in Beyond thePleasure Principle of the primal life-span, in which the course of its life was prob-ably a brief one, until

decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still survivingsubstance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to makeever more complicated dtours before reaching its aim of death. These circu-itous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, wouldthus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. . . . What weare left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.Thus these guardians of life [the instincts], too, were originally the myrmi-dons of death.16

This may describe not only the career of Arthur in the whole book, but, asChapter 5 will show, may describe also the acts of translation and selection,cutting and composition, by which Malory fashioned the book. And it may alsoaccount for lapses in the whole books memory of itself: Malorys last episode isa semantic set determined by memory: memory as expressed in genre, incompilatio and in the conception of a codex. This chapter will try to indicate whatwe might call the Mortes rhetorical unconscious, a space of hidden, inappre-hensible conflict within the narrative, but also within the compositional effort which troubles the closing sequences of Malorys book.

INTRODUCTION 9

16 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,1961), pp. 46, 47.

1The Text at Hand

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddledbook. I remember when I found it in a dimly lighted place near the blackoily river where the mists always swirl . . . I never learned its title, for theearly pages were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me aglimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.

(H. P. Lovecraft, The Book (fragment c. 1934))

Introduction: A Note on a Note on Editions

All Malory criticism must, even if provisionally, deal with the question of theauthors identity. Even in studies which do not confront the question directly,and even in those which (perhaps rightly) profess indifference to the question ofwhich Thomas Malory wrote the Morte Darthur even in these a position istaken. Its readers, not excluding the present one, refer habitually to Malorystext or Malorys book in the singular as if it were possible to consider theWinchester manuscript and Caxtons 1485 edition one book. Malory criticismsince 1934 is really a narrative of at least two texts resolutely not being the samebook.1 In her study, The Genesis of Narrative in Malorys Morte Darthur, ElizabethEdwards appreciates this fact fully, nor would she have her readers overlook it:I prefer to preserve the contradictions [within the Morte Darthur], she writes,rather than to neutralise them.2 These contradictions are at the same timenarrative and codicological. In order to get on with things, however, Edwards, asmost do, refers to Malorys work in the singular (Le Morte Darthur) while citingthe Vinaver edition (Works); nor does she consider this expedient to beself-explanatory, since in the Note on Editions at the head of her book shewrites,

The edition of the Morte Darthur cited here is the three volume The Works of SirThomas Malory, edited by Eugne Vinaver and revised by P. J. C. Field(Oxford: Clarendon 1990). All subsequent citations will be to this edition

1 Professor Field: The critical moment in the modern understanding of the Morte Darthuroccurred in mid-June 1934, when Walter Oakeshott, Librarian of the Moberly Library atWinchester College, was preparing an exhibition of early printed books. . . . He had noticed afat paper manuscript about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that had lost itsbeginning and end. Oakeshott checked it against a Caxton-based Morte Darthur, and madewhat was, as far as medieval English literature is concerned, arguably the most importantmanuscript discovery of the twentieth century. Introduction, Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), p. 1. Oakeshotts own account is in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A.W. Bennett (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 16.

2 Genesis of Narrative in Malorys Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 23.

unless otherwise noted. My practice has been to verify Vinavers work byconsulting both the Winchester MS (BL Add. 59, 678, published in facsimileby EETS). [sic]

In her study then, she theoretically differentiates the idea Malorys book fromthe numerous historical forces (in the form of other texts and other languages)running through it by calling Malorys book the text at hand.3 Even so, her ideaof the text at hand equates Vinavers edition and Le Morte Darthur. Even withthe proviso cited here, the equation, because of the word edition, is contraryto fact: Vinaver rejected the title Morte Darthur as Caxtonian (and so spurious),and called his edition Works. And since Edwards refers neither to the survivingCaxtonian edition, properly called Le Morte Darthur, nor to the critical editionof Caxtons book by Matthews and Spisak (1983), the edition to which Edwardsrefers to which all Malory critics habitually refer is an imaginary one,residing in, but not identical to, Vinavers three volumes. Indeed, Vinavers ownedition of the Winchester manuscript is professedly and necessarily supple-mented, in many ways determined, by Caxtons 1485 book.

All of this is to demonstrate the difficulty of talking about Malorys text (ortexts) at all historically. Few of us, if any, mean Caxtons 1485 incunable whenwe refer to Le Morte Darthur; we mean rather Vinavers edition, which emphati-cally does not call itself Le Morte Darthur but Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Whenwe do refer to Caxtons 1485 Morte Darthur, we call it the Caxton, a name meantto distinguish that book from its historical author and title. There is no harm inour customary nomenclature the present study does not go far out of its way toavoid it as long as we are aware of the not insignificant distinctions we areeliding.

Nor can there be any harm in observing the typographical error which resultsin that ingenious and ghostly both in Edwards Note. Standing at the begin-ning of a quite illuminating study of Malorys text, it points, on the one hand, tothe primary extant witness of that text, and, on the other hand, to relevanthistorical contingencies entirely absent from the historical stage.

In all of this, Malory himself is nowhere to be found, yet it is with reference tohis historical authorship of the text at hand that Vinavers edition upholds thesuperiority of the Winchester manuscript as being the closest extant one toMalory (M). It is with reference to the same entity that William Matthews beganto undermine Vinavers hypothesis that the Winchester text was closer to theoriginal text. So, as an effect of its investment in Vinavers total theory ofMalorys text, Edwards book stakes its own position on its authorship.

It is easy, then, to endorse the pragmatic expedient of getting a text in handand moving on. Terence McCarthys appraisal of the authorship question isequally pragmatic:

Malory is an unobtrusive writer with no ironic detachment towards his materialto make us aware of the narrators mind. He is reluctant ever to come forward toexpress an opinion, let alone browbeat the reader, and yet, at the same time, inspite of his apparent narrative reticence, his personality comes across so strongly

12 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

3 Ibid. p. ix.

that we feel a definite desire to know more about the man. Unfortunately, theinformation available is so scant that this is impossible. The Morte Darthur is, toall extents and purposes, an anonymous book.4

An assertion of Malorys anonymity makes for a nice conundrum, since hisname is the only thing we do know about him. Like the stray both in EdwardsNote, this conundrum is wonderfully emblematic of historicist (in this casebiographical) criticism: while the psychology of any author remains an impon-derable, having the body of the author would be of historical value above andbeyond the biographical; it would allow us to reconstruct with greater hope ofaccuracy the conditions of the books production. Lacking this data, however and this is the point McCarthy is really making we can get along well withoutthe corpus, since we can recover data that is just as, if not more, useful bystudying historical conditions in fifteenth-century England. The utility of thisapproach is admirably demonstrated in Hyonjin Kims The Knight without theSword, which, while declining to choose among the three main Thomas Malorysproposed by twentieth-century research,5 does make use of all three. Reasoningthat since the three were historical contemporaries, came from squirearchicalfamilies of ancient origin who had regularly produced knights, who lived awayfrom London and were active in politics, the differences between the candidatesperhaps do not rise to the level of cultural importance. Kim concludes that Thegreatest Arthurian fiction written in English, which is known to posterity as theMorte Darthur, originated in a late fifteenth-century community of the greatergentry more specifically the rural landowners who assumed leading roles intheir localities and were possibly a little more conservative in behavior andoutlook than their neighbors due to their ancient tenure and long-establishedfamily traditions.6 It is a similarly collective idea of textual history which moti-vates Raluca Radulescus recent study, which asserts that to appreciate fully theextent to which Malorys text reflects some of the most important aspects of latefifteenth-century attitudes, a fresh look at gentry letters and gentry readinghabits is required.7 My study also presumes the importance of this peculiargroup, these dyverse gentylmen who desired, in the early 1480s, to see a booklike Malorys in print. Radulescus analysis of fifteenth-century English gentry,in fact, does as much as any biography to place Malory (whoever he was) on thehistorical map.

But since someone called Sir Thomas Malory and his Morte Darthur, as it iscalled, remain so firmly lashed together, both in textual history and in thehistory of criticism, it is well to examine closely the ligatures.

THE TEXT AT HAND 13

4 Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 171.5 I.e. those of Warwickshire, Cambridgeshire and though rarely any more Yorkshire.6 The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 56.7 The Gentry Context for Malorys Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 13.

Canons of Probability

The Sir Thomas Malory who was excepted from pardon must have beenthe author of the Morte Darthur. No other conclusion is possible, even if oneexchanges the normal canons of probability for those of detective fiction.

(P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory)

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impos-sible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

(Holmes to Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four)

That the authorship question does assert itself so stubbornly in Malory studieshas at least three causes. One is the fact of the Mortes appearing on the cusp of aperiod when, generally speaking, individual talent became less absorbed intothan celebrated by the culture. The circumstances of Le Morte Darthurs produc-tion by Caxton itself the focus of the chapter following this place that bookwithin a certain new authorial space. Even though the book names its author one Sir Thomas Malory the final words of Caxtons Morte Darthur are Caxtonme fieri fecit: Caxton caused me to be made. The value of individual craftsman-ship was celebrated by Caxton in his prefaces and epilogues, even as it wasinstantiated by Caxtons printed books themselves. It was through this newform of literary production that Malorys book came into existence in 1485.

The second cause must be the scandal which attaches to the traditionallyupheld candidate for authorship, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel,Warwickshire. Early critics seemed to see a contradiction between the nobilityof Malorys book and the apparent criminality of his life. This eminently Victo-rian point of view need not trouble us: even in the nineteenth century it was afalse dilemma, but it did keep the legend alive. The historical Sir Thomas Maloryof Newbold Revel, the one imprisoned for robbery, rape and the destruction of adeer park,8 was the liveliest of men, and his incorrigibility before the law what-ever anyone says does as much to recommend as to disqualify him. Literaryaccomplishment has never been the exclusive prerogative of the law-abiding.Like Chaucer before him and Ben Jonson after him, Malory may well havegotten into scrapes with the law and still have been able to write well, evennobly. Nor should we forget Malorys contemporary, Francois Villon, whowent to jail for the murder of a priest. (It isnt that late medieval writers weremore violent than their predecessors: merely that written documents had begunto keep better track of people.)

The third and most decisive cause must be the fact that P. J. C. Field, reviser ofVinavers Works and the foremost living Malory scholar, is a formidableresearcher in textual, historical and biographical criticism. Fields consolidationand analysis of the life-records of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel9 isfounded on the conviction shared with Kittredge, Sommer, Vinaver and othersthat this Thomas Malory is the author of the Morte Darthur, and it is Fields

14 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

8 The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 100ff.9 The Malory Life-Records, Companion, pp. 11530.

painstaking work that keeps the question of authorship not only alive, but rele-vant; given this, no consideration of Malorys texts can ignore the issue, nor canit omit to test Fields conclusions for example that the author of the Morte was,in the ninth year of Edward IVs reign, both knight and prisoner. Partially as aresult of Fields weighty advocacy, the Newbold Revel candidate remains by farthe most famous and widely accepted, and most scholars now concede thatprobability favors this knight-prisoner as author. We will bring Fields Life ofMalory into focus now and take our discussion from there.

Professor Fields method is to locate pertinent documents which name SirThomas Malory and from them reconstruct the facts of his life. These documentsare also used to distinguish the author of the Morte Darthur from the eight otherThomas Malorys flourishing (more or less) in the mid-fifteenth century, mostnotably from the Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, Yorkshire, and the ThomasMalory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire. The documents are mostly ofthe legal variety and, since they are anything but contiguous, their relationshipmust be inferred and supplied by the researcher according to the bestprobability.

The foremost of the life records is the Winchester manuscript itself, and itsseven authorial colophons which, taken all together, identify that author. InVinavers mise-en-page these, excluding the two which do not name the author (f.96 and f. 113), read as follows:

1. f. 70 (The Tale of King Arthur): And this booke endyth whereas sir Launcelotand sir Trystrams com to courte. Who that woll make ony more lette hymseke other bookis of kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot or sir Trystrams; forthis was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorr, that God sendehym good recover. Amen. Explicit.

2. f. 148 (The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney): And I pray you all that redyth thistale to pray for hym that this wrote, that God sende hym good delyverauncesone and hastely. Amen. Here endyth The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney.

3. f. 346 (The Book of Sir Tristram): Here endyth the secunde boke off syrTrystram de Lyones, whyche drawyn was oute of freynshe by sir ThomasMalleorr, knyght, as Jesu be hys helpe. Amen.

4. f. 409 (The Tale of the Sankgreal): Thus endith the tale of the Sankgreal thatwas breffly drawyn oute of Freynshe which ys a tale cronycled for one ofthe trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde by sir ThomasMaleorr, knyght. O, blessed Jesu helpe hym thorow Hys myght! Amen.

5. f. 449 (The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere): And here on theothir syde folowyth The Moste Pyteuous Tale of the Morte Arthure SaunzGwerdon par le Shyvalere Sir Thomas Malleorr, Knyght. Jesu, ayede ly purvoutre bone mercy! Amen.

Another colophon occurs at the very end:

I praye you all jentylmen and jentylwymmen that redeth this book of Arthur andhis knyghtes from the begynnyng to the endynge, praye for me whyle I am onlyve that God sende me good delyveraunce. And whan I am deed, I praye you allpraye for my soule.

THE TEXT AT HAND 15

For this book was ended the ninth yere of the reygne of Kyng Edward theFourth, by Syr Thomas Maleor, Knyght, as Jesu helpe hym for his grete myght,as he is the servaunt of Jesu bothe day and nyght.10

Of the five colophons which mention the author by name, the last, which alsodates the book in the ninth year of Edward IVs reign, is witnessed only byCaxtons edition, since the last quire (as well as the first gathering) of theWinchester manuscript is lost. Professor Field considers Malorys colophons tobe of the greatest historical importance.

It is the criteria that the Morte provides, that its author was a knight and a pris-oner between March 3, 1469 and March 4, 1470, that establish [the authors] iden-tity. . . . Thomas Malory of Hutton, like his namesake from Papworth St. Agnes,was not a knight, and so not the author . . . No-one but Sir Thomas Malory ofNewbold Revel could have written the Morte Darthur.11

So Field establishes the hypothesis which is the cornerstone of his argument:that in the ninth year of Edwards reign, Malory was simultaneously an author, aknight and a prisoner.

The most famous objection to the Warwickshire knights candidacy, and toProfessor Fields canon of probability, long remained that of William Matthews,as argued in The Ill-Framed Knight:

. . . Le Morte Darthur could not have been written without the aid of a consid-erable library. So the question must be asked: how could Malory have been aprisoner and used such a library? Had his incarceration been of the kind thatCharles dOrleans enjoyed a few years before one spent in various countrycastles, with freedom enough to carry on a couple of love affairs and to writeabout them in a sequence of virelays and ballades there might be noproblem. But Malory was in Newgate, it is claimed.12

Nor, for sundry well-documented reasons flight risk, massive debt, and aviolent disposition among them can we be sure that the Newbold RevelMalory was in one of Newgates comfortable upper cells, the prerogative of richand well-connected inmates. Anything else would have meant languishing in anovercrowded, disease-ridden prison with criminals and traitors.13 In addition,Matthews argues, Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel would have been aboutseventy years of age in the ninth year of Edwards reign: bare survival, let alonewriting a thousand-page book, might well have been impossible in thesecircumstances.14 Matthews suggests instead that a Sir Thomas Malory of HuttonConyers, Yorkshire, was the only Malory situated close enough to the rightlibrary that of Jacques Count of Armagnac (143377) to have translated theFrench texts represented in the Morte. It was while imprisoned near Bordeaux,

16 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

10 Works, p. 1260.11 Life and Times, pp. 345.12 The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1966), pp. 523.13 Ibid. p. 59.14 Ibid. p. 73.

Matthews suggests, that Malory had access to the volumes which he translated.Rather than rehearse Professor Fields effective reasons for rejecting this daringsupposition,15 I will go on to suggest a few others.

With regard to source availability, Matthews, interestingly, neutralizes hisown objection that a large library was the sine qua non for Malorys task. WhenMatthews (rightly) directs our attention to specific libraries and specific kinds offifteenth-century text production, introducing us to Jacques dArmagnac, heshows that Jacques library included three copies of the complete Vulgate cycle(that is, three large single-volume books containing LEstoire del Saint Graal,Merlin, Lancelot, Queste del Saint Graal, and Mort Artu), four copies of the proseTristan, and two copies of Palamede, among other Arthurian works. In 1470,Matthews tells us, Jacques scribe Michel Gonnot of Crozant completed work ona great manuscript which Matthews calls the nearest parallel to Malorys workamong all the manuscripts of medieval romance. Michels book, now BN fr. MS122, was a single-volume (of about 1,100 folios) compilation of Arthurianromances drawn from his masters immense library. The books objective,Matthews writes, was to encompass the whole body of Arthurian romancewithin one frame which had its own individuality:

This was achieved by completeness of coverage of the material represented inArthurian and Tristan prose romances, and by a procedure of copying largeexcerpts taken from different texts of the individual romances and arrangingthem in sequence. In large measure, it was a procedure of conflating, antholo-gizing, and arranging; but it also involved some shortening of the excerpts, agood deal of condensation, some concentration on individual heroes, and a fairamount of disentangling and clarifying the narrative entrelacement of thecomplicated sections.16

This suggests three things. First, it tells us that this kind of compilation was ahistorical category of bookmaking for which there existed a market in thefifteenth century, a kind that blurs the Vinaverian distinction between inter-laced single-romance and anthology of romances. Secondly, it suggests thepossibility not friendly to Matthews own argument that Malory was trans-lating not from a massive library but from a single-volume compilation such asMatthews describes, rendering the project much more likely of success (for onein or out of jail). Thirdly, it allows for the possibility that the unlacing of theentrelacement, which, following Vinaver, we usually attribute to Malory and hisjob of separating out the tales, might have been performed at an earlier stage inthe transmission: not in the transmission from French into English, that is, butfrom various single-romance manuscripts into a Gonnot-style compilation.

Matthews other objection, that Malory was too far advanced in age to beginand finish so lengthy a translation, has been effectively put to rest by the subse-quent researches of Field, who persuasively puts Thomas Malory of NewboldRevels birth- date between 1414 and 1418 (rather than the traditional c. 1396),putting him in his early fifties when the Morte was written.17

THE TEXT AT HAND 17

15 Life and Times, pp. 2535.16 The Ill-Framed Knight, pp. 1456.17 Life and Times, pp. 54ff.

A theory not voiced of late, but which remains neither impossible norimprobable, is that of Richard R. Griffith. Adopting the same chief criterion asMatthews (i.e. source availability), Griffith, in the compelling 1981 article TheAuthorship Question Reconsidered,18 finds the most likely author to be theThomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire. Like WilliamMatthews, the value of Griffiths argument lies not in the banishment of uncer-tainty as to biographical data. Indeed, Griffith resurrecting the candidature ofthe apparently unknighted Cambridgeshire man, originally suggested by A. T.Martin in 1897 must knight his candidate by means of a wonderfully imagined(though, strictly speaking, not impossible) historical fiction.19 What Griffith doesoffer us, analogously to Kim and Radulescu, is a way to liberate historicalMalory criticism from having to have a single protagonist; specifically, he locateswith precision the milieu in which Malorys project, and others like it, flourished.

Griffith argues that, after William Matthews had attacked them in TheIll-Framed Knight, most arguments in support of the Newbold Revel knight laydemolished, leaving only Kittredges original assertion that this candidate wasthe only Thomas Malory living in the ninth year of Edward IVs reign with rightto the title Sir. Griffith, in turn, continually forces the nomination of theWarwickshire man back to that same square inch of turf. More helpful, Griffithreasoned, would be evidence linking the book not to a name, but to a set ofcircumstances in which such a project could have been undertaken. Griffithsown research into Martins forgotten candidate outlines just such a set of circum-stances. Most compellingly, Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes owned prop-erty adjacent to that of the Woodville family, that is, the household of RichardWoodville (or Wydville), 1st Earl Rivers, and his wife Jacquetta St Pol (thewidow of John, Duke of Bedford). This households library, Griffith finds,contained most of the French books sent home by Bedford when regent ofFrance, whose texts included, in one form or another, all of Malorys Frenchsource material. To judge by its character, the Bedford-Woodville library maywell have contained not only a single-volume redaction of Vulgate material, butalso the English poems Malory used. If Malory was not working from a compila-tion such as Gonnots, he certainly needed access to such a library. That Malorywould have had access to this library is suggested to Griffith by his likely famil-iarity with the younger Woodvilles, his contemporaries Anthony (Lord Scales,2nd Earl Rivers) and Elizabeth (later Edward IVs queen).20 Anthony, indus-trious courtier, benefactor of Caxton and translator of French texts, is rightlymade much of in Griffiths article as the likely patron of Malory, and a profile ofthe 2nd Earl Rivers here would not be out of place.

This Woodvilles life was, from quite a young age, bound with that of EdwardIV, whom he first met when Edward was in Calais planning his 1461 invasion. In1464 Anthonys sister Elizabeth became Edwards queen; this was the beginning

18 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

18 Aspects of Malory, pp. 15977.19 For the much-disputed 1471 inquisition post mortem which names Sir Thomas Malory,

Miles, see Matthews, Ill-Framed Knight, p. 158, n. 1; Griffith, Authorship Question, in Aspectsof Malory, pp. 1756; and Field, Life and Times, pp. 1324.

20 See also Barbers Malorys Morte Darthur and Court Culture under Edward IV, ArthurianLiterature XII (1993), pp. 13355.

of that Woodville ascendancy which many contemporaries (as have modernhistorians) viewed with such distaste. Anthony rose quickly, being made aKnight of the Garter and granted the lordship of the Isle of Wight. In 1477 hewas made governor to the Prince of Wales, and put in charge of the youngerEdwards education. As to that education he had a specific mandate from theking. The Prince was to be virtuously, cunningly and knightly brought up. Itwas further provided that

noe man sytt at his boarde but such as shal be thought fit by the discretyon of thesayd Earl Rivers and that then be reade before him, such noble storyes asbehoveth a Prince to understand and knowe; and that the communicatyon at alltymes in his presence, be of vertu, honor, cunnynge, wisdom, and deedes ofworshippe, and of nothing that should move or styrre him to vyces.21

This directive being given to Anthony Woodville marks a clearly legible conflu-ence of royal practice and chivalric reading. As such it is not only an index of agiven literatures propaganda content though it is that but it is also an indexof specific relations between Edward and his family, and between Woodvillesown family and the kings. The Woodvilles were inveterate social climbers,almost all of them (including Anthonys father) marrying upward. The extent towhich they were regarded as parasites by many of their Yorkist in-laws is ofconsiderable historical interest. For example, if the Woodvilles rose with Eliza-beths marriage to Edward, it was they, as Charles Ross has observed, whobrought about the destruction of Edwards dynasty. Even as Edward crowdedhis court with Woodvilles, they were construed by his blood relatives as theenemy within; after his death they were treated accordingly by Edwardsyounger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester.22

On the other hand, Anthony Woodville had things to recommend him, evento those who, such as Domenico Mancini, had little affection for the Woodvillesas a family. Anthony was, according to the Italian visitor, a kind, serious andjust man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life. Whatever his prosperity hehad injured nobody, though benefiting many. Sir Thomas More called him Vir,haud facile discernas, manu ne an consilio prestantior (a right honourable man,as valiant in hand as politic in counsel); Commynes said he was un tres gentilchevalier (a very noble knight).23 He also knew how to fight. His joust with theBastard of Burgundy at Smithfield (1467) is well known: it ended with the twoon foot swinging axes with such violence that Edward had to intervene.24

THE TEXT AT HAND 19

21 Gloucester Annals, in C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature of the Fifteenth Century(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913; repr. New York: Burt Franklin Bibliographical andReference Series No. 37), p. 357; Philippe de Commynes, History, trans. Thomas Dannet, ed.C. Whibley (London: 1896, 1967), vol. I, p. 78; S. Moore, General Aspects of LiteraryPatronage in the Middle Ages, The Library, 3rd ser., no. 4 (1913), pp. 36970.

22 Edward IV, pp. 84103.23 Dominico Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard III, trans. and ed. C. A. J. Armstrong, 2nd edn

(Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1984), pp. 679; Thomas More, History of Richard III, in TheComplete Works of Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press,1963), vol. II, p. 105; Philippe de Commynes, Mmoires: The Reign of Louis XI, 146183, trans.Michael Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 321.

24 Robert Fabyan, Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811) p. 656.

Killing the Bastard, anyway, would have defeated the purpose of his visit, whichwas to arrange the marriage of Margaret of York to Johns brother Charles (theBold), future Duke of Burgundy. In a joust on the occasion of that wedding inJune 1468, Woodville broke eleven lances with Adolf de Cleves. As the calcu-lated use of chivalric pageantry25 such jousting suggests the conscious blendingof art and politics. Woodville had taken a part in the translation of romance intoa functioning reality; at the same time, he helped bring Burgundian mannersinto English usage.

A better co-conspirator for William Caxton would be difficult to imagine. Itwas Caxtons own years in Burgundy that formed his own taste for chivalricliterature and introduced him to the printing press. His project in Englandwould take the shape largely of translating French courtly literature of aBurgundian cast into English. It was just after Woodvilles appointment asgovernor in 1477 that Caxton brought out Anthonys translation from the Frenchof the Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophres, a production whose didacticism andappeal to Chaucerian translatio set the aristocratic tone for all of Caxtons publi-cations. Griffith finds in Woodville a very likely patron for Malory.

Elegant as Griffiths hypothesis is, its utility rests on a number of assump-tions. As Carol Meale points out, some fairly basic questions must be asked atthis point:

For instance, what justification is there for assuming, first, that the French librarydid remain intact after Bedfords death, and that it did pass to AnthonyWydville? Secondly, can we be sure that there was no comparable collection ofpotential source materials in England at the time? Thirdly, is it reasonable toassume that, in the context of fifteenth-century England, Malory would have hadto rely on either the motivation and/or the resources offered by a patron in orderto compose his work?

Such answers as are available to these questions do not simplify matters, andmost evidence points to a piece-meal, and haphazard, fragmentation of thecollection after the Dukes death in 1435.26 This is not a dead-end, however.Whatever their point of origin, and whoever handled them, the books in theWoodville library were the right kind: one of them was the Arthurian miscellanybequeathed by Richard Roos to his niece Alianor hawte. That book (now BL MSRoyal 14.E.III) contains a Queste, an Estoire and a Mort Artu.27 Furthermore,Anthony Woodville was an active reader and translator of chivalric and aristo-cratic texts. Studies of Woodvilles prose and translation style, in fact, revealquite remarkable affinities with Malorys own: in her edition of the Body ofPolicye, the anonymous translation into Middle English of Christine de PisansLivre du corps de policie, Diane Bornstein argues tentatively but persuasively thatthe likely translator was Anthony Woodville.28 Among the many pieces of

20 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

25 Edward IV, p. 95.26 Manuscripts, Readers, and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century England: Sir Thomas Malory and

Arthurian Romance, in Arthurian Literature, IV (1985), pp. 93126; 96, 99.27 Ibid. p. 103.28 Diane Bornstein, ed., The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisans Livre du Corps de

Policie, from MS C.U.L. Kk.1.5 (Heidelberg, 1977), pp. 316.

evidence she offers including the suitability of this text for the youngerEdwards education the most compelling is her comparative analysis of thetranslation styles of the Body of Policye and that of Woodvilles Dyctes or Sayengis.Both English versions succeed to a degree rare among fifteenth-century transla-tions in rendering French into elegant and idiomatic English prose.

. . . by the standards of the time, he does not use a highly Latinate vocabulary. Thecomplexity of the work is syntactic rather than lexical. Although the syntax is tooinvolved by modern standards, it is controlled. These are the same features thatare found in the Body of Policye. In discussing his method of translation [in theprologue to his Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres] Woodville states that heremained close to the meaning and vocabulary of the original. The statementalso describes the method of the translator of the Corps de policie.29

Whether or not she is right about Anthony being the translator of the Livre decorps de policie, Bornstein places that translation in the same school of transla-tion as Woodvilles. To this hypothetical school Sir Thomas might seem alsohave belonged, since, as observed by Eugne Vinaver, Malory

reduces the French text into English without adding anything of substance that isnot in the text; building up an English sentence with the words selected from theFrench, translated and then arranged in a totally new way. The history of archi-tecture knows many examples of this procedure but they are much less commonin the history of prose. What they imply is the separation in the translators mindbetween the vocabulary and the syntax of the original, his respect for the formerand his relative indifference to the latter. One might go a bit further and say thatthis situation suggests that the translator, consciously or unconsciously, prefersto rely upon his own syntactical patterns and so refrains from reproducing thoseof his model.30

Whereas Woodvilles and the Livre de corps-translators syntax retained ahypotactic structure, Malorys was plainer and more linear. Each translatornevertheless proceeded by a common method: departing from the originalsentence structure of the French prose while keeping the vocabulary. The trans-lators similar method, as well as the nature of their subject matter, may point, ifnot to Woodvilles patronage, then at least his literary acquaintance with Malory,possibly through Caxton.

It is not difficult, then even as we heed Carol Meales skepticism to seeMalorys Morte as a mediate result of the Woodville-Caxton collaboration.Whether Malory used a series of single-volume romances or a fifteenth-centuryanthology of Arthurian material, even a distant association with someone likeWoodville who knew books and could get them would be a significant factorin the Mortes production. Richard Griffiths argument establishes, at least, thatMalorys book benefited from Anthony Woodvilles own industrious chivalricproject.31

THE TEXT AT HAND 21

29 Ibid., 356.30 A Note on Malorys Prose, in Aspects of Malory, p. 10.31 Life and Times, pp. 1445.

It remains to view one further piece of evidence. In September 2000 a docu-ment was brought to light by Anne F. Sutton which shows definitively that SirThomas Malory of Newbold Revel was in Newgate prison at the time the MorteDarthur, according to the final colophon, was completed. Found among therecords of the Mercers Company of London, the document shows that on20 April 1469 Sir Thomas Malory was one of twenty-one men who stood aroundthe deathbed of Thomas Mynton, gentleman, in Newgate gaol hearing his decla-ration that he would, if he lived, perform all his past promises made to SirThomas Cook and cease to vex him or harm him in any way.32 The implicationsof this document are several. First, it shows that after September 1464, the dateof the last known record of Malory as a free man in the 1460s (he is mentioned ashaving witnessed a betrothal), but before 20 April 1469, Sir Thomas, having beenexcluded from pardons in 1468 and 1470, was in all likelihood a constant resi-dent of Newgate. This would help explain the lack of any other record of hisactivity during that time.

The newfound document also permits a reliable historical assessment of theconditions in which Malory might have composed his book. Sutton demon-strates that Newgate then was not such a bad place. It had been completelyrebuilt in 142332 and at that time outfitted for a new supply of water. Currentregulations at Newgate are described by Sutton:

Citizens of London and honest persons, that is those of some social standingand financial means among them Malory, who as a knight-prisoner was secondafter the keeper in the list of witnesses at Myntons deathbed could procurechambers in one of the towers, with the privilege of walking on the leads andwith easy access to the privies, to the two well-lit and large halls or day-roomson either side of the chapel, to the fountain, and to the chapel itself, on the northside of the gaol. Access to the day-rooms and the chapel was particularlyvalued for recreation, and it was free to all except those accused of the worstcrimes, who were kept in basements and strongholds on the south side.33

Although Newgate still required fetters for those in debt of over 5, Malory, byFields reckoning, had by 1454 reduced his debt to 4 3s. These conditions,combined with the right to receive visitors, which prisoners of Malorys rankenjoyed, make it feasible for a long book, a translation even, to have beencomposed in Newgate.34 This seems all the more feasible in light of the possi-bility that Malory need not have had an entire library for his work, but only oneor two such compilations as were being produced on the Continent, plus anEnglish miscellany such as Robert Thorntons.

The historical narrative is thus very much sharpened, and, incidentally, thecandidacy of the Warwickshire Malory further strengthened. That narrative,

22 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

32 Malory in Newgate: A New Document, The Library: The Transactions of the BibliographicalSociety, Seventh Series, vol. I, no. 3 (September 2000), pp. 24362.

33 Ibid., p. 248.34 For a hypothetical reconstruction of the knight-prisoners writing day, see D. Thomas Hanks,

Jr, Textual Harassment: Caxton, de Worde, and Malorys Morte Darthur, in Re-Viewing LeMorte Darthur, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and K. S. Whetter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005),pp. 2747; 289.

nevertheless, is one we must still take to be a historical fiction even if a veryaccurate one.

In all the historical reconstructions we have discussed, there are not only hori-zontal gaps between instances of documentation, but vertical gaps betweendocumentation and history itself.35 The job of filling in such gaps requires thehistorian to do two things at once: to make rational, educated guesses, and alsoto reconcile events and their documentation. The first thing very few are knowl-edgeable enough to do (these scholars certainly are); the second we all tend todo automatically, when filling out tax forms, for instance. In other words, theresults are fundamentally subjective and contingent; Professor Suttons findings valuable as they are are equally so.

There is no way of writing about the life of Thomas Malory without usingyour imagination. Field, accordingly, addresses his Life and Times to readers whodo not mind living dangerously.36 But if there is a point to discovering whoMalory was, it must be to place his Morte Darthur in some meaningful relation-ship to the world in which it was produced; by produced I mean not only trans-lated and written down, but copied (at least twice) and then printed aproduction history shared at that time by only a handful of other books.

The Malory Canon

A radical change in editorial practice was made in 1868 by EdwardStrachey. Realizing that nothing could justify the reprinting of the mostcorrupt of all the old editions when the first and best was in reach, he wentback to Caxton, and his example was soon followed by H. Oskar Sommer.

(Eugne Vinaver, Works, p. ci)

The question of what, exactly, Malory did write is at the center of anotherdebate. McGann, as cited in my Introduction, contends that the answer to such aquestion must be as pluralistic as medieval authorship itself. This renders thequestion of an edition highly problematic. It is the job of textual criticism torender a text legible with accurate reference to that texts production history; butthis is a task which leads only indirectly to the appearance of an edition.Editions mediate between a texts theoretical unity and its historical diffuseness.The Morte Darthur survives (in Vinavers Works) in just such a mediated condi-tion; so do all edited medieval texts, the best example perhaps being PiersPlowman. Lee Patterson demonstrates that a composite edition (the most radicalform of editorial transmission) of that poems B-text made by Kane andDonaldson (1975) can provide an object lesson in the logic and illogic of textualcriticism:

THE TEXT AT HAND 23

35 Pattersons description of this tradition is useful: Since the results of its investigations werethus thought to be untouched by human hands, historicism thus ascribed to them an unquali-fied objectivity and explanatory power that no merely thematic interpretation could possiblyattain. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 15.

36 Life and Times, p. 1.

Apart from the sheer magnitude of its achievement, the Kane-Donaldson editionis notable for its rigorous rethinking of the questions surrounding not only thiswork but textual criticism itself. Furthermore, the editors adopt a position thathas been characterized by one reviewer as a profoundly informed subjectivity,a description with which they would probably not quarrel. At every turn in their220-page introduction they stress the priority of internal over external evidence,a procedure that has led another, less friendly commentator to describe theirmethod as editorial free choice and the edition as radical, if not revolu-tionary. In fact, what the edition represents is a profound reconceptualization ofthe whole question of what constitutes evidence, with results that show howcharacterizing terms like subjective and objective are profoundly mis-leading. This is a conclusion, however, that not even the editors make fullyexplicit.37

The composite text, however confident we are of the scholarship behind it, isthus radically unhistorical. Neither can the perfection, or the authentic state,of the Morte Darthur be envisioned as one or the other extant version withoutrecourse, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Kane-and-Donaldson-like subjec-tivity. A study of Malory by means of Vinavers editorship, that is, a study of theWorks, similarly, must also be a study of that editors own profoundly informedsubjectivity. Even as the Winchester-Caxton binary is articulated by Vinaversunique fluency with the source material, the works of Malory are massivelyreconstituted by the editors deductive sifting. Vinavers emendations inhalf-brackets ( ), for instance, which denote readings absent from Winchesterbut present both in Caxton and in a source text and which belong to Vinaversadmirable practice of making his editorship as transparent as possible tend tohomogenize all three texts, to make Ws readings more flush with, and thusgenealogically subordinate to, those of its cousins.

Despite the wide recognition of this effect, a debate over the relative merits ofC and W is conducted today largely in binary terms. That is, the Lachmannianidea of the better text persists. The locus terribilis of the Caxton-Winchesterdebate is the section entitled The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that WasEmperor Himself through the Dignity of His Hands (the Roman War), whosevariants are the most pronounced. Scholarship on these and other variants regis-ters the high sophistication, and high difficulty, Malorian textual criticismattained after 1934, especially in 1947 (Vinavers First Edition) and with thework of William Matthews in the 1960s and 70s. The chief positions in thisdebate can be summarized as follows.

Beginning with Eugne Vinavers edition based on the Winchester manuscript(Works), readers confront the difficulty of two different versions of Malorys text:that witnessed by the unique manuscript (now BL MS Add. 59678), and thatwitnessed by William Caxtons incunable of 1485. Readers are then confrontedwith the job of identifying the theoretical underpinnings of Vinavers method,that is, the criteria for his choice of W over C as a base-text; the degree ofauthority, or authenticity, granted to the base-text; and the manner in which that

24 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

37 Negotiating the Past, p. 78.

base-text is re-presented in a critical edition. Following this, contemporaryMalory critics must be clear as to what part of this question they engage: that is,whether the historical object of inquiry is the state of a no-longer-extant originaltext and the relative faithfulness to it of its offspring (beginning with the notextant first-written text and ending with C), or whether the texts bibliographicalemergence is considered to be its print-production in June 1485.

Vinaver is clear about the questions which his textual scholarship seeks to askand answer: Since the primary aim of any critical edition is a text which wouldapproach as closely as the extant material allows to the original form of thework, the real question before us is how far the material now available for thestudy of Malorys text will allow us to go in this direction. In other words, thecritic seeks to discover, not the content of the oldest manuscript, but the textsoriginal state; the difference is crucial. Whereas manuscript is historical, the text however many witnesses to it remains always an abstraction. Vinaver is wellaware of this; but his method supposes that it is possible to approach the orig-inal text from manuscript evidence, that an origin can be triangulated fromextant material. The blind spot in this method is that there can be no historicalconception of a purely original text: each layer of scribal or editorial interfer-ence which is stripped away yields yet another layer of mediation, whether it isthat of an ancient scribe or a modern editor. While it is important to creditVinavers editorial conservatism as witnessed by his critique of WendelinFoersters edition of Chrtien, a Kane-and-Donaldson-like composite of goodreadings which Vinaver described as disastrous and totally unreal38 it isequally important to recognize his tendency to refer to the damage done bycopyists.39 It is not that Vinaver was wrong, that he deliberately ignored thehistorical relevance of scribal events; rather he was asking a different question:not What can this manuscript (or incunable) tell me about the world in which itwas produced? but What is the relationship of this manuscript to the original(i.e. authentic) composition? The latter is simply the question which his ownprofound learning prompted him to ask.

By Vinavers own account, his choice of W as the more authentic Maloriantext was founded on three main convictions. First, that it was Caxton, and notMalory, who authorized the variations wherein C (especially in the Roman War)differs so widely from W. The variants lack the authorization of the texts orig-inal producer (Malory) and so are a function not of authorship, nor eventhoughtful editing, but of producing a unit of sale intended for a specific market.Second, that the copy-text Caxton used was inferior to W. Vinaver contends thatCaxtons copy text and W had a common ancestor, but that the manuscriptwhich Caxton printed was corrupt, as witnessed by Ws fuller readings and thepresence in it of all the colophons. Thirdly, Vinaver deduced from W that Maloryhad written eight separate romances, and that the printed Mortes novelisticunity the result of Cs continuous rubrics and concatenating chapter divisions was the invention of the printer. This conclusion was reached when, with W,the authorial-scribal colophons which divide the eight sections of the whole

THE TEXT AT HAND 25

38 Works, p. cvii.39 Ibid., p. cviii.

book were discovered. It was Caxtons idea, not Malorys, to publish theseworks under one general title, a title borrowed from Malorys last romance, TheTale of the Death of King Arthur.40

Vinaver saw his job then as one of de-Caxtonizing W, and said so explicitly:It is only now that the damage due to Caxtons symple connynge can bepartially repaired.41 But, as witnessed by the word partially in that statement,Vinaver took pains to qualify his idea of the original text. In practice, it was a jobof grappling with the historical limitations of the surviving material, not one oftotal restoration. As he writes in the front matter to his edition:

I have endeavored to treat the Winchester MS. with all the care due to a copywhose original is no longer extant: not to reconstruct that original in its entiretyby means of hypothetical readings, but merely to lessen as far as possible thedamage done by copyists. . . . The Winchester MS. has been adopted . . . notbecause it is in every respect the nearest to the original, but because it is so insome parts, and because as long as absolute truthfulness is not aimed at, the lesswell known of the two versions, which is at least as reliable as the other, is as fairas any choice can be.42

These comments are intended specifically to justify his edition and in them-selves make very little claim for Ws greater authenticity. After all, that it is[nearer to the original] in some parts may also be said of C. Theoretically,however, Vinavers edition promotes the value of a static, authentic text, a textat the point whereafter composition ceases to be authorial and begins to bescribal. The discovery of this text, the isolation of its infinitesimal period of exis-tence, is, as we know, full of pitfalls.

Enter the ghost of William Matthews, Exeter Arthurian Congress, 1975. In apaper posthumously delivered to the congress entitled A Question of Texts,Matthews presented the case that Vinaver had chosen the wrong base-text forhis edition, that it was Caxtons Malory which was, in every respect, nearest tothe original. He introduced the word revision rather than Vinavers omis-sion43 to describe much of the scribal for Matthews, authorial activity occur-ring between W and C: he believed the version of the Morte witnessed by thecopy-text of C, which was faithfully printed, to have been derived, at oneremove, from the text (though not the manuscript) of W. Matthews four mainreasons for supposing these things are as follows.

First, he contends that C reflects Malorys prose style at a later stage of refine-ment than does W. For instance, the suppression in Cs Roman War of the alliter-ative patterns which in W were massively carried over from the alliterativepoem seems to Matthews a specific rhetorical and stylistic move, and improve-ment, on the part of Malory. Secondly, these alterations to the Roman War repre-sent a further adaptation of the original: that from epic into romance, a mode ofadaptation, argues Matthews, generally characteristic of Le Morte Darthur, as of

26 MALORYS CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

40 Ibid., p. xxxix.41 Ibid., p. xxxv.42 Ibid., pp. viiiix, cxxi.43 Ibid., p. cii.

fifteenth-century prose romance in general. Third, the revisions witnessed by Care largely in the suppression of descriptive detail, which brought the RomanWar into greater stylistic harmony with the rest of the book.

The stylistic difference between C and W is pretty clearly the result of the reviserhaving realized that the style of W was quite out of keeping with the rest of LeMorte Darthur. So although C retains a good many phrases, even sentences,in exactly the same words as its original, it is, as a whole, written quite differ-ently. Generalizing, one might say it is written in a more modern narrativestyle, more truly prose, plainer, and simpler.44

Fourth, and most compellingly, Matthews notes that, due to the presence in C ofmaterial freshly adapted from Ws sources, the reviser,