Sir Thomas Malory

It was as a hapless participant in the wars of the 1460s and 70s, bringing defeat with him to every party to which he changed sides, that the Warwickshire gentleman and outlaw, Sir Thomas Malory, began to assemble his own stock of Arthurian lore. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in some ways the greatest of the medieval Arthurian cycles, was written between 1468 and 1470 whilst Malory languished in far from chivalric captivity as a prisoner of Edward IV in the Tower of London. It was published fifteen years later by William Caxton, on his printing press at the sign of the Red Pale in Westminster, becoming, together with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published by Caxton in 1476, the very first English bestseller, its success all the more ironic given that the warfare of the 1470s was so very far from the polite and honour-ridden combat described in Malory’s fantasies. Misappropriated from the Welsh, and clothed in fifteenth-century armour, Arthur became a hero for the modern age: doomed, drawn both to piety and to mass murder, an appropriately violent and confused national figurehead for violent and confusing times.