5 - The fifteenth-century Arthur

Summary

From any modern perspective the dominating achievement of fifteenth-century English Arthurian literature is Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. But Malory's Morte was not composed until 1469-70 and not printed until 1485, and its compendious perspective filled a space previously occupied for English audiences by works focused on particular aspects and fragments of Arthurian history, supplemented for some by familiarity with continental traditions. In Caxton's preface to his Morte edition - which stresses the number of books about Arthur in other languages, yet only 'somme in Englysshe, but nowher nygh alle' - the material proofs of Arthur's historicity include books (Malory p. cxlv.20-2): not only Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury but Polychronicon's account of his body's rediscovery and reburial; not only 'at Wynchester the Rounde Table' but the accounts of Arthur's life in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (or, in practice, Lydgate's influential English version in his Fall of Princes [1431-8]). Malory's Morte is the outcome of a discerning and knowledgeable ambition to create an 'Arthuriad' in English, a compendium that draws together sequentially the authoritative accounts (largely to be translated from French sources) of all significant aspects of King Arthur's life and reign and the history of the Round Table fellowship. Malory's Arthuriad belongs to a late-medieval Europe-wide fashion for compendious Arthurian compilations.