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Malory and prose<-chapter 2<-contents<-position





V. Sir Thomas Malory and Prose in the 15th Century


1. Life
    Sir Thomas Malory was born into a gentry family that had lived for centuries in the English Midlands near the point where Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire meet. His father, John Malory, was an squire with land in all three counties, but was primarily a Warwickshire man, being twice sheriff, five times M.P. and for many years a justice of the peace for that county.
    Of Sir Thomas Malory’s early years, almost nothing is known. As a young man of 23, records reveal that he was a “respectable country landowner with a growing interest in politics.” He dealt in land, witnessed deeds for his neighbours, acted as a parliamentary elector, and by 1441 had become a knight. Sir Thomas married Elizabeth Walsh of Wanlip in Leicestershire, who later bore him a son, Robert. Perhaps. In 1443, Malory was “charged with wounding and imprisoning Thomas Smith and stealing his goods, but the charge apparently fell through”. However, in 1445, he “was elected M.P. for Warwickshire” and served “on commissions to assess tax-exemptions in the county”.
    Up to the time of 1449 when the civil war broke out, Marlory’s life seems to have all the markings of a traditional country gentleman, but then his life underwent a startling change. During Henry VI’s insanity, when the Duke of York was Lord Protector, Malory was given a royal pardon. Once the Yorkists invaded in 1460 and had expelled the Lancastrians, Malory was freed and pardoned. He was never tried on any of the charges brought against him.
    Malory repaid his deliverers by taking part in Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick’s expedition against the castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh, and Dunstanborough..., which the Lancastrians had seized. The castles were taken, and Malory settled down to a more peaceful life.
    Yet, in 1468 and again in 1470, he was named in lists of Lancastrians who were excluded from royal pardons for any crimes. Most of those excluded were at liberty; but the Morte Darthur shows us that Malory was in prison, completing his work.
    In October 1470, when the Lancastrians returned to power, among their first acts was freeing those of their party who were in London prisons. Six months later, Sir Thomas Malory died and was buried under a marble tombstone in Greyfriars, Newgate, which was the most fashionable church in London. On the day of Malory’s death, King Edward landed in Yorkshire, and two months later the Yorkists were back in power.


2. Le Morte d’Arthur
    As a kind of final summing-up of the Arthurian legend built up from the 12th to the 15th century, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is the only monumental work of prose at the time. Le Morte d’Arthur was written in English and consists of eight tales in 507 chapters in 21 books, so arranged by Caxton, for clarity of understanding. It is the basis of most modern telling of the Arthurian story and was the inspiration for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
    The story begins with Arthur’s father, King Uther Pendragon and his desire for Igraine-married to another; Uther's use of enchantment to father his son with Igraine; Arthur's claim to the throne established by pulling Excalibur from the stone; his rule of Britain, marriage to Guinevere, refusal to give tribute to King Lucius of Rome, and the war that followed. The romances intertwined in Malory's retelling of the tale are those of Guinevere and Sir Launcelot, Tristram and Isolde, Sir Launcelot and Elaine and their son, the future Sir Galahad. With Galahad's appearance at Camelot begins the quest for the Holy Grail-relics from Christ's Last Supper brought to the British Isles by Joseph of Arimathea. And of course, there is the conflict between King Arthur and Sir Mordred, Arthur's natural son.
     Based primarily on the French Arthurian Prose Cycle of the thirteenth century, Malory's work combines the flashback narratives of the original to fashion a new kind of fictional structure; the result not simply condensation, but a disentanglement of the elements of narrative and a recombination of them into an order, an emphasis, and a significance entirely alien to the sources. The elegance and controlled artificiality of his antecedents are changed by Malory into directness and moral earnestness, which allows Le Morte d'Arthur to remain a vigorous and compelling narrative, full of the spirit of adventurous knighthood.
     Le Morte d’Arthur is an important landmark in the development of the English prose from the late Middle English to early modern English, and has the distinction of being written in a lucid and simple style. Both the Arthurian legendary material it contains and its facile prose style had their wide and lasting influence upon English literature of the later centuries.


3. Contribution
    Malory is the first important English writer to show that prose could be used to express sensitive feelings. He did in prose what Chaucer did in poetry: telling stories in a natural and simple but effective style. His narrative power impressed many later writers and the book encouraged Lord Tennyson to recreate the legend three and a half centuries later.

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