SOURCE: Field, P. J. C. Introduction to Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, edited by P. J. C. Field, pp. 33-67. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.

[In the following excerpt, Field provides an overview of Malory's Morte Darthur, focusing on issues of authorship, structural unity, and sources.]

SIR THOMAS MALORY

Although Sir Thomas Malory lived a thousand years later than the events that gave his story its origin, not much more is known with certainty about him than about the historical Arthur. All that is certain is found in his book, mostly in the explicits (the closing words) of the eight tales that make up the Morte Darthur. In the explicit to the last tale, he tells us his name, that he was a knight and a prisoner, that he wanted his readers to pray for him, and that he finished his book between 3 March 1469 and 4 March 1470. The earlier explicits confirm all but the last of these statements, and the first explicit makes it clear that when Malory wrote it he did not expect to write anything else afterwards. The book as a whole shows that he had access to some very expensive manuscripts, that he knew French and was proud of it, and that he loved hunting, tournaments and chivalry. He once speaks, with feeling but without mentioning himself, of how an illness in prison made Sir Tristram suicidally depressed, which is probably a reminiscence of a serious prison-illness of his own. Medieval prisons being extremely unhealthy, a serious illness would not be in the least surprising, and it is characteristic of Malory that he should say nothing directly about himself: his attention is all on the story he is telling. His language suggests that he was not a southerner, but where in the Midlands or North he came from is disputed: the best opinion suggests (with reservations) Lincolnshire. His politics may have been Lancastrian. Writing under a Yorkist king who had seized the crown from a Lancastrian, he reproached Englishmen with their ingratitude to good kings (see p. 213); and one or two incidents in the narrative seem to point in the same direction, as when the traitor Mordred raises troops against Arthur in a Yorkist part of the country (see p. 217). The very guardedness of Malory's words strengthens this suggestion. But certainty is impossible: the guardedness may be common caution; there are reasons of narrative convenience that could explain the incidents in the story; and a Yorkist, or any Englishman who knew what civil war meant, might equally fear his countrymen's fickleness in politics. When Malory reproached them, the English were about to expel the Yorkists and restore the Lancastrians, and the signs may have been evident even to a prisoner.

Everything else about the author of Le Morte Darthur is even less certain. The book can hardly have taken less than two years to write, but we cannot guess when it was begun, since the writing may very well not have been continuous. Illness, freedom, loss of interest, legal processes and lack of sources may all have affected the author, and the explicit of the first tale sounds as if written when Malory was expecting some such interruption. Neither can it be assumed that the eight tales were written in their present order. They are in this order now to make up what Malory called the ‘whole book of King Arthur’, with his birth at the beginning, his death at the end, and other things in place between. Readers have generally agreed that the later tales are better than the earlier ones; but this proves nothing, since authors do not always improve with age. Moreover, the improvement is not simple: parts of the earlier tales, especially of the third and fourth ones, are among the best in the book. Malory must have read other things besides the romances that were his immediate sources, but almost the only book that can be even tentatively suggested as in this class is John Hardyng's Chronicle, a Lancastrian history completed in 1457 and reissued in the following five years in a revised ‘Yorkist’ version.

The book, then, does not reveal much about its author. But there are equally great difficulties in trying to use the author's life to explain the book. The greatest difficulty is in identifying him. Fifteenth-century records are sketchy: most men died leaving no written trace of their lives, and where there are records, what seems at first to be the career of one man may turn out to be the careers of two, and vice versa. A century of literary detective work has identified five Thomas Malorys alive at about the right time, but no external evidence has been found to connect any of them with the Morte Darthur. There may be others undiscovered, since Malory was not a very uncommon name. But fortunately the internal evidence of the book shows that its author did not come from the social class of which fewest records survive. This internal evidence also excludes two of the five known Thomas Malorys: a Northamptonshire priest, and an agricultural labourer from Tachbrook Mallory in Warwickshire. Neither of them could have been a knight; and it is probable that the labourer could not read English and almost certain that he could not read French, even if he had been interested in and able to gain access to the Arthurian manuscripts. But the other three are not so disqualified. The Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and Warwickshire branches of the Malory family each had a Thomas alive in 1469-70, though none of them is known to have led either a bookish or a knightly life. As far as the known records go, the dominant feature of their lives seems rather to have been bad luck, as the name Malory suggests (Fr. malheur = ‘misfortune’).

The first of the three was the son of a Sir William Malory, who is said to have been MP for Cambridgeshire in 1433. His main estates were at Papworth St Agnes in Cambridgeshire and at Shawbury in Shropshire, but he also held two Lincolnshire manors until 1442-3. He died in 1445. Thomas, his son and heir, was born in Shropshire and was twenty when his father died. It seems that, as was usual in the Middle Ages, the first man to get the ear of the court was made his guardian, and took control of Thomas's lands for what he could make out of them. Thomas was unable to get full possession of them until 1451, when he was twenty-five. Despite this handicap, he held a number of minor offices in local government, made connections in the London cloth trade, married and begot ten children, and performed one or two less praiseworthy exploits. Sir William, when one of his kinsmen died, had stolen an estate in Northamptonshire from the widow, whose family only managed to regain it after Sir William's death. As soon as he could, Thomas seized it back from his relatives, who only recovered it again after he died. On another occasion, he armed himself with a variety of fearsome weapons, kidnapped his parish priest, and carried the unfortunate man round the countryside threatening his life until he agreed to resign his church to Malory or forfeit £100. Despite these things, there is no record that he was ever in prison, and throughout his life and even after his death he is always referred to as an esquire, never as a knight. In deciding the authorship of the Morte Darthur, those things must offset his father's Lincolnshire manors. He made his will in September 1469 and was dead by 27 October 1469.

Of the second Thomas Malory, even less is known. His father was William Malory, an esquire of Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire, who was born in 1417 and died in 1475. Thomas was one of fourteen children, and was probably illegitimate. He is only mentioned (as far as is known) in two documents during his lifetime: a record of fines in 1444, and the Ripon Cathedral records in 1471, the latter as having cited one of his neighbours, a well-known troublemaker, before the Cathedral Chapter. Two of his brothers were probably killed fighting for the Lancastrians. If Thomas joined in, it would have increased his chances of imprisonment or knighthood or both, but there are no other grounds for suggesting that he was ever a knight or a prisoner.

The third Thomas Malory was certainly imprisoned—though perhaps at the wrong time—and knighted, and in the present state of knowledge this must make him the favourite for authorship. He was the son of John Malory, an esquire whose not very extensive lands centred on Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, and who was Member of Parliament for that county five times from 1413 to 1427. The first record of Thomas connects him with the war that was being waged between England and France from 1337 to 1453. In 1414, Thomas enlisted with Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, to serve with one lance and two archers in his retinue for the siege of Calais. Beauchamp, who was famous throughout Christendom as a pattern of chivalry, spent much of the next twenty-five years in Normandy fighting a war of skirmishes and sieges against the French. Where Malory spent these years is not known. He must have inherited the family estate when his father died in 1433-4, and in 1439 he reappears as a respectable country landowner with a growing interest in politics. He took a mortgage on some of his brother-in-law's lands, was knighted, acted as a parliamentary elector, and witnessed documents in a neighbouring family's land settlement. A discordant note was sounded in 1443: he was charged with wounding and imprisoning Thomas Smythe and stealing his goods, but the charge apparently fell through. In 1445 he became Member of Parliament for Warwickshire, and in this and the following year served on a parliamentary commission to assess tax-exemptions for the impoverished towns of the county. He may have married about this time, because his son Robert was born in 1447-8. In 1449 he acquired outright the lands that had been mortgaged to him, and in September of that year the Duke of Buckingham, who had been on the earlier commission with him and who controlled the constituency of Bedwin in Wiltshire, had Malory elected to parliament for that borough. To a background of serious unrest in the country, which was eventually to turn into civil war, parliament met in November and December, and dispersed for Christmas on 17 December.

With the new decade, Malory's life, for no known reason, underwent a sudden and startling change. On 4 January 1450, he and 26 other armed men laid an ambush to murder his patron Buckingham, at Coombe near Newbold Revel. This was followed by many other crimes, or at least many very well-supported allegations of crimes. He seems to have behaved himself while parliament was in session again in London, but it was adjourned to Leicester in April, and the later charges accused him of committing rape and theft and extortion around Newbold Revel from May to August.

Despite this, when a new parliament met in September 1450, Malory was returned to it as the Member for Wareham in Dorset, which was controlled by the Duke of York. York needed experienced parliamentary help against the government, and Malory needed a protector. Although a warrant was issued halfway through this parliament for his arrest ‘for divers felonies’, he may have attended parliament until it was dissolved in May. A few weeks later, he and his accomplices were stealing cattle in Warwickshire. While Buckingham was trying to catch up with him, Malory raided Buckingham's hunting-lodge, carried off his deer, and did an enormous amount of damage. He was arrested and imprisoned at Coleshill, but two days later swam the moat and escaped. He then twice raided a nearby abbey with a large band of men, breaking down the doors, insulting the monks, and stealing a great deal of money. He was charged with nearly all these crimes at a court at Nuneaton, over which, disregarding his own involvement, Buckingham presided. Malory may still have been free, but by January 1452 he was in prison, in London, where he spent most of the next eight years, waiting for a trial that never came.

Patient waiting was not in Malory's character. During 1453, when the first battle of the civil war took place, and the country was polarising into the York and Lancaster factions, he seems to have escaped again—this time perhaps by bribery—and been recaptured in the Midlands. When the Duke of Norfolk's men bailed him out for six months in 1454, he joined an old crony on a horse-stealing expedition across East Anglia that ended in Colchester jail. From here he escaped again, ‘using swords, daggers, and halberds’, but was again recaptured and sent back to prison in London. After this he was shifted frequently from prison to prison, and the penalties put on his jailers for his secure keeping reached a record for medieval England. During Henry VI's insanity, Malory was given a royal pardon by the Lord Protector, the Duke of York. But this was the lowest point in his fortunes: the courts refused to accept his pardon, he was twice sued for small debts he could not repay, and he did not even get beyond the walls in the attempted mass-escape from Newgate prison in 1456. Soon after it, he was moved to another prison. However, late in 1457 the Earl of Warwick's men bailed him out for two months, and he seems to have been free again briefly in 1459. He was moved to a more secure prison when the Yorkists invaded in 1460, but after they had expelled the Lancastrians he was freed and pardoned. He seems never to have been tried on any of the charges brought against him.

The new decade looked more promising for Malory. He repaid the attentions the Yorkist lords had given him when he was in prison by following them north in 1462 to the siege of the castles of Alnwick, Bamborough, and Dunstanborough, which the Lancastrians had seized. He was over age, but he may have known more about sieges than any younger man. The castles were taken, and Malory settled down to a more peaceful life. In 1464 he witnessed another land-settlement, and in 1466 his grandson Nicholas was born. But by July 1468, when King Edward was beginning to be at odds with his chief supporters, Warwick's family, the Warwickshire knight appears to have changed sides again. Between June 1468 and March 1470, his name appears six times in lists of Lancastrians who were excluded from royal pardons for any crimes they might have committed. It is possible that he, like most of those excluded, was not in prison; but it seems more reasonable to assume that the Sir Thomas Malory whom the government wanted under lock and key was the Sir Thomas Malory who was in prison at this time completing the Morte Darthur.

Outside the prison, the balance of power shifted uncertainly. In October 1470 a sudden invasion brought the Lancastrians back, and among their first acts in London was to free those of their party who were in prison. Six months later, on 14 March 1471, Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel died, and was buried in Greyfriars, Newgate, which, despite its proximity to one of the gaols in which he had been imprisoned, was the most fashionable church in London. On the day of Malory's death, King Edward landed in Yorkshire, and two months after that the Yorkists were back in power. When the administration held an inquiry into Malory's estate, the jurors testified that he had died owning nothing. In a prudent moment, the rash Sir Thomas had made all his lands over to his wife. She was left in possession of them, and he was left to rest in peace until 1547, when Henry VIII had all the tombstones in Greyfriars sold for whatever they would fetch.

‘THE WHOLE BOOK OF KING ARTHUR’

Why Malory wrote his book no one knows. (The commonest motive writers professed at the time was the Avoidance of Idleness, and a prisoner would have had plenty of time on his hands.) But once he had taken his decision, he faced problems very different from those of a modern novelist. Just as medieval history is unexpectedly like romance, so medieval romance is unexpectedly like history. The greatest stories, such as those of Arthur, Charlemagne and Troy, were partly independent of their tellers: many of the ‘facts’ were so widely known as to be unalterable. The audience not only, in the classic phrase, suspended its disbelief: it believed. History itself was less certain than it is nowadays; and even the sceptical would believe that these famous stories contained some truth. The less sceptical would accept them, without debating the issue much, as being very largely true—as true as history. Moreover, even an extreme sceptic would still know, for instance, that certain components were the story of Tristram and Isolt, and accept them as that. Tampering with the accepted components, of which the plot was usually the most firmly established, was likely to destroy all three kinds of belief, and with them the audience's interest. Like a modern historical novelist, the author had to respect at least the well-known facts, and use his skill with pace, proportion, perspective, characterisation and detail to tell the story more interestingly than before. Like the historical novelist, he could omit repellent or boring parts of his story, and fill gaps from his imagination or from new sources he had found, or pretended to find.

He told a story set, like a historical novel, in the distant past. Nevertheless, it was not a historical novel, recreating a world distanced from the author's own by innumerable tiny differences, yet coherent in itself. These differences, which make up the pastness of the past, were something few people before the nineteenth century were aware of, and fewer interested in. For most people, the whole of the past was a play in modern dress. The romance writer most commonly stressed what past and present had in common and assimilated unavoidable differences, such as the paganism of Greek and Roman heroes, with the minimum of fuss, perhaps hardly noticing what he was doing. His purposes were different, to tell the story well and bring out whatever message he felt was implicit in it. This message might not be the one his predecessors had seen there. He could not end the story of Tristram and Isolt with a happy marriage, but he could present it as anything between high tragedy and pornographic farce.

If Malory had been pressed on the point, he would no doubt have said that the Arthurian stories he used contained much more truth than fiction. His remark on the ingratitude of the English to good kings implied that their ingratitude to Arthur was real; and he requested prayers for Sir Tristram's soul just as he did for his own release from prison. But even had he thought otherwise, the quasi-objective status of the story would have imposed much the same restrictions on him. He had to find the story of Arthur in ‘authorised books’ (to use his own words), and then retell it to the best of his ability. His almost-history allowed, as has been said, a good deal of latitude in style and presentation. Even the action could be altered to some extent if a particular incident were distasteful or incredible. For instance, in the French prose Tristan, Lancelot fights Tristram and gets rather the worst of it. Malory evened things up, to fit his idea of Lancelot's supreme prowess. A good many of the things that he changed he concealed by ascribing them to his French sources (for the section edited here, the Commentary says which of his ascriptions are genuine). But the overall structure of the story he could not alter: in particular, although he admired both Sir Lancelot and the Round Table, he must show the Round Table destroyed by Lancelot's misdeeds.

But there were advantages as well as problems for a medieval author ambitious enough to attempt one of the famous stories of his age. An author's talents could be drawn out supremely by the difficulties themselves: by the conflict, for instance, between the inexorable situation and the sympathy he felt for a character whom he might not like or approve of in any ordinary sense, but whom his own imagination, half discovering, half creating, had made him first understand and then sympathise with. Chrétien's Lancelot, Chaucer's Criseyde and Shakespeare's Falstaff are greater than the roles they were originally intended to fill, greater even than the books they appear in. Malory likewise presents his Lancelot with a grasp of character and tragic situation that he never achieves in the less challenging story of his second knight-hero Sir Tristram. More directly, the author could be sure of his audience's interest, since the fame of the subject guaranteed quality, authenticity and a kind of truth; their knowledge of the action allowed economy of explanation and counterpoint of mood, a setting of the present against the final outcome; and the resolution of a particularly difficult puzzle of situation or character would make the more knowledgeable among them share with him a special pleasure in discovering ‘the way it must have been’. And, although a pre-existing story might contain elements that its would-be teller could neither omit nor successfully integrate into the action as he understood it—and there are several such elements in the Morte Darthur—it might also have potentialities the author could respond to and develop, but which he himself would never have been able to devise. Malory's sources give, with many discrepancies, a picture of the rise, prosperity and fall of a great kingdom. There is no sign in his book that he could have thought of this idea without prompting; but he appreciated it and developed it further than any of his sources had, and it became the master-symbol of his story of Arthur.

He began his book with incisive independence. The Vulgate Cycle was his principal source, but he cut away the whole of The History of the Holy Grail and a substantial part of the prose Marlin, and began with Arthur's conception. Merlin's magic makes this possible, and ensures that Arthur is brought up secretly as the foster-son of one of his father's vassals, to keep him safe during the anarchy after his father's death. When Arthur comes of age, he proves himself the rightful king by drawing the miraculous sword from the stone. Most of his barons refuse to accept him; and, with Merlin's advice, he fights a tough and skilful campaign against them. During a truce, he and his half-sister, not knowing their kinship, have an affair in which he begets Mordred. Merlin warns him that this incest will eventually be his destruction, but again assists him by helping him obtain the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. When the war is won, Arthur falls in love with and marries Guenivere. The Round Table is her dowry, and Arthur reorganises it as an Order of Chivalry to fight for peace and justice. The king and his knights face oppression, new rebellions, hostile magic and treachery within his family and the Order; and they lose Merlin's help when he is outwitted and buried alive by a sorceress. But, although some knights come shabbily or shamefully out of their adventures, by the end of the tale Arthur is undisputed king of all Britain.

The second tale, an adaptation of the Roman war in the alliterative Morte Arthure, takes this kingship for granted. The Emperor's messengers demand tribute of Arthur; but he, with his barons' enthusiastic agreement, defies them and invades France (himself killing, en passant, the predatory giant of Mont St Michel), and outfights the Romans. The newly knighted Lancelot particularly distinguishes himself, but all the barons fulfil their vows of support, and Arthur himself kills the Emperor in the climactic battle. He is crowned Emperor in Rome, establishes sound government there, and returns triumphantly with his knights to Britain. To harmonise the source with the rest of the book, Malory changed its tragic end, saved from death several knights who have parts to play later, and increased Lancelot's part from six passing mentions to that of a principal character, the rising star of chivalry.

The third tale sets several incidents, nearly all from the French prose Lancelot, in a frame of Malory's own making. It is the end of the Roman war, and Lancelot is in love with Guenivere. But the tale shows the growth not of their love but of his reputation. In the adventure-filled forest, force, trickery and the supernatural break without warning upon the solitary questing knight. Lancelot discovers himself sufficient to handle every kind of danger, to protect the weak, defeat the king's enemies and send a steady stream of the latter to submit themselves to Guenivere—an incomparable present. Lancelot's discovery of his own capacity to achieve difficult ideals gives the story its tone: an exultant and youthful gallantry. There is as yet nothing to set his ideals at odds: in particular, no sign that his love is more than platonic. His achievements gain him many friends—some of them past enemies—and the reputation of the greatest knight in the world.

The source of the fourth tale is almost certainly a lost English poem about Sir Gawain's younger brother, adapted by transferring much of Gawain's rôle to Lancelot. Arthur is now said to be at the height of his power, and Lancelot is his friend and most famous knight. A young man comes to ask Arthur for three boons. His first request is for a year's sustenance, which he has to work for in the kitchens. Then a girl comes to ask Arthur for help for her sister, Lady Liones, whose castle is besieged. The young man asks for knighthood at Lancelot's hands and this quest, and is granted them. The girl at first jeers at him as a kitchen-boy, but he overcomes opponent after opponent and finally Liones's enemy, all of whom do him homage. In the tale's second half, which has many inconsistencies, the hero is revealed to be Gawain's brother Gareth; his new vassals make their peace with Arthur; and he wins Liones's hand in a tournament and marries her. He avoids Gawain because of his vindictiveness, and becomes one of Lancelot's closest friends.

The fifth tale is based on the French prose Tristan, first summarising its hero's birth and upbringing. He is knighted by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, and fights a duel to decide an Irish claim for tribute. He kills his opponent, but receives a poisoned wound that can only be cured in Ireland. He goes there incognito, and Isolt, who is being wooed by Palomides the Saracen, cures him. They fall in love, but Tristram is recognised and banished. Mark comes to hate his nephew, and, hoping that he will be killed, sends him to Ireland to ask that Isolt should marry Mark. Tristram loyally does so, but on the return voyage he and Isolt accidentally drink a magic potion that makes them lovers for life. Most of the tale presents adventures in a profusion like life itself; but some themes stand out and there are elusive hints of others. The whole Arthurian world is involved, but Tristram is the main character. Despite Mark's treachery, Palomides' rivalry and Dinadan's teasing, he becomes a knight of the Round Table and Lancelot's friend. When he and Isolt have to flee from Cornwall, Lancelot gives them his own castle, Joyous Garde. Within the Round Table, ominous factions slowly crystallise round Lancelot, Gawain and Lamorak. Gawain and the other sons of King Lot of Orkney (except Gareth) murder Lamorak, and Lancelot's devoted supporters become a potential danger as more and more people suspect him of adultery with the queen. Several incidents foreshadow the Grail-quest. In one, interpolated into the Tristan from the prose Lancelot, Lancelot is tricked into sleeping with Elaine of Corbenic, believing she is Guenivere. So Galahad is conceived by the very act that tells us that the rumours of adultery are true. Tristram's consistent generosity of mind throughout the second half of the tale makes Palomides into his friend and a Christian, and Palomides' baptism ends the tale. Malory left out the last section of his source, a Grail-quest that would have been incompatible with his next tale.

The source of Malory's sixth tale is the Vulgate Cycle Quest of the Holy Grail. He follows it more closely than any other source, and the account already given of its plot (p. 30) exactly describes his tale.

The seventh tale opens with Lancelot returning from the Grailquest, and relapsing into his adultery. The tale divides into five chapters, the first two of which have a double source, the French Mort Artu and the English stanzaic Le Morte Arthur. The stories in the first part of the Mort Artu are interwoven with one another in short sections. The corresponding portion of the stanzaic Morte Arthur separates out the most important, the stories of the poisoning and of ‘The Fair Maid of Astolat’, into four alternating blocks a b a b, and omits everything else. Malory's two separate chapters complete this process, though his narrative itself generally remains closer to his French than to his English source. His third chapter, an account of a tournament, he may have invented himself. His fourth chapter, the story of the ‘Knight of the Cart,’ is a free adaptation of Chrétien's Lancelot or perhaps of the version of Chrétien's story that was incorporated into the prose Lancelot. His last chapter, about the healing of Sir Urry, he probably elaborated from another incident in the prose Lancelot. The five incidents are presented as happening one after another during about a year, each in turn endangering the secrecy of Lancelot's affair with the queen.

The eighth tale is set an unspecified time later, and begins with a sixth incident, in which the secret is discovered. This sets in motion the sequence of events that destroys both Arthur and his Order of Chivalry. The sources are again the Mort Artu and Le Morte Arthur. The French romance's narrative is less complicated here, but the English poem again simplifies by omission, notably of the Roman war and the war against the sons of Mordred. Malory not only follows it in this—the story of the Roman war he had told already—but quite often echoes its wording. In both these last tales, he handles the narrative with a masterly freedom that reveals that he understands and is in control of both what he changes and what he keeps unaltered.

The different stories of Malory's sources have become one coherent narrative, and so consistently so that it must be his deliberate creation. The first four tales form one chronological sequence, and the last four another later one. The beginning of the fifth must overlap to some degree with some of its predecessors, but Malory was inconsistent about the extent of the overlap. This and a few other contradictions within and between tales are no doubt due to the difficult conditions under which he was working. The progress of his story is revealed partly by the explicit time-references at the beginning and end of many of the tales, partly by the many references to what has happened in previous tales or will happen in future ones, and partly by reference to events that are not described at all: Arthur's wars with Claudas, Lancelot's first appearance at court and his capture of Joyous Garde. They exist in the fictional but objective world formed by the consensus of all existing Arthurian romances; and events dated by reference to them have an apparently historical solidity. The progress of the story is also revealed by the development of the action itself: the characters' changes of situation, personality and relationship, and the effect these have on the king and the Round Table. The dozen or so leading characters are followed through the story, and, where sources disagree, personality as well as action is harmonised. Lancelot's attractive and chivalrous nature draws people to him in nearly every tale; King Arthur is consistently shown as generous and honourable, despite sources that attempted to palliate the adultery by making him suspicious and violent. Hence their conflict is tragic. And the tragedy is shared by hundreds of minor characters who move in and out of the story. Many of these Malory created, by giving names to the mysterious anonymous characters the French romances abound in: names from the Vulgate Cycle or his English sources in incidents from the Tristan, and vice versa; and sometimes names from obscure romances that he may never have read, only heard of. The cumulative effect of this is the creation of a complete society, growing, flowering and decaying. The pattern of rise, supremacy and fall is universal in human experience: Malory saw it and brought it to life in the story of King Arthur.

THE MORTE DARTHUR AND THE WORLD OF KNIGHTHOOD

Part of the unity of the Morte Darthur comes from its genre, chivalric romance. As a romance, it is a story of events that are strange and heroic, and therefore interesting. The tone is varied by strategic verisimilitude in parts of the first tale and Homeric heroic warfare in the second, by folk-tale patterns of action in the fourth and the workings of a mysterious spiritual cause-and-effect in the sixth; but it remains romance.

A good deal of it is at least based on history. Throughout, the main occupation of the characters is knight-errantry. It is not quite historical knight-errantry, but history tempers the romance. In the heyday of knighthood it had been possible, if never easy, for a young and landless knight to rise to real political power by success in tournaments, or to travel to a distant country and win a principality by his sword. Most of Malory's sources were written at or shortly after this time, and the endless quests they contain reflect these possibilities, and sometimes show flashes of real political insight. In this respect, the knightly class of Malory's day was justified, at least as far as its own members were concerned, in sharing the widespread medieval belief that the past was much like the present, but better. Success in tournaments might still bring popularity and influence at court, but poor knights could not afford to take part. A very successful soldier might still win a title, power and lands; but with greater difficulty, and from beginning to end he would be more in the power of the king than his predecessor had been in the power of his liege-lord. Nevertheless, Malory's romance shows a part of early medieval life that had survived in attenuated form into his own time, and to this he added much from his own age, making—no doubt unconsciously—a mixture that is of no one period. For instance, he sees the Round Table as a late medieval institution, an Order of Chivalry. It has the distinctive attributes: devotion to the sovereign, a fixed number of knight-companions as members, regular meetings and statutes that the companions were sworn to observe. Arthur promulgates these when he reorganises the Round Table, and those then mentioned are largely concerned with practical justice and keeping the peace. They strongly resemble fifteenth-century Ordinances of War (standing orders for armies on campaign), such as those issued by Henry V for his wars in France. We learn in passing that the companions have to swear not to fight one another—a common feature of fifteenth-century brotherhood-in-arms.

The Morte Darthur has occasional even closer correspondence with particular historical events—but it is not a political allegory. Nor is it a set of examples showing how a country should be run—such a book would have been unthinkable at the time without, for instance, an extensive treatment of flatterers. It is a romance, made up mainly of elements from, but not intended to be a picture of, everyday medieval life. Romance naturally contains much that is at or even beyond the limits of common experience. Surprising things happen, some of them magical or miraculous. But there are limits to what can happen. The powers that produce supernatural effects are themselves apparently subject to rules, although the powers and the rules, and their relationship to fate and providence, all remain mysterious. Lancelot's cure of Sir Urry may be magic, the automatic consequence of his prowess; or it may be a miracle, the result of divine intervention in nature. Some of the characters understand something of these forces, and use them, both for and against Arthur's knights. But the knights (like the reader) know these forces only by particular commands, visions and prophecies, and they cannot use them at all: their achievements are the product of their chivalry alone. The actions the rules dictate may often be odd and unkind, but enormous unknown consequences depend upon them. Before Arthur is taken to Avalon, his sword Excalibur must be thrown back into the lake from which it first came, even at the risk of the king's life. Why this is necessary is not explained, and the king himself may not know. Arthur is conveyed to Avalon by queens powerful in the supernatural sphere who were previously enemies, and this hints—but no more—that some ultimate reconciliation is taking place between the deepest and most conflicting forces of Malory's world.

Like the events, the characters of Malory's world also tend to extremes. Strong sudden passions often make his knights outstandingly heroic or wicked, and sometimes both by turns. Pellinore defeats Arthur in a fight, and then tries to kill him in case Arthur should hold the defeat against him; but Merlin, who speaks with authority, shortly afterwards calls Pellinore the worthiest of all the Knights of the Round Table. The knights' lives are simplified by the omission of administrative responsibilities and (usually) of pressing need for money; and by the absence of peasants, lawyers and merchants. The Knight is reduced to his essence, the fighting-man able and perhaps willing to fight for land or reputation or justice; and, within the Order of Knighthood itself, the Knights of the Round Table are sustained by their companions in an active Order of Chivalry that comes closer than any historical one did to the professed aims of such Orders.

Paradoxically, the literary effectiveness of this world comes largely from its exaggerations and limitations, from its conspicuous avoidance of ‘naturalism’—the literary reproduction of common experience and nothing else. It is because the knight's activities in chivalric romance are limited in variety and slightly unreal that they are a ready symbol of any man's activities. Romance is selective even within the range of activities of the historical knight-errant. Its knight is a man on horseback, dominating nature yet part of it. He follows his quests alone, with such courage, perseverance and loyalty as he can muster against unpredictable obstacles. He may have a particular objective, or he may simply be looking for what chance will bring; but at any time events may force him to show by his actions what he really is, with no guarantee of victory or life or honour. His fighting capacity makes him the potential helper or oppressor of everyone he meets, but even his fighting is partly stylised: little is seen of campaigning conditions, or loot, or experiment with different kinds of weapons, and the mess and pain of fighting are normally played down. The quest, like the voyage and the pilgrimage, is an apt symbol of any one man's way through life, and this simplification emphasises its symbolic effect, which is particularly conspicuous in the long central fifth tale, whose length and lack of any real plot make the fact of questing its dominant feature. In a similar way, since social relationships vary more than most things with time and place, the kings and lords and knights of the Morte Darthur are made by the almost complete elimination of other social classes into a distanced and universalised society. The rise and fall of a kingdom is as natural a symbol for collective human enterprise as the quest is for individual ones, and the avoidance of naturalism brings out the symbolic function of the kingdom in the Morte Darthur as a whole.

Chivalric romances embody many different kinds of chivalry, and Malory rarely pauses to expound his. This brevity suggests that he did not want to explain his ideals in abstract terms, and his sometimes confused words suggest that he could not have done so clearly if he had wished. He usually narrated actions both good and bad without comment, and his admirable characters are independent enough to behave badly at times and to voice views with which he did not agree. He was willing to praise good even when mixed with bad, and he did not always assimilate his sources perfectly. Nevertheless, throughout the Morte Darthur, judgments made in passing, the implications of words and the way the sources are altered reveal a coherent set of preferences and aversions; and paradoxically, whereas the action of his story is idealised, its ideals form a code by which men of his time could and did try to live.

The essence of chivalry, for Malory, was its unity. It is not merely that he had little taste or talent for making intellectual distinctions: he saw, almost certainly more intuitively than consciously, the various virtues as generating and sustaining one another in war, love and religion, from the most elevated nobility of mind to competence in action. He recognises individual variations—that one knight may have more stamina and another more strength, that a third may be brave but cruel—but his whole book stresses the tendency of the virtues to generate one another and to produce action in the world.

He sees chivalry in the state as naturally practical, maintaining peace and justice, and defending the state and Christendom as a whole. The importance of this brings the feudal-chivalric virtues to the fore, prowess and loyalty most of all. When Gawain is trying to find the most compressed insult he can hurl at Lancelot, he repeatedly calls him a disloyal coward. Malory rarely indicates prowess by describing particular blows, or the skills by which one knight outfights another. A knight is praised for qualities of mind, or of mind and body together, as tough, brave, agile, or energetic, and we are left to infer from this how he would fight. But the fighting these qualities produce is so important that several characters who are behaving discreditably are incongruously called ‘noble knights’ for their prowess alone. Loyalty is just as important: it is from one point of view the subject of the whole Morte Darthur, and the lack of this virtue in his own day provokes Malory to a unique outburst, his only comment on fifteenth-century politics (lines p. 213). As in the case of prowess, he spends more time on the virtue itself than on its manifestation in effective ambushes and battle-formations; implying that if the virtue is sound, the rest follows. A lord with the feudal—chivalric virtues will attract knights to his service, and men will come to be knighted by him, which will create a special bond between them. Family unity is another bond of loyalty, so strong that a whole family may feel tainted by the disgrace of one member. These factors together create powerful fellowships that can maintain the peace. Yet their very success can be dangerous: loyalty to the lord of the fellowship may be stronger than loyalty to the king. Moreover, the lords and the king himself will be to a great extent in the power of their united followers. Arthur and Lancelot are at different times compelled by their followers to continue fighting one another. To ensure this, Gawain even threatens Arthur with a diffidatio, a formal renunciation of allegiance.

Among the interdependences of the virtues, the effect of generous courtesy on loyalty and prowess is particularly clear. A reputation for not being generous nearly costs Guenivere her life. Nevertheless, Malory rather takes it for granted that the good knight will normally be generous with land and other possessions, and only picks out for special mention spectacular examples of this, as when Lancelot gives away an entire kingdom. Similarly with courtesy. He rarely describes any court ceremonial: important as the idea of the Order of Knighthood was to him, he never describes the knighting ceremony, even in its simple form; and in his seventh tale he leaves out much of the procedure of the trial by combat. What he does describe and even comment on is spontaneous but difficult acts of generosity and courtesy: giving someone else one's horse in battle, refusing to suspect a friend, taming violent passions into gentleness. When Lancelot takes Guenivere back to her husband, this, their greatest act of self-sacrifice, is highlighted by the most detailed description of ceremonial in the Morte Darthur. The four virtues that dominate Lancelot's eulogy on his friend Gareth (p. 111) are prowess, loyalty, generosity and courtesy—generosity extending to straightforward sincere behaviour, and courtesy to humility, to being ‘meke and milde’, a phrase recalling Chaucer's Knight. This is the nearest Malory ever comes to a definition of the ideal knight; and it is noticeable that the eulogy, like the book as a whole, neglects some gifts and virtues highly valued in later times: among them knowledge, intelligence, wit, good looks and the careless grace many Renaissance thinkers felt to be essential to the good life.

The fifth of the feudal—chivalric virtues, the desire for glory, is also omitted from Lancelot's eulogy, but throughout the book something like it underlies all the others. For Malory, nobility of mind—having the whole range of chivalric virtues—generates every kind of chivalric achievement, just as particular traits of mind produce particular kinds of fighting; and the key to nobility of mind is the desire for worship. But worship is an ambiguous idea, meaning ‘honour’ in two senses: noble idealism of mind and high reputation. Malory leaves the ambiguity to be resolved by the action. Sometimes the Morte Darthur presents discrepancies between reputation and merit; but more often they correspond, as no doubt would normally happen in a small family-like court whose members knew one another well. Kay is a boaster, but he deceives no one. For Malory, the chivalric virtues include the desire for worship in both senses together, for deserved reputation. Nobility of mind, that is, includes the desire to increase in worth; and therefore—since Malory sees all virtues as outgoing—to act in the most worthwhile way; and, in consequence, to be known to be honourable. The most worthwhile action is seeking out and rectifying injustice, for which the quest is both opportunity and symbol. A knight successful in quests will increase in worship (in the chivalric virtues and the reputation for them), and he may enjoy himself enormously and win lands. But his most important achievement will be establishing justice, without which the rest would be selfishness, more or less high-minded. The need for justice means that a knight ought to undertake quests; and the higher his rank, the greater his obligation.

Malory's view of love, except for what is in a single incoherent passage of explanation (see pp. 129-30 and Commentary), has to be discovered in the same way as his view of chivalry. Like the classic exponents of courtly love, he portrays sexual passion as a powerful arbitrary force, difficult to resist but impossible to conjure into existence if it will not come of itself. But after that, his view and courtly love diverge. Love takes many forms, some neither beneficent nor admirable. It can inspire great feats of chivalry, but it can also destroy virtue, sanity, happiness and life itself. It drives Morgan le Fay to the attempted murder of her husband and brother, keeps Tristram at home during the Roman War, and leaves Merlin ‘besotted’. Like a knight's chivalry, a lover's feelings and actions are produced by and reveal his innermost being; but the noble character may find love most destructive, just as a brave knight may be killed while a coward escapes. But widespread, various and powerful though it is, love is not universal. Some good knights are never said to be in love, and those that are seem more often to undertake adventures for the sake of justice or adventure itself than for their ladies. Despite this, love is as natural to a knight as war. Nobility of mind, Malory says, predisposes one to love, and when a noble man loves a noble woman, his character and achievements will draw her irresistibly to love him. Knights, however, sometimes find their ladies regrettably able to resist: Gareth complains to Liones that he has earned her love with the best blood in his body, and Tristram reproaches Isolt with the lands he gave up for her.

For Malory, true love is very like feudal chivalry. It has the same virtues, and resourceful courage (the equivalent of prowess) and loyalty are foremost among them. Arthur falls in love with Guenivere for her courage and beauty, and his love makes him in turn braver. Loyalty is given a special importance: in love, too, contemporary disloyalty provokes Malory to a unique outburst about his own time (the passage in which he tries to explain the nature of love). Lovers too should be courteous and generous, and the emphasis is again on spontaneous virtue in difficult circumstances. Chaucer's Squire's many social accomplishments, and the delight in ‘love-talking’ and the special vocabulary that Malory's age had inherited from courtly love, are all virtually ignored; and even beauty is mentioned surprisingly infrequently. Jantyl servyse, as Malory calls generosity and courtesy together, is real service, but one in which both lovers, not merely the man, seek to please and to obey. The lover should desire worship, but for his beloved not for himself: Isolt insists on Tristram's going to tournaments instead of staying with her, and Lancelot tries to protect Guenivere's reputation by avoiding her company. ‘True love’ will have these virtues, whereas ‘modern love’ is fickle, promiscuous and selfish, and deserves to be despised.

But true love is incomplete without another quality. If it is to become virtuous love, it must ‘reserve the honour unto God’: it must be chaste. The literature of courtly love often showed marriage as an impediment to love, or an irrelevance. Chaucer's Book of the Duchess describes at length a lover mourning for his dead mistress, and never mentions that they had been married for ten years. But in the Morte Darthur, the true end of love is marriage. Lancelot says that even an affair between unmarried lovers is shameful, a sin, and will bring the lover bad luck; and the course of the story bears him out. An adulterous affair is worse, and the only honourable course for a man who falls in love with another's wife is platonic love. The sin is graver, and Tristram's refusal to fight his mistress's husband because he has wronged him too much already shows how the shame inevitably involves the husband too. If the wronged husband is one's lord, the sin and shame are compounded. Malory disliked showing Lancelot behaving dishonourably, and presumably for that reason he used the prose Tristan instead of the prose Lancelot as the centre of his book, and told only selected incidents from the Lancelot that left Lancelot's adultery in doubt for as long as possible. This unavoidably brought Tristram's adultery into prominence instead, but that at least had Mark's viciousness to palliate it. But despite this and the fact that Tristram's was ‘true’ love, the idea that it had been adulterously consummated was so shameful that Perceval refused to believe it of so honourable a knight. Lancelot and Guenivere's affair is necessary to the last two tales; but even then, Malory only relates the act of adultery itself where the plot requires it, as in the ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode: where it does not, as when Aggravayne traps the lovers together, he casts doubt on its having taken place. As narrator he seems to feel (and as author he may really have felt) embarrassed at the diminution of Lancelot's excellence, but he could not alter the story.

In the Morte Darthur, true love that is not virtuous is wrong, and the very strength its good qualities give it may make it immensely destructive. But the real good in it makes it respectable enough for the world to turn a blind eye to it: when Tristram brings Isolt to Arthur's court, everyone speaks and acts as though Tristram were merely chivalrously acting as her escort. Such love may also be strong enough to be an education for the love of God: Malory seems to agree with Elaine of Astolat that all good love comes from God (whatever the lover may make of it later), and he says as narrator that Guenivere's true love earns her her good end. It is part of the paradox that, their true love having destroyed everything else they value, all that either she or Lancelot then has left is the honour they had previously failed to reserve to God.

Religion in the Morte Darthur is Catholic and entirely orthodox, though Malory shows no more inclination towards theological exposition than towards expounding the theory of chivalry. He accepts the theology of his sources, sometimes abbreviating their explanations; and almost the only idea he adds is his hint that even sinful true love may become part of the lover's way to God. The world he portrays is sustained by God, whose presence and mysterious purposes are occasionally revealed by miracles, visions, and prophecies. Men move towards God by grace or away from Him by sin. He may punish by death a serious sin like incest, and lovers who commit suicide know they are damned. Many medieval religious institutions appear in Malory's book, though there are no pardoners offering old pillowcases as Our Lady's veil and no parish priests excommunicating for their tithes, and though Malory's hermits (like Shakespeare's friars) can, when the plot demands, behave with a freedom that would turn an ecclesiastical superior's hair white. But the book includes popes and bishops, monasteries and chantries, the seven sacraments, the liturgy, and the Church calendar. Religion has harmonised the virtues of chivalry and love with itself. Though most of this harmony came to Malory in his sources from the experience and theological thought of earlier centuries, he extended the process, and not only in the case of chastity in love. He stressed humility in love and in chivalry; and sometimes, like Chaucer, supplemented the feudal virtues with wisdom, which he apparently understood as a practical temperateness (mesure) and prudence, which would shut Aggravayne's dangerous ‘open mouth’ and show lovers' fickleness to be stupid as well as shameful. Most of the practical disputes between feudal and religious chivalry do not arise: Arthur's wars are just, his knights do not need ransom-money, and the good knights usually manage to avoid killing anyone in tournaments, however serious the injuries they inflict. So religious and feudal-chivalric virtues reinforce one another naturally, as when a knight guilty of robbery and rape is blamed because he is breaking his knightly oath. Religion gives knighthood itself its dignity: Malory as narrator calls it again and again the High Order of Knighthood.

The Morte Darthur contains no heretics or atheists, and none of its characters thinks the virtues of war and love form a system independent of God. But for all their religious surroundings, the characters can forget God. ‘Forgetting’ does not mean total oblivion, but letting things slip to the back of one's mind: so lovers in winter ‘forget’ past kindnesses, but springtime brings them to mind again (pp. 128-9). Malory's characters are prone to forgetting: Tristram ‘almost forgets’ Isolt on one long absence, and Lancelot ‘forgets’ his promise of reform soon after the Grail-quest. Those who forget God think of their faults only in terms of shame, never of sin; they do not refer their actions to God, but try to gain reputation with the world at large, or love from one person, or their own self-respect. Lancelot does all three. They may have many real virtues—Lancelot is immeasurably better than King Mark—but they have no safeguard to prevent their virtues being distorted into vices. So Gawain falls into pride, and Lancelot and Guenivere into illicit love. God in His courtesy sends the Grail-quest, the quest for Himself, as a remedy; all the Round Table know it to be the highest of all quests, and pursue it, but few persevere. Gawain makes excuses early on, and Lancelot, who wants to want God, is unable to change himself enough to do so. He is condemned as lacking loyalty (stabilité) towards God, the virtue Malory prized above all.

A vivid awareness of God makes progress in loving him and so in the other virtues possible. Awareness of God may come from ‘great goodness’, as in Galahad or the hermit in the ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode, or from repenting sins by seeing their consequences. Gawain is brought out of his pride and Lancelot and Guenivere out of their adultery by the disaster their sins cause, which brings out in each an objectivity and selflessness far beyond what would (if only it could have been shown earlier) have averted the disaster itself. The awareness of God puts one into a service as personal as that of a human lord, and demands the same virtues, but in different form. Lancelot's prowess is shown again in the wholeheartedness of his life of penance, and generous courtesy in the hermit who gives away all his great possessions for God; but the ‘worship’ sought is entirely supernatural, and of its nature shuns fame. God's service is most perfect in the monastic life, but is also possible in war. Both, though they may demand the willing acceptance of suffering as penance for sin, are active: the one in performing the liturgy and giving hospitality to travellers; the other in crusading to the Holy Land. To those whose love becomes perfect, God responds with His own generous courtesy, as can be seen in the angelic escort that receives Lancelot's soul.

STYLE

The narrative style of the Morte Darthur is based on speech, a business-like ‘paratactic’ prose predominantly of straightforward declarative sentences and clauses, joined by conjunctions such as and, but, and then, with little antithesis, parallelism, or subordination of one element to another, and usually in simple past tenses. Parataxis is common in medieval English prose: most literature was then read aloud, and a more complicated style would have been difficult for listeners to understand fully. Because parataxis can recount competently a series of events happening or things seen one after another, it was much used in English chronicles of the time. Like those of the spoken language, Malory's sentences sometimes repeat words to remind the hearer of the subject when it is not logically necessary, and omit words that logical completeness would demand but that the hearer can supply without confusion. Like that of speech, Malory's grammar is occasionally careless in small ways, in, for instance, sequence of tenses, number and gender. Very occasionally this becomes ambiguous or even misleading, most often when two clauses appear in an order different from that of the events they describe. Malory's diction is as straightforward as his syntax, making powerful use of ordinary words and phrases (often phrases in the same kind of common use as proverbs), and sparing in the use of adjectives.

Malory never uses the elaborate figures of speech, heavy alliteration, or polysyllabic French or Latin-derived words that medieval formal rhetoric recommended for an impressive style. He does use a number of French words, many of them short, but, except for a very few copied without thought from his sources, they were a natural part of the English spoken by the knightly class he belonged to. His style, however, has a kind of instinctive rhetoric: a tendency towards forceful brevity of expression and towards emphasising important points by unobtrusive alliteration and patterns of repetition, particularly the use of pairs of synonyms such as ‘prayers and orisons’, and the thematic repetition of a word or phrase throughout a whole passage. Some words and phrases, such as ‘out of measure’ and ‘noble knights’ accumulate special associations and acquire significance by repetition throughout the whole book.

In storytelling, narration and description are opposite poles: the more a writer describes, the more slowly his story will proceed. Physical causality is relatively unimportant in Malory's story, and he gives very little physical description. He regularly omits circumstantial detail and occasionally even leaves the reader to assume part of a sequence of actions. Most of his story is told in direct narration. The adjectives, descriptive phrases, and formal similes are few and taken from ordinary common speech. The story highlights chivalry and characterisation, and characters will be described as noble, and actions and speeches reported to show what their nobility consists of; but the reader must nearly always imagine their appearance for himself. A few physical details are mentioned because they are strikingly odd, or because they change the course of events, like the scar by which the hermit recognises Lancelot. It is only at climactic moments—and not all of those—that the physical scene is visualised, whether in some striking symbolic aspect or in a full description. This is another side of the practical speech-derived style of fifteenth-century chronicles.

Because the description is limited, the story moves fast. But Malory controls its speed with a sense of pace worthy of a skilful film-director. Repetitions, description and dialogue in different ways slow the action and provide touches of emphasis, and a break-and-link technique adds suspense at the ends of incidents, notably on page 160 and page 211. Allusions to events not recounted in the narrative give the story an extra dimension, a context and a past, as is particularly evident in the ‘Healing of Sir Urry’. These allusions can also hold and stress a desirable image for a moment, as in the link passage between the seventh and eighth tales. This catches Lancelot characteristically on quest, at the zenith of his and King Arthur's fame, in the moment before the peace and order of the kingdom breaks down, and so strengthens the contrast between what precedes and what follows.

In the dialogue of the Morte Darthur, syntax and diction are very much like those in the narration, except that in dialogue the syntax is sometimes a little more complicated and the diction a little more colloquial, so that the characters seem more vivid than the narrator. Expression again shows no sign of formal rhetoric; and, as in real-life speech, is forceful rather than precise. But again pace and emphasis are skilfully controlled, partly as in narration and partly by means special to dialogue, such as interjections, oaths, and vocatives. These means can slow down the pace of a speech and make it deliberate and dignified. And across the whole book, key phrases build up a cumulative effect: Lancelot's reputation as ‘the best knight of the world’ is established largely by the repetition of that phrase by the other characters. In many speeches, the repetition of words reveals strong feelings, but, especially in emotional speeches of explanation, the logical structure is often less complete than the patterns of words. General judgments about life are restricted almost entirely to proverbs, usually spoken by the characters rather than the narrator, and often helping to instil courage or an unembittered endurance of suffering. Proverbs are the product of collective rather than individual experience, and they act as a reminder that Malory's characters are facing the same difficulties and defeats as those who used the proverbs before them. (Particular instances of these traits of style are noticed in the Commentary.)

Malory's dialogue is not much differentiated by the rank or temperament or place or origin of speakers. Different moods are finely distinguished, but different men in the same mood speak in the same way, even in the same words; and the different social classes have the same linguistic usages—even with the class-distinguishing pronouns ye and thou. Ye was once merely the plural pronoun and thou the singular; but it came to be thought courteous to use ye and you to one's superiors, and then later to one's equals. By Malory's time, thou and thee were used to God in prayer, to a close member of one's family (especially at emotional moments), and to a social inferior. A king could call a knight thou—though Arthur normally uses ye to his own knights—but for one knight to use it to another was to insult him by demoting him. So knights who were fighting or about to fight call one another thou—Lancelot's unique use of ye to Gawain during their two fights at Benwick (pp. 205-11) is a measure of his courtesy, his love and respect for Gawain, and his unwillingness in conscience to fight. Mellyagaunte's carter adds insult to injury by refusing Lancelot a lift and then calling him thou. The usages can be mixed: when Guenivere calls Lancelot thou, she is both insulting him and reminding him of her higher rank. Arthur apparently calls Urry thou partly because he is a stranger and partly because his injury brings out in a healthy man a sympathetic superiority such as he might feel to a likeable but not-yet-grown-up cousin: when Urry recovers, the king calls him ye. But Arthur's use of thou to the dying Gawain and Ector's over Lancelot's body are the simple product of intense family grief.

Very occasionally a particular phrase will be so much the product of one temperament as to be unattributable to any but one speaker, or a phrase from war or hunting, religion, or law, will suggest a character's occupation, as when the Bishop of Rochester distinguishes smoothly between the Pope's ‘worship’ and his own mere ‘poor honesty’. But this is rare: Malory's knights do not continually discuss the details of war in military jargon. Their speech is often knightly, but for another reason. Malory says as narrator that speeches showing courage and presence of mind are knightly, and those qualities are often shown in his knights' speech by direct and forceful brevity. Knights often respond to startling news with laconic stereotyped phrases such as ‘That is truth’, and ‘I will well’, where other writers, such as those of Malory's French sources, would prefer long eloquent speeches. Knights usually avoid exaggeration and emotionalism, whatever their situation, and prefer understatement, even irony. They rarely attempt long explanations, and those explanations they do give usually show some degree of incoherence. The knights' very lack of fluency suggests an uncomplaining courage in enduring what they do not fully comprehend; and, by contrast, the few long and well-organised explanations, such as Lancelot's great defence of Guenivere, seem to be given their form by the sheer pressure of intolerable emotion. This kind of speech is appropriate to knighthood, and it is knights who speak it most often and most memorably, though other characters—Guenivere, for instance—at times speak with a terse courage worthy of any knight. Because this knightly speech embodies the essence of chivalry without the technicalities of war, it reinforces the universal symbolism of quest and kingdom: Malory's knights seem to stand for Everyman.

Every story gives its readers some impression of the kind of person who is telling it, who chose these words and this way of narration rather than that. A narrator must exist, although his character may be, by accident or design, very different from that of the real author. The pilgrims who narrate their separate tales on the road to Canterbury are very different from one another, and from the historical Geoffrey Chaucer who created them all. The narrator may break into his story to comment on it or to address his audience directly: the Canterbury pilgrims do both. But Malory as narrator rarely does either, so the main impression his readers get of him comes from the narrative itself. The simplicity of narration and description makes him seem honest and unobtrusive. If, very occasionally, a word needs now to be explained in more than one sense, its senses do not make up a pun but are meanings that were felt as one in Malory's time and that have diverged since. The simplicity of narration gives the story verisimilitude, immediacy, dignity and pathos; and it makes the story objective, standing free of the narrator and distanced by the past tenses of its verbs. Its unalterable historical separateness is reinforced by the short formulas like ‘Now turn we to so-and-so’, and ‘The French book says such-and-such’, which comprise the majority of the narrator's remarks; by the handful of longer and more individual comments on the differences between King Arthur's days and his own; and by the link passage between the last two tales, where he confesses that part of the story has escaped him.

The narrator's knowledge of his world is incomplete in other ways. The most pervasive kind of knowledge of all comes from irony in narration. Irony embodies a knowledge that the narrator shares with at least the more discerning among his audience, but which is hidden from others. Chaucer is a master of this, as is shown in his agreement that his Monk should not stay within the cloister to labour, or

How shal the world be served?

Cant. Tales, A 187

The reader shares the narrator's superior knowledge of divine realities and of the way of the world; the Monk's ignorance of how the world should really be served puts him below them. Malory's characters can be ironic towards one another, but he as narrator is never ironic towards them. His few explicit observations on the world at large are simple and usually proverbial. Behind his story lie the mysterious workings of fate or providence; but such explanation as is given of them comes mostly from the characters, both privileged ones like Merlin and ordinary knights like Dinadan. Many of them seem to know more than the narrator, whose longest appearance in person is to complain (like so many of his predecessors) that he has not been able to discover Arthur's ultimate fate (p. 226). His explanations seem even more liable to confusion than do those of his characters, though this lack of eloquence has its own impressiveness: it is incoherence that gives the ‘love and summer’ passage (pp. 128-9) its passionate urgency. Furthermore, he does not exploit a creator's omniscience about the characters' thoughts and feelings, rarely saying more than common observation could deduce; and though as author he manages his characters' behaviour with profound understanding, as narrator his generalisations about it are remarkably naïve. He appears to be not a showman, superior to his characters, but a companion on their level or a little below it, and the story's seeming independence of him gives the heroism of the characters and the tragedy of their situation an extraordinary authenticity.

What little information the narrator discloses about himself is almost all in the explicits of the various tales, where a totally different style, interlarded with scraps of English verse and French and Latin, marks a genre as different from romance as a curtain-call is from a play. In the text, except for a comment apiece on the politics and morals of his day, he actually avoids speaking about himself and his ideas, directly or by ironic implication. The nearest he ever comes to irony is his sad observation that ‘men say’—as if his contemporaries did not know it by experience—that modern Englishmen are still fickle in their loyalty to good rulers. In the progress of simple narration and laconic dialogue, with their built-in chivalric value-judgements and relative neglect of physical causality, the events are seen through the clear medium of his style: style and narrator alike are almost invisible. Yet, on his few appearances, his very limitations reinforce the verisimilitude that the story derives from its directness and its independence of him. He seems a naïve man trying to tell a plain blunt tale, who could not deceive if he wanted to; not controlling the action, but observing, suffering, and trying to understand.

TRAGEDY, MYSTERY AND TRIUMPH

Given the narrator's limitations, what Malory's characters are is necessarily shown mainly by their own words and actions; and what the characters are is to destroy them and the Round Table. The seventh tale opens with Arthur and his knights too firmly in power to be endangered by external threat; but Lancelot and Guenivere's adultery begins again. It is the major theme of the tale: the repeated risk it brings of discovery and disaster for Arthur's world, and the contradictory effects it has on the lovers, their natures tending to ennoble it, its nature driving them to act in ways unworthy of each other. At the beginning of the first episode, careless and malicious gossip is already spreading and Lancelot is torn by conflicting impulses: the selfless part of his love makes him avoid Guenivere, and his memories of the Grail make him still want to do God's will. He undertakes quests on behalf of defenceless women from this last motive, and also (we may infer) to try to compound with God for his adultery by extraordinary virtue in other respects. In consequence, Guenivere feels insecure and provokes a quarrel, which displays these and other motives. Close reading, as in many of Malory's dialogues, shows more than narrator or participants seem conscious of. Guilt and resentment drive the lovers to try to hurt each other, and their long-enduring love gives them weapons. Lancelot's are the more powerful: he has sacrificed his worship for her in the past, and may have to rescue her from the consequences of her own folly in the future. (Prescience like this, by which a character foresees or guesses much of a future disaster without being able to avert it, adds a sense of fatality to the story here and at several later points.) Unwittingly, Lancelot's arguments expose another flaw: he may have begun his present quests for God alone, but he now also thinks of them as camouflage for his adultery. But Guenivere, on even shakier ground morally, does not reply directly to his arguments. She responds instead to the wish to hurt that underlies them, and takes it as proof that he does not love her at all. Determined to hit back at whatever cost, she accuses him of every fault she can think of and banishes him from the court.

This disedifying but revealing exchange provokes Guenivere into giving the ill-fated dinner at which she is accused of poisoning one of her guests. Arthur is very shaken by the charge and by her inability to find a champion to defend her in the consequent trial by battle. As king, he is the only husband in the country who cannot fight for a wife he believes innocent. He must preside over such trials, and, if the prisoner cannot find another champion, he must see her burnt. In an excruciating situation, he acts with justice, dignity and speed: arranging the trial as the law demands, but being merciful where he can; and then trying to find a champion for her. Of Lancelot's kinsmen, Bors is nearest to him in prowess, and Guenivere asks him to fight for her. At first he refuses, because in the heat of the moment, full of resentment at her banishing Lancelot, he believes her guilty. Calmer thought and persuasion by Arthur change his mind, and he agrees to fight, though he continues to dislike her. By taking Bors's place in the battle and winning it, Lancelot is reconciled with the queen, and soon afterwards other events confirm her innocence beyond doubt.

The second episode in this tale is also sparked off by a disagreement between the lovers, though one more muted and more ambiguously motivated. Lancelot goes to the tournament at Winchester as Guenivere wants him to, but in a thoroughly resentful frame of mind. When Elayne, daughter of his host at Astolat, presses him to wear a favour of hers in the tournament, he breaks a life-long custom and accepts, telling himself that it is only a disguise. His thoughtless acceptance encourages Elayne in a passion that eventually kills her, and his disguise is so successful that his kinsmen nearly kill him. Elayne helps to nurse him back to health, and, Lancelot being what he is, her love continues to grow, although he does nothing else to encourage it. In courage and generosity and all the chivalric virtues she is his equal, and both Bors and Gawain wish that he would return her love. That would solve every problem but Guenivere's—and Guenivere's problem is something both knights want to know as little about as possible. Lancelot does not fall in love with Elayne, but Guenivere hears an account, magnified by accident and gossip, of what is happening, and is as furious as any disgruntled lover's subconscious could wish. Malory shows in little ways the suffering that Elayne feels and refuses to flinch from, but she is as stoical in pain and as unshaken by the prospect of her own death as any knight, and at first the others do not realise the damage her love is doing her. Finally, she asks Lancelot to marry her, or at least to take her as his mistress. His clumsy refusal, in which with unintentional cruelty he says every single thing he should not, precipitates her breakdown and death. Her deathbed speech is pure grief—intense but free from distortion, resentment, or self-pity. She acknowledges her love to have been ‘out of measure’, and her ability to place herself and love objectively in the divine order despite her pain displays once more her heroic quality of mind. When Guenivere hears the true story and sees the dead body of her rival, her natural generosity reasserts itself, and with splendid inconsistency she suggests to Lancelot that he should have been kinder to Elayne to save her life. Lancelot less generously gives an ambiguous reply: his explanation of why he could not is also a covert rebuke to the queen. Guenivere perseveres and apologises to him for her anger, he grudgingly accepts, and they are once again reconciled. The queen's generosity, however, has limits: in his next tournament she throws discretion to the winds and evens the score with Elayne by making him wear a favour of her own.

In the ‘Knight of the Cart’ episode, Mellyagaunte kidnaps Guenivere: he has been infatuated with her and has been shown as detesting Lancelot as early as the fifth tale of the Morte Darthur. The lovers appear to better advantage coping with the practical urgencies of rescue, particularly in contrast with the mercurial Mellyagaunte, who is quick to seize an opportunity, but sly, irresolute and incompetent. Even in his moment of triumph (p. 132), his feelings are mixed: as much resigned to danger as exulting in success. Guenivere coolly and skilfully exploits every advantage in her circumstances and her captor's character until Lancelot arrives, and then her instant sympathy for him and joy in his prowess banish thought for herself. Yet she retains her presence of mind, calmly accepting Mellyagaunte's panic-stricken surrender at one moment, and teasing her furious lover out of fighting madness at the next. Her agreement to forget the whole affair is both far-sighted and magnanimous: Mellyagaunte has made a formal unconditional surrender, and the laws of war entitle the victors to kill him out of hand if they choose. In all this, Guenivere is credibly the woman Lancelot could not stop himself loving.

But from the next morning, the narrative is shot through with ironies. Mellyagaunte finds Lancelot's blood on Guenivere's bedclothes, and concludes that it came from one of her escort, all of whom were wounded. With the same impulsive unscrupulousness that made him kidnap the queen, he now seizes the chance to hide his previous crimes by out-accusing his potential accusers, although they had not harmed him and Guenivere was his queen, his guest, and (so he had said) his love. Febrile excitement in scheming, absolute certainty that he is right, and his still-evolving plans overcome his normal cowardice, and he warns Lancelot, Guenivere's champion, that ‘God will have a stroke in every battle’, a proverb one would only expect in such desperate straits from a better man than he—from Lancelot, for instance. Yet it is the traitor who is in the right: both halves of his challenge as he first delivers it are word-for-word true; and, in taking it up, only by verbal trickery can the best knight in the world get any shadow of justice on his side. Strictly speaking, Mellyagaunte should challenge Guenivere, and Lancelot accept the challenge as her champion. By accusing Mellyagaunte of lying, Lancelot is able to manoeuvre him into wording the accusation so that Guenivere, though guilty in fact, is innocent as charged. Mellyagaunte then manoeuvres Lancelot on to a trapdoor that drops him into a prison cell, which is Mellyagaunte's idea of the way God intervenes in battles. Characteristically, however, he fails to exploit his advantage fully, and Lancelot escapes in time for the queen's trial. The shameful story of Mellyagaunte's actions embarrasses the whole court, and provokes Arthur into a single tiny lapse from his painful impartiality in the conduct of the trial. In the battle, Mellyagaunte is inevitably soon grovelling for mercy. By human standards he deserves to die: by the criminal law as the loser in trial by battle; and by natural justice because, after Guenivere forgave him a capital crime, he tried to have her burnt alive under the form of law. But Lancelot has often, as Christianity and the statutes of the Round Table alike demanded, given mercy to those who asked for it, even though they did not deserve it; and by the criminal law Guenivere, though technically innocent, deserves the death she has just escaped. Nevertheless, she signals to Lancelot to kill, and he accepts her decision. Malory gives no hint of her motives: whether Mellyagaunte has exhausted her generosity, or whether she fears what he might say later—even on his way to execution, if the king refuses to ratify Lancelot's pardon. Now Lancelot in turn uses the process of law for deliberate homicide. The law entitles him to kill the loser on the spot; but instead he relies on his supreme prowess and offers Mellyagaunte further combat at apparently ridiculously favourable odds: in fact, certain death. Consistent to the end in bad judgment and eagerness to seize any advantage, particularly an unfair one, Mellyagaunte accepts, and the lovers are once more safe.

In the last episode of this tale, Sir Urry is brought to Arthur's court suffering from wounds that only the best knight in the world can cure. Lancelot has performed several such feats in earlier tales, each time behaving as if he were prepared, for the good of the sufferer, to act on an assumption that his humility made him want to deny. In these cures, as in other ways, Galahad superseded him during the Grail-quest; but Galahad is dead. All the knights at court attempt to cure Urry, providing incidentally a recapitulation of the major themes of the Morte Darthur: Arthur's love for his knights, their past achievements, the fellowships linking and dividing them, the Grail, Lancelot's preeminence and weaknesses, and the enemies who lie in wait for him and Guenivere. All the other knights fail—even Bors, the only survivor of the three who achieved the Grail—and Lancelot succeeds; but the outcome shakes him as it never had before, and he weeps as if relieved of a great tension. It seems as if his hesitation about presumption was only part of his unwillingness to try to cure Urry: he was also afraid that his renewed adultery had made him no longer the best knight in the world, that this would prevent the cure everyone expected of him, and that that would be taken as proving the gossip about his adultery true. So he prays most urgently for a miracle to supplement the possible deficiencies of magic; and, whether by magic or in answer to his prayer, ends the tale supernaturally confirmed as still the best knight in the world.

As the seventh tale had opened with Lancelot and Guenivere's secret love, so the eighth opens with Aggravayne and Mordred's secret hate, incongruous in May, the season of new love. Their hate sparks off the tragedy; but although the narrator seems not to look beyond it, in fact almost everyone who suffers in the tragedy contributes in some degree to it; and before they die Gawain, Guenivere and Lancelot each acknowledge part of the responsibility. Hatred disguised as duty impels Aggravayne and Mordred to tell the king about the adultery, despite their brothers' counter-arguments of prudence and gratitude. Significantly, no one even mentions the possibility of Guenivere's innocence. For a third time a charge is made, and for a third time Arthur, whose generous mind had previously suppressed its own suspicions, has to act impartially, allowing Aggravayne and his kinsmen to set a trap that catches Lancelot in the queen's chamber at night. At this point, the narrator himself seems (like Arthur) to be trying, without complete success, to convince himself that the lovers might have been doing nothing more culpable than playing chess. Unlike their enemies, the lovers are commendably terse, brave, decisive and selfless: expecting to die, each still thinks first of the other. But there are stains on the shining fabric: he speaks casually of having fought for her ‘in right and in wrong’; even if they have not just committed the crime the king's knights are trying to arrest them for, they are habitually guilty of it; and when, against all odds, Lancelot escapes and gathers his friends for the now inevitable fight, Bors says that whether Lancelot had done right or wrong before, it is his duty to defend the queen now. Bors, the closest to Lancelot of all his kinsmen, does not know or want to know the truth about Lancelot's nocturnal visits to the queen.

To the news that one knight without armour has killed thirteen fully-armed ones, even Arthur first responds with admiration; but admiration is rapidly succeeded by grief, resolve and anger at what he has been forced into and those who have forced him into it. Although Gawain argues that the queen might be innocent, she is summarily condemned to death. Lancelot and his friends rescue her, but in the mêlée they kill dozens of Arthur's knights, and Lancelot himself kills his friend Gareth.

The rescue affects Arthur and Gawain very differently, yet in both the heart of the tragedy is revealed: the pain that people who love one another inflict on one another. The king speaks with the simple honesty of desolation. At the beginning of his reign he loved the Round Table second only to Guenivere, and he loved Guenivere enough to marry her although Merlin warned him of the consequences. Malory shows, as usual without explanation, the result of the years when she loved Lancelot and Arthur did not allow himself to suspect them. His Order of Chivalry had become his first love; but he still loved her. Now he has lost them both: he has had to sentence her to death, and more than twenty of his Order have deserted him and nearly forty have been killed. To make it worse, he can foresee that Gawain will put irresistible moral and political pressure on him to make war on Lancelot. From this point on, he is a broken man. In Gawain, Malory shows a violent and passionate nature shocked out of precarious emotional equilibrium. During the short while before the full impact takes effect on him, Gawain can argue with apparent cogency that what has happened cannot have happened. This is followed by physical collapse when the mental strain becomes intolerable, then by exploration of the disaster even through simple affirmation of obvious facts (‘which were two noble knights’), seeking for some kind of bearings in chaos. Then comes a solemn resolve when a new purpose, revenge, is discovered. Like falling in love or religious conversion, it seems to be imposed upon him by a force from outside himself. It seems to him to be his duty to Lancelot to kill him: hence his macabre promise not to ‘fail’ Lancelot until one or other of them is dead.

But Lancelot takes Guenivere and his uneasy conscience off to Joyous Garde, and will not fight. After months of siege, he and Gawain are drawn into an argument across the battlements. In the heat of it, truth is mixed on one side with equivocation, exaggeration, and raking up the past, and on the other with distortion, obsession, and deliberately provocative insult. Gawain's provocation is successful indirectly: Lancelot's knights force him to fight; but Lancelot, feeling continually that what he is doing is wrong, cannot bring himself to slaughter his way to the victory that is within his grasp. After this, the Pope makes peace, and Lancelot hands Guenivere back to the king, making in her defence one last superb blasphemous speech in which he cites his victory over the thirteen knights as God's testimony to her innocence. But Gawain cannot now be moved by this, or by reminders of debts of gratitude, or by generous offers of reparation and public penance for the death of Gareth. With Arthur's acquiescence, he banishes Lancelot from England and promises to follow him wherever he may go. Lancelot returns to his lands in France, divides them among his knights, leaving nothing for himself, and prepares for the attack.

The French invasion is the nadir for Arthur and Gawain. The king allows Gawain to refuse generous peace terms, and to begin the war with a campaign of devastation against civilians. In Gawain himself, the constraints put by Christianity and courtesy upon martial extremism have tragically collapsed, and the chivalrous knight regresses into a fierce warrior of the pre-feudal age, the age in which the primary social duty was revenge for slaughtered kinsmen. Lancelot's proud knights are eager to fight back; but he will not, until in the end he is compelled twice to fight Gawain himself. Both before and after these fights, Gawain's obsessive energy contrasts sharply with Lancelot's unhappy conscience and weary courtesy; but it is Lancelot who wins.

Mordred's usurpation and his attempt to marry Guenivere partly restore Arthur to his old self. He has something urgent, practical and right to do, instead of having to watch the two men he most loves attempting to destroy each other, while he wonders which of them is the more in the wrong. He ships his army home, and himself, fierce and irresistible, leads the landing. In the fighting, Gawain receives a mortal blow on the old wound that Lancelot had given him in France. This jolts him out of his vengeful pride, and makes him confess his own guilt and fallibility. Before he dies, he writes a letter to Lancelot seeking reconciliation, and assuring him that his death was his own fault, not Lancelot's, even though the old wound was part-cause of it. He had got the wound by his obstinacy in pursuing Lancelot: Lancelot had not wished it, and did not deserve the misfortune of being even accidentally among the causes of his death. If Gawain had been equally objective about Gareth's death, the tragedy would have gone no further.

Amid portents and omens, the king pursues Mordred to the final battle at Salisbury, where all but two of his remaining Knights of the Round Table are killed, and he ends the war by killing his son. That sharply visualised moment symbolises both the self-destructiveness of evil, and the dissolution of the natural ties that held the Round Table together: the closest of all those bonds are broken when a father kills his son, and the son (so it seems) his father. The annihilation of the Round Table as an instrument for preserving peace and justice is vividly brought home when, after the battle, Arthur's last two knights have to look on while their dead and dying fellows are murdered and robbed by pillagers. At the same time, the mystery around the king himself deepens further, in the unexplained necessities of returning the sword Excalibur to the lake, and in the ambiguity of his passing to Avalon. Even among omens that seem supernaturally inspired, some point firmly to his death, others no less firmly to his survival and return; and between them, the narrator has to confess himself at a loss.

When Lancelot receives Gawain's letter and brings an army to England, the Round Table is already destroyed, and Guenivere has disappeared, having secretly entered a convent, where she has been made abbess. Lancelot finds her, but greatly changed. Her sins had sparked off the preceding catastrophe; that had shocked her into seeing their seriousness; and she has set about making reparation for them by a life of penance, in which there can be no place for an ex-lover. She steels herself by speaking before her ladies and using thou to force him to a suitable inferiority; and, invoking both their old love and her new authority as abbess, banishes him from her presence for the last time and forever. His duty now is to rule his lands; and, she adds with ruthless logic, to marry (to ensure descendants and an orderly succession). But Lancelot has already provided for the government of his lands, and chooses instead to enter the religious life himself. Love and honour obliged him to remain in the secular life as long as she did, to protect her. But the hunger the Grail-quest had aroused in him for perfection and the love of God has not died; and, like her, he has sins to do penance for. The first step is the hardest, because their old love is still dangerously hot under the ashes: when he took her back to Arthur under suspicion of adultery, honour and etiquette allowed him a farewell kiss in front of the whole court; but now, the total commitment of their new vocations must forbid it. The seeming callousness of Guenivere's last words to Lancelot are an index of how difficult this is.

Lancelot enters the first religious house he comes to, the hermitage of a fugitive bishop, where Arthur is buried and the last Knight of the Round Table serves as a lay-brother. Lancelot's kinsmen send the army home and set out to look for him; and within six months his old magnetism has drawn eight of them into the monastic life. The completeness of the change is symbolised by their turning loose their horses, the knight's most essential possession. Two of Lancelot's closest kinsmen are missing: Lionel, killed in a casual skirmish; and Ector, whose search is still going on: they were the two of the family who failed conspicuously in the Grail-quest. After six years, Lancelot is ordained priest; and a year later, Guenivere dies. He and his companions are warned by a vision to fetch her body and bury her beside Arthur. When Lancelot sees their bodies lying together, his heart is wrung by the memory of their beauty and nobility, which have perished as all earthly things must; by the visual reminder of the marriage he had violated; and so by a renewed awareness of how his sinfulness had helped to set the two people he most owed love and loyalty to against one another, destroyed their marriage, and killed them. He intensifies his life of penance as previously he would have summoned up his last reserve of energy in a fight; and physically broken, but spiritually perfected, gains in death the victory he seeks. Of this victory his companions are given supernatural confirmation.

They bury Lancelot not with Arthur and Guenivere, but the length of England away, in his own castle of Joyous Garde. Ector finds him there at last and too late, and delivers over his body the most famous and moving of all chivalric laments. It sets the tragedy of what has been lost in human terms against the confidently evoked triumph of Lancelot's death, creating a complete perspective. After what the closest of Lancelot's kinsmen have endured, there can be no return to ordinary life, whether ruling their own lands or assisting Arthur's capable successor Constantine in governing England. The Grail-quest is beyond recall, but they put their own lands in order and go as crusaders to the Holy Land, to fight and die for Jerusalem.