Le Morte DArthur, vol 1 | Page 3

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Le Morte Darthur
Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of
the Round Table
IN TWO VOLS.--VOL. I

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE Morte Darthur was finished, as the epilogue tells us, in the ninth
year of Edward IV., i.e. between March 4, 1469 and the same date in
1470. It is thus, fitly enough, the last important English book written
before the introduction of printing into this country, and since no
manuscript of it has come down to us it is also the first English classic
for our knowledge of which we are entirely dependent on a printed text.
Caxton's story of how the book was brought to him and he was induced
to print it may be read farther on in his own preface. From this we learn
also that he was not only the printer of the book, but to some extent its
editor also, dividing Malory's work into twenty-one books, splitting up
the books into chapters, by no means skilfully, and supplying the
``Rubrish'' or chapter-headings. It may be added that Caxton's preface
contains, moreover, a brief criticism which, on the points on which it
touches, is still the soundest and most sympathetic that has been
written.
Caxton finished his edition the last day of July 1485, some fifteen or
sixteen years after Malory wrote his epilogue. It is clear that the author
was then dead, or the printer would not have acted as a clumsy editor to
the book, and recent discoveries (if bibliography may, for the moment,
enlarge its bounds to mention such matters) have revealed with
tolerable certainty when Malory died and who he was. In letters to The
Athenaeum in July 1896 Mr. T. Williams pointed out that the name of a
Sir Thomas Malorie occurred among those of a number of other
Lancastrians excluded from a general pardon granted by Edward
IV. in 1468, and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same
year as taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September 1897, again, in
another letter to the same paper, Mr. A. T. Martin reported the finding
of the will of a Thomas Malory of Papworth, a hundred partly in
Cambridgeshire, partly in Hunts. This will was made on September 16,
1469, and as it was proved the 27th of the next month the testator must
have been in immediate expectation of death. It contains the most
careful provision for the education and starting in life of a family of
three daughters and seven sons, of whom the youngest seems to have
been still an infant. We cannot say with certainty that this Thomas
Malory, whose last thoughts were so busy for his children, was our

author, or that the Lancastrian knight discovered by Mr. Williams was
identical with either or both, but such evidence as the Morte Darthur
offers favours such a belief. There is not only the epilogue with its
petition, ``pray for me while I am alive that God send me good
deliverance and when I am dead pray you all for my soul,'' but this very
request is foreshadowed at the end of chap. 37 of Book ix. in the
touching passage, surely inspired by personal experience, as to the
sickness ``that is the greatest pain a prisoner may have''; and the
reflections on English fickleness in the first chapter of Book xxi.,
though the Wars of the Roses might have inspired them in any one,
come most naturally from an author who was a Lancastrian knight.
If the Morte Darthur was really written in prison and by a prisoner
distressed by ill-health