Malory's Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England (Arthurian Studies)

ARTHURIAN STUDIES LXVI

MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE THE SOCIAL READING OF ROMANCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

This book seeks to place Malory’s Morte Darthur more firmly in its cultural and historical context. Its composition, in the mid to late fifteenth century, took place at a time of great upheaval for England, a period beginning with the loss of Bordeaux (and the Hundred Years War) and ending with the rise of Richard III. During this time the Morte was translated from numerous French sources, copied by scribes, and, finally, in July 1485, printed by William Caxton. The author argues that in this unique production history are reflected the ideological crises which loomed so massively over England’s ruling class in the fifteenth century; and that the book is in fact inseparable from these crises. THOMAS H. CROFTS is Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee State University

ARTHURIAN STUDIES ISSN 0261–9814 General Editor: Norris J. Lacy

Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE THE SOCIAL READING OF ROMANCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Thomas H. Crofts

D. S. BREWER

© Thomas H. Crofts 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Thomas H. Crofts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2006 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 085 5

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction 1

2

3

4

1

The Text at Hand

11

Introduction: a note on a ‘note on editions’ Canons of probability The Malory canon

11 14 23

Caxton’s Preface: Historia and Argumentum

31

Introduction: locating fifteenth-century historiography Earlier medieval historia Caxton’s preface Argumentum, exemplarity and ideology Conclusion

31 33 40 51 59

Malory’s Moral Scribes: ‘Balyn’ in the Winchester Manuscript

61

Introduction: exemplarity and fifteenth-century literary production Visual features of the Winchester manuscript Visual effect and cultural authority The emergence of Balyn The adventure of Balyn

61 62 67 71 78

Usurpation, Right and Redress in Malory’s Roman War

94

Introduction: the history of the Roman War Fifteenth-century Froissart: textual history and local correspondence Local memory: bear and boar in Arthur’s dream Right and redress in Froissart’s Chroniques: an exemplum Arthur’s war council: chronicle and re-legitimization Taking the exemplum: Arthur answers the ambassadors The conclusion of Malory’s Roman War

94 96 97 100 104 110 114

5

No Hint of the Future

121

Introduction: memory and the book Contingencies of fifteenth-century prose May in Malory’s Prose Morte Return and/or arrival The last fight The myrmidons of death Conclusion

121 123 125 137 144 148 151

Epilogue: Two Gestures of Closure

152

Bibliography

159

Index

169

Illustrations The illustrations are placed between pages 82 and 83. Plate 1 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 21r Plate 2 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 23r Plate 3 BL MS Add. 59678, folio 29v

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

for Judge Thomas H. Crofts, Sr aka Pop

The publishers are grateful to the Vinaver Trust for generously providing a subvention towards the production costs of this volume

Acknowledgements Professor Donald W. Rowe guided this project in its dissertation form at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his gift for finding the goddes foison in texts has remained its inspiration. Thanks also to the rest of my dissertation committee, Keith Busby, Sherry Reames and Susanne Wofford, for their many and valuable helps. Matthew Hussey, Michael LeMahieu, Elizabeth Rivlin and John Tiedemann each read chapters of this book in manuscript; for their precious time, meticulous care and sage suggestions I am eternally grateful. Keith Busby and Logan Whalen helped me avoid mesfait sur mesfait in the realm of Old French; for this and for their general encouragement I owe them much. For advice and insight at key moments I am also indebted to Matthew Stratton, Jack Opel, K. S. Whetter, Cory Rushton, Amanda Hopkins, Sandra Ihle and Peter Field. Thanks also to my graduate assistants Lori-Beth Baker and Annalee Kodman whose proofreading and schlepping of books were a wonder. I would also like to thank my chair Judith B. Slagle and my other friends and colleagues in the Department of English at East Tennessee State University, who provided encouragement and guidance in many forms, and especially Karen Cajka and Robert Sawyer whose generosity of spirit and sound advice helped me keep it together in the closing stages of writing this book. Versions of chapters two and three have appeared in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur (D. S. Brewer, 2005) and the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, vol. 83, no. 3 (2005), respectively, and I am grateful to their editors for allowing me to develop these pieces here. Thanks also to Jacques Lezra for allowing me to quote from the manuscript of a forthcoming article. A grant from the Research Development Committee at East Tennessee State University provided vital funds for travel and research; it is a pleasure for me to thank the committee members here. I also gratefully acknowledge a bequest from the Eugène Vinaver Trust Fund which helped to cover this book’s production costs. Many thanks as well to my editor Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer for her very great patience and encouragement, and to my two anonymous readers for their invaluable suggestions. Any remaining errors or infelicities are entirely mine. Last but far from least I thank my parents Tom and Mary Locke, and my sister Ellen, for their unflagging cheer and support, my wife Molly who kept me from being completely disparbeled, and my sons Rex and August for their total genius.

Abbreviations Aspects of Malory

Aspects of Malory, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer, Arthurian Studies I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981) C William Caxton’s Le Morte Darthur (1485) Companion A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards, Arthurian Studies XXXVII (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996) EETS, o.s./s.s./ Early English Text Society, original series / supplementary e.s. series / extra series The Malory Debate The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda, Arthurian Studies XLVII (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000) Mort Artu La Mort le Roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe Siècle, Troisième édition, ed. Jean Frappier (Genève: Droz/ Paris: M.J. Minard, 1964) Prologues and The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B. Epilogues Crotch, EETS, o.s. 176 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928) W BL MS Add. 59678, the Winchester manuscript Works The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (London: Oxford University Press, 1990) Unless otherwise indicated, Works is the edition used in this study. Citations of Works, as of all edited medieval texts here, silently adopt editors’ emendations. Citations which indicate line numbers place them after the page number, separated by a point.

Introduction This book seeks to place the production of Malory’s Morte Darthur – in both its manuscript and printed form – in the context of political and literary culture in the second half of the fifteenth century. That historical context will be defined here by especial consideration of the social practice which underwrites all particulars connected to literary production, that is, reading. ‘Texts come before us’, Fredric Jameson writes, ‘as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or – if the text is brand-new – through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.’1 Thus, all reading is ‘social reading’: one is never quite alone when one is doing it. This is true not only of our reading, of course, but also that of Sir Thomas Malory and his contemporaries. The objects of my inquiry, then, include the things both written and read by Malory and his contemporaries: books (not only texts but codices), political events (whether witnessed in the fifteenth century or chronicled from earlier times), literature (both fifteenth-century English and that of earlier periods and other languages). By way of introduction I would like, first, to offer a historical anecdote which demonstrates the immediacy of the relationship between literary culture and social practice in Malory’s time; after this, I will indicate something of the critical methods which inform the chapters that follow.

The Battle of Nibley Green At the very time Malory was finishing his book, two prominent families, the Talbots and the Berkeleys, were entering the final and bloodiest stage of their fifteen-year dispute over the ownership of some manor houses in Gloucestershire. The families had many times seen each other in court, where the matter had finally, in 1469, been decided in favor of the Berkeleys. However, Thomas Talbot, the nineteen-year-old 2nd Viscount Lisle, now rejected a peaceful solution by sending the following note to William, the then middle-aged 12th Lord of Berkeley, on 19 March 1469: William, called Lord Berkeley I merveile yee come not fourth with all your carts of gunnes, bowes, with oder ordinance, that yee set forward to my manor of Wotton to beate it doune vpon my head. I lett you witt ye shall not nede to come soe nye, for I trust to God to mete yee neere home with Englishmen of my one

1

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 9.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

nation and neighbors; whereas yee by subtile craft have blowen about in diverse places of England that I should intend to bringe in Welshmen for to destroy and hurt my one nation and country; I lete the wit, I was never soe disposed, nor never will bee; And to the proofe heerof, I require the of knighthode and of manhode to appoint a day to mete halfe way, there to try between God and our two hands all our quarrell and title of right, for to eschewe the shedding of christen mens bludd, or else at the same day bringe the vttirmost of thy power, and I shall mete the: An answere of this by writinge, as yee will abide by, accordinge to the honour and order of knighthood. Thomas Talbot, ye viscont

Lisle. Talbot’s invocation of ‘the order of Knighthood’ seemed implausible to Lord Berkeley, who, the same day, responded dexterously with, ‘I marveile greatly of thy strange and leude writinge’, and further, As for the determininge betweixt our two hands of thy vntrue clayme and my title and right of my land and true inheritance, thou wottest right well that there is noe such determinacion of land in this realm used: And I ascertaine thee that my lyvelode, as well as my manor of Wotton, as my castle of Berkeley, bee intayled to mee by fyne of record in the kings courts, by the advyse of all the Judges of this land in that daies beinge; and if it were soe That the matter might be determined by thy hands and mine, the kinge our soveraine Lord and his lawes not offended, thou shouldest not soe soone desire but I would as soone answere thee in every point that belongeth to a knight; ffor thou art, God I take to record, in a false quarrell, and I in a true defence and title; And where thou desirest and requirest mee of knighthood and of manhood to appoint a day and that I should bee there with all the power I could make, and that thou wouldest meete mee halfe way, I will thou understand I will not bringe the tenth part that I can make, and I will appoint a short day to ease thy malitious heart and thy false counsaile that is with thee.2

In Berkeley’s eyes, whatever claim to the honor and order of knighthood Talbot might have had is vitiated on the one hand by his desire to enact fanciful and illegal forms of judicial combat, and on the other by the suggestion that the honor and order of knighthood necessitate the violation of the king’s law – as if knighthood were something other than service to a sovereign lord. Talbot’s ultimatum nevertheless led to the Battle of Nibley Green, which occurred on the day following this exchange of letters, and in which 150 men, including Talbot himself, were killed. Certainly Talbot wished to defy the king’s law, but that law was taking away lands to which he believed he had a hereditary right; and, no less considerably, the king’s civil law was at this time very rarely enforced. It is hard to say which side was the less ‘orderly’: the one which rested in the arbitrary rectitude granted by the king’s court, or the one which sought to maintain an ancient right in the face of a royal administration which was in general corrupt and so enfeebled as to be unable to enforce court decisions. Such complications could only imperfectly be laid to rest by things like the Battle of Nibley Green. Accordingly,

2

The Berkeley Manuscripts, 3 vols, ed. John Maclean (Gloucester, 1883), vol. III, pp. 267–8.

INTRODUCTION

3

the Talbot-Berkeley model of conflict resolution continued to be observed among the lesser nobility and country gentry; private interest everywhere infringed on law and order. As Charles Ross has observed of this period, The weakness and partiality of [Henry VI and his] council had placed little curb on powerful offenders. The growth of faction was accompanied by recourse to private war . . . and the outbreak of civil war, which in one aspect at least may be seen as an ‘escalation of private feuds’, had served only to make matters worse. Riot, oppression, vendetta and gangsterism flourished under the umbrella of civil strife and armed rebellion. The first few months of Edward IV’s reign probably saw a higher level of disorder than any other period in the entire fifteenth century.3

The gentry was no less vulnerable to this effect than the nobility, of course, as witnessed by the letters of such families as the Pastons and Stonors, and by individual members of that class like Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, who was extending the offices of knighthood to include harrying deer parks, robbing churches, rustling cattle, attempting the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham and raping Joan Smyth (cum ea carnaliter concubuit).4 The fact that Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel was indeed part of the problem is not an argument for or against his authorship of the Morte. It is, however, entirely apposite to any historical discussion of that book’s production. While the shape of Malory’s book is in part prescribed by its French and English sources, that prescription was itself a contingency of the social reading of romance in Malory’s time. Malory’s book is one example of this reading. Other examples of the culture’s reading of romance are legible in behaviors of historical people and in the texts which document them (just as a collective reading of chivalry is found not only in Froissart’s Chroniques but, as argued below in Chapter 4, in that text’s reception and production history). In placing Malory’s book in this context, we will notice some things writ relatively large, such as that late medieval romance storytelling is showing the strain of having to answer the political claims of chronicle history. But we will also begin to see other things which touch on Malory’s book at the level of the lived – or at least the recorded – experience of its audience. Behavior, in other words, is also an act of reading: whether it is a reading of law or of literature it is always a reading of historical possibilities within a cultural code. Accordingly, even in the relative sobriety of the elder lord’s response, there is on Berkeley’s part recognition of naturalness in the exchange proposed by Talbot, whose fieriness got him the posthumous nickname ‘the English Achilles’. Despite his comparative sobriety, Berkeley showed up at Nibley Green and not

3 4

Charles Ross, Edward IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 395. See P. J. C. Field, ‘The Malory Life Records’, item 32, in Companion, pp. 115–130; 121. Elsewhere, Field elucidates the rape charge as follows: ‘Although the rape charges plainly involve rape in the modern sense rather than (as some have wanted to believe) abduction or assault, when one charge came up in the King’s Bench, it was pressed not by the alleged victim but by her husband, and under the statute of 6 Richard II, a statute whose purpose was to make elopement into rape despite the woman’s consent’: The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 106.

4

MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

only fit the battle à outrance, but pursued Talbot retainers to Wotton Manor and ‘rushed the gates of the great manor-house and ransacked for the deeds and manorial rolls. . . . The deeds were found and William returned triumphantly to Berkeley carrying with him the Lisle arms ripped down from the wall.’5 The Battle of Nibley Green may have been a performative anachronism, but it was not cynical or insincere. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, such exchanges involve more than one kind of prize: at stake are forms of capital both economic (or material) and symbolic. Bourdieu illustrates this principle of exchange by considering, for example, that a piece of land will sometimes take on a symbolic value disproportionate to its economic value, as a function of the socially accepted definition of the symbolic patrimony. Thus the first plots to be relinquished will be the land least integrated into the estate, least associated with the name of its present owners, the land which was bought (especially by a recent purchase) rather than inherited, the land bought from strangers rather than that bought from kinsmen. When a field endowed with all the properties which define strong integration into the patrimonial estate is owned by strangers, buying it back becomes a question of honour, analogous to avenging an insult, and it may rise to exorbitant prices.

The happy relevance of Bourdieu’s ‘real-estate prices’ to the Talbot-Berkeley discussion will not distract us from the fact that the rule of symbolic capital would apply whether the contested object were real estate, livestock or a new pan. Each may have a symbolic price. In the Berkeley-Talbot example the price was both symbolic and material, and it was exorbitant. The terms in which the Nibley Green affair was negotiated express a social reading of romance cognate equally with Malory’s book and William Caxton’s chivalric project. The theater in which Talbot’s ‘honour’ found its fatal expression was a world (however waning) in which ‘noble and dyvers gentylmen’ were happy (and relatively free) to defend their own interests, and, in doing so, to take their cue from chivalric literature. It is a sort of powerlessness before chivalric imperatives, we observe, that Talbot conjures in his letter to Berkeley. The fictive possibility of a joust, as raised by the viscount, is the performance of a not-wholly-fictive cultural code. No modern notion of the delusional can be brought to bear in a critique of Talbot’s ‘unrealistic’ behavior. Even if we acknowledge that Talbot used an imaginary code of honor in pursuit of self-interested ends, we still cannot regard his letter – any more than his death – as disingenuous. Talbot was acting out a historical psychodrama, a realization of self on the aristocratic stage; but Talbot certainly did not invent that stage. ‘Men make their own history’, Marx writes, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.6 5 6

Jonathan Blow, ‘Nibley Green, 1469: The Last Private Battle Fought in England’, History Today II (1952), pp. 598–610; 610. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart’, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton &. Co., 1978), p. 595.

INTRODUCTION

5

It is such a tradition that weighs on Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. And it is by studying the cultural, literary and textual transmissions of that ‘nightmare’ that we can hope to place the Morte in its fifteenth-century context.

Critical Methods The unique production history of the Morte Darthur – which was translated and adapted from numerous sources, copied (at least twice) and, some fifteen years later, printed by William Caxton – is itself a series of social readings. Medieval texts are the collective work of numerous hands, and each stage in a text’s transmission may have equal claim on a reader’s attention. Chapter 1 investigates the changing preoccupations of textual study, and the effect modern textual criticism has had on our understanding of Malory. The bibliographical emergence and critical reception of Malory’s text (in both its chirographical and print versions) are in fact an abiding focus of this book as a whole. For all students of literature, however, there is also the fact of the critical edition; it too must be read. Apart from the text(s) found within it, the critical edition is a complex of erudition and error, pleasure and preoccupation – an experimental combination of theory and practice. The present Chapter 1, then, is also in constant negotiation with Eugène Vinaver, whose master edition still breathes all the fluency, erudition and subtlety – though none of the crapulence – of the dragon in John Gardner’s Grendel, mystifying even as it explains. It is Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester manuscript, called Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947, 1967, 1990), which institutes the modern double life of Malory’s book; and that doubleness is a great topic in Malory studies today. Accordingly, Vinaver’s editorship is also an object of our reading. Jerome McGann’s Critique of Modern Textual Criticism includes the following notes toward this reading, which are worth quoting at length: Vinaver’s edition appeals to our longing to read texts which come as clearly and directly from the author’s hand as possible. His critical scrupulousness, however, reminds us of the special authority which Caxton’s editorially mediated text will always possess. In this way, paradoxically, Vinaver’s edition shows that for an editor and textual critic the concept of authority has to be conceived in a more broadly social and cultural context. Authoritative texts are arrived at by an exhaustive reconstruction not of an author and his intentions so much as of an author and his context of work. Even in those cases where the rule of authorial intentions seems determining or even regulative, we must see that it will have been so only in the event, that is to say, only after an editor has weighed a great many other factors which bear upon his understanding of the received texts. In cultural products like literary works the location of authority necessarily becomes dispersed beyond the author. When, therefore, Vinaver speaks of “the aim of any critical edition” being to approach as closely as possible the author’s original work, he assumes an editorial concept of poetic authority which cannot really be maintained through an analysis.7 7

Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 84.

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Analysis of Vinaver’s edition is vital to the project at hand, that of reading Le Morte Darthur as a social text, that is to say a text determined by a collective history and a collective investment in the practice of historiography. (My references to Malory’s text follow the convention of citing Vinaver’s three-volume Works, unless otherwise stated.) Reading also has less tangible, but nevertheless intelligible, objects, such as desire, law and history; objects, that is, which emanate from the matrix of culture, preparing the way for things like manuscripts, and also for occasions like Nibley Green, the career of Anthony Woodville and the demand for Caxton’s Malory, which is the subject of Chapter 2. ‘But how’, asks Fredric Jameson, do you go about “historicizing” such mental categories or conceptual operations? A first step in this direction has been taken when you come to understand that they are not the result of purely philosophic choices or options in the void, but are objectively determined.8

Accordingly, readers of Malory must try to apprehend, to the fullest extent that they are legible, indications of such determination as they arise in Caxton’s practice of producing, maintaining and transmitting texts and textual traditions. An account of Caxton’s work is necessary, that is, to historicizing the bibliographical production of Malory’s text. Unlike the manuscript witness, the Caxton incunable – particularly the preface – is laden with explicit statements about the book’s social and political relevance, its intended audience, its awareness of the generic interplay between history and romance, and the rhetorical negotiations which attend printing such a book as the Morte Darthur in 1485. Caxton, as we know, declares himself openly on most of these topics, but Caxton, as we also know, must be sifted as carefully as Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, or Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, when it comes to facts. The result of such care on our part will, I think, be a deepened understanding of what Malory meant to his contemporaries. Who are those contemporaries? Who are Malory’s audience? Caxton adroitly blurs lines of class distinction as he addresses his audience of ‘many noble and dyvers gentylmen’ and ‘al noble lordes and ladyes wyth al other estates, of what estate or degree they been of’.9 Caxton, by directing his generically aristocratic book to both gentry and noble, makes it hard for us to know what class distinctions were asserted, or were being performed (whether anachronistically or otherwise), by his (and Malory’s) audience. Important studies by Raluca Radulescu, Hyonjin Kim, Richard Moll and others go a long way toward clarifying this matter, and their studies of book ownership, reception and demand indicate the solidest ground for consideration of fifteenth-century literary culture as productive of, and negotiating, class distinctions. Malory’s text is thus ‘social’ in another sense: not only collaborative, but as an index of the desires of a specific collective audience, whatever social ‘estate or degree they been of’. Caxton’s edition, with all its trappings, shows us what is also true of Malory’s 8 9

The Political Unconscious, p.109. Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 92, 94.

INTRODUCTION

7

text, that Le Morte Darthur is the answer to a specific occasion, a specific desire, but it is not necessarily a straight answer. The Winchester manuscript, while not as discursive about itself as Caxton’s book, also bears information about its supposed audience. Both the bibliographical text (the manuscript as a physical witness) and the lexical text (the semantic content) of BL MS Add. 59678 contain social information. The section called ‘The Tale of Balyn le Sauvage, or the Knight with Two Swords’, as I will show in Chapter 3, allows the modern reader (as it did the contemporary reader) to identify its intended place in the social realm. The bibliographical text, for example, is composed in this case not only of the scribally transmitted letter of the tale, but also of the illustrations and commentary which appear in the margins, which are also scribally produced but of less certain origin. The marginalia in the Winchester manuscript – which are especially concentrated in the front sections of the book, where ‘Balyn’ appears – may be read as corresponding to specific late medieval reading habits among the nobility, habits which overwhelmingly begin to be shared by the gentry. The lexical text of ‘Balyn’, which transmits the narrative, must, at least provisionally, be read separately. The lexical text is always subtly altered or manipulated in its material (bibliographical) form. Reading the ‘Balyn’ narrative in the Winchester manuscript we discover many things which correspond to the information yielded by the bibliographical text. But we are also free to discover places where the two texts diverge. ‘The Tale of Balyn’, by virtue of its particular narrative, has a mind of its own, one might say, which is not totally accommodated by its scribal presentation in ‘Winchester’. The narrative is one in which the intentionality of chivalric practice is at odds with historical cause and effect, in which the traditional patterns of romance yield not the elegance of the hero’s wiser return, but the hero’s anonymous death in a remote place. Balyn’s unheimlich end is unsettling to traditional expectations of romance, and the extent to which it was ‘re-authored’ by the Winchester scribes proves a remarkable object lesson in the linguistic and visual reading of medieval texts. The end result is a text even more plural and multi-authored than Malory’s text – mostly a set of translations, after all – already was. Scribal agency, then, no less than Caxton’s editorial agency, is partially constitutive of social reading, of social text production. Turning to the political realm, Malory’s book emerged in a culture whose rapid cycles of challenge and overthrow had largely exposed the mysteries of divine-right monarchy and the myth of genealogically determined succession. Parliament was, as Leslie Coote puts it, ‘a place where people go when all is lost’.10 Force is always an option. God no longer makes kings, the Kingmaker makes kings, and does so by being able to spill the right amount of blood at the right moments. As the Battle of Nibley Green showed, this state of affairs accommodated extra-legal enactments which were both fanciful and highly expedient. It was in the dawn of this much-simplified model of political domination that Malory flourished, in an England waking up in the uncomfortable knowledge that humanity, as Foucault writes, 10 Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), p. 197.

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does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.11

That the Morte Darthur, in the face of this, still wishes to assert the value of these mysteries is the source of its vast melancholy. But Malory is too fine an observer of power to ignore the implications of history’s rampant parataxis. Parataxis, as a principle of syntax, is one of Malory’s poetic strengths. ‘Contiguity’, as Felicity Riddy notes, ‘has its own tantalizing and minimal way of suggesting coherence’,12 and Malory makes the most of this. But parataxis can also be a historiographical principle. In Chapter 4’s discussion of the uses of chronicle, I suggest that rival claims to a throne are made with reference to the same chronology but with the clock variously turned back to the desired moment, to the desired forebear. Foucault continues, An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked “other”.13

Like a paratactic sentence, history presents a series of points which receive their emphases from the outside, by a reader, an interpreter, a social code (hegemony); emphases will always be made, but no piece of the chain can be subtracted without falsification of the whole. Nietzsche called the history of the ‘whole chain’ wirkliche Historie, or ‘effective history’. Understanding ‘history’ to mean historia, that is, written history, effective history might also be called ‘impossible history’ since it cannot be written, or even conceived, except in a numberless set of particulars, or else in an unhistorical abstract totality. But when Malory de-interlaces his French sources, when he organizes his fiction in the chronicle style, he allows his readers to see the ‘minimal coherence’ which, in the power struggles of late medieval England, generally sufficed. It is at the very end of Malory’s book that the reader is alerted to the fact that he has just read a ‘hoole book’.14 One way of conceiving the book’s wholeness is as it accounts for itself in ‘The Piteous Tale of Kyng Arthur Saunz Guerdon’, which Felicity Riddy describes as enacting ‘the death-wish of a class’.15 As Riddy suggests, the death-drama of Arthur may be described in psychoanalytic terms. The historical blindness which, in one way or another, plagues the central protagonist of Malory’s book, may be described as an occasion of cathexis: at the end of his career, Arthur, pathologically unable to read his own history, is swept into a sequence of events engendered by misrecognition and irrational response.

11 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:

12 13 14 15

Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76–100; 85; a translation of ‘Nietzsche, La Généalogie, L’Histoire’, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), pp. 145–72. Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), p. 142. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 88. Works, p. 1260. ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, Companion, p. 72.

INTRODUCTION

9

Morte’s closing sequences enact a complex pattern of returns, in which, for a time, the old perfection of the Round Table is glimpsed. The death-sequence, however, is crafted so that none of these returns is completed. As in ‘Balyn’, all efforts to return – to ease the heart – violently fail to restore the ‘lost’ balance. Hence, the earlier units of Malory’s compilation defer their logical and necessary conclusions by giving way to other, succeeding units. This non-recognition of the necessity of death, or of its finality, recalls Freud’s evocation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the primal life-span, in which ‘the course of its life was probably a brief one’, until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circu-

itous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. . . . What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life [the instincts], too, were originally the myrmidons of death.16 This may describe not only the career of Arthur in the whole book, but, as Chapter 5 will show, may describe also the acts of translation and selection, cutting and composition, by which Malory fashioned the book. And it may also account for lapses in the whole book’s memory of itself: Malory’s last episode is a semantic set determined by memory: memory as expressed in genre, in compilatio and in the conception of a codex. This chapter will try to indicate what we might call the Morte’s ‘rhetorical unconscious’, a space of hidden, inapprehensible conflict – within the narrative, but also within the compositional effort – which troubles the closing sequences of Malory’s book.

16 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

1961), pp. 46, 47.

1 The Text at Hand

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it – in a dimly lighted place near the black oily river where the mists always swirl . . . I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling. (H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Book’ (fragment c. 1934))

Introduction: A Note on a ‘Note on Editions’ All Malory criticism must, even if provisionally, deal with the question of the author’s identity. Even in studies which do not confront the question directly, and even in those which (perhaps rightly) profess indifference to the question of which Thomas Malory wrote the Morte Darthur – even in these a position is taken. Its readers, not excluding the present one, refer habitually to ‘Malory’s text’ or ‘Malory’s book’ in the singular as if it were possible to consider the Winchester manuscript and Caxton’s 1485 edition one ‘book’. Malory criticism since 1934 is really a narrative of at least two texts resolutely not being the same book.1 In her study, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Elizabeth Edwards appreciates this fact fully, nor would she have her readers overlook it: ‘I prefer to preserve the contradictions [within the Morte Darthur]’, she writes, ‘rather than to neutralise them.’2 These contradictions are at the same time narrative and codicological. In order to get on with things, however, Edwards, as most do, refers to Malory’s work in the singular (Le Morte Darthur) while citing the Vinaver edition (Works); nor does she consider this expedient to be self-explanatory, since in the ‘Note on Editions’ at the head of her book she writes, The edition of the Morte Darthur cited here is the three volume The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver and revised by P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon 1990). All subsequent citations will be to this edition 1

2

Professor Field: ‘The critical moment in the modern understanding of the Morte Darthur occurred in mid-June 1934, when Walter Oakeshott, Librarian of the Moberly Library at Winchester College, was preparing an exhibition of early printed books. . . . He had noticed a fat paper manuscript about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that had lost its beginning and end.’ Oakeshott ‘checked it against a Caxton-based Morte Darthur, and made what was, as far as medieval English literature is concerned, arguably the most important manuscript discovery of the twentieth century’. ‘Introduction’, Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), p. 1. Oakeshott’s own account is in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 1–6. Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 23.

12

MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

unless otherwise noted. My practice has been to verify Vinaver’s work by consulting both the Winchester MS (BL Add. 59, 678, published in facsimile by EETS). [sic] In her study then, she theoretically differentiates the idea ‘Malory’s book’ from the numerous historical forces (in the form of other texts and other languages) running through it by calling Malory’s book ‘the text at hand’.3 Even so, her idea of the ‘text at hand’ equates Vinaver’s edition and Le Morte Darthur. Even with the proviso ‘cited here’, the equation, because of the word ‘edition’, is contrary to fact: Vinaver rejected the title Morte Darthur as Caxtonian (and so spurious), and called his edition Works. And since Edwards refers neither to the surviving Caxtonian edition, properly called ‘Le Morte Darthur’, nor to the critical edition of Caxton’s book by Matthews and Spisak (1983), the edition to which Edwards refers – to which all Malory critics habitually refer – is an imaginary one, residing in, but not identical to, Vinaver’s three volumes. Indeed, Vinaver’s own edition of the Winchester manuscript is professedly and necessarily supplemented, in many ways determined, by Caxton’s 1485 book. All of this is to demonstrate the difficulty of talking about Malory’s text (or texts) at all historically. Few of us, if any, mean ‘Caxton’s 1485 incunable’ when we refer to Le Morte Darthur; we mean rather Vinaver’s edition, which emphatically does not call itself Le Morte Darthur but Works of Sir Thomas Malory. When we do refer to Caxton’s 1485 Morte Darthur, we call it the ‘Caxton’, a name meant to distinguish that book from its historical author and title. There is no harm in our customary nomenclature – the present study does not go far out of its way to avoid it – as long as we are aware of the not insignificant distinctions we are eliding. Nor can there be any harm in observing the typographical error which results in that ingenious and ghostly ‘both’ in Edwards’ ‘Note’. Standing at the beginning of a quite illuminating study of Malory’s text, it points, on the one hand, to the primary extant witness of that text, and, on the other hand, to relevant historical contingencies entirely absent from the historical stage. In all of this, Malory himself is nowhere to be found, yet it is with reference to his historical authorship of the text at hand that Vinaver’s edition upholds the superiority of the Winchester manuscript as being the closest extant one to Malory (M). It is with reference to the same entity that William Matthews began to undermine Vinaver’s hypothesis that the Winchester text was closer to the original text. So, as an effect of its investment in Vinaver’s total theory of Malory’s text, Edwards’ book stakes its own position on its authorship. It is easy, then, to endorse the pragmatic expedient of getting a text in hand and moving on. Terence McCarthy’s appraisal of the authorship question is equally pragmatic: Malory is an unobtrusive writer with no ironic detachment towards his material to make us aware of the narrator’s mind. He is reluctant ever to come forward to express an opinion, let alone browbeat the reader, and yet, at the same time, in spite of his apparent narrative reticence, his personality comes across so strongly 3

Ibid. p. ix.

THE TEXT AT HAND

13

that we feel a definite desire to know more about the man. Unfortunately, the information available is so scant that this is impossible. The Morte Darthur is, to

all extents and purposes, an anonymous book.4 An assertion of Malory’s anonymity makes for a nice conundrum, since his name is the only thing we do know about him. Like the stray ‘both’ in Edwards’ ‘Note’, this conundrum is wonderfully emblematic of historicist (in this case biographical) criticism: while the psychology of any author remains an imponderable, having the body of the author would be of historical value above and beyond the biographical; it would allow us to reconstruct with greater hope of accuracy the conditions of the book’s production. Lacking this data, however – and this is the point McCarthy is really making – we can get along well without the corpus, since we can recover data that is just as, if not more, useful by studying historical conditions in fifteenth-century England. The utility of this approach is admirably demonstrated in Hyonjin Kim’s The Knight without the Sword, which, while declining to choose among the three main Thomas Malorys proposed by twentieth-century research,5 does make use of all three. Reasoning that since the three were historical contemporaries, came from ‘squirearchical families of ancient origin who had regularly produced knights’, who lived away from London and were active in politics, the differences between the candidates perhaps do not rise to the level of cultural importance. Kim concludes that ‘The greatest Arthurian fiction written in English, which is known to posterity as the Morte Darthur, originated in a late fifteenth-century community of the greater gentry – more specifically the rural landowners who assumed leading roles in their localities and were possibly a little more conservative in behavior and outlook than their neighbors due to their ancient tenure and long-established family traditions.’6 It is a similarly collective idea of textual history which motivates Raluca Radulescu’s recent study, which asserts that ‘to appreciate fully the extent to which Malory’s text reflects some of the most important aspects of late fifteenth-century attitudes, a fresh look at gentry letters and gentry reading habits is required’.7 My study also presumes the importance of this peculiar group, these ‘dyverse gentylmen’ who desired, in the early 1480s, to see a book like Malory’s in print. Radulescu’s analysis of fifteenth-century English gentry, in fact, does as much as any biography to place Malory (whoever he was) on the historical map. But since someone called Sir Thomas Malory and his Morte Darthur, as it is called, remain so firmly lashed together, both in textual history and in the history of criticism, it is well to examine closely the ligatures.

4 5 6 7

Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 171. I.e. those of Warwickshire, Cambridgeshire and – though rarely any more – Yorkshire. The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 5–6. The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 13.

14

MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

Canons of Probability The Sir Thomas Malory who was excepted from pardon must have been the author of the Morte Darthur. No other conclusion is possible, even if one exchanges the normal canons of probability for those of detective fiction. (P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory) How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Holmes to Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four)

That the authorship question does assert itself so stubbornly in Malory studies has at least three causes. One is the fact of the Morte’s appearing on the cusp of a period when, generally speaking, individual talent became less absorbed into than celebrated by the culture. The circumstances of Le Morte Darthur’s production by Caxton – itself the focus of the chapter following this – place that book within a certain new authorial space. Even though the book names its author – one Sir Thomas Malory – the final words of Caxton’s Morte Darthur are Caxton me fieri fecit: ‘Caxton caused me to be made.’ The value of individual craftsmanship was celebrated by Caxton in his prefaces and epilogues, even as it was instantiated by Caxton’s printed books themselves. It was through this new form of literary production that Malory’s book came into existence in 1485. The second cause must be the scandal which attaches to the traditionally upheld candidate for authorship, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire. Early critics seemed to see a contradiction between the ‘nobility’ of Malory’s book and the apparent criminality of his life. This eminently Victorian point of view need not trouble us: even in the nineteenth century it was a false dilemma, but it did keep the legend alive. The historical Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, the one imprisoned for robbery, rape and the destruction of a deer park,8 was the liveliest of men, and his incorrigibility before the law – whatever anyone says – does as much to recommend as to disqualify him. Literary accomplishment has never been the exclusive prerogative of the law-abiding. Like Chaucer before him and Ben Jonson after him, Malory may well have gotten into scrapes with the law and still have been able to write well, even ‘nobly’. Nor should we forget Malory’s contemporary, Francois Villon, who went to jail for the murder of a priest. (It isn’t that late medieval writers were more violent than their predecessors: merely that written documents had begun to keep better track of people.) The third and most decisive cause must be the fact that P. J. C. Field, reviser of Vinaver’s Works and the foremost living Malory scholar, is a formidable researcher in textual, historical and biographical criticism. Field’s consolidation and analysis of the life-records of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel9 is founded on the conviction shared with Kittredge, Sommer, Vinaver and others that this Thomas Malory is the author of the Morte Darthur, and it is Field’s

8 9

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 100ff. ‘The Malory Life-Records’, Companion, pp. 115–30.

THE TEXT AT HAND

15

painstaking work that keeps the question of authorship not only alive, but relevant; given this, no consideration of Malory’s texts can ignore the issue, nor can it omit to test Field’s conclusions – for example that the author of the Morte was, in the ninth year of Edward IV’s reign, both knight and prisoner. Partially as a result of Field’s weighty advocacy, the Newbold Revel candidate remains by far the most famous and widely accepted, and most scholars now concede that probability favors this knight-prisoner as author. We will bring Field’s Life of Malory into focus now and take our discussion from there. Professor Field’s method is to locate pertinent documents which name Sir Thomas Malory and from them reconstruct the facts of his life. These documents are also used to distinguish the author of the Morte Darthur from the eight other Thomas Malorys flourishing (more or less) in the mid-fifteenth century, most notably from the Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, Yorkshire, and the Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire. The documents are mostly of the legal variety and, since they are anything but contiguous, their relationship must be inferred and supplied by the researcher according to the best probability. The foremost of the life records is the Winchester manuscript itself, and its seven authorial colophons which, taken all together, identify that author. In Vinaver’s mise-en-page these, excluding the two which do not name the author (f. 96 and f. 113), read as follows: 1. f. 70 (The Tale of King Arthur): And this booke endyth whereas sir Launcelot and sir Trystrams com to courte. Who that woll make ony more lette hym seke other bookis of kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot or sir Trystrams; for this was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorré, that God sende hym good recover. Amen. Explicit. 2. f. 148 (The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney): And I pray you all that redyth this tale to pray for hym that this wrote, that God sende hym good delyveraunce sone and hastely. Amen. Here endyth The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney. 3. f. 346 (The Book of Sir Tristram): Here endyth the secunde boke off syr Trystram de Lyones, whyche drawyn was oute of freynshe by sir Thomas Malleorré, knyght, as Jesu be hys helpe. Amen. 4. f. 409 (The Tale of the Sankgreal): Thus endith the tale of the Sankgreal that was breffly drawyn oute of Freynshe – which ys a tale cronycled for one of the trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde – by sir Thomas Maleorré, knyght. O, blessed Jesu helpe hym thorow Hys myght! Amen. 5. f. 449 (The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere): And here on the othir syde folowyth The Moste Pyteuous Tale of the Morte Arthure Saunz Gwerdon par le Shyvalere Sir Thomas Malleorré, Knyght. Jesu, ayede ly pur voutre bone mercy! Amen. Another colophon occurs at the very end: I praye you all jentylmen and jentylwymmen that redeth this book of Arthur and his knyghtes from the begynnyng to the endynge, praye for me whyle I am on lyve that God sende me good delyveraunce. And whan I am deed, I praye you all praye for my soule.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

For this book was ended the ninth yere of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth, by Syr Thomas Maleoré, Knyght, as Jesu helpe hym for his grete myght, as he is the servaunt of Jesu bothe day and nyght.10

Of the five colophons which mention the author by name, the last, which also dates the book in the ninth year of Edward IV’s reign, is witnessed only by Caxton’s edition, since the last quire (as well as the first gathering) of the Winchester manuscript is lost. Professor Field considers Malory’s colophons to be of the greatest historical importance. It is the criteria that the Morte provides, that its author was a knight and a prisoner between March 3, 1469 and March 4, 1470, that establish [the author’s] identity. . . . Thomas Malory of Hutton, like his namesake from Papworth St. Agnes, was not a knight, and so not the author . . . No-one but Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel could have written the Morte Darthur.11

So Field establishes the hypothesis which is the cornerstone of his argument: that in the ninth year of Edward’s reign, Malory was simultaneously an author, a knight and a prisoner. The most famous objection to the Warwickshire knight’s candidacy, and to Professor Field’s canon of probability, long remained that of William Matthews, as argued in The Ill-Framed Knight: . . . Le Morte Darthur could not have been written without the aid of a consid-

erable library. So the question must be asked: how could Malory have been a prisoner and used such a library? Had his incarceration been of the kind that Charles d’Orleans enjoyed a few years before – one spent in various country castles, with freedom enough to carry on a couple of love affairs and to write about them in a sequence of virelays and ballades – there might be no problem. But Malory was in Newgate, it is claimed.12 Nor, for sundry well-documented reasons – flight risk, massive debt, and a violent disposition among them – can we be sure that the Newbold Revel Malory was in one of Newgate’s comfortable upper cells, the prerogative of rich and well-connected inmates. Anything else would have meant languishing in an overcrowded, disease-ridden prison with ‘criminals and traitors’.13 In addition, Matthews argues, Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel would have been about seventy years of age in the ninth year of Edward’s reign: bare survival, let alone writing a thousand-page book, might well have been impossible in these circumstances.14 Matthews suggests instead that a Sir Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, Yorkshire, was the only Malory situated close enough to the right library – that of Jacques Count of Armagnac (1433–77) – to have translated the French texts represented in the Morte. It was while imprisoned near Bordeaux, 10 Works, p. 1260. 11 Life and Times, pp. 34–5. 12 The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1966), pp. 52–3.

13 Ibid. p. 59. 14 Ibid. p. 73.

THE TEXT AT HAND

17

Matthews suggests, that Malory had access to the volumes which he translated. Rather than rehearse Professor Field’s effective reasons for rejecting this ‘daring’ supposition,15 I will go on to suggest a few others. With regard to source availability, Matthews, interestingly, neutralizes his own objection that a large library was the sine qua non for Malory’s task. When Matthews (rightly) directs our attention to specific libraries and specific kinds of fifteenth-century text production, introducing us to Jacques d’Armagnac, he shows that Jacques’ library included three copies of the complete Vulgate cycle (that is, three large single-volume books containing L’Estoire del Saint Graal, Merlin, Lancelot, Queste del Saint Graal, and Mort Artu), four copies of the prose Tristan, and two copies of Palamede, among other Arthurian works. In 1470, Matthews tells us, Jacques’ scribe Michel Gonnot of Crozant completed work on a great manuscript which Matthews calls ‘the nearest parallel to Malory’s work among all the manuscripts of medieval romance’. Michel’s book, now BN fr. MS 122, was a single-volume (of about 1,100 folios) compilation of Arthurian romances drawn from his master’s immense library. The book’s objective, Matthews writes, ‘was to encompass the whole body of Arthurian romance within one frame which had its own individuality’: This was achieved by completeness of coverage of the material represented in Arthurian and Tristan prose romances, and by a procedure of copying large excerpts taken from different texts of the individual romances and arranging them in sequence. In large measure, it was a procedure of conflating, anthologizing, and arranging; but it also involved some shortening of the excerpts, a good deal of condensation, some concentration on individual heroes, and a fair amount of disentangling and clarifying the narrative entrelacement of the

complicated sections.16 This suggests three things. First, it tells us that this kind of compilation was a historical category of bookmaking for which there existed a market in the fifteenth century, a kind that blurs the Vinaverian distinction between ‘interlaced single-romance’ and ‘anthology of romances’. Secondly, it suggests the possibility – not friendly to Matthews’ own argument – that Malory was translating not from a massive library but from a single-volume compilation such as Matthews describes, rendering the project much more likely of success (for one in or out of jail). Thirdly, it allows for the possibility that the unlacing of the entrelacement, which, following Vinaver, we usually attribute to Malory and his job of separating out the tales, might have been performed at an earlier stage in the transmission: not in the transmission from French into English, that is, but from various single-romance manuscripts into a Gonnot-style compilation. Matthews’ other objection, that Malory was too far advanced in age to begin and finish so lengthy a translation, has been effectively put to rest by the subsequent researches of Field, who persuasively puts Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel’s birth- date between 1414 and 1418 (rather than the traditional c. 1396), putting him in his early fifties when the Morte was written.17 15 Life and Times, pp. 25–35. 16 The Ill-Framed Knight, pp. 145–6. 17 Life and Times, pp. 54ff.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

A theory not voiced of late, but which remains neither impossible nor improbable, is that of Richard R. Griffith. Adopting the same chief criterion as Matthews (i.e. source availability), Griffith, in the compelling 1981 article ‘The Authorship Question Reconsidered’,18 finds the most likely author to be the Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire. Like William Matthews’, the value of Griffith’s argument lies not in the banishment of uncertainty as to biographical data. Indeed, Griffith – resurrecting the candidature of the apparently unknighted Cambridgeshire man, originally suggested by A. T. Martin in 1897 – must knight his candidate by means of a wonderfully imagined (though, strictly speaking, not impossible) historical fiction.19 What Griffith does offer us, analogously to Kim and Radulescu, is a way to liberate historical Malory criticism from having to have a single protagonist; specifically, he locates with precision the milieu in which Malory’s project, and others like it, flourished. Griffith argues that, after William Matthews had attacked them in The Ill-Framed Knight, most arguments in support of the Newbold Revel knight lay ‘demolished,’ leaving only Kittredge’s original assertion that this candidate was the only Thomas Malory living in the ninth year of Edward IV’s reign with right to the title Sir. Griffith, in turn, continually forces the nomination of the Warwickshire man back to that same square inch of turf. More helpful, Griffith reasoned, would be evidence linking the book not to a name, but to a set of circumstances in which such a project could have been undertaken. Griffith’s own research into Martin’s forgotten candidate outlines just such a set of circumstances. Most compellingly, Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes owned property adjacent to that of the Woodville family, that is, the household of Richard Woodville (or Wydville), 1st Earl Rivers, and his wife Jacquetta St Pol (the widow of John, Duke of Bedford). This household’s library, Griffith finds, contained most of the French books sent home by Bedford when regent of France, whose texts included, in one form or another, all of Malory’s French source material. To judge by its character, the Bedford-Woodville library may well have contained not only a single-volume redaction of Vulgate material, but also the English poems Malory used. If Malory was not working from a compilation such as Gonnot’s, he certainly needed access to such a library. That Malory would have had access to this library is suggested to Griffith by his likely familiarity with the younger Woodvilles, his contemporaries Anthony (Lord Scales, 2nd Earl Rivers) and Elizabeth (later Edward IV’s queen).20 Anthony, industrious courtier, benefactor of Caxton and translator of French texts, is rightly made much of in Griffith’s article as the likely patron of Malory, and a profile of the 2nd Earl Rivers here would not be out of place. This Woodville’s life was, from quite a young age, bound with that of Edward IV, whom he first met when Edward was in Calais planning his 1461 invasion. In 1464 Anthony’s sister Elizabeth became Edward’s queen; this was the beginning 18 Aspects of Malory, pp. 159–77. 19 For the much-disputed 1471 inquisition post mortem which names ‘Sir Thomas Malory,

Miles’, see Matthews, Ill-Framed Knight, p. 158, n. 1; Griffith, ‘Authorship Question’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 175–6; and Field, Life and Times, pp. 132–4. 20 See also Barber’s ‘Malory’s Morte Darthur and Court Culture under Edward IV’, Arthurian Literature XII (1993), pp. 133–55.

THE TEXT AT HAND

19

of that Woodville ascendancy which many contemporaries (as have modern historians) viewed with such distaste. Anthony rose quickly, being made a Knight of the Garter and granted the lordship of the Isle of Wight. In 1477 he was made governor to the Prince of Wales, and put in charge of the younger Edward’s education. As to that education he had a specific mandate from the king. The Prince was to be ‘virtuously, cunningly and knightly brought up’. It was further provided that noe man sytt at his boarde but such as shal be thought fit by the discretyon of the sayd Earl Rivers and that then be reade before him, such noble storyes as behoveth a Prince to understand and knowe; and that the communicatyon at all tymes in his presence, be of vertu, honor, cunnynge, wisdom, and deedes of worshippe, and of nothing that should move or styrre him to vyces.21

This directive being given to Anthony Woodville marks a clearly legible confluence of royal practice and chivalric reading. As such it is not only an index of a given literature’s propaganda content – though it is that – but it is also an index of specific relations between Edward and his family, and between Woodville’s own family and the king’s. The Woodvilles were inveterate social climbers, almost all of them (including Anthony’s father) marrying upward. The extent to which they were regarded as parasites by many of their Yorkist in-laws is of considerable historical interest. For example, if the Woodvilles rose with Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward, it was they, as Charles Ross has observed, who brought about the destruction of Edward’s dynasty. Even as Edward crowded his court with Woodvilles, they were construed by his blood relatives as the enemy within; after his death they were treated accordingly by Edward’s younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester.22 On the other hand, Anthony Woodville had things to recommend him, even to those who, such as Domenico Mancini, had little affection for the Woodvilles as a family. Anthony was, according to the Italian visitor, ‘a kind, serious and just man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life. Whatever his prosperity he had injured nobody, though benefiting many.’ Sir Thomas More called him ‘Vir, haud facile discernas, manu ne an consilio prestantior’ (‘a right honourable man, as valiant in hand as politic in counsel’); Commynes said he was ‘un tres gentil chevalier’ (‘a very noble knight’).23 He also knew how to fight. His joust with the Bastard of Burgundy at Smithfield (1467) is well known: it ended with the two on foot swinging axes with such violence that Edward had to intervene.24

21 ‘Gloucester Annals’, in C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature of the Fifteenth Century

(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913; repr. New York: Burt Franklin Bibliographical and Reference Series No. 37), p. 357; Philippe de Commynes, History, trans. Thomas Dannet, ed. C. Whibley (London: 1896, 1967), vol. I, p. 78; S. Moore, ‘General Aspects of Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages’, The Library, 3rd ser., no. 4 (1913), pp. 369–70. 22 Edward IV, pp. 84–103. 23 Dominico Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard III, trans. and ed. C. A. J. Armstrong, 2nd edn (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1984), pp. 67–9; Thomas More, ‘History of Richard III’, in The Complete Works of Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), vol. II, p. 105; Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires: The Reign of Louis XI, 1461–83, trans. Michael Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 321. 24 Robert Fabyan, Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811) p. 656.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

Killing the Bastard, anyway, would have defeated the purpose of his visit, which was to arrange the marriage of Margaret of York to John’s brother Charles (the Bold), future Duke of Burgundy. In a joust on the occasion of that wedding in June 1468, Woodville broke eleven lances with Adolf de Cleves. As the ‘calculated use of chivalric pageantry’25 such jousting suggests the conscious blending of art and politics. Woodville had taken a part in the translation of romance into a functioning reality; at the same time, he helped bring Burgundian manners into English usage. A better co-conspirator for William Caxton would be difficult to imagine. It was Caxton’s own years in Burgundy that formed his own taste for chivalric literature and introduced him to the printing press. His project in England would take the shape largely of translating French courtly literature of a Burgundian cast into English. It was just after Woodville’s appointment as governor in 1477 that Caxton brought out Anthony’s translation from the French of the Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophres, a production whose didacticism and appeal to Chaucerian translatio set the aristocratic tone for all of Caxton’s publications. Griffith finds in Woodville a very likely patron for Malory. Elegant as Griffith’s hypothesis is, its utility rests on a number of assumptions. As Carol Meale points out, ‘some fairly basic questions’ must be asked at this point: For instance, what justification is there for assuming, first, that the French library did remain intact after Bedford’s death, and that it did pass to Anthony Wydville? Secondly, can we be sure that there was no comparable collection of potential source materials in England at the time? Thirdly, is it reasonable to assume that, in the context of fifteenth-century England, Malory would have had to rely on either the motivation and/or the resources offered by a patron in order to compose his work?

Such answers as are available to these questions do not simplify matters, and most evidence points to ‘a piece-meal, and haphazard, fragmentation of the collection’ after the Duke’s death in 1435.26 This is not a dead-end, however. Whatever their point of origin, and whoever handled them, the books in the Woodville library were the right kind: one of them was the Arthurian miscellany bequeathed by Richard Roos to his niece ‘Alianor hawte’. That book (now BL MS Royal 14.E.III) contains a Queste, an Estoire and a Mort Artu.27 Furthermore, Anthony Woodville was an active reader and translator of chivalric and aristocratic texts. Studies of Woodville’s prose and translation style, in fact, reveal quite remarkable affinities with Malory’s own: in her edition of the Body of Policye, the anonymous translation into Middle English of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du corps de policie, Diane Bornstein argues tentatively but persuasively that the likely translator was Anthony Woodville.28 Among the many pieces of 25 Edward IV, p. 95. 26 ‘Manuscripts, Readers, and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century England: Sir Thomas Malory and

Arthurian Romance’, in Arthurian Literature, IV (1985), pp. 93–126; 96, 99.

27 Ibid. p. 103. 28 Diane Bornstein, ed., The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de

Policie, from MS C.U.L. Kk.1.5 (Heidelberg, 1977), pp. 31–6.

THE TEXT AT HAND

21

evidence she offers – including the suitability of this text for the younger Edward’s education – the most compelling is her comparative analysis of the translation styles of the Body of Policye and that of Woodville’s Dyctes or Sayengis. Both English versions succeed to a degree rare among fifteenth-century translations in rendering French into elegant and idiomatic English prose. . . . by the standards of the time, he does not use a highly Latinate vocabulary. The complexity of the work is syntactic rather than lexical. Although the syntax is too involved by modern standards, it is controlled. These are the same features that are found in the Body of Policye. In discussing his method of translation [in the

prologue to his Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres] Woodville states that he remained close to the meaning and vocabulary of the original. The statement also describes the method of the translator of the Corps de policie.29 Whether or not she is right about Anthony being the translator of the Livre de corps de policie, Bornstein places that translation in the same ‘school’ of translation as Woodville’s. To this hypothetical school Sir Thomas might seem also have belonged, since, as observed by Eugène Vinaver, Malory reduces the French text into English without adding anything of substance that is not in the text; building up an English sentence with the words selected from the French, translated and then arranged in a totally new way. The history of architecture knows many examples of this procedure but they are much less common in the history of prose. What they imply is the separation in the translator’s mind between the vocabulary and the syntax of the original, his respect for the former and his relative indifference to the latter. One might go a bit further and say that this situation suggests that the translator, consciously or unconsciously, prefers to rely upon his own syntactical patterns and so refrains from reproducing those of his model.30

Whereas Woodville’s and the Livre de corps-translator’s syntax retained a hypotactic structure, Malory’s was plainer and more linear. Each translator nevertheless proceeded by a common method: departing from the original sentence structure of the French prose while keeping the vocabulary. The translators’ similar method, as well as the nature of their subject matter, may point, if not to Woodville’s patronage, then at least his literary acquaintance with Malory, possibly through Caxton. It is not difficult, then – even as we heed Carol Meale’s skepticism – to see Malory’s Morte as a mediate result of the Woodville-Caxton collaboration. Whether Malory used a series of single-volume romances or a fifteenth-century anthology of Arthurian material, even a distant association with someone like Woodville – who knew books and could get them – would be a significant factor in the Morte’s production. Richard Griffith’s argument establishes, at least, that Malory’s book benefited from Anthony Woodville’s own industrious chivalric project.31

29 Ibid., 35–6. 30 ‘A Note on Malory’s Prose’, in Aspects of Malory, p. 10. 31 Life and Times, pp. 144–5.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

It remains to view one further piece of evidence. In September 2000 a document was brought to light by Anne F. Sutton which shows definitively that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was in Newgate prison at the time the Morte Darthur, according to the final colophon, was completed. Found among the records of the Mercers’ Company of London, the document ‘shows that on 20 April 1469 Sir Thomas Malory was one of twenty-one men who stood around the deathbed of Thomas Mynton, gentleman, in Newgate gaol hearing his declaration that he would, if he lived, perform all his past promises made to Sir Thomas Cook and cease to vex him or harm him in any way’.32 The implications of this document are several. First, it shows that after September 1464, the date of the last known record of Malory as a free man in the 1460s (he is mentioned as having witnessed a betrothal), but before 20 April 1469, Sir Thomas, having been excluded from pardons in 1468 and 1470, was in all likelihood a constant resident of Newgate. This would help explain the lack of any other record of his activity during that time. The newfound document also permits a reliable historical assessment of the conditions in which Malory might have composed his book. Sutton demonstrates that Newgate then was ‘not such a bad place’. It had been completely rebuilt in 1423–32 and at that time outfitted for a new supply of water. Current regulations at Newgate are described by Sutton: Citizens of London and ‘honest’ persons, that is those of some social standing and financial means – among them Malory, who as a knight-prisoner was second after the keeper in the list of witnesses at Mynton’s deathbed – could procure chambers in one of the towers, with the privilege of walking on the leads and with easy access to the privies, to the two ‘well-lit and large’ halls or ‘day-rooms’ on either side of the chapel, to the fountain, and to the chapel itself, on the north side of the gaol. Access to the ‘day-rooms’ and the chapel was particularly valued for recreation, and it was free to all except those accused of the worst crimes, who were kept in basements and strongholds on the south side.33

Although Newgate still required fetters for those in debt of over £5, Malory, by Field’s reckoning, had by 1454 reduced his debt to £4 3s. These conditions, combined with the right to receive visitors, which prisoners of Malory’s rank enjoyed, make it feasible for a long book, a translation even, to have been composed in Newgate.34 This seems all the more feasible in light of the possibility that Malory need not have had an entire library for his work, but only one or two such compilations as were being produced on the Continent, plus an English miscellany such as Robert Thornton’s. The historical narrative is thus very much sharpened, and, incidentally, the candidacy of the Warwickshire Malory further strengthened. That narrative,

32 ‘Malory in Newgate: A New Document’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical

Society, Seventh Series, vol. I, no. 3 (September 2000), pp. 243–62.

33 Ibid., p. 248. 34 For a hypothetical reconstruction of the knight-prisoner’s writing day, see D. Thomas Hanks,

Jr, ‘Textual Harassment: Caxton, de Worde, and Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and K. S. Whetter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 27–47; 28–9.

THE TEXT AT HAND

23

nevertheless, is one we must still take to be a historical fiction – even if a very accurate one. In all the historical reconstructions we have discussed, there are not only horizontal gaps between instances of documentation, but vertical gaps between documentation and history itself.35 The job of filling in such gaps requires the historian to do two things at once: to make rational, educated guesses, and also to reconcile events and their documentation. The first thing very few are knowledgeable enough to do (these scholars certainly are); the second we all tend to do automatically, when filling out tax forms, for instance. In other words, the results are fundamentally subjective and contingent; Professor Sutton’s findings – valuable as they are – are equally so. There is no way of writing about the life of Thomas Malory without using your imagination. Field, accordingly, addresses his Life and Times to readers ‘who do not mind living dangerously’.36 But if there is a point to discovering who Malory was, it must be to place his Morte Darthur in some meaningful relationship to the world in which it was produced; by produced I mean not only translated and written down, but copied (at least twice) and then printed – a production history shared at that time by only a handful of other books.

The Malory Canon A radical change in editorial practice was made in 1868 by Edward Strachey. Realizing that ‘nothing could justify the reprinting of the most corrupt of all the old editions when the first and best was in reach’, he went back to Caxton, and his example was soon followed by H. Oskar Sommer. (Eugène Vinaver, Works, p. ci)

The question of what, exactly, Malory did write is at the center of another debate. McGann, as cited in my Introduction, contends that the answer to such a question must be as pluralistic as medieval authorship itself. This renders the question of an ‘edition’ highly problematic. It is the job of textual criticism to render a text legible with accurate reference to that text’s production history; but this is a task which leads only indirectly to the appearance of an edition. Editions mediate between a text’s theoretical unity and its historical diffuseness. The Morte Darthur survives (in Vinaver’s Works) in just such a mediated condition; so do all edited medieval texts, the best example perhaps being Piers Plowman. Lee Patterson demonstrates that a composite edition (the most radical form of editorial transmission) of that poem’s B-text made by Kane and Donaldson (1975) can provide an object lesson in the logic and illogic of textual criticism:

35 Patterson’s description of this tradition is useful: ‘Since the results of its investigations were

thus thought to be untouched by human hands, historicism thus ascribed to them an unqualified objectivity and explanatory power that no merely thematic interpretation could possibly attain.’ Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 15. 36 Life and Times, p. 1.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

Apart from the sheer magnitude of its achievement, the Kane-Donaldson edition is notable for its rigorous rethinking of the questions surrounding not only this work but textual criticism itself. Furthermore, the editors adopt a position that has been characterized by one reviewer as a “profoundly informed subjectivity,” a description with which they would probably not quarrel. At every turn in their 220-page introduction they stress the priority of internal over external evidence, a procedure that has led another, less friendly commentator to describe their method as “editorial free choice” and the edition as “radical, if not revolutionary.” In fact, what the edition represents is a profound reconceptualization of the whole question of what constitutes evidence, with results that show how characterizing terms like “subjective” and “objective” are profoundly misleading. This is a conclusion, however, that not even the editors make fully explicit.37

The composite text, however confident we are of the scholarship behind it, is thus radically unhistorical. Neither can the ‘perfection’, or the ‘authentic state’, of the Morte Darthur be envisioned as one or the other extant version without recourse, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Kane-and-Donaldson-like subjectivity. A study of Malory by means of Vinaver’s editorship, that is, a study of the Works, similarly, must also be a study of that editor’s own profoundly informed subjectivity. Even as the Winchester-Caxton binary is articulated by Vinaver’s unique fluency with the source material, the works of Malory are massively reconstituted by the editor’s deductive sifting. Vinaver’s emendations in half-brackets (" #), for instance, which denote readings absent from Winchester but present both in Caxton and in a source text – and which belong to Vinaver’s admirable practice of making his editorship as transparent as possible – tend to homogenize all three texts, to make W’s readings more ‘flush’ with, and thus genealogically subordinate to, those of its cousins. Despite the wide recognition of this effect, a debate over the relative merits of C and W is conducted today largely in binary terms. That is, the Lachmannian idea of the ‘better’ text persists. The locus terribilis of the Caxton-Winchester debate is the section entitled ‘The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that Was Emperor Himself through the Dignity of His Hands’ (the Roman War), whose variants are the most pronounced. Scholarship on these and other variants registers the high sophistication, and high difficulty, Malorian textual criticism attained after 1934, especially in 1947 (Vinaver’s First Edition) and with the work of William Matthews in the 1960s and 70s. The chief positions in this debate can be summarized as follows. Beginning with Eugène Vinaver’s edition based on the Winchester manuscript (Works), readers confront the difficulty of two different versions of Malory’s text: that witnessed by the unique manuscript (now BL MS Add. 59678), and that witnessed by William Caxton’s incunable of 1485. Readers are then confronted with the job of identifying the theoretical underpinnings of Vinaver’s method, that is, the criteria for his choice of W over C as a base-text; the degree of authority, or authenticity, granted to the base-text; and the manner in which that 37 Negotiating the Past, p. 78.

THE TEXT AT HAND

25

base-text is re-presented in a critical edition. Following this, contemporary Malory critics must be clear as to what part of this question they engage: that is, whether the historical object of inquiry is the state of a no-longer-extant original text and the relative faithfulness to it of its offspring (beginning with the not extant first-written text and ending with C), or whether the text’s bibliographical emergence is considered to be its print-production in June 1485. Vinaver is clear about the questions which his textual scholarship seeks to ask and answer: ‘Since the primary aim of any critical edition is a text which would approach as closely as the extant material allows to the original form of the work, the real question before us is how far the material now available for the study of Malory’s text will allow us to go in this direction.’ In other words, the critic seeks to discover, not the content of the oldest manuscript, but the text’s original state; the difference is crucial. Whereas manuscript is historical, the text – however many witnesses to it – remains always an abstraction. Vinaver is well aware of this; but his method supposes that it is possible to approach the original text from manuscript evidence, that an origin can be triangulated from extant material. The blind spot in this method is that there can be no historical conception of a purely original text: each layer of scribal or editorial ‘interference’ which is stripped away yields yet another layer of mediation, whether it is that of an ancient scribe or a modern editor. While it is important to credit Vinaver’s editorial conservatism – as witnessed by his critique of Wendelin Foerster’s edition of Chrétien, a Kane-and-Donaldson-like composite of ‘good’ readings which Vinaver described as ‘disastrous’ and ‘totally unreal’38 – it is equally important to recognize his tendency to refer to ‘the damage done by copyists’.39 It is not that Vinaver was wrong, that he deliberately ignored the historical relevance of scribal events; rather he was asking a different question: not ‘What can this manuscript (or incunable) tell me about the world in which it was produced?’ but ‘What is the relationship of this manuscript to the original (i.e. authentic) composition?’ The latter is simply the question which his own profound learning prompted him to ask. By Vinaver’s own account, his choice of W as the more authentic Malorian text was founded on three main convictions. First, that it was Caxton, and not Malory, who authorized the variations wherein C (especially in the Roman War) differs so widely from W. The variants lack the authorization of the text’s original producer (Malory) and so are a function not of authorship, nor even thoughtful editing, but of producing a unit of sale intended for a specific market. Second, that the copy-text Caxton used was inferior to W. Vinaver contends that Caxton’s copy text and W had a common ancestor, but that the manuscript which Caxton printed was corrupt, as witnessed by W’s fuller readings and the presence in it of all the colophons. Thirdly, Vinaver deduced from W that Malory had written eight separate romances, and that the printed Morte’s novelistic unity – the result of C’s continuous rubrics and concatenating chapter divisions – was the invention of the printer. This conclusion was reached when, with W, the authorial-scribal colophons which divide the eight sections of the whole 38 Works, p. cvii. 39 Ibid., p. cviii.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

book were discovered. ‘It was Caxton’s idea, not Malory’s, to publish these works under one general title, a title borrowed from Malory’s last romance, The Tale of the Death of King Arthur’.40 Vinaver saw his job then as one of de-Caxtonizing W, and said so explicitly: ‘It is only now that the damage due to Caxton’s “symple connynge” can be partially repaired.’41 But, as witnessed by the word ‘partially’ in that statement, Vinaver took pains to qualify his idea of the original text. In practice, it was a job of grappling with the historical limitations of the surviving material, not one of total restoration. As he writes in the front matter to his edition: I have endeavored to treat the Winchester MS. with all the care due to a copy whose original is no longer extant: not to reconstruct that original in its entirety by means of hypothetical readings, but merely to lessen as far as possible the damage done by copyists. . . . The Winchester MS. has been adopted . . . not because it is in every respect the nearest to the original, but because it is so in some parts, and because as long as absolute ‘truthfulness’ is not aimed at, the less well known of the two versions, which is at least as reliable as the other, is as fair as any choice can be.42

These comments are intended specifically to justify his edition and in themselves make very little claim for W’s greater authenticity. After all, that it is ‘[nearer to the original] in some parts’ may also be said of C. Theoretically, however, Vinaver’s edition promotes the value of a static, ‘authentic’ text, a text at the point whereafter composition ceases to be authorial and begins to be scribal. The discovery of this text, the isolation of its infinitesimal period of existence, is, as we know, full of pitfalls. Enter the ghost of William Matthews, Exeter Arthurian Congress, 1975. In a paper posthumously delivered to the congress entitled ‘A Question of Texts’, Matthews presented the case that Vinaver had chosen the ‘wrong’ base-text for his edition, that it was Caxton’s Malory which was, in every respect, ‘nearest to the original’. He introduced the word ‘revision’ rather than Vinaver’s ‘omission’43 to describe much of the scribal – for Matthews, authorial – activity occurring between W and C: he believed the version of the Morte witnessed by the copy-text of C, which was faithfully printed, to have been derived, at one remove, from the text (though not the manuscript) of W. Matthews’ four main reasons for supposing these things are as follows. First, he contends that C reflects Malory’s prose style at a later stage of refinement than does W. For instance, the suppression in C’s Roman War of the alliterative patterns which in W were massively carried over from the alliterative poem seems to Matthews a specific rhetorical and stylistic move, and improvement, on the part of Malory. Secondly, these alterations to the Roman War represent a further adaptation of the original: that from epic into romance, a mode of adaptation, argues Matthews, generally characteristic of Le Morte Darthur, as of

40 41 42 43

Ibid., p. xxxix. Ibid., p. xxxv. Ibid., pp. viii–ix, cxxi. Ibid., p. cii.

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THE TEXT AT HAND

fifteenth-century prose romance in general. Third, the revisions witnessed by C are largely in the suppression of descriptive detail, which brought the Roman War into greater stylistic harmony with the rest of the book. The stylistic difference between C and W is pretty clearly the result of the reviser having realized that the style of W was quite out of keeping with the rest of Le

Morte Darthur. So although C retains a good many phrases, even sentences, in exactly the same words as its original, it is, as a whole, written quite differently. Generalizing, one might say it is written in a more modern narrative style, more truly prose, plainer, and simpler.44 Fourth, and most compellingly, Matthews notes that, due to the presence in C of material freshly adapted from W’s sources, the reviser, among other requirements, would have to have ‘used not only W but also the same three sources Malory used – the alliterative poem, John Hardyng’s Chronicle and the French Prose Merlin’.45 This departure from Vinaver’s supposition that the presence of unique material in each version derives from accidents of inheritance from a common ancestor (and that these differences were in place a recension or two earlier than W and C), is based on Matthews’ own stemma, which is called the ‘revision stemma’. It differs from Vinaver’s ‘inheritance stemma’ as follows:46

REVISION MA

INHERITANCE

VM

H

MA

VM

H

M M W W2 C

W M MA VM H W W2 C

C

Malory Alliterative Morte Arthure Vulgate Merlin Hardyng’s Chronicle Winchester Caxton’s lost copy-text Caxton’s 1485 edition

Matthews believes the reviser to have been Malory himself and here P. J. C. Field’s observation commands attention: Had [Caxton] wished to correct the book from its sources, and found time to gratify that wish, it is doubtful whether he would have known what the sources

44 The Malory Debate, p. 79. 45 Ibid., p. 85. 46 Field’s diagrams, The Malory Debate, p. 142.

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MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE

were: the Winchester manuscript does not name them, and Malory, being dead, could not have told him.47

Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel apparently died around 1471, and he of Papworth St Agnes was executed about 1470. Barring the emergence of another manuscript (e.g. Caxton’s copy-text) which identified its sources we must suppose that it was with the assistance of a third party that Caxton, if it was he, made the corrections. It might after all have been the third party who made all the corrections. Furthermore, the corrections need not have been made in 1485, but might have been registered on what became the copy text at any time between W and C. (We provisionally exclude the possibility that Caxton could have recognized and worked from Malory’s sources.) As the editors of The Malory Debate remark, ‘This drive to discern the “real” and “authentic” [Malorian text] resembles the drive to identify the real, historical Arthur.’48 In other words, there can be no answer to Matthews’ open (and heavily loaded) question, ‘Did Vinaver base his edition on the wrong text?’ As least, there is no logical or scientific way of arriving at the definition of ‘wrong text’. While Matthews denies that W is closer to the original than C, he upholds the idea that the closer a manuscript is to the original text, the better it is, and the more worthy, apparently, of presentation in a critical edition. And here Matthews seems to conflate the two questions, ‘which text should a critical edition be based upon’ and ‘which is the better text’. Either question, as its concomitant assumptions are sifted through, spawns any number of other problems: the first, for example, assumes that that critical edition will use a single base-text (not true of Vinaver’s edition), and also that there is need for only one critical edition of a given text to exist (Matthews was at work on his own when he died; it was completed by James Spisak49). As with the authorship question, however, the very terms of the textual debate can help in more practical matters. If Matthews’ late work on the Caxton text had done nothing more than reestablish the legitimacy of the printed Le Morte Darthur, it would have performed very great service. However, that body of scholarship continues to shed light elsewhere, and is, in particular, responsible for the rehabilitation of William Caxton’s reputation as a literatus. That rehabilitation, in turn, is most useful to the scholar who wants to place the production of Le Morte Darthur in a historical context. Matthews’ work in toto affirms that any social, historical criticism of Malory’s work must turn on a historical understanding of Caxton. The structural differences between the Winchester manuscript and Caxton’s book are well known, as are the conclusions Vinaver drew from them, the chief one being that, whereas Caxton packaged Malory’s book as a single narrative, the makers of the manuscript faithfully reproduced Malory’s divisions of eight 47 ‘The Earliest Texts’, in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 4. 48 The Malory Debate, p. xi. 49 Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur Based on the Pierpont

Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485, ed. William Matthews and James Spisak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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separate romances. The chief ‘damage’ done by Caxton – besides re-writing the Roman War episode (which C. S. Lewis considered rather a boon50) – was the suppression of the explicits which in the Winchester manuscript signal the end of one romance and the beginning of another. We will not now enter into the details of comparative editorship, however. I wish for the moment to consider the prejudices inherent in Vinaver’s remarks, since these prejudices inhere in much subsequent Malory criticism. We observe a certain disingenuousness in casting that ‘symple connynge’ back in Caxton’s face, since it is a (willfully) literal reading of an age-old rhetorical figure. As classical rhetoric taught, a preface might require a captatio benevolentiae (a capturing of the audience’s good will), and this could be expressed by the ‘ab nostra method’, in which, according to Tony Hunt, the speaker/author ‘may make protestations of unworthiness, lack of ability and so on in various humility formulae’.51 If Caxton was a man of simple understanding, the evidence for it is not in his Preface, which is the work of a seasoned translator, editor and librarius. In addition, to consider a man of Caxton’s achievements truly of ‘symple connynge’ is short-sighted. Even if one attributes Caxton’s printing of Chaucer (including a revised edition) to the poet’s popularity and not to the printer’s perspicacity, so acute a bibliographical sense as Caxton’s cannot be attributed to a keenness to move merchandise. At some point in assessing the ‘damage’ which Caxton was causing to the books he published, we must begin to see things another way: however warped Caxton’s product might have seemed to a twentieth-century scholar, it was not so in its own time. It sprang from a thriving, cosmopolitan, high-tech and highly connected operation. The unexpressed content of Vinaver’s disparagement of C is of course the medievalist’s privileging of the manuscript over the incunable. Like other philologists and textual critics in the German tradition – Sievers, Zupitza, Klaeber, Gollancz – Vinaver thinks in terms of manuscript-ontology. Manuscripts, like cathedrals, were a medieval cultural product of the highest sophistication. Their textuality – each manuscript linked both to its predecessor and to its own progeny by a sublime physical genealogy of copying – provided a material link to the ancients as well as a material index of millennia of history and learning. Also, the manuscript tradition is perfectus, and therefore capable of being studied from beginning to end. Print culture is our common, living tradition, and to some degree historically imponderable. It is not to be wondered at that incunabula, to the eye of a hard-working student of paleography, appear primitive and grotesque. Vinaver’s training quite understandably recoiled from such a thing as Caxton’s Malory where a manuscript was also available. We are accustomed now, however, to grant each instance of textual production its own ontology: none, in any objective scheme, has supreme being. Scholars and editors of the Piers Plowman tradition, as we have observed, have

50 ‘The English Prose Morte’, in Essays on Malory, pp. 7–28; 26–7. 51 ‘The Rhetorical Background to the Arthurian Prologue: Tradition and the Old French Vernac-

ular Prologues’, in Arthurian Romance: Seven Essays, ed. D. D. R. Owen (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), pp.1–23; 1, 3.

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been long accustomed to think of Piers as a poem which is (at least) three poems, and ‘William Langland’ frequently as a kind of shorthand for the poem’s polymorphous authorship. The scribes of the Old English Bede manuscripts thought nothing of adding their own closing remarks to the Historia in Bede’s own voice, and thus with Bede’s authority; Caxton did the same in his editions of the Polychronicon and the Brut, continuing them up to Caxton’s own time – there is no implication of fraud in either case. Vinaver overestimates the alienness of incunabula from manuscript culture; at the same time, he underestimates the complexity of Caxton’s bibliographical sense; at all times he seems to reject the authenticity of the mechanically reproduced literary-commercial art form.52 A historical reading of Malory’s texts must therefore take its cue not from Vinaver’s theory, but from his practice. That is, it must provisionally set aside the contribution Vinaver makes in his edition’s front-matter and dwell on that made in his Notes, for it is the latter which invites the reader to a historical consideration of medieval textuality, and whose terms may easily be extended to the consideration of William Caxton’s contributions to the Morte Darthur.

52 Walter Benjamin’s term ‘aura’, as analogous to Vinaver’s idea of authenticity, is discussed

below in Chapter 3.

2 Caxton’s preface: Historia and Argumentum

. . . on condamnait pour amphigouri (à moins qu’on ne l’attribuât à quelque erreur de copiste!) toute opacité du discours; on louait pour leur «humanité» tels énoncés qui, souvent après extraction de leur contexte, paraissent interprétables en termes d’aveu ou de référence à une nature extérieure, transcendante aux mots qui sont censés avoir pour fonction de la manifester. (Paul Zumthor)1

Introduction: Locating Fifteenth-Century Historiography Anachronistic characterizations of the Morte Darthur’s historiographical content have been made in passing by many a distinguished medievalist. One critic writes: ‘It is well known that from the late twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries practically all Englishmen thought that Arthur was a genuinely historical figure; and it is clear from the general situation and from his own remarks (e.g. Works, 1229) that Malory shared this view.’2 Another: ‘. . . for history (and the Arthurian romances were considered as such) the fifteenth-century was an age of prose’.3 Neither critic claims to have proved the argument, being busy enough with different questions; nevertheless, such formulations can form a critical inheritance which all too easily goes unquestioned. A later critic, for example, writes: ‘Before turning to the political bias which informs Malory’s reading of the story, we need to establish the fact that for the Middle Ages and especially for the later English Middle Ages, the Arthurian story claimed the status of history.’4 The critic seeks to establish this fact by yoking Malory’s understanding of historia to that of the twelfth-century historians, thus eliding some three hundred years of change in historiographical theory. Another critic, commenting on the didactic nature of Caxton’s prefaces to his histories, writes that

1

2 3 4

‘. . . they condemned as gibberish any opacity in discourse (unless it could be attributed to some error of the scribe!); they praised for its “humanity” any utterance which, frequently taken out of its context, seemed interpretable in terms of an avowal, or reference, to external nature, transcending the words whose supposed function was to manifest it’, Parler du Moyen Age (Paris: Minuit, 1980), pp. 57–8. (My translation.) Derek Brewer, ‘the hoole book’, in Essays on Malory, pp. 41–63; 49. Those remarks are: ‘Lo ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a myschyff here was?’ etc. Larry Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 8–9, 20. Elizabeth T. Pachoda, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 29.

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by postulating and emphasizing the didactic function of history, Caxton could easily assemble narratives drawn from widely differing sources and pass them off as ‘historical’ accounts. Thus, Godeffroy of Boloyne, Kyng Arthur and Charles the Grete, originating as respectively a ‘chronicle’, a prose romance and a chanson de geste, are all subsumed under the nomenclature of ‘Christian history’, which in turn represents the continuation of Jewish and Ancient History. In short, we witness the divinely ordained historical process unfolding before our eyes.5

Besides tending to superciliousness, this characterization of Caxton’s historiography is also unhistorical and misleading, for it insists, on the one hand, that the critical nomenclature used in describing early medieval ecclesiastical historia can be used to describe late fifteenth-century historia; and it implies, on the other hand, that didacticism itself is prescriptive of the universal history. (For all that, it is – minus the imputation of fraud – a good description of early medieval histories.) Such characterizations of Caxton’s historiography may be attributed to the general feeling that Caxton was incapable of rhetorical modulation. Nellie Slayton Aurner in the 1920s thought of Caxton as one possessed of ‘modesty, simplicity, and almost childlike absence of affectation’;6 and William A. Kretschmar expressed roughly the same idea in the 1990s: ‘We can give Caxton credit for meaning exactly what he said in the prologue to the Morte Darthur. Caxton did not move toward modern categorizations of history and fiction. As foreign as his logic there may be to modern sensibilities, it reflected what we can take to be his own straightforward and conservative view.’7 Such categorizing forecloses on any engagement with Caxton’s prose that does not assume its blind servility to outmoded ideas. What if Caxton’s prose was in fact highly rhetorical? Caxton’s ‘conservatism’ (which Kretschmar arbitrarily opposes to ‘modernity’) is not in question. But there is no reason to insist on his ‘straightforwardness’. Where Aurner calls him ‘simple’, perhaps Caxton is actually being quite dry. Nor need we consider Caxton to be ‘moving toward’ anything we recognize as modern. Rather he moved – as occasion warranted – in and out of things which, to certain of us, resemble either medievalism or modernity. These entities, medievalism and modernity, are not mutually exclusive in any case: William Caxton throve in his own modernity. But the present study makes no claims for Caxton’s moving toward, or even loitering near, any epoch other than his own. It remains to define those historiographical practices whose traces are found in, but whose theories do not necessarily determine, Caxton’s historiographical prose, and then to consider the extent to which that prose casts the Morte as history. We must try for as accurate a picture as we can of the different canons of 5

6 7

Jeorg Fichte, ‘Caxton’s Concept of “Historical Romance” within the Context of the Crusades: Conviction, Rhetoric and Sales Strategy’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. R. Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 101–13; 102. Caxton: Mirrour of Fifteenth-Century Letters: A Study of the Literature of the First English Press (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), p. 205. ‘Caxton’s Sense of History’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (October 1992), pp. 510–28; 527–8.

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belief and the different functions of historia which, collectively, were Caxton’s and Malory’s inheritance. We shall first do so with particular reference to early medieval – ecclesiastical, universal – history-writing, which was practiced (roughly) between the fourth and the ninth centuries, or from Eusebius to the Historia Brittonum; and also with reference to the twelfth-century Anglo-Latin historiographers (e.g. William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales) whose method was less theological than bookish, less catholic than dynastic. We will then turn to fourteenth-century historiography, whose most illustrious practitioner, Jean Froissart, had an enormous influence on Caxton’s century. As to the Morte Darthur itself, if we want to consider what historiographical capability this text had for its fifteenth-century readers, we must give an ear to Caxton, since in Caxton’s rhetorical presentation of the Morte are indexed the capacious boundaries of Malory’s historia. The chapter will conclude with a reading of Caxton’s preface to Malory’s book.

Earlier Medieval Historia Universal history Universal history is not just a narrative of events but a theory of reality. Its correspondence to history, and to the future, is figural. Accordingly, its historical, theoretical and political connection to patristic exegesis – of which it is really a sub-category – cannot be left out of the reading. The history of medieval figura – beginning with Paul’s interpretation of the Old Testament by means of the New – demands much fuller elaboration than space allows here, but its characteristic function is to interpret present history as the fulfillment of Old Testament prefigurations.8 Perhaps the most familiar figura in English historical writing is the identification of the condition of Britain – whether Celtic or Saxon – with the movement of Israel out of Egypt, particularly in the crossing of the Red Sea. Gildas uses this imagery to describe the Scottish and Pictish onslaught: ‘The barbarians push us back to the sea, the sea pushes us back to the barbarians; between these two kinds of death we are either drowned or slaughtered.’9 The Old English Exodus narrates the journey with distinct martial and naval inflections, the dry land in the midst of the Red Sea becoming the island of Britain itself.10 Early medieval histories, taking after Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (composed and frequently revised c. 311–323) and Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans (c. 418), are both compositions and interpretations and form an ecclesiastical record of historical figurae. As certain modern critics, such as Robert Hanning and Walter Goffart, have demonstrated, the figural, or ‘provi8

See Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 11–71. 9 Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London and Chichester: Phillimore/ Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), pp. 23–4. 10 See Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 3: ‘Exodus and the Ancestral History of the Anglo-Saxons’.

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dential’, historiography which was practiced in the post-Imperial Germanic north is a product of specific relations in the early Middle Ages between Rome and the ‘barbarian’ episcopates.11 Just as hagiography preaches the divine attributes and miraculous deeds of the saints by glorifying their relics, early medieval historiography preached national history (whether victorious or catastrophic) as the material expression of God’s will, while reminding Rome that remote northern episcopates were legitimately Catholic and deserved support. In fact, hagiography and historiography frequently, and quite naturally, overlap. (Helena’s finding of the true cross, for example, is foundational in Eusebius’s conception of Constantinople.) Here, Robert W. Hanning describes a British example, the ‘St. Germanus’ episode in the Historia Brittonum. Originally a separate piece of hagiography, the St. Germanus section has been inserted into the narrative in a way reminiscent of the Alban legends of Bede and Gildas, or of Bede’s use of the same St. Germanus. The conflict between Germanus and Benli or Germanus and Guorthigirn is a traditional hagiographical conflict intended to glorify the holy Christian at the expense of the wicked king, himself exemplary of the evils of society. But once again, when a hagiographical account is placed within the framework of national history, its import has changed. Germanus himself has become a social hero, saving Britain from the sins of its leaders. The Benli episode, which seems at first to have nothing to do with the saint’s encounter with Guorthigirn, is in fact inserted to establish the operation of God’s providence in British history.12

This description, both of the narrative and of the historiographer’s compilatio, shows the medieval historical imagination being deployed in all its ideological plenitude: the nation is guided by a native saint from worldly (political) wickedness to divine (but still political) rectitude, and into a history which is in harmony with theology. Like Eusebius and Bede, who insert letters and fragments of other histories into their narratives too, the author of the Historia Brittonum appropriates and re-deploys other texts in their entirety. All written histories, then, national or hagiographical, may attest to the truth of providential history. Texts of Gildas, Bede and the author of the Historia Brittonum and others like them are gathered by Robert Hanning under the appellation ‘Fall of Britain texts’ since, in one way or another, they relate and seek to justify the fall of Celtic Britain to the Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries, attributing political downfall to the historical blindness of a degenerate population. Gildas, a British priest, does not doubt the justice of Britain’s fall. He begins with a comment on the present generation: ‘I saw clearly how men of our day have increasingly put 11 Bede’s historical project, for example, was peculiarly and intensely invested. On the one

hand, Bede was at pains to demonstrate the English Church’s devotion to, and dependence upon, Rome: Gregory the Great, and the missionaries Augustine, Hadrian and Theodore – and not the Celts, Saxons or Romans – are the fathers of Christian Britain. On the other hand, as Walter Goffart has shown, the Historia was part of a campaign, directed at Egbert, Bishop of York, to ‘reform the much deteriorated church of Northumbria’. ‘The Historia Ecclesiastica: Bede’s Agenda and Ours’, The Haskins Society Journal 2 (1990), pp. 29–45; 31. Also Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 235–328. 12 The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 115.

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care aside, as though there were nothing fear.’13 This lack of vigilance leads directly to the Saxon calamity, of which Gildas’s description is famous: Then all the members of the council, together with the proud tyrant [Vortigern], were struck blind; the guard – or rather the method of destruction – they devised for our land was that the ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken!), hated by man and God, should be let into the island like wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the north. Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land. How utter the blindness of their minds! How desperate and crass the stupidity!14

God himself hates the Saxons: he did not award them the land but sent them as a scourge, to clear the island of unworthy tenants. Even in their calamity, the Celtic Britons retain some vestige of having been the chosen ones (cf. Gildas’s prefatory description of Britain as an Edenic agricultural paradise). Bede is in agreement with Gildas as to the causes of Celtic Britain’s destruction, and cites Gildas’s account almost verbatim, albeit from the victorious, Saxon point of view. Remarking on the political confusion into which Celtic Britain had fallen by the middle of the sixth century, he writes: So long as memory of past disaster remained fresh, kings and priests, commoners and nobles kept their proper rank. But when those who remembered died, there grew up a generation that knew nothing of these things and had experienced only the present peaceful order. Then were all restraints of truth and justice so utterly abandoned that no trace of them remained, and very few of the people even recalled their existence. Among other unspeakable crimes, recorded with sorrow by their own historian Gildas, they added this – that they never preached the Faith to the Saxons or Angles who dwelt with them in Britain. But God in his goodness did not utterly abandon the people whom he had chosen; for he remembered them, and sent this nation more worthy preachers of truth to bring them to the Faith.15

Bede also preaches the island’s history. The chosen ones were now the Saxons and Angles. The more worthy preachers, Augustine of Canterbury and his fellow missionaries, would actually save the Saxons by rescuing them from the Celts’ aggressive non-evangelizing and culpable misdating of Easter. Only in this world could the invading Germanic tribes be the victims of the Celts. But they were victims, indeed, of the stiff-necked natives’ historical and ecclesiastical blindness.

The twelfth century: exemplum not figura In the twelfth century, historical truth is a less mysterious quantity: it is what is told in historiae. The genre has now come to underwrite the veracity of the historiographical instance. In the twelfth-century histories – such as Eadmer’s Historia novorum in Anglia (c. 1115), Ordericus Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica 13 The Ruin of Britain, p. 15. 14 Ibid., p. 26. 15 Bede, History of the English Church and People, ed. and trans. Leo Shirley-Price

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 65–6.

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(before 1141), Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (c. 1129–1154), Hermann of Tournai’s De Miraculis S. Mariae Laudunensis (1146) and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum (1124, continued c. 1135–1140) – the idea of political cause-and-effect began to crowd out salvation as the ordering principle of reality. History was still didactic but it functioned by means of exempla, not figurae. These exempla, it must be emphasized, ‘were basically foreign to the synthetic, multileveled view of history common to the Christian national-ecclesiastical historiography of earlier centuries’.16 Especially interesting to us is that this change occurred at the same time as King Arthur entered the Latin British historical narrative, that is, with Malmesbury’s Gesta and the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100–1154). These were not the first texts to mention Arthur; by the twelfth century, he was a Celtic hero-king of long standing. Malmesbury and others sought to rectify the historical record by separating the historical truth about Arthur from the exaggeration of his exploits in popular tales, tales which had no written authority behind them. ‘This is the Arthur’, writes William about whom the trifles of the Bretons rave even now; one certainly not to be dreamed of in false myths, but proclaimed in truthful histories – indeed, who for a long time held up his tottering fatherland, and kindled the broken spirits of his countrymen to war.17

It is against the background of this ethic that Geoffrey of Monmouth composed the history of Arthur as eventually transmitted to Malory. To some of his contemporaries Geoffrey’s book was a culpable abuse of historia,18 whose closely guarded textual continuity and integrity – its substantiation of historical claims by means of texts – was only mocked by Geoffrey’s citing an otherwise unknown ‘Britannici sermonis librum vetustissimum’ (‘a very old book of sermons in British’)19 as his authority. For all that, Geoffrey’s Historia passed fairly quickly into the canon. According to Barbara Sargent-Bauer, Geoffrey’s many twelfth-century admirers and his few detractors appear to have agreed that his account was indeed history, although the latter thought it bad history. It exploited the familiar conventions, it used sources perceived as factual, it asserted not novelty but antiquity, and it was composed in Latin.20 16 The Vision of History in Early Britain, p. 174. 17 Trans. Richard L. Brengle, Arthur, King of England (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,

1964), p. 8; see also the account in William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum libri quinque: Historiae novellae libri tres, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (1887–88), ch. I, bk 8. 18 The ill reception of Geoffrey’s work by contemporary historians can be glimpsed in William of Newburgh’s proem to his Historia rerum Anglicarum, and in the Itinerarium Kambriae (I.5) of Giraldus Cambriensis, both printed in Latin and in translation in Arthur of Britain, ed. E. K. Chambers (Cambridge: Speculum Historiale/ New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), pp. 268, 284. 19 Historia regum Britannie I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), p. 1. 20 ‘Veraces Historiae aut Fallaces Fabulae?’ in Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris Lacy (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 25–39; 29. Another apt description of this effect is Hanning’s: ‘Geoffrey’s influence on the following centuries was . . . both enormous and normative. Until the sixteenth (and in some quarters the seventeenth) century, British history was Geoffrey’s Historia, expanded, excerpted, rhymed, combined, or glossed. Of course, it was one thing to copy Geoffrey’s narrative, and quite another to understand or

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The history of Geoffrey’s book demonstrates the influence which a genre and its accompanying expectations may wield over texts themselves and, in this case, over the historical imagination. But subsequent readers and writers did not, as many critics presume they did, fail to recognize this effect. Rather, they seemed to make room for it. Wace and Chrétien understood what a paper-thin proposition Arthur’s historicity was; this understanding did not require them to reject it, however: it merely reminded them to attribute that proposition to other texts. Arthur’s historicity seems always to have been provisional: it is to be expected, then, that he would thrive in a historiography that had lowered its gaze from the horizon of universal history and begun to answer to local requirements, and to serve secular interests.

Fourteenth-century historiography Remarkably, criticism has overwhelmingly neglected to read Caxton in relation to the historian perhaps most important to Caxton’s own period, Jean Froissart (1337–1410). Froissart witnessed and recorded the events (the Hundred Years War; the deposition of Richard II) which in large part determined the political conditions of Caxton’s England; Froissart, like Caxton, had loyalties on either side of the channel; and both promoted chivalric culture vigorously. Some acquaintance, then, with the fourteenth-century writing of history, of which Froissart was an exemplar and Caxton the student, would seem necessary to an understanding of Caxton’s preface. The writing of universal histories was not a dead practice in fourteenth-century England. Nicholas Trevet (1258–1334) wrote two of them, the Latin Historia ab orbe condito and the Anglo-Norman Chronicles. There is also the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, which Caxton himself both published (in Trevisa’s translation) and continued. (The vernacular prose Brut, or Chronicles of England, also printed and continued by Caxton, founded on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history, is less in the ‘universal’ tradition than is the Polychronicon, but it shares with the later universal histories a vast timeline and a preoccupation with classical origins.) On the model of the Polychronicon, other Latin histories were written in England: the Historia aurea, the Eulogium historiarum, the Speculum historiale (all anonymous), to name just a few. The fourteenth-century universal history, however, differed from the Orosian model in several important ways, the most important to our present discussion being its desire for an English history continuous, not with the Church, but with Troy. John Taylor observes that one reason for the great popularity of Higden’s work was ‘the increasing interest in classical antiquity’:

emulate the premises of his historiography. Of the latter phenomenon there are few, if any, examples in the later medieval centuries. Instead, Geoffrey’s “facts” were reabsorbed into the overall Christian-patriotic interpretations of history which (with inevitable changes and developments) reasserted themselves, apparently without difficulty, in the work of most medieval historians who cast their nets widely enough to include the pre-Saxon history of Britain.’ The Vision of History in Early Britain, pp. 173–4. See also Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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As the Brut in England and the Grandes Chroniques in France bear witness, countries were producing fictitious and legendary histories which connected the origin of their societies with those of the ancient world. Classical history and classical legend were increasingly present in the literature of the fourteenth century. It was but a step, therefore, for an English monastic chronicler to reconstruct the story of antiquity, and to associate the history of his own country with that of Troy.21

We must also bear in mind that the majority of English universal histories were composed in Latin, a few of them in Anglo-Norman, and, until Trevisa’s translation of Higden (c. 1380), none in English. Such chronicles were still the domain of monastic and secular clerics who had the Latin language, as well as their libraries’ collections of historical texts, at their finger-tips. There is good reason, then – despite the popularity of the Polychronicon – to look elsewhere for a fourteenth-century practice cognate with Caxton’s own. That older cousin is the ‘chivalrous history’ which we owe largely to Edward I and Edward III, whose wars in Scotland and France provided chroniclers (both English and French) with such dramatic material. The writers of this history, especially Peter Langtoft (d. 1307?), Jean de Bel (1300–1361?), Lodewijk van Veltham (c. 1312), Froissart, and Sir Thomas Gray (fl. 1355–1363), wrote chronicles richly informed by the chivalric ethos of thirteenth-century romance. Almost all of the chivalrous histories were written in French, and most of them in prose.22 They are united by an overt didacticism, but are not directed toward salvation; they are rather concerned with the chivalric indoctrination of young knights. Thus the function of chivalrous history is frequently the same as that of chivalric manuals like Ramon Lull’s Libre del orde de cavalleria and Geoffroy de Charny’s Livre de chevallerie. It is Froissart’s stated purpose, after all, to write a history which had within it the didactic potential of a manual: In order that the honourable enterprises, noble adventures and deeds of arms which took place during the wars waged by France and England should be fittingly related and preserved for posterity, so that brave men should be inspired thereby to follow such examples, I wish to place on record these matters of great renown.23

As Elspeth Kennedy observes, it is common for these histories to make direct use of romances (especially the Prose Lancelot), and not only for exemplary stories, but for exemplary practices as well. Romance is also used in these histories, interestingly, to explain the production of chivalric texts. ‘In the Prose Lancelot,’ Kennedy writes, ‘every knight who left Arthur’s court on a quest had to swear an oath to give on his return a true account of his adventures, whether to his honor or to his shame. . . . These reports were set down in writing by four of Arthur’s learned clerks in a great book that was drawn upon for the “conte 21 English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.

97–8.

22 An excellent study of these histories is in Richard J. Moll, Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later

Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

23 Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 17.

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Lancelot.” ’24 The Knights of the Company of the Star, the order to which Charny belonged, observed the same custom, and one recorded by Jean de Bel in words similar to the Lancelot’s: And there each year, at least, the king was to hold full court with the companions. And there each of the companions was to recount all the adventures, the shameful as well as the glorious, which had come to him in the time since he had been in the noble court. And the king was to establish two or three clerks who were to listen to all these adventures and put them in a book, so that they might be reported there every year before the companions, by which one could know the most valorous and honor those who best deserved it.25

Romance provides history with not only the behavioral structures within which ‘matters of great renown’ take place, but the protocol for recording deeds and for making them into books. The etiology of the romance text, as given in the Lancelot is made also the etiology of the chivalric history-text, and the romance-logic which governs the adventures of Lancelot is assumed by the historical knights of the Company of the Star to govern theirs. In the class ideology which governed both the literature and life of a man such as Charny, of course, nothing could be more natural than such an assumption. Charny himself served in the Hundred Years War and his death in the Battle of Poitiers is recorded by Froissart: Meanwhile Sir Geoffroy de Charny had been fighting valiantly near the King. The whole of the hunt was on him because he was carrying the King’s master-banner. He also had his own banner in the field, gules, three inescutcheons argent. The English and the Gascons came in such numbers from all sides that they shattered the King’s division. The French were so overwhelmed by their enemies that in places there were five men-at-arms attacking a single knight. Sir Geoffroy de Charny was killed, with the banner of France in his hands.26

The career of Charny suggests what may indeed be the basic assumption of fourteenth-century chronicles such as de Bel’s and Froissart’s: that the telling of history is a natural and even integral part of chivalric practice. As Taylor observes of the fourteenth-century aristocracy, ‘What history they knew came chiefly in the form of the Brut and the historical material of the French romances.’27 Especially with regard to the Brut, the same may be said of England’s late medieval gentry, whose interests, as Raluca Radulescu has shown, are reflected in the contemporary production history of the Brut itself. The Brut, or Chronicles 24 ‘Theory and Practice: The Portrayal of Chivalry in the Prose Lancelot, Geoffroy de Charny,

and Froissart’, in Froissart across the Genres, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Gainesvillle: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 179–94; 181. 25 Chronique de Jean de Bel, ed. J. Viard and E. Deprez, 2 vols (Paris, 1904), pp. 204–6. The translation is from D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe 1325–1520 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 180–1. 26 Chronicles, p. 140. 27 English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 14.

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of England, which began life as an Anglo-Norman text in the thirteenth century, served an exclusively noble and high-ecclesiastical audience (it was also translated into Latin) well into the fourteenth century, when it was translated into English. Radulescu notes that The Middle English version of the chronicle subsequently reached a wider audience, evident from the survey of gentry owners. . . . The upper-class overtones of the narrative remained largely unchanged, yet the political colour of the fifteenth-century additions suggests an appeal to a growing audience, including country gentry and urban circles.28

Caxton himself, of course, printed and wrote continuations for both the Brut and the Polychronicon.29 It is easy to see, now, how much closer we have come to the historiography of William Caxton’s period, whose readers in all likelihood did not need Caxton to tell them to ‘rede Froissart’30. Caxton’s fluency within this historiographical realm – and his recognition of Malory’s belonging to it – is the subject of the next part of this chapter.

Caxton’s Preface Jesus said, ‘Business people and merchants will not enter the realm of my father.’ (The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi Codex II, f. 44v))

While it is not within the scope of this study to treat fully the reception of Caxton by modern critics,31 we must hope to expose a few of those prejudices which have, over the years, hardened into institutions. Caxton’s reputation as ‘mercer first and man of letters second’, for example, promotes an ideological binary which seeks to keep separate the ‘literary’ and the economic functions of literature. This exclusionary fiction has created a gulf between Caxton and the very idea of literature, which is to say, between production and high art. Caxton, the supposition goes, was a dilettante and a salesman, a literary tinkerer who hardly read or understood the texts he translated and printed. Though divided in opinion as to whether Caxton was dishonest or just rather dim, critics are fond of remarking that, in publishing what he did, Caxton went the way the wind blew; he did not – as would have been more to his credit – refine or revolutionize English literary culture. Even in his studious publication of Chaucer, the printer does not show good judgement, but reveals himself to be

28 The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 55. 29 See Lister M. Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe: Caxton, the Polychronicon and the Brut’, Speculum

vol. 60, no. 3 (July 1985), pp. 593–614.

30 Epilogue, The Ordre of Chivalry (1484), see below, p. 108. The injunction is, at any rate, rhetor-

ical, designed, one suspects, to embarrass the unchivalric knights of Caxton’s time.

31 This work, at any rate, has been undertaken by William Matthews in almost all of his writing,

but see especially ‘The Besieged Printer’, in The Malory Debate, pp. 35–64; see also William Kuskin’s unpublished doctoral thesis ‘William Caxton and the English Canon: Print Production and Ideological Transformation in the Late Fifteenth Century’ (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996), and his related article ‘Caxton’s Worthies Series: The Production of Literary Culture’, English Literary History vol. 66, no. 1 (1999), pp. 511–51.

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a follower of current taste. It is this tendency which made Caxton’s greatest modern scholar, N. F. Blake, so dubious of the printer’s critical faculty. Of all his prologues, that to the second edition of the Canterbury Tales is the one which modern scholars have welcomed most warmly, for it has been used to show time and again not only that Caxton regarded Chaucer as the greatest English poet, but also that he did everything he could to publish his works accurately. For most scholars there is thus a happy union of the talents of the greatest medieval English poet with those of the first English printer: the latter being a humble, though worthy, acolyte at the shrine of the master. Regrettably, I find it difficult to view their relationship in this way. I have already considered why Caxton chose to print the Canterbury Tales rather than Piers Plowman.32 The choice was determined more by current literary fashion than by the printer’s own discrimination.33

The ideologically loaded binary on which Blake’s account rests expresses this prejudice: one can have a talent for reading poetry, but it cannot coincide with or be determined by sensitivity to current literary fashion. ‘Regrettably’, Caxton is dull and unoriginal, embodying the worst of both medieval conservatism and mechanical reproduction.34 If Blake’s later work on Caxton has been more precise and less condemnatory, it is the earlier note of exasperation that is most often re-sounded today. By other critics, the printer is still cited for representing (uncritically) the ‘bourgeois literary theory’ of his age, and for being a ‘fundamentally non-innovative thinker’.35 But this valuation of artistic trail-blazing – a modernist ideology, to be exact – is totally foreign to medieval textual culture. If Chaucer was ‘ahead of his time’ – which is one way of accounting for, or instituting, a genius-differential between Chaucer and his own contemporaries and followers – Caxton may be said to be utterly of his time. His conservative text-production was simply ‘medieval’, and not substantially different in impulse from scribal text-production. What remains of interest, though, is the cultural divide which criticism has supposed between Caxton and the matter which he translated and printed. That supposition institutes a genius-differential between Caxton and Thomas Malory, and casts the textual operations of the

32 Caxton and his World (London: André Deutsch, 1969), p. 70. The reason supplied here is that

Caxton ‘confined himself to the court poets; Langland was not one of them’. Pearsall also cites Caxton’s ‘neglect’ of Piers (‘The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 26). 33 Caxton and his World, pp. 101–2. See also N. F. Blake’s ‘Caxton and Chaucer’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. (1967), p. 36; Diane Bornstein’s ‘William Caxton’s Chivalric Romances and the Burgundian Renaissance in England’, English Studies 57 (1976), p. 9; and Seth Lerer’s Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 175. 34 As to N. F. Blake’s work on Caxton’s total oeuvre, scholarship will always be deeply in his debt. If his earlier presumptions of Caxton’s crude commercialism set the dominant tone for late twentieth-century criticism, his own continuing scholarship has proven much more flexible. With regard to Malory’s book, see especially ‘Caxton Prepares his Edition of the Morte Darthur’, in his William Caxton and English Literary Culture (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), pp. 119–211; and ‘Caxton at Work: A Reconsideration’, The Malory Debate, pp. 233–53. 35 R. F. Yeager, ‘Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1984), pp. 146–7; and Elizabeth Kirk, ‘Clerkes, Poetes, and Historiographs’, in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), p. 291.

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former on the work of the latter as a zone of corruption. A responsible literary history of the fifteenth century will insist on the fictionality of such a zone. For Caxton, as for Anglo-Norman historians and fourteenth-century chroniclers, history was more a function of texts than a theory of reality. But unlike that of the twelfth century, fifteenth-century historiography did not offer its practitioners such neat categories as veraces historiae and fallaces fabulae. Caxton’s definition of the word ‘history’ in the Polychronicon preface (1482), for example, is consistent only in that it subordinates a history’s truth-value to its function as a repository of exempla: . . . whiche worde hystorye may be descryved thus / Historye is a perpetuel conservatryce of thoos thynges that have be doone / before this presente tyme / and also a cotydyan witnesse of bienfayttes, or malefaytes / grete Actes / and tryumphal victoryes of all maner peple. And also yf the terryble, feyned Fables of Poetes have moche styred and moeved men to pyte / and conservynge of Justyce / How moche more is to be supposed / that Hystorye, assertryce [advocate] of veryte / and as moder of alle philosophye / moevynge our maners to vertue / reformeth and reconcyleth ner hande all thoos men / which thurgh the Infyrmyte of oure mortal nature hath ledde the mooste parte of theyr life in Ocyosyte [idleness] and myspended theyr tyme, passed right soone oute of Remembraunce / of whiche lyf and deth is egal oblyvyon / The fruytes of vertue ben Inmortal / Specyally whanne they been wrapped in the benyfyce of hystoryes.36

The final sentence is remarkable not only for positing various levels of immortality, but also for the ‘wrapping’ metaphor by which it explains the historical text. This may indeed point to Caxton’s familiarity with Boccaccio’s De genelogia deorum gentilum, which Blake assumes he read in the original Latin.37 ‘Such then is the power of fiction’, writes Boccaccio, ‘that is pleases the unlearned by its external appearance, and exercises the minds of the learned with its hidden truth; and thus both are edified and delighted with one and the same perusal.’38 Similarly, the moral benefit of exempla, that is ‘the fruytes of vertue,’ exists eternally, and thus prior and externally to the historicity of an exemplum; but when those fruits can be wrapped in the ‘benyfyce of historyes’ – transferred from deed to word – then they are ‘especially’ eternal. The descriptive result of Caxton’s metaphor can be expressed with reference to the three subcategories of narratio proposed by Cicero and other Roman rhetors, which are fabula, historia and argumentum: Fabula est in qua nec verae nec veri similes res continentur, cuiusmodi est: ‘Angues indentes alites, iuncti iugo.’ Historia est gesta res, ab aetatis nostrae memoria remota; quod genus: ‘Appius indixit Karthaginiensibus bellum.’ Argu-

36 Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 65–6. 37 Caxton’s own Prose, ed. N. F. Blake (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), p. 24. Caxton cites

Boccaccio’s book in his additions to his Historie of Jason (1477), for which see Caxton’s own Prose, pp. 65–7; and Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 34, 35. 38 Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930), p. 51.

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mentum est ficta res, quae tamen fieri potuit. Huiusmodi apud Terentium: ‘Nam is postquam excessit ex ephebis . . .’ Fabula is the term applied to a narrative in which the events are not true and have no verisimilitude, for example: ‘Huge winged dragons yoked to a car.’ Historia is an account of actual occurrences remote from the recollection of our own age, as: ‘War on men of Carthage Appius decreed.’ Argumentum is a fictitious narrative which nevertheless could have occurred. An example may be quoted from Terence: ‘For after he had left the school of youth.’39

It is important to remember, however, that the rules of history-writing laid down by the medieval authorities do not always play out as we might expect. For instance, Isidore of Seville is quite clear in his distinction between historia and fabula.40 Fabula, or res fictae, refers to fictional narrative, such as that composed by Aesop. On the other hand, historia, or the narratio rei gestae is, by definition, that which is sine mendacio (without falsehood). But historia is also, by definition, that which is ‘worthy of remembering’ (a phrase often used by Caxton). More practically, it is also a narrative (in Barbara Sargent-Baur’s paraphrase of Isidore) ‘derived from the testimony of witnesses who recorded what they had witnessed’.41 Witnesses to historical truth are always in the form of texts; these texts then, however copied or used, are always authoritative because always deriving from that moment of witnessing – a moment written into any number of Arthurian narratives: for example, Arthur’s viewing Lancelot’s confessional mural; knights relating their adventures to scribes; Merlin relating his to Blaise, who writes them down. Also, to the extent that argumentum is predicable of historia it can be neither ‘impossible or improbable’,42 even though it is invented. There is nothing ‘false’, for example, about preaching or prophesying: preaching is a way of rhetorically calling a future into being, and prophecy is just historia in advance. A saint’s life, similarly, is both historia and argumentum since its value derives equally from its historical veracity – as witnessed by text and relic – and also from its being an exemplum, which is a separate substance. Whether or not Caxton’s theory of historical narratio is strictly continuous with either Cicero’s or Isidore’s, the tripartite conception of historical veracity is much better suited to Caxton’s exposition than the fallaces fabulae / veraces historiae distinction of William of Malmesbury.43 The Polychronicon’s raison d’être is situated by Caxton’s preface somewhere between res gestae and argumentum. Indeed, given the partisan proclivities of fifteenth-century English chroniclers – who are not above heavy spin – such may be argued to be the situation of most historical writing in Caxton’s century.44 While it is more skeptical of the texts

39 De inventione, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell (London: William Heinemann, 1949, 1968), I. 19.

27, p. 55. See also Rhetorica ad Herennium, I. 8. 3, and Quintillian, Institutio, II. 4. 2.

40 Isidori Hispalensis episcope Etymologiarum sive Originum, 2 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 41 42 43 44

1911), I, xl–xli, l. ‘Veraces historiae’, p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. De Gesta Regum Anglorum, vol. I, p. 11. This view is especially well argued by Paul Strohm, both in Hochon’s Arrow (1992) and England’s Empty Throne (1998) passim, but see especially the books’ first chapters, ‘False Fables and Historical Truth’ and ‘Prophecy and Kingship’, respectively.

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(i.e. of the instances of historiography which are its matter), fifteenth-century historia seeks not only to foreground exempla (something historia shares with argumentum) but, by means of those, to intervene in history itself. Even across the generic distinctions which Caxton made between the two texts, his prefaces to the Polychronicon and to the Morte Darthur both rely on argumentum, promoting the ethical exposition, not necessarily of historical events, but of historia. Taking these two prefaces together, R. H. Wilson writes that Caxton ‘moves toward modernity by admitting that the stories are likely not all true, and can be read for pleasure; and the prologue to the Polychronicon derives its literary theory from what may be called a humanistic document’.45 Though Wilson somewhat inexactly characterizes as ‘humanist’ this grammatical modulation between history and fiction, he is undoubtedly right in saying of Caxton that his ‘other contact with humanism is small’. William Kretschmar denies any such portent, arguing that any humanism in the preface to the Polychronicon is a holdover from the (now lost) Latin or French preface from which it was adapted. Caxton, he argues, simply remained ‘under the influence’ of a text derived from fifteenth-century Florence, and probably did not understand what he was translating.46 This argument, except as a spectacular installment in the fiction of Caxton’s stupor mentis, need not detain us. But we need not, and should not, assume for Caxton any degree of humanism. (Anyway, Wilson’s equating of ‘modernity’ with ‘humanism’ is quite arbitrary.) No such broadly identifiable trend need have informed Caxton’s rhetoric for R. H. Wilson’s observation to be instructive; he is right to observe something out of the ordinary in the two prefaces. That something is elusive, however. Joerg Fichte rightly remarks that for Caxton ‘histories’ is ‘a term referring not primarily to [texts’] ontological status but to their utility’.47 This would partially explain why the Polychronicon seemed to Caxton to require a definition of the word ‘history’: his preface to that text addresses the reader’s expectations of vera historia, and of history’s utility. But in Caxton’s other prefatory text containing that glimmer of ‘modernity’, the one composed for Le Morte Darthur, the utility of that text is just as doubtful as the ontological status of its subject matter. With regard to the doubtfulness, or fictionality, of that subject matter, it is well to remember one of the most remarked upon characteristics of Malory’s Morte: its tendency to dispense with the marvelous, to delete the giant winged dragons and – as Terence’s comedy did – concentrate on things that per argumentum might conceivably have happened. I will turn now to a reading of Caxton’s preface, and specifically to what I will treat as its three major rhetorical phases. These are, roughly, (1) the imprimatur,

45 ‘Malory and Caxton’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English: 1050–1500 (New Haven:

Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980), p. 775. The ‘humanist’ document in question is the preface to the Historical Library by Diodorus Siculus, which was translated from the Greek by Poggio Braccholini; Caxton may have worked from a French translation of Poggio’s Latin preface. 46 ‘Caxton’s Sense of History’, pp. 514–15. 47 ‘Caxton’s Concept of “Historical Romance” ’, p, 101. I take texts’ ‘ontological status’ here to mean the historicity of the events they report.

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which negotiates arguments for and against publication of the book, (2) the acquiescence, which establishes the rhetorical position adopted by the printer after he agrees to the job, and (3) the justification, the manner in which Caxton, by appeals to conventional wisdom, makes the ground safe for his book. It will then be possible, I think, to arrive at an understanding of Caxton’s understanding, and deployment, of historical narratives.

Imprimatur Caxton’s preface dramatizes a printer’s resistance to the idea of publishing a book about King Arthur. As if wanting to be clear from the outset that it was not his idea, Caxton emphatically attributes the imprimatur to a multi-voiced and apparently dogged body of ‘Many noble and dyuers gentylmen of thys royame of Englond’ who not only came in person demanding the book, but whose success depended on their doing so ‘many and oftymes’.48 Caxton reports, but does not wish to seem complicit in, a group voicing of this demand. I read the arguments in the first phase of the preface49 as indirect discourse, that is, spoken in a dramatic voice other than Caxton’s own. Far from being just a ‘provocative sales gambit’,50 this is a dramatic meditation on the function of an Arthuriad in the fifteenth century. First, the printer is called out for publishing books about foreign heroes and none thus far about English ones. This leads to the related argument that, having already printed a book about one of the three Christian worthies, Caxton must now work toward a completion of the triad. This appeal to symmetry tries to establish (rhetorically) the necessity of a Caxtonian Arthur book over and above the desires of the gentlemen: the very full treatment given the Nine Worthies trope suggests that the gentlemen considered Caxton to be, or that Caxton wished to show himself, already somehow committed to an Arthurian volume; he would now be fulfilling that obligation. According to the Nine Worthies argument, the trope itself requires Caxton to make an Arthur book. On the other hand, at the moment this trope is rendered visible, it is subject to a sharp and historically significant critique. This critique, in addition, is colored by the fact that, before he gives his rebuttal to the gentlemen, Caxton is again reminded of his obligation to ‘this royaume’.51 The Nine Worthies agenda, we are reminded, serves a nationalistic, as well as a chivalrous, ideology. These arguments do not win the printer over, and the nature of his diffidence is dramatized in Caxton’s category-shifting response: To whome I answerd / that dyuers men holde oppynyon / that there was no suche Arthur / and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym / ben but fayned and fables / by cause that somme cronycles make of hym no mencyon ne remembre hym noo thynge ne of his knyghtes52

48 49 50 51 52

Prologues and Epilogues, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 92–4, lines 6–80 (though lines are unnumbered in Crotch’s edition). William Caxton and English Literary Culture, p. 209. Prologues and Epilogues, p. 93. Ibid., p. 93.

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The other eight Worthies are historical figures, whereas Arthur is a creature of fabula. This recalls us to the first sentence of the preface, in which Caxton neatly defines his market. He is here explicitly a printer of ‘dyuers hystoryes as wel of contemplacyon as of other historyal and wordly actes of grete conquerors & prynces / And also certeyn bookes of ensaumples and doctryne’. If Caxton’s tacit claim not to deal in fiction is disingenuous, his real point is that Arthur does not exactly fit in with the Nine Worthies, and that, far from compelling him to publish an Arthur book, the notion of the Nine Worthies is – Arthur’s historical reality being in doubt – itself historically specious. At the same time, we cannot fail to remark the blandness of Caxton’s assertion that ‘somme cronycles make of hym no mencyon’ in light of his own historical publications – Brut (1480 and 1482) and Polychronicon (1482) – which all make mention of Arthur. I understand this less as inconsistency on Caxton’s part than a rhetorical effort to undermine the ‘Worthies’ argument, and also as a joke. It is worth remarking that Caxton’s skepticism toward the Nine Worthies trope differentiates it from his other two prefaces in his ‘Worthies Series’, Godeffroy of Boloyne (1481) and Charles the Grete (1485), in which the legitimacy of all nine worthies is assumed. Thus it troubles significantly, if momentarily, readings such as that by William Kuskin, who sees in Caxton’s use of the Worthies ‘symbolic structures that work to consolidate the disparate literate groups within the English polity’.53 While Caxton’s preface to the Morte consolidates a literate group within the English polity, it cannot be said to serve willingly a desire to elide distinctions within the polity at large. Caxton will give the paying people what they want, but he will not naively print a nationalistic fiction disguised as an account of ‘historyal and worldly actes’. His customers, well-versed in the Brut as they were, would have smelt something funny there. Caxton was aware that, as Derek Pearsall observes, ‘the Arthurian legend had the same ambiguity in relation to assertions of English nationhood that it had always had’.54 Whatever the gentlemen say, Arthur is in a different historical category than Charlemagne or Godfrey. Caxton’s rebuttal shows his own historiographical insight. As he did in his preface to the Polychronicon, he draws the reader’s attention to notions not only generic – that is, ‘fable’ or ‘chronicle’ – but also ontological – events that are fayned versus those which are historyal. It is not in the words themselves that we find these distinctions being made but in their rhetorical opposition, an opposition which the nature of the Morte itself seems to require Caxton to make: Malory’s Arthur, as Caxton knows, springs only indirectly from Geoffrey of Monmouth; in the interim lie his incarnations in Wace, Chrétien, the thirteenthcentury French prose romances, La
amon’s Brut and the English verse romances of the fourteenth century. Whatever Arthur’s ancient historicity, his narrative has, for hundreds of years, been fabula not historia. Caxton does not wish to

53 ‘Caxton’s Worthies Series: The Production of Literary Culture’, ELH vol. 66, n. 1 (1999), pp.

511–51; 511. See also Catherine Batt’s reading, cited below, p. 50.

54 ‘The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century’, in Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on

Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 9–27; 25.

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appear ignorant of this, nor would he appear to foist on his audience a fiction masquerading as fact – at least not without tipping them off beforehand.

Acquiescence If the gentlemen’s analysis of Arthur’s historicity is specious (or at least disingenuous), Caxton’s being persuaded of his own ‘folye and blyndenesse’55 is equally so – but for all that, both the historical argument and the (rhetorical) condition of being persuaded by it are indispensable to Caxton’s framing of the Morte. The book, that is, must believe itself to be sine mendacio. With comic fullness of expression, then, the printer registers in the preface itself the available historical proofs (which include a book he himself has printed). According to my reading, these proofs have been supplied directly by the diverse gentlemen: Fyrst ye may see his sepulture in the monasterye of Glastyngburye / And also in polycronycon in the v book the syxte chappytre / and in the seuenth book the xxiij chappytre / where his bodye was buryed and after founden and translated in to the sayd monasterye / ye shall se also in thystorye of bochas in his book de casu principium / parte of his noble actes / and also of his falle / Also galfrydus in his brutysshe book recounteth his lyf / and in dyuers places of Englond / many remembraunces ben yet of hym and shall remayne perpetuelly / and also of his knyghtes / Fyrst in the abbey of westmestre at saynt Edwardes shryne remayneth the prynte of his seal in reed waxe closed in beryll / In whych is wryton Patricius Arthurus / Brittanie / Gallie / Germanie / dacie / Imperator / Item in the castel of douer ye may see Gauwayns skulle / & Cradoks mantel. At wynchester the ronnde table / in other places Launcelottes swerde and many other thynges56

Caxton here presents two things simultaneously: a reductio of historiohagiographical protocol, and a guide to the reading, understanding and enjoyment of the same. This passage is thus an occasion for us to review some late medieval textual traditions surrounding relics with which Caxton would have been familiar. Caxton adduces perhaps the greatest authority when he mentions Arthur’s remains at Glastonbury. From the time of Henry II, Glastonbury had been the great repository of Arthurian capital both physical and cultural. This reputation dates specifically from the fire which occasioned a distinct crisis in the monastery’s relic inventory. This moment in the foundation’s history is described by James Carley and Martin Howley thus: In 1184 . . . came the devastating fire in which many relics were destroyed or, if they survived, were rendered unidentifiable. The loss of relics must have been a bitter blow because it deprived Glastonbury of a major source of revenue, that is, donations by pilgrims. The community responded to the fire by identifying hitherto unknown but prestigious relics, such as the remains of St. Dunstan, rediscovered in a hiding place in which they had purportedly been placed 172 years earlier. In 1191, an even more spectacular discovery occurred when a coffin

55 Prologues and Epilogues, p. 93. 56 Ibid., p. 93.

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containing the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere was unearthed in the ancient cemetery.57

The family of texts which bear the immediate imprint of this crisis, and miraculous recovery, has been admirably charted by John Scott in his work on that family’s progenitor, William of Malmesbury, whose De antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesie contains the oldest listing of the monastery’s relics. There is, in addition, Glastonbury’s Magna Tabula. It is (in Jeanne Krochalis’s description) the ‘large, hollow wooden box, about 3 feet by 1½ feet, with two hinged wooden leaves inside’ on which are pasted four fifteenth-century parchment pages containing, for the edification of the monastery’s Latined visitors, ‘the history of the abbey from its purported foundation by Joseph of Arimathea in AD 63 to the refurbishings of 1382 under Abbot John Chinnock (1375–1420)’.58 The tablet tells the visitor that In this island, then, which is called Avalon, there indeed lies within the tomb of the saints at Glastonbury the celebrated King Arthur, prime flower of the kings of Britain, and Guenevere his Queen, who after their deaths were placed near an ancient church between two stone pyramids nobly wrought at that time: they were sepulchered honorably. And the same have been resting there for a long period of time, six hundred and forty-eight years, to be exact.59

Fixed to a wall (as tabula-custom – and the nail-holes on back – indicate60) in a lay-accessible area within the monastery, the Magna Tabula contained perhaps the most publicly accessible of Arthurian relic-documents, and may be considered, even more than the other Glastonbury inventories on record, the literary antecedent to Caxton’s preface. It is, moreover, analogous to it: it stands at the entrance to a historical and narrative hoard; and its function is both to identify treasures and to shore up their cultural value – it is, in the same sense as Caxton’s preface, a guide. Of Caxton’s verbal reliquary, Fichte argues that it functions as the Arthur book’s real justification, and was meant to establish Arthur’s true historicity, which ‘Caxton feels obliged to prove and affirm against some doubting Thomases’.61 But Caxton’s list suggests to me a different idea of the relics’ value: while he introduces them as exhibits, he doesn’t ascribe historicity – let alone divinity – to them. Caxton himself remains a doubting Thomas. By listing hagiographical proofs of Arthur’s historicity, Caxton, whatever his own beliefs or those of his ad hoc editorial board, attaches his Arthur book to an institutional belief: that in the sanctity of relics. In this way, without having to go too far out on a limb, Caxton is able to fabricate a provisional historical reality, sine 57 ‘Relics at Glastonbury in the Fourteenth Century: An Annotated Edition of British Library,

Cotton Titus D vii, fols 2r–13v’, Arthurian Literature XVI (1998), pp. 83–129.

58 ‘Magna Tabula: The Glastonbury Tablets (Part I)’ and ‘. . . (Part II)’, in Arthurian Literature XV

(1997), pp. 93–183; and XVI (1998), pp. 41–82. Edited text with description, commentary and glossary. 59 Ibid. (Part I), p. 163. (My translation.) 60 For the use of tablets in medieval churches and monasteries, see Krochalis, Part I, pp. 95–100; for a physical description of the Glastonbury tablets, ibid. pp. 118–22. 61 ‘Caxton’s Concept of “Historical Romance” ’, p. 101.

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mendacio, for Malory’s Arthur; it is one in which some of the mystical valence of old historiography is momentarily revived, the old correspondences of universal history reactivated. Caxton’s worldly wisdom concerning relics does not in itself indicate disbelief. Caxton admits that the category (relics) is real, and he deploys it in the most traditional manner: as a paratactic repository of mystical proofs. The relic hoard – as a concept – is good enough to convince Caxton (or so he implies in his preface) that Arthur is historical, even as his second-hand reportage of the relic inventory suggests that Caxton is quite ready to doubt any individual relic. At any rate, Caxton, by invoking the inventory at Glastonbury, removes himself from the argument: you must believe both accounts, or neither. Relics, after all, are still a map to something. Like the historical data unearthed by modern scholarship, they may be put to use, stored up against future developments. To what use were they being put in 1485? At least we may suppose this: that any truly mystical symbolic order to which Arthurian relics refer is, by 1485, a dead one, if it was ever truly alive.62 But to the extent that the magic affirms Arthur’s political rule, and England’s place in God’s universe, that magic had frequently been, and in the fifteenth century could still be, invoked. Malory’s Arthur, after all, moves in a universe governed by just these laws: Joseph of Arimathea causes what were considered blood-relics of Christ’s last days to be transmitted to Britain; accordingly, swords, shields, lances and finally the Grail are the signposts of God’s plan.63 The acquisition of the Grail is a bringing of grace out of abstraction and into the phenomenal world (which is what relics do), bringing them specifically into Arthur’s court (so that oath-swearing customs such as those recorded in the Prose Lancelot, for instance, and in de Bel’s history, may be observed). The downfall of Arthur, accordingly, can then be cast as a theological event. Like the Anglo-Norman histories, however, it is less figurative than genealogical; like Froissart’s, more exemplary than factual. The material residue of history (the relic: a skull, a table) is the key to a narrative which is both etiological and eschatological. It is Malory’s text which suggested this to Caxton, and it is this aspect of the Morte that Caxton found necessary to explain (and exploit, if you like) in his front matter.

Justification If the printer has acquiesced (rhetorically) to the gentlemen, it remains to really justify the project. Caxton, after all, not the gentlemen, will have to live with the results: Caxton me fieri fecit, the printer’s final colophon reads: ‘Caxton caused me to be made’. The printer, at any rate, does not claim to have been persuaded, but merely that ‘al these thynges consydered there can no man resonably gaynsaye butt here was a kyng of thys lande named Arthur’, and then ‘. . . al these thynges forsayd aledged, I coude not wel denye / but that there was suche a noble kyng named Arthur / and reputed one of the ix worthy & fyrst & chyef of the crysten 62 For a properly skeptical account of these relics’ catholicity, see E. M. R. Ditmas, ‘The Cult of

Arthurian Relics’, Folk-Lore 75 (Spring 1964), pp. 19–33. See also ch. 9, ‘Obscure Histories, Dubious Relics’, in Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 116–34. 63 As in the ‘Jerusalem’ lyric in William Blake’s Milton.

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men’.64 These statements do not signal a literal ‘change of mind’.65 To concede that there was an Arthur and that he is ‘reputed’ to be one of the Worthies hardly institutes a blanket endorsement of the veracity of the stories told of him. Moreover, an unwillingness to disagree can be attributed to any number of causes, particularly in the case of a publisher dependent on the patronage and custom of his readers; but it is sufficient for Caxton to affirm that ‘al these thynges’ have persuaded him to print the book. Caxton also has ready some of his own, market-related, reasons for embarking on an Arthur project, including the fact that other producers of books, in many countries and in many languages, have already done so, especially in France. These French books, he writes, ‘I haue seen & redde beyonde the see’. For this kind of relic, at least, Caxton can personally vouch. And it is this kind of relic, after all, that the diverse gentlemen in Westminster wish Caxton to reproduce: that is to say, cultural and political capital. In a recent book, Catherine Batt argues that, for the ‘jantylmen’, King Arthur functions both universally as Christian worthy, and politically as a national hero, and so ‘avoids any factional problems that might have arisen within the carefully-constructed “English” community, had the editor named a patron for the Arthurian work. Arthur thus becomes accessible to the broadest possible grouping of Englishspeaking readers, one united by national allegiance rather than local political loyalties.’66 But I would suggest that the suppression (if that is what it was) of the book’s patronage points – as do several other aspects of the Morte’s production – to the delineation, rather than dissolution, of political factions: just because no patron was named does not mean that it did not have one, or further, that his patronage would not be recognized in the character of the final product despite that patron’s anonymity. The function here, rather, is the production of cultural and political capital, and the capital in question is of a specifically Burgundian kind. This in itself would be sufficient to render it hateful to Richard III. If Anthony Woodville was involved in the book’s production then certainly the suppression of his name would serve the local function of keeping Caxton – both as mercer and as citizen – clear of association with that disgraced and largely exterminated family.67 But even if the book’s patron was not Anthony Woodville, it must have been someone like him – a holdover from the chivalric climate of Edward IV’s court. If the book had no patron, as most critics now believe was the case, then the Burgundianism of Malory’s Morte comes down, as well it might, squarely on William Caxton’s shoulders. For Caxton suppresses his own history as well, stating that he had read and seen Arthur books while ‘beyonde the see’, when he might more transparently have said while ‘moving

64 65 66 67

Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 93, 94. ‘Caxton’s Sense of History’, p. 511. Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 39. Hilton Kelleher (‘The Early History of the Malory Manuscript’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 155–6) and J. R. Goodman (‘Malory and Caxton’s Chivalric Series’, in Studies in Malory, p. 265), citing affinities with Woodville’s Cordiale (which Caxton printed in 1479), advocate Woodville’s patronage; Carol Meale (‘Manuscripts, Readers and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century England: Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance’, Arthurian Literature IV (1985), pp. 116–17 passim) persuasively dissents.

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in courtly circles in Burgundy and enjoying the patronage of Margaret of York’. But Caxton’s audience probably consisted of people who did not need to be told this. I do not wish to paint a picture of a unified back-room agenda. Caxton could have been of a divided mind with or without the help – or the invention – of the ‘jantylmen’. Rather I want to suggest that the preface’s arguments for and against making an Arthur book serve an apparent need to distance living historical persons from the book itself. Whatever the book’s patrimony, the job seems to have been to get the text published without drawing attention to the specific cultural capital being accrued. It is with great ingenuity that Caxton justifies his printing of an Arthur book and simultaneously registers his own doubt as to the usefulness of the project, and of the auspices under which it is being demanded. Whether or not Caxton’s own doubt was sincere is not important: it is a functioning part of the Morte’s rhetorical landscape. By citing their reference to Caxton’s own duty to the Realm of England, and to Arthur’s historicity, the printer shows that his clamoring gentlemen pretend to be unaware of – or wish for some reason to elide – literary history between Geoffrey of Monmouth and themselves. Perhaps more accurately, they wish to close their own historical distance – as they have already closed their own rhetorical distance – from Geoffrey’s Arthur. If there is a universalizing impulse here, it begins to look less like a call for national unity than an open-ended desire for a different style of nationality. In an England which toiled in such a constitutional limbo as theirs did, late fifteenth-century aristocrats and gentry might well have found a shared security, or escape, in such a book as Malory’s, one that asserted a monolithic function of history, of monarchy, and of England’s relationship to its own soil.

Argumentum, Exemplarity and Ideology The printing is also justified, and perhaps most broadly so, by its didactic utility. Caxton wants to be clear: I haue after the symple connynge that god hath sente to me / vnder the fauour and correctyon of al noble lordes and gentylmen enprysed to enprynte a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayd kynge Arthur / and of certeyn of his knyghtes after a copye vnto me delyuerd / whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye did take oute of certayn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe / And I accordyng to my copye haue doon sette it in enprynte / to the entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble actes of chiualrye / the Jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes vsed in tho dayes / by whiche they came to honour / and how they that were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke / humbly besechyng al noble lordes and ladyes and al other estates of what estate or degre they been of / that shal see and rede in this sayd book and werke / that they take the good and honest actes in their remembraunce / and to folowe the same / wherein they shalle fynde many joyous and playsaunt hystoryes / and noble & renomed actes of humanyte / gentylnesse and chyualryes / For herein may be seen noble chiualrye / Curtosye / Humanyte

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frendlynesse / hardynesse / loue / frendshypp / Cowardyse / Murdre / hate / vertue / and synne / Doo after the good and leue the euyll / and it shal brynge you to fame and renomee / And for to passe the tyme thys book shal be plesaunte to rede in / but for to gyue fayth and beleue that al is trewe that is contayned herin / ye be at your liberte but al is wryton for our doctryne / and for to beware that we falle not to || vyce ne synne / but texcersyse and folowe vertu / by whyche we may come and atteyne to good fame and renomme in thys lyf / and after thys shorte and transytorye lyf to come unto everlastyng blysse in heuen / the whyche he graunte vs that reygneth in heuen the blessyd Trynyte Amen /68

Again, while the didactic capability of universal history was founded upon the truth claim of its narrative, that of Caxton’s historia is based on stories of bienfaits and malefaytes. Accordingly, Caxton’s introduction to the Morte and the general character of his chivalric program work to highlight the exemplary (as opposed to the ontological) status of Arthur. As in hagiography, the remains of Arthur – both physical and textual – are posited at face value; but in Malory’s case the exemplary parts must be shepherded to the forefront: ‘Doo after the good’, Caxton says, ‘and leue the euyll’. Unlike a hagiographical text, which posits only ‘the good’, Malory’s book also posits an apparently dangerous amount of ‘the evil’. The ‘good’ must be understood to be not only ‘morally redemptive’ but also ‘sanctioned by authority’. For ‘evil’, accordingly, we must read not only ‘sinful’ but ‘ideologically out-of-bounds’. If we ask, ‘To what authority, or ideology, does Caxton’s injunction defer?’ the short answer might be, ‘Lydgate’s’.

John Lydgate’s Arthur The ‘bochas’ of Caxton’s preface refers in all likelihood to Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s de casibus text, The Fall of Princes (c. 1431–1439), whose King Arthur section owes little to romance, being composed almost entirely of chronicle matter. Echoing the histories of Bede, Nennius and Geoffrey, ‘Bochas reherseth’ a geographical and agricultural survey of the island of Britain (lines 2672–709) then introduces Arthur as son of Uther and conqueror of ‘Orcadois, Denmark and Houlond, / Hirelond, Norway, Gaule, Scotlond & France’, and founder of the Round Table (lines 2710–30), before expending a good number of lines (lines 2731–870) on the ‘statutis set be vertuous ordenaunce, / Vndir proffessioun of marcial gouernaunce’.69 Here, in a series of passages which tacitly authorizes Arthur’s conquest and governance – and which adds substantively to Boccaccio’s text – Lydgate constructs a pax Arthuriana, transforming the knights’ Pentecostal oath into something like a constitution, in defense of whose laws knights must The feebler parti, yif he hadde riht, To ther poweer manli to supporte, Yif that thei wern requered of any wiht Folk disconsolat to bern vp & conforte, At alle tymes men may of hem reporte, 68 Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 94–5. 69 Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols (Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institute of

Washington), pp. 900–13.

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No maner wise thei do no violence And ageyn tirauntes make knihtli resistence, That widwes, maidnes suffre no damage Be fals oppressioun of hatful cruelte, Restoren childre to ther trewe heritage, Wrongli exiled folk to ther contre, And for hooli chirchis liberte Reedi euere to make hemsilue strong, Rather to deie than suffre hem to haue wrong. For comoun proffit, as chose champiouns, Pro republica defendyng ther contre, Shewe ay themsilffe hardi as leouns, Honoure tencrece, chastise dishoneste, Releue al them that suffre aduersite, Religious folk, haue hem in reuerence, Pilgrymes resceyue that faille of þer dispence. Callid in armis seuen deedis of mercy, Burie soudiours that faile sepulture, Folk in prisoun delyuere hem graciousli, Swich as be poore, ther rauncoun to recure. Woundid peeple that languisshe & endure, Which pro republica manli spent her blood, – The statut bond to do suich folkis good. (Lines 2738–72)

Thus is Arthur rededicated as an exemplary figure, and one of a specific kind: a giver and enforcer of the law. Lydgate’s Arthur’s sober egalitarianism is further extended in its exclusion of errantry (‘auenture’), which is characterized as inexpedient, a legal liability: To putte hemsilff neuer in auenture But for mateeres that wer iust & trewe, Afforn prouided that thei stoode sure, The ground weel knowe, wer it of old or newe. And aftir that the mateer whan thei knewe, To proceede knihtli & nat feyne, As riht requereth, ther quarelis to darreyne. (lines 2773–9)

Arthur’s law as envisioned by Lydgate does not permit so potentially chaotic a thing as knights riding in search of adventure. The language of this stanza seems to be on especial guard against the ‘rash promise’ by which so many romance protagonists commit themselves to great – but, according to Lydgate, ethically suspect – deeds of arms (such as those committed, twenty years after Lydgate’s death, at Nibley Green). This is certainly a rejection of ‘literary’ behavior, and perhaps also of Froissartian chivalrous history; such a rejection perhaps has its analogue in medieval English contract law, which was increasingly concerned with riht over the moral force of a dispute.70 70 R. F. Green, A Crisis in Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 326–35.

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Despite its general exclusion of romance matter, there is room in Lydgate’s account for the Holy Grail, which is treated in a single stanza (lines 2787–93). When the knights ‘everich took his seete / Lik ther estat, as was to them meete’, Lydgate writes, Oon was voide callid the se pereilous, As Sang Real doth pleynli determyne, Noon to entre but the most vertuous, Of God prouided to been a pure virgyne, Born bi discent tacomplisshe & to fyne, He allone, as cheeff and souerayne, Al auentures of Walis & Breteyne.

Lydgate’s one nod to the Vulgate tradition is best understood, perhaps, as an appropriation of that tradition’s one narrative of outright piety. It seems more concerned, anyway, with re-emphasizing the ideal of moral and political attainment than with chivalric virtues. In the line ‘As Sang Real doth playnli determyne’ Lydgate might be naming his textual source (as he does with ‘Brutus’ in line 2709), but the spelling of ‘Sang Real’, combined with ‘determyne’, invites the reader to consider the pun – as Hardyng’s ‘sank roiall’ also does71 – on which turns the alternate reading ‘blood royal’. Lydgate’s narrative now proceeds to the familiar events which, in the chronicle tradition, lead to Arthur’s death: the embassy from Lucius, the invasion of Rome, Mordred’s usurpation, Arthur’s return and death in battle. These events take up the remainder of the Arthur section proper (lines 2871–3129), in whose last few stanzas Lydgate (as Caxton’s ad hoc editorial board will) names Arthur as one of the Nine Worthies (line 2108), and blandly reports the ‘erroure’ still abiding ‘among Bretouns’ that Arthur is now ‘crownid in Fairie, / With sceptre and suerd’ and will someday return to the British throne (lines 3109–21). If Lydgate’s treatment of the Arthur story is subordinated – as narrative and as exemplum – to the moral function of the Fall of Princes, there remains a further modulation of the story itself. As if the matter were still too much open to interpretation, Lydgate inserts his own ‘Lenvoy’ on Arthur (lines 3129–64). Of especial interest is this envoi’s relation to what comes before it – Boccaccio’s exemplumnarrative which, apparently, lacks a forceful enough statement of its moral – and after it: Boccaccio’s own exclamacioun (lines 3165–206) which at first glance ‘repeats’ the matter of Lydgate’s interpolation. Lydgate apparently felt the need to put just the right spin on it. For the full effect, his envoi is cited in its entirety. This tragedie of Arthour heer folwyng Bit princis all bewar of fals tresoun; For in al erthe is non mor pereilous thing Than trust of feith, wher is decepcioun Hid vnder courtyn of fals collusioun. For which men sholde – I hold þe counsail good – Bewar afforn euere of vnkynde blood. 71 The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (1812), pp. 135–6. Henry Lovelich used this

spelling too; see Barber, The Holy Grail, pp. 215–17, 227–9.

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The world is dyuers, Fortune ay chaungyng, In euery contre & eueri regioun; At a streiht neede fewe freendis abidyng; Long abscence causeth deuisioun: And yif princis be fals ambicioun, Nih of allie, shewe too facis in oon hood, Lat men bewar euere of vnkynde blood. Who was mor hardi of princis heer regnyng Or mor famous of marcial renoun Than whilom was, his enmyes outraieng, Arthur, cheef sonne of Brutis Albioun? But, for all that, the disposicioun Of Fate and Fortune, most furious & wood, Caused his destruccioun be vnkynde blood. What mor contrarious to nature in shewing Than fair pretence, double of entencioun, Gret alliaunces frowardli werkyng? Hid vnder flours, a serpent casts poisoun, Briht siluir scaled, damageth the dragoun; Ech werm sum parti tarageth of his brood. And what mor pereilous than vnkynde blood? Noble Princis, on Arthour remembryng, Deemeth the day of Phebus goyng doun: Al is nat gold that is cleer shynyng, Afforn prouided in your inward resoun, Fals vndermynyng & supplantacioun, Remembryng ay with Arthour how it stood, Be conspiracioun of vnkynde blood.

Lest readers think Arthur guilty of hubris in his imperial conquests, or rash in his Roman campaign – and that in these lie Arthur’s (negative) example – the poet directs them away from such a reading. The significance of the Arthur story, we are assured, is its figuring of betrayal by kindred. The effect of this emphasis is simultaneously the vindication of Arthur in all other things than his trust in Mordred and the cautioning of the prince against familial competition. The main difference between Lydgate’s ‘Lenvoy’ and Boccaccio’s exclamacioun is that whereas the latter is specifically an extension of the Arthur-and-Mordred narrative – naming Arthur three times and Mordred six in his 42 lines – the former broadens the theme to ‘unkynde blood’, making that its refrain, naming Arthur four times and Mordred not at all. It is well to remember here that Lydgate’s dedicatee was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the brother of Henry V and John, Duke of Bedford. Given Gloucester’s ambitious nature, a sense of urgency may have occasioned Lydgate’s envoi, and suggested its usefulness over and above Boccaccio’s own similar exclamation. Indeed, for the poet to pause in his transmission of another text in order to address the reader in his own voice, and in his own time, carries with it a rhetorical force otherwise unavailable to the translator. It is a rhetorical force which Malory himself commands in the second-person harangue beginning, ‘Lo ye all Englysshemen . . .’

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Whatever its specific motivation, we have in Lydgate’s envoi not only an indication of Arthurian matter’s cultural significance in the fifteenth century, but quite a detailed picture of how literature signified in that culture. From his research in extracts from the Fall of Princes which appear in other manuscripts, A. S. G. Edwards concludes that Almost invariably [contemporary readers] show no interest in the de casibus tragedies that Lydgate translated so relentlessly from Boccaccio. What seems to have mattered to them was the sententious, didactic content of the Envoys he added to the work, his reduction of human tragedies to generalities or gnomic wordplay.72

Such wordplay is not only to be found in ‘Sang Real’, but also in Lydgate’s use of the word ‘unkynde’ in the envoi, which may mean both ‘malicious’ and ‘not kindred’, a fitting ambiguity to describe Mordred. It is this, Lydgate’s refining of the tragedy into a de-temporalized and, to the extent possible, non-narrative object lesson, which evidently appealed to his readers. And it is this refinement of history by which Lydgate found his most socially productive poesis, by which he defined his authority as a public poet, ‘working’, as Pearsall writes, ‘like a mason or a sculptor or a mural-painter, not like a poeta vates’.73 It was by commanding so public an ideological space – and by inventing a category of social reading in which king, baron and bourgeois were (in Althusser’s terminology) interpellated – that Lydgate and his poetic followers became custodians of the secular categories of authority. A poet whose patrons include kings, dukes, countesses and abbots74 was a powerful one indeed, since it is by reference to characters such as Arthur, and concepts such as ‘sang real’, as well as ‘unkynde blood’, that fifteenth-century kings built up their own claims to the throne; and, in turn, it was with reference to the royal prerogative that the upper nobility organized itself. But perhaps more importantly, Lydgate’s work was circulated energetically by the gentry, many of whom were the newly minted knights of Edward’s early reign. Raluca Radulescu shows, for example, that Lydgate’s ‘Secrees of Old Philosoffres’ (a translation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum), Serpent of Division, Dance Macabre, Fall of Princes (in various degrees of completion) along with his shorter verses, were widely anthologized in the fifteenth-century ‘Grete Bokes’ compiled by gentlemen such as Sir John Astley, Sir John Paston and Sir Thomas Cook.75 The contents of these miscellanies, whether literary or political in character, were important indicators of the gentry’s rising status. As the public wielders of these tokens, Hoccleve and Lydgate (and after them Caxton) are not only the makers or transmitters of official literature, but the

72 ‘Lydgate Manuscripts: Some Directions for Future Research’, in Manuscripts and Readers in

Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 15–26; 23.

73 John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 5. 74 An upper-echelon list: Henry V, Henry VI, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, John, Duke of

Bedford, Richard of Warwick, Alice, Countess of Suffolk (who was Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter), Abbot John Whethamstede and Abbot William Curteys. 75 See Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur, pp. 39–50.

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index of literature’s function and, as Caxton’s publications show, the creators of the market for that literature.76

Caxton, Malory and the Chaucerian tradition It is with reference to that market that we may account for Caxton’s publishing the Morte Darthur in the way he did. Caxton in fact seems to have done as much as he could to make Malory’s book (in Hilton Kelleher’s words) ‘a salable proposition’ in this market, and not only by prefacing it as he did. By dividing it into twenty-one books, and the books into readily digestible chapters, ‘for to understonde briefly the contente of thys volume’,77 Caxton gave it the outward form of a series of discrete episodes. By calling it the Morte Darthur, he brought it (nominally) into alignment with the two English poems of that title, whose ruling principle was Arthur’s becoming mort. By printing a shortened version of the Roman War, he may in fact have taken his cue from Lydgate, who himself passes over much of the tedious havoc: To write the deth, the slauhtre & the maneere, Touchyng the feeld wer tedious for to heere. To conclude & leue the surplusage, In that bataile ded was many a kniht, The consul Lucyus slayen in that rage, The proude Romeyns be force put to fliht. (lines 3030–5)

If Hoccleve and Lydgate may be said to have consolidated Chaucer’s achievements, and to have established the ‘Chaucerian tradition’, Caxton, then, was a purveyor of that tradition. This is the specifically post-Chaucerian tradition which Larry Scanlon characterizes as vernacular and lay yet claiming a spiritual prestige and ideological efficacy analogous to the Latin traditions of the Church. This quasi-sacral secular authority belongs precisely to that set of textual traditions modernity will come to call literary.78

Almost all of Caxton’s publications are books which, in one way or another, wield the kind of secular authority which Chaucer won for the vernacular. In short, Caxton offers narratives and tracts which function explicitly as series of exempla, and have the confidence of that function. Caxton’s customers, both noble and gentry, in turn, looked for books which affirmed their own special authority. If one example may serve for many, Edward IV’s instructions to 76 It is worth remarking that of Lydgate’s gargantuan poem (over 36,000 lines) fully thirty-seven

complete manuscripts are extant, apart from the survival of the many excerpts copied from it; these numbers beat out the surviving manuscripts of the Troy Book (twenty-two) and the Siege of Thebes (twenty-nine). Albert E. Hartung, Jonathan Burke Severs and John Edwin Wells, eds, Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, rev. Alain Renoir and C. David Benson (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980), vol. VI, pp. 2073–2175. My numbers reflect the corrections of A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Lydgate Manuscripts’, p. 15. 77 Works, pp. cxlvi, 29–30. 78 Narrative Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 322.

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Woodville as to the education of the Prince of Wales stipulate that the boy be ‘virtuously, cunningly and knightly brought up’ and that at table there should ‘be reade before him such noble storyes as behoveth a Prince to understand and knowe’.79 Accordingly, many texts produced by Caxton and/or Woodville between 1473 (History of Jason, Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophres) and 1484 (Ordre of Chyvalry) bear the stamp of that directive. These books were all divided into shortish sections readable in a single sitting, possibly at table.80 Philosophic compendia and chivalric manuals lent themselves easily to such a format, as did de casibus texts. Karen Cherewatuk has persuasively argued that ‘in composing his text Malory expected it to be read aloud’.81 The Winchester manuscript, she finds, gestures consistently to a listening audience (as Caxton’s version also does) accustomed to ‘hearing read’ just the sorts of books that Woodville and Caxton produced, an audience habituated to the pithy and didactic. In its conception, however, Malory’s was not necessarily this kind of book. While military deeds abound, they are not always to be emulated. Exemplary qualities in persons are blurred by adultery, bastardy and magic. ‘Noble’ narratives are frequently submerged or subordinated, and they are, at any rate, so crowded with names and persons as to be difficult of contemplation. Most of all, it is a narrative which is perpetually in motion: since all narratives are subordinated – nominally, at least – to Arthur’s personal history, the narrative cannot rest until its ultimate ethical quietus in Arthur’s death (or, if you like, Lancelot’s and Guenivere’s). The two English poems which Malory worked into his book, tellingly, treat specifically of Arthur’s final phase. That both are entitled the ‘Death of Arthur’, despite the poems’ dissimilaritiy, may tell us something about the fifteenth-century consumption of Arthurian literature. Taking Lydgate’s Arthur section together with these poems, we may make an educated guess that, for the literary imagination of the fifteenth century at least, the ruling principle of King Arthur was his being quondam, since in his being dead lay his exemplary status. In the Vulgate, however, the king’s death is indefinitely postponed to allow for more narrative. But while that postponement in the Vulgate is a function of the story-cycle’s own narrative arc, in Malory it is the result of the highly deliberate cutting and pasting of narratives. The Roman War, which in the insular tradition is the death of Arthur, is transformed by Malory into another episode in Arthur’s early career, and one which increases, rather than ends, Arthur’s power. Malory’s book thus propels Arthur past the point at which he usually becomes morte, and thus exemplary, and on into aventure foreign to the expectations of fifteenth-century English readers. One might argue in fact that this alteration alone made Malory’s book difficult reading, since it frees the familiar, static, mythological character from the traditional repositories of his significance 79 See above, p. 19. 80 Hilton Kelleher, ‘Early History of the Malory Manuscript’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 143–58;

154. For a discussion of textual division in fifteenth-century books, see George R. Keiser, ‘Serving the Needs of Readers: Textual Division in Some Late Medieval Texts’, in New Science out of Old Books, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (London: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 207–26. 81 ‘Aural and Written Reception in Sir John Paston, Malory, and Caxton’, Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2004), pp. 123–31; 126.

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– his exemplarity, his being dead, his seat among the Nine Worthies – and allows more to happen. The effect is similar, in fact, to that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the hero is continually displaced from his reputation, and forced into an awkward relationship with his own illustriousness.

Conclusion Finally, as if to clear the air, Caxton, as he often does, quotes Paul at Romans 15:4: ‘For whatsoever things were written, were written for our learning: that through patience and comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope.’82 If Robert H. Wilson cites the character of Caxton’s preface as evidence that Caxton is moving ‘toward modernity’, Kretschmar, on the basis of Caxton’s quotation of Paul, disagrees. ‘All is written for our doctrine’, he argues, alone would have justified the printing of a fictional text since, as Kretschmar demonstrates, Romans 15:4 was often deployed for that purpose by medieval authors (e.g. Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’).83 Claiming that the two issues for Caxton were Arthur’s historicity and moral purpose, Kretschmar contends that Caxton did not distinguish between history and romance.84 But this seems to oversimplify matters: in fact, these various and overdetermining justifications were supplied by the diverse gentlemen. It is Caxton’s own recognition, and suspicion, of this overdetermination that his preface is designed to show. Paul’s words, then, are used to adduce a higher authorization than any put forth by the gentlemen. There may be various, and hidden, immediate causes, but there is one ultimate cause for ‘everything that is written’ which overrides Caxton’s own volition. Caxton’s justification of the book’s production has now moved yet another step away from the gentlemen’s arguments. It is in relation to those gentlemen’s desire, which it playfully de- and then re-mystifies, that Caxton’s preface has its insight: that histories are used, that their present function is always ideological. Perhaps Caxton’s caginess here is his rhetorical achievement, and this is a far cry indeed from the presumption of ‘the divinely ordained historical process unfolding before our eyes’. If Caxton’s preface, and through it Malory’s book, did have a theology, it might be something like this: And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; lo, he is here: do not believe. For there will rise up false christs and false prophets, and they shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce (if it were possible) even the elect. Take you heed therefore; behold I have foretold you all things. (Mark 13:21–23)

A certain skepticism is theologically proper, making the disciple Thomas’s doubt as to Christ’s resurrection the correct response. Similarly, William of Malmesbury’s doubting the truth of popular Arthur legends is a tribute to the 82 As Caxton would have known it in the Vulgate: ‘Quaecumque enim scripta sunt, ad nostram

docrinam scripta sunt: ut per patentiam et consolationem scripturarum, spem habeamus.’

83 ‘Caxton’s Sense of History’, pp. 519–28. 84 Ibid., 512, 536, et passim.

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real, if unrecoverable, King Arthur. Caxton, too, seems ready to concede (for present purposes) that Arthur is a historical figure, but not that all the stories about him are true; he, and presumably his readers, know too much literary history to pretend otherwise. He therefore advises his readers to seek other kinds of truth in the tales. Whatever their historicity, that is, all the tales can function as moral exempla, as historiographical relics. If Caxton’s Morte preface does much to grant a provisional stability to Arthur as a historical exemplum, it also responds skeptically to any transcendence presumed already to exist there. That preface is, as we have argued, much preoccupied with the way in which this exemplarity elides historical reality and political process. Whether Caxton fears that Arthur did not exist, or that he existed differently than his diverse gentlemen would have him think, he is aware that Malory’s narrative will give the lie to Arthur’s current reputation, and thus also give the lie to that reserve of authority which poets like Lydgate kept in escrow for kings. It is Caxton’s recognition of this discontinuity between exemplum and narrative that motivates his somewhat overwrought apologetics. (This recognition, as I will argue in the next chapter, may have been suggested to Caxton by the way in which Malory’s book was represented scribally.) In any case, Caxton’s account of that discontinuity shares in Nietzsche’s own ‘uncomfortable and disagreeable’ words on historiography: . . . the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and

becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.85 What is fascinating, and potentially disorienting, about Caxton’s Morte is that, to trouble the opacity of his exempla (the ‘good’ which the reader may find in Malory’s stories), there is a prefatory a key, a tabula, to the mystical symbolism of Arthurian-British history. To the extent that the key demystifies (or exposes as cultish) the mystical symbolism, it may also ‘obscure or even obliterate’ the desired history. But the book also preserves itself in this way: prefixed by a relic inventory and a dialectical meditation on history, the Morte carries with it its own articles of faith, which articles prove also to be a map of the fifteenth-century social and political milieu from which the book springs, and an index, not only of possible interpretations of the Morte, but also of the possible motivations for printing – or causing to be printed – such a book. The anonymous gentlemen’s imprimatur thus becomes the printer’s own absit omen.

85 On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage

Books, 1989), p. 77.

3 Malory’s Moral Scribes: ‘Balyn’ in the Winchester Manuscript

Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, it appears, of all the poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must be a unity. (Aristotle, Poetics, VIII. 1–2)

Introduction: Exemplarity and Fifteenth-Century Literary Production Since Malory’s translation served not only a linguistic but a cultural demand, the Morte must be read not only in the context of its French sources, but as continuous with the Winchester manuscript itself. This chapter will analyze the extent to which the manuscript’s ‘exterior’ tokens of literary value can help us historicize the emergence of Malory’s book. As we shall see, such an analysis must also expose aspects of Malory’s text that are little suited to the uses urged by those exterior tokens. That ‘unsuitability’ has a history of its own. For example, the struggle of a knight to be, or become, identical with himself is found in Chrétien’s Percival; it is refined (highly) into comedy by the Gawain-poet; and it is also the struggle of Malory’s knights, especially Lancelot, who are doomed to serve both truth and honor, virtues whose paths are rarely the same. This structure is constantly recurring in romance and it is at odds with the exemplarity which is ostensibly the main function of late medieval literature. The inability of the knight, or of knighthood itself, to fulfill traditional functions is not new with Malory, but it is, in Malory’s time, an urgent problem. Malory’s time, for example, is precisely that mentioned in Marx’s Capital as the period of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in England: The prelude to the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production was played out in the last third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth. A mass of ‘free’ and unattached proletarians was hurled onto the labour-market by the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart correctly remarked, ‘everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.’1 Although royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, forcibly hastened the dissolution of these bands of retainers in its striving for 1

James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy: Volume I (Dublin, 1770), p. 52.

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absolute sovereignty, it was by no means the sole cause of it. It was rather that the great feudal lords, in their defiant opposition to the king and Parliament, created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the lords themselves, and by usurpation of the common lands. The rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England provided the direct impulse for these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers.2

It is the culture of the new nobility, and recently elevated gentry, which produced – even required – the Morte Darthur, a book which, as the previous chapter proposed, is part of an attempt to connect idealized old-nobility virtues with contemporary conditions. On the one hand, the Morte, and chivalric literature in general, tends to uphold the warrior class’s claim to a rarefied social existence. On the other hand, the Morte was written in an era when the raison d’être of warrior class had become diffuse. Edward IV’s habit of creating knights to gain political support, and to fill administrative positions, increased the number of knights in the realm, but did little to stabilize the country.3 Knights at this time became increasingly anxious – to the point of litigiousness – about the proliferation of heraldic arms; veteran campaigners mobilized bands of private retainers to commit violent crimes against their neighbors; and landed knights, of course, expelled the peasant proprietors of their agricultural fields in favor of sheep-walks. Malory’s ‘hoole book’ bears the marks of this historical moment and if we expand that book’s wholeness to include not only its stories but its manuscript we can discover how deeply these marks are cut. We will read the ‘Tale of Balyn’ for signs, both narrative and scribal, of the ideological maneuvers attending the Morte’s production of chivalric culture.

Visual Features of the Winchester Manuscript The Winchester marginalia were in all likelihood carried over from that manuscript’s exemplar and committed to the pages of the manuscript roughly at the time of its copying; the question of exceptions to this rule is addressed below. It should be noted that the margins of Winchester were not used for corrections except twice, on folio 139v and folio 279v, where the words ‘thus’ and ‘prayde’, respectively, are supplied for insertion (whether for the benefit of reader or future copier) into the main text. Taking this as an indication that the scribes ‘wanted above all to produce a handsome page and had no qualms about sacrificing meaning to do that’, P. J. C. Field finds it ‘surprising, therefore, to find them copying out a large number of seemingly inessential marginalia’,4 mostly in the form of pointing hands and side-notes usually enclosed in shield-like frames. 2 3 4

Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 878–9. See Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur, pp. 8–13. ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, Medium Aevum vol. LXX, no. 2 (2001), pp. 226–39; 227; see also Takako Kato, ‘Corrected Mistakes in the Winchester Manuscript’, in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur, ed. K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 9–25.

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Pointing Hands, or maniculae Of the two chief kinds of marginalia, the pointing hands, which appear only between folios 9v and 42v, all within Scribe A’s portion (and so all within the Tale of King Arthur) may, Kelleher suggests, ‘be rather later than the copying’,5 and so post-date the shield-enclosed side notes. This observation might be supported by Field’s assertion that the scribes made a concerted effort to leave wide, clean margins,6 presumably in expectation of marginalia to come. Nothing about the penmanship or the ink used, however, rules out their having been drawn either by Scribe A (or B, for that matter), or by a contemporary corrector. The hand decorations, fourteen in number, follow no thematic pattern which can any longer be distinguished (see Table 1). This may be either because they are idiosyncratic, belonging to a set of passages which appealed for unknown reasons to an individual reader, or because the scribe, in copying them, placed them on Winchester’s page according to their position on the exemplar’s page and not their relation to the accompanying text. Since all the Winchester marginalia seem to have been carried over somewhat mechanically,7 the latter seems as fair a supposition as any.

Side notes With the second main type of marginalium – that in the form of short commentaries often enclosed in shield-like frames – it is easier to tell what is, or what was intended to be, their proper position, and it is from the displacement of some of these from their proper locus that we can postulate the rather mechanical copying of Winchester’s marginalia by the scribes, and the probable displacement of the pointing hands. Of these side notes Field renders a valuable description: There are eighty of these, forty by each scribe, scattered from fol. 11r to fol. 477r. They all refer to events related in the accompanying text, but the aspects of the narrative to which they refer are very various. . . . Their forms of expression are various too. They come in four distinct styles. The first style is found only in the first marginalium: a single word in Latin. The rest are all in English and longer, but they mix three styles, some beginning ‘Here (is)’, some beginning ‘How’, and some consisting of a bald phrase with no verb. The order in which the different styles recur seems to be random, and certainly does not correlate with the identity of the scribe who wrote them. . . . Although there is a great variety of subject in the scribal marginalia, some topics come up more often than others. The commonest subject is death. There are thirty-five marginalia recording deaths, thirty-three of them brought about by force of arms. The odd ones out are a suicide (by a woman using her lover’s sword) and the death of Perceval’s sister, a liminal event that hangs uneasily between murder and self-sacrifice. With the actual killings may be associated two serious near-fatal woundings (of Kay by Gareth, and Gawayne by Galahad), and a determined attempt at murder (of Bors by his brother Lionel). The 5 6 7

All the pointing hands thus fall under Scribe A’s first stint. Cf. Hilton Kelleher, ‘The Early History of the Malory Manuscript’, in Aspects of Malory, p. 146. ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, p. 229. ‘Early History of the Malory Manuscript’, p. 146; ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, passim.

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second-largest group is that of non-fatal single combats, whether isolated jousts or sustained battles. There are sixteen of those, including a long-prophesied and very fully described battle incognito between Tristram and Lamorak, the only one that ends in a draw. The third, and only other, significant group is that of ‘avisions’, that is prophetic or warning visions. There are six of these, mostly in the Grail story. With them one can associate two other Grail events, the engagingly named ‘prognostication’ in which the narrator anticipates the healing of the Maimed King, and the appearance of the grail to Launcelot. These three categories together provide sixty-two of the eighty marginalia (77.5%). The remaining eighteen marginalia are harder to categorize. Some describe the subject of an episode, some the opening event of one, some the end. There are three rescues, a request for a boon (the Lady of the Lake asking for Balyn’s head), a healing (of Melyot by Launcelot), carrying a corpse as a punishment (by Pedivere), a double wedding (Gareth and Aggravayne), the gift of a dog (to Tristram), a recognition (Tristram by the same dog), a revenge (Palomides at the Red City), several grail events that are not ‘avisions’ (the knighting of Galahad, the achievement of the Siege Perilous by Galahad, the pulling of the sword from the stone by Galahad, the conjuring of the devil by Galahad, and the taking of the Crown by Melyas), a pathetic request (by Guenivere to Bors), a trap (by Mellyagaunt for Launcelot), and a deathbed letter (by Gawain to Launcelot).

Field concludes that the marginalia ‘do not seem to be the product of any comprehensive scheme of arrangement’.8 Alternatively, we might consider that, like the pointing hands, the side notes did belong to a scheme, but one which has fallen into obscurity. What remains, after all, is a set of marginal emphases placed on certain parts of Malory’s book, in expectation of which marginalia – as is likely – the Winchester scribes maintained so carefully the book’s snow-white margins. Though it is not our goal to assign a comprehensive motive for all the marginalia, their local effects are at times compelling. Their commonest subject being death, for instance, at once suggests a thematic preoccupation (if not a comprehensive scheme) and the desire for a sustained effect. At all events, the marginalia belong in the medieval tradition, both textual and epistemological, of memoria. Mary Carruthers brings her description of textual memoria right to our doorstep: Many manuscripts’ margins contain images that seem to grow out of the words and into the margins, a kind of emphasizing bracket that becomes the shape of the hand or a head. Heads are very common, possibly because the head is the seat of the memory. Heads also can be differentiated more easily than hands (which can be provided with a string or a cuff, but not much else), for they can wear a variety of headdress, be male or female, frontal or in profile, and so on. A head, drawn with a text-balloon such as modern cartoonists use, as though it were thinking the words of a titulus, occurs in a margin of the Winchester manuscript of Malory. The image clearly indicates that this reader understood drawings of heads to be a part of a book’s mnemonic apparatus.9

8 9

‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, pp. 227–8. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 248.

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Table 1 The fourteen maniculae occur on the following folios, and index the following places in the text. Words in boldface are those closest to the point of the finger. Arrival of Ban and Bors fol. 9v: And so royally they were receyved / and brought toward the cité of London. And so Arthur mette them ten myle / oute of London, and there was grete joy made as couthe be thought Arthur in combat fol. 19v: That shall I amende seyde Arthur and I shall / defende thee sayde the knyght and anon he toke hys horse and dressed / hys shelde and toke a grete spere in hys honde Fight between Arthur and Pellynore fol. 20v: Knyght / holde thy honde, for and thou sle that knyght thou puttyst the realme in the / gretteste damage Tale of Balyn fol. 23r: departynge this knight Balyn called into her fol. 24r: swerde knightly he smote of hys hir hede fol. 25r: seyde the knyght Launceor and dress you unto me for that one shall abyde / in the field than they fewtred their speris and com togedyrs fol. 28v: And [Pellynore] strake many a mighty stroke at kynge Lott as he fought with hys enemyes, and he fayled of his stroke and smote the horse necke that he foundered to the erthe with kynge / Lott and therewith anone kynge pellynore smote hyme a grete stroke thorow / the helme and hede unto the browis fol. 29v: And as they came by an hermitage/ evyn by a chy[r]cheyerd, there come Garlonde invisible and smote thys knyght / Peryne de Mounte Belyarde, thorowoute the body with a glave . . . fol. 31r: my brother Than kynge Pellam a grymme wepyn and smote egirly / at Balyn Torre and Pellinor fol. 36r: Than torre alyght of hys / mare and pulled oute hys swerde knelynge and requyrynge the kynge / to make him knight fol. 37r: the brachett evir boote hym by the buttocks / and pulde outte a pece therethorow the herte lope a grete lepe / and overthrew a knyght fol. 38v: he mette with sir Gawayne and sayde why have ye slayne / my howndis fol. 41r: brachett agayne that was my queste and therewith he toke off / hys helme and therewith he arose and fledde and sir Torre afftir / fol. 42v: hys swerde and put hys shield afore hym and seyde knyghte kepe the well / for thou shall have a buffet for the sleying of my horse So kynge Pellynore

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More will be said of the marginalium on folio 23r below. If the marginalia taken as a whole do seem ‘inessential’, and even ‘amateurish’ – the head mentioned by Carruthers is the only one of its kind in W – it is their ‘surprising’ existence itself that makes them relevant to the present study.

Rubrication On the whole, this feature marks a much bolder and more consequential investment in the present copying of the Morte Darthur than the marginalia do. (See Plates 1–3.) It required a great deal more work and it was carried out with greater skill and consistency. It is a feature which impresses itself so strongly on the eyes – and does so largely because of the book’s wide, neat margins – that, in turning from this manuscript back to the typographical text, one feels as if the lights had gone out.10 For a basic description we need not try to surpass Ker’s: A remarkable feature is the writing of all personal names and some place names and the word Sankgreal in non-current script and red ink. Personal names are very numerous, sometimes as many as two dozen on a page, and the scribes must have found the task of distinguishing them very laborious, particularly as they did not do it the easy way by leaving blank spaces for subsequent filling, but changed pen each time a name came up. That they did this is fairly obvious a priori: one could not leave so many spaces of exactly the right size. Scribe A dispels any doubts we may have by twice holding on to his red-ink pen too long. At f. 15r/26 he wrote Merlyon bade h and at f. 37/3 Pellinor by the in ‘superior’ script and red ink. Headings, links, explicits, and colophons and the words on Arthur’s tomb (f. 482v) are also in this script and ink, as are the side notes which the scribes wrote here and there. The distinguishing of personal names was evidently a matter of great consequence to the scribes. Whatever their failings in other matters they are consistent and almost faultless in this one, even to the writing names in catchwords in red and names in the red-ink link, f. 364v/18, in black.11

There are analogous practices in French tradition. Though highlighting in French manuscripts is generally accomplished by pen-flourished initials rather than red ink, the function of that highlighting is analogous to that in the Winchester manuscript. ‘By and large,’ observes Keith Busby, ‘it would seem that the desire to punctuate and organize the narrative, and, consequently, to guide the reader, was the primary concern for scribes and planners.’ And when, as is commonly the case in prose as well as verse romance texts, the pen-flourished initial appears in the name of a subject, it results in an emphasis laid on the social status of the protagonists, either through title or status itself (Li rois, Li barons, La damoisele, and so on) or through proper names (for example, Lancelos, Erec, Alixandres) or both (such as Mes sire Gauvins, La roine Genievre, Li rois Athis). It is true, of course, that many protagonists in romance, for example, are of elevated social status, but the frequency of pen-flourished initials 10 Stephen Shepherd’s recent edition of the Morte Darthur (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

2004), based on W, approximates the rubrication to good effect in black Old English type.

11 The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, ed. N. R. Ker, EETS, s.s. 4 (London: Oxford University

Press, 1976), pp. xiv–xv.

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in such locations has a genuine effect of reinforcing the social setting of the narrative and endowing its inhabitants with absolute respectability. Moreover, placing initials on proper names of the familiar characters of romance or on lines where they enter or leave the locus of the action, can put individual readers at ease by reassuring them of the kind of text they are experiencing.12

It is not known for certain whether the Winchester manuscript’s rubrication of proper names was carried over from its exemplar, but it is cognate, at least, to analogous gestures in the French romance manuscripts.

Visual Effect and Cultural Authority Some debate attends the origins of W’s marginalia and rubrication but, wherever they came from, they do form an interpretive response both to the French tradition and to Malory’s text, and one of a very specific kind. If Field speaks for all modern readers of Malory when he concludes that ‘the events [the marginalia] refer to are not always important’,13 we must at least consider the possibility that the events indicated were important to someone (or ones) in the fifteenth century. But we must also keep in mind that the function of the marginalia is not referential only. As features of both exempla and memoria, they claim for the persons and events highlighted a specific social recognition, which they also enact and produce. To the horizontal movement of Malory’s narrative, the names in red introduce a vertical reference to an entire history (pseudo- or otherwise, textual at all events) which itself is invoked as a witness to the present act of writing and reading. Also invoked, then, is the cultural authority which dwells in the Arthurian matter: that is, the founding mythology of England’s nation-state, and a key element of insular historiography. As Caxton suggests, it is the immanent fame of Arthur’s knights – which fame his preface also enacts – that authorizes his printing of the Morte. The names themselves conduct textual authority and affirm, or reaffirm, the illustriousness of the Arthurian matière. This is true in an even larger sense in the case of the marginalia, the very presence of which in any manuscript asserts that manuscript’s cultural authority. From at least the twelfth century, manuscript margins were the prime locus of auctoritates, and were integral to the technology of producing and reading important texts. Scholastic commentaries, as M. B. Parkes has observed, required the development of a mise-en-page which could accommodate both main text and copious side notes.14 By the fourteenth century commentary and gloss are also to be found in the margins of key vernacular works: Dante’s Commedia, Piers Plowman, the English Brut, and in translations such as that of Claudian’s De

12 Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols. (New York and

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), vol. I, pp. 187, 193.

13 ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, p. 228. 14 ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in

Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), p. 37.

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consulatu Stiliconis (1445).15 In the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, Parkes reminds us, ‘sources and topics are indicated in the margins, and the word “auctor” is placed alongside a sententious statement. The text is well disposed in its sections, and each section is carefully labeled by means of full rubrics.’16 Its simply having marginalia and rubrications, on the one hand, makes the Winchester manuscript part of the tradition of ‘secular scripture’ in the largest sense; the didactic, exemplary nature of these features, on the other hand, shows that the Morte aspires to fifteenth-century high literature. As features of decoration, rubricated names are indeed legible as apart from the narrative itself. Their appearance on the page, against a background of black and white, could well have functioned as a running key to the narrative or narratives. As it served its indexical function, allowing readers of the Winchester manuscript to orient themselves easily when opening and reopening the tome, the rubrication of protagonists’ names served also to position those names in ideological space. As Andrew Lynch observes, writing the names in red ‘ensured that a name became in Malory’s text an index of power and prestige’.17 My understanding of this power and prestige is that its force is text-specific, not character-specific. That is, while the reputation of each knight precedes him (in the annals of romance and history) it does little to determine his behavior or in any way unify his actions. Naming in Malory’s text is raised to extra-narrative event, that is, while characterization is left to serve local necessity. The Arthur in the Suite du Merlin, for example, is not the same one we find on the alliterative Morte Arthure, nor, for that matter, the same one we find in the other Vulgate installments. The name, and the name only, bridges the space between these texts. The ability of names to do this is explained, perhaps, by their uniqueness, their primal authenticity, the part of their existence which, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’. This quality Benjamin calls ‘aura’.18 It is a work of art’s aura which makes it worthy of reproduction, but it is also this aura which reproduction, mechanical reproduction in Benjamin’s essay, eventually destroys. In Caxton’s mechanical reproduction of texts, the high-speed liquidation of aura remained a latent effect; and certainly this was so in manuscripts. But we may observe a similar relationship between the aura of a name like ‘Arthur’ and the historical instance of that name’s deployment: there is a discontinuity, that is, between one’s aura, or reputation, and what one does, so that even a disreputable deed may leave the aura untroubled. It is aura, after all, which supported the medieval ideology of an entitled aristocracy where entitlement transcends individual merit or behavior. To the extent that aura is wielded in an exchange, it corresponds neatly with Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic capital’: Caxton, for example, trades on 15 BL MS Add. 11814; see C. E. Wright, English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth

Centuries (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), plate 19.

16 ‘Ordinatio and Compilatio’, p. 65. 17 Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,

1997), p. 4.

18 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflec-

tions, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–51; 221.

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the collective aura of Arthurian matter, Arthurian names, in order to promote a book by an unknown author. Aura can also play a specific role in the textual comedy (often dark) of chivalric self-identification. In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to choose a high-relief example, Gawain’s subjectivity is always an effect of his reputation, and thus always external. Gawain, therefore, is dangerously free to contradict himself, which would not be a problem except that his historical instance (in the poem) is possessed of only one body, nor can he flit into another story with a more agreeable set of local demands. The Gawain-poet has fun in general challenging his readers (i.e. readers of romance), on just this point: reputation only, not internal consistency, survives a knight’s translation from one romance text to another – or even from one section of a single romance to another section. In short, what befalls Gawain in Gawain is a name which everywhere precedes him (aura), but which is itself inconsistent in its associations. By the end of the poem, Gawain’s identity is split several ways, and Morgan’s prank has given the hero a glimpse of the gap which, to his shame, divides his reputation and his behavior. This gap, importantly, is what allows him to remain a hero despite his demonstrable failures: when he arrives back at Arthur’s court his aura is waiting for him intact. In the Winchester manuscript too, it is the reputation of Arthur’s court, and, secondarily, the reputations of its knights, that merits the rubrication of knights’ names and other proper nouns. Through this ritualized naming, the errant knight is reunited with his aura, and thus regains his ‘proper’ aspect. If the history of Malory’s Morte is largely the history of the Vulgate’s appropriation by English literary culture, that appropriation was not a violent one. Malory was as much a creature of his time as Lydgate and Caxton were, and the Englishing of thirteenth-century French material was undertaken for an audience that already existed. That audience – lay, aristocratic (both gentle and noble), military – had its expectations of what literature should be. Readers of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, readers of chivalric manuals and ‘gestes hystorial’ – the dominant readers, that is, in fifteenth-century English polity – would reasonably expect an English Arthuriad to have all they could desire of socially and politically redemptive content. As understood by fifteenth-century readers, Arthurian romance was, by definition, both ‘noble’ and in ‘anthology form’, and thus it satisfied the two highest articles of contemporary taste. Indeed Malory’s is, in Larry Benson’s words, ‘a peculiarly fifteenth-century Arthurian work, for his book belongs to the genre of one-volume prose histories that were popular at the time, a genre in which the old cycles were reduced to brief continuous narratives . . .’19 So described, such a book is not so different in conception from a de casibus text. As observed in the previous chapter, exemplarity is part of what constituted the literariness of texts. Caxton knew, however, that Arthurian narrative on the French model did not so readily meet the requirements of exemplarity, and that for an English one to do so would require more than trans-

19 Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 4.

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lation into English, hence the many editorial and typographical operations which Caxton performed in preparing Malory’s book for print. In fact, these operations were quite continuous with those already performed by the Winchester scribes. Whatever Malory’s own preference for parataxis (the universal grammatical mode of exempla), the ‘English Vulgate’ project in its first conception could not have conformed strictly to an additive structure. No cyclic account of the Round Table could ever be completely de-interlaced: King Arthur’s career must still preside over and interact with those of his knights. The individual stories could not be extracted from the story of Arthur’s life and death, or otherwise be made to stand alone, as the figures in the de casibus tradition are made to do. Arthur himself can only provide an exemplum-in-progress: just as the readers of the Vulgate cycle must ‘wait’ to discover the manner of Arthur’s death, so are Arthur’s knights – including those who survive their king – blind to the example, if any, which their Lord will have provided. In Larry Scanlon’s apt formulation, ‘a person who serves as an example becomes exemplary precisely by transforming his or her actions into a moral narrative’.20 But Arthur, by virtue of his narrative function in the Vulgate cycle, never completes this transformation. Arthur is always non perfectus. The incompleteness of Arthur’s transformation into exemplum thus renders Malory’s text problematic within the ideology of late medieval literature. As a corrective to this problem the Winchester manuscript supplies marginalia and rubricated names, tokens which confer on the things and persons named an apparent perfection. By thus referring to – or rather urging – a protagonist’s self-identical completeness, the Winchester manuscript urges for the Morte an exemplary function. In raising the inscription of names to the level of public performance (and jealously maintaining the quality of that performance), and in making that mode of inscription a unifying principle of its own production, the Malory manuscript seeks to establish, within the logic of exemplarity, the individuation and internal consistency of Malory’s protagonists. In both narrative and codicological space, the rubrication imposes on Malory’s translation, and on his compilatio, a unity which, while it corresponds to the function of literature in late medieval England, does not necessarily correspond to Malory’s (lexical) text. As markers of that unity, the rubrication then, along with the other manuscript features under discussion, may be usefully described as hegemonic according to Gramsci’s definition of social hegemony as, ‘The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’.21 As Raymond Williams usefully explains, hegemony is not identical to ideology or to baseand-superstructure models of ‘control’:

20 Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 34. 21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and

Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 12.

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A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. Its internal structures are highly complex, as can readily be seen in any concrete analysis. Moreover (and this is crucial, reminding us of the necessary thrust of the concept), it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own.22

Hegemony is not wielded, that is, but unconsciously lived. That vernacular literature should have defined itself in such close relation to the ruling class, then, prescribes certain practices, such as the subordination of narrative to the exemplary perfection of characters and names within narratives. In presuming to enact so forcefully this mode of naming – in which each return to a name is a return to the same name, a renewal of the same aura – the Winchester scribes promote the perfection of persons and events they name or point to. This kind of perfection is far from being a perfection of character in the psychological sense; it rather aligns the protagonist in question with a vertical index of his exemplary value, a value here stamped on each character whose name appears in red, whose death is memorialized in the margins, and whose deeds are indicated by the disembodied hands.

The Emergence of Balyn If fame requires a heroic emergence and an equally heroic death, exemplarity must often suppress the narrative connecting the two. Malory’s scribes struggle against the corruption which his book’s matière necessarily imparts to exemplary reading. The effort of the post-Vulgate romancers to ‘make sense’ of the main part of the story, and by means of various new stories to make the whole cohere, is also such a struggle to contain wayward material. (The Grail Quest itself stands as the most monumental effort at this kind of containment.) For its part, the post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin, Malory’s source for ‘Balyn’, tends to express this struggle in the mirroring, or even the duplication, of symbolic events occurring within the Vulgate proper. It is this book which gives the sword Excalibur to Arthur by having it rise out of the lake: thus it made sense of Arthur’s having thrown it into the lake at the end of the Vulgate Morte Artu. That final act, then, becomes a symmetrical ‘returning the sword to its origin’ rather than a ‘throwing it away’. By such explanations, the life of Arthur moves closer to perfection: it begins to be ended and closed, and so, ostensibly, complete enough to hang a moral on. The post-Vulgate Suite introduces many such correspondences, none more striking than, in the Roman de Balain, the Dolorous Stroke, a back-formulated foreshadowing of the Grail Quest. In his own ‘Tale of Balyn le Sauvage or the Knight with Two Swords’, Malory makes the correspondences even stronger. 22 Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 112.

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Indeed he strikes a register of allusiveness which the tale can hardly contain. The effect of Malory’s ‘Balyn’ is not only a foreshadowing of the Grail Quest, but an accelerated returning, ending, closing in which analogical symmetries are established and careers perfected (and cancelled) at every level of the text, foregrounding redundancies not only in cycles of vendetta and combat, but in the sounds of individual names (Balyn and Balan) and, in the Winchester manuscript, the death notices of individual knights. The narrative of the ‘Knight with Two Swords’, I shall argue, figures forth the very literary practice which we have been discussing in this and the previous chapter – the maintenance of the exemplary register within a narrative – by recording Balyn’s unfortunate career as the effect of a chivalric praxis which creates more work than it can rightly conclude, creating what we might call ‘surplus chivalry’ (a variation of Marx’s ‘surplus population’, the effect in which the working population produces ‘the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing’23). In Malory, this behavior results in the ever-decreasing duration of a characters’ positive exemplarity. For instance, at the moment of Balyn’s emergence in Arthur’s court, he is already both the target and the prosecutor of a vendetta (whose folk-law justification seems to offend against Arthur’s own law). If the achievement of the maiden’s sword seems to mark the beginning of an adventure that God may have ordained, Balyn is in fact already committed to an unfinished adventure: his blood feud with the Lady of the Lake. The achievement of the sword – as suggested by Merlin’s subsequent exposure of the sword-bringer’s treachery – is an arbitrary, and so a false, beginning. Such beginnings, nevertheless, are the sine qua non of romance narrative; King Arthur’s, after all, was such a beginning. ‘Balyn’ reminds us of this fact when the Lady of the Lake, prosecuting her own vendetta, arrives to claim a boon which Arthur promised when, at a different beginning, she gave him the sword Excalibur. The structural similarity between Balyn and Arthur – as chivalric exemplars, as heroes who emerge from obscurity to receive a marvelous sword – will push Balyn to the margins of usefulness, even as it leaves his death-dealing prowess intact. To restore Balyn’s usefulness, then, appears to be Malory’s own struggle. Before the Lady of the Lake arrives to claim her boon, Arthur hears a marvel from another lady: the challenge of the maiden from the Lady Lyle of Avalon (these ladies also crowd each other); and Arthur announces that he will accept the challenge first. It is significant that, both in the French and in the English, Arthur explicitly assumes an exemplary role within his court. Et pour chou que je sui sires de ceste terre et de tous chiaus qui chaiens sont l’asserai je tout premiers, non nie por chou que je cuic estre le millour chevalier de cest pais, mais pour douner ensample as autres qu’i l’assaient.24

23 Capital Vol. I, p. 783. 24 La Roman du Balain, ed. M. Dominica Legge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1942),

p. 5. ‘And since I am lord of this land and of everyone here, I’ll try first of all, not because I am the best knight in the country, but to give the example to others who should try it’ (my translation).

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. . . I woll assay myselffe to draw oute the swerde, nat presumynge myselff that I am the beste knyght; but I woll begynne to draw youre swerde in gyvyng an insample to all the barownes, that they shall assay everych one aftir othir whan I have assayde.25

Thus he enacts his traditional function as the fixed center of his wandering order. Positioning himself as a first among equals, with nothing to prove, Arthur provides the ceremonial example which his knights will follow; he does not expect, nor require, success. Arthur is not modeling ‘success’ but ‘assaying’. Accordingly, after Arthur fails, each of his knights follows suit: just as their exemplar fails, so do they. Arthur has modeled not only assaying, but, by prolepsis, he has exemplified failure. It is only when Arthur’s ‘barownes all’ have failed to draw the damsel’s sword that Balyn appears. Than hit befelle so that tyme there was a poore knyght with kynge Arthure that had bene presonere wyth hym half a yere for sleyng of a knyght which was cosine unto kynge Arthure. And the name of this knyght was called Balyne, and by good meanys of the barownes he was delyverde oute of preson, for he was a good man named of hys body, and he was borne in Northehumbirlonde. And so he went pryvaly into the courte and saw thys adventure whereof hit reysed his herte, and wolde assayed as other knyghtes ded. But for he was poore and poorly arayde, he put hymselff nat far in press. But in hys herte he was fully assured to do as well, if hys grace happed hym, as ony knyght that there was.26

Whereas in the Suite, the unnamed knight served his prison term in Northumberland, having killed a relative of the northern king, Malory makes Balyn a murderer of Arthur’s cousin and a former inmate of Arthur’s prison. The significance of the change, I believe, is in Arthur’s imprisoning the knight instead of responding in kind, instead, that is, of joining a blood feud: this upholds Arthur’s status as law-giver, and Balyn’s as outlaw, in episodes to come. Another significant departure from the French source is Balyn’s being named at the moment of his entry into the narrative. The Suite does not name Balain until after his banishment, when the narrator omnisciently fills in his family history and bleak future, and he is only named then for the purpose of demonstrating how his new name – Li Chevalers as Deus Espees – will displace the old. While naming Balyn as soon as he walks onstage may be a function of Malory’s de-interlacing, we must also remember that this is not the first occasion of Balyn’s name being used, that the name ‘Balyn’ twice precedes the arrival of Balyn himself, that is, at folio 16v (Works, 40.6), where he and his brother are named in a not entirely sensical prophecy;27 and, more significantly, in the margin of folio 21r (Works, 52, n. 31), at the moment of Arthur’s rash promise to render to the Lady of the Lake whatever unspecific ‘gyffte that ye woll aske’.28 The shield-enclosed side note in W reads: ‘Here ys a me[n]cion of ye Lady of the 25 26 27 28

Works, p. 62.8–12. Ibid., pp. 62–3. Cf. Works, p. 1296, n. 39.32–40.5. Ibid., p. 53.1–2.

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Laak Whan she asked Balyne le Sauvage his hede’29 (see Plate 1). At the moment of Arthur’s promise, the text itself, like Arthur, knows not what this gift will be: the marginal statement, inasmuch as it occurs before Balyn enters the tale, is not yet true or even referential. But the manuscript knows what is coming and makes its prophecy, regardless of whether we the readers have any idea who ‘Balyn’ is. When Balyn does appear, however, the reader knows what Balyn does not: that he is marked for death. Balyn’s proper adventure begins to unfold when, seeing that none of Arthur’s knights are able to free the maiden’s sword – and thereby prove themselves to be ‘withoute velony other trechory and withoute treson’30 – he steps forward through the press: ‘Damesell, I pray you of youre curteysy suffir me as well to assay as thes other lordis. Thoughe that I be pourely arayed yet in my herte mesemyth I am fully assured as som of thes other, and mesemyth in myne herte to spede ryght welle.’ Thys damesell than behelde thys poure knyght and saw he was a lyckly man; but for hys poure araymente she thought he sholde nat be of no worship withoute vylony or trechory. And than she sayde unto that knyght, ‘Sir, hit nedith nat you to put me to no more payne, for hit semyth nat you to spede thereas all thes othir knyghtes have fayled.’ ‘A, fayre damesell,’ seyde Balyn, ‘worthynes and good tacchis and also good dedis is nat only in araymente, but manhode and worship [ys hyd] within a mannes person; and many a worshipfull knyght ys nat knowyn unto all peple. And therefore worship and hardynesse ys nat in araymente.’31

Such is Balyn’s advent, at the moment when exemplarity has reproduced not only the king’s authority but his failure. From a test which demonstrates that ‘vylony, trechory and treson’ in fact permeate Arthur’s court, Balyn emerges to take an oblique course from Arthur’s exhausted example. And with him emerges a social reading of Arthurian romance which is new to the Vulgate tradition. For here, in the inside margin of the Winchester manuscript, folio 23r, there is a manicula at the word ‘Damesell’, and, in the outside margin, in brown ink (other side-notes are in red), a small head whose shield-like speech bubble reads ‘vertue & monhode ys hyed wyth In the bodye’ (see Plate 2). And it is just here that Balyn, by employing the sententia (if not the verba ipsissima32) also expressed in the marginalia, persuades the lady to give him a chance, whereupon he follows, and does not follow, the king’s ‘insample’. Before we can pursue the significance of this and the manuscript’s other side-notes, we need to pause over this singular escutcheon. Excursus: marginalium on folio 23r While this particular escutcheoned commentary is in the spirit of the others in the manuscript, it requires its own examination apart from its companions. It is drawn, according to Field, 29 30 31 32

Side-notes are quoted directly from W. Works, p. 62.1–2. Ibid., p. 63.11–21. Field finds that the verba ipsissima must derive from a source common to Winchester and Caxton: ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, pp. 230–1.

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in a sprawling hand much less professional than those of the text-scribes. [Its commentary] is set in a shield-shaped surround that looks as if it was drawn in imitation of those commonest in this part of the manuscript, but by a more uncertain hand. It does not refer to the action, as all the scribal marginalia do, but repeats a moral ‘sentence’ from the text: ‘vertue & monhode ys hyed [read hydde] wyth In the bodye.’33

In addition, this marginalium, unlike the other decorations, is in brown ink instead of red or black. It would be difficult to conclude that this marginalium belongs to anything other than a post-copying layer of response to the text, and one made rather by a reader than a corrector. Helen Cooper argues that all the Winchester marginalia, except this one, are responses to the text by scribes A and B themselves, making a strong case for the distinct character of each scribe’s marginalia. Cooper goes on to observe that this ‘vertu’ marginalium is – with Caxton’s preface – an early, post-scribal interpretive response to Malory’s text, since it shares with Caxton ‘an insistence on the ethical value of the text’.34 For Cooper, the ‘vertu’ marginalium is, with the other annotations in the Winchester manuscript, the residue of a multiple, interactive readership (which includes the scribes) whose many marginal notes ‘express almost every response that it is possible to bring to the work: a fascination with its quasi-mystical possibilities, with its knockabout physical adventures, and with its portrayal of ideal knightliness’.35 If Cooper’s ‘response’-reading of the ‘vertu’ marginalium assumes that its language was prompted by the corresponding passage in the text, Field’s reading sharpens its focus on the lexical differences between text-passage and commentary. text: manhode and worship [ys hyd] within a mannes person marginalium: vertue & manhode ys hyed wyth In the bodye

Accepting Vinaver’s emendation of the text (‘ys hyd’, which Vinaver imports from the margin), Field accounts for the differences between text and marginalium as follows: Of the various differences between text and marginalium, the one that matters most is that the text lacks ‘ys hydde’ [sic]. Those two words, however, are present in the Caxton text, which reads ‘manhood and worship is hyd within mans persone’. The agreement between the marginalium and the Caxton shows that ‘ys hydde’ is an authentic reading. A reader faced with the Winchester text alone, however, could not know that. It would be obvious that the text had lost a verb, but the reader could not discover what the lost verb was from among many possibilities. One must therefore ask how the author of the marginalium came to have the correct reading. It is unlikely that he found it in the Caxton text. If there had been an early reader of Winchester whose reaction to passages that did not make sense was to check the Caxton and substitute Caxton readings that did make sense, the margins of Winchester would be crowded with corrections. The marginalium must surely have been copied from another manuscript, presum33 [read ‘hydde’] is Field’s emendation. 34 ‘Opening up the Malory Manuscript’, in The Malory Debate, p. 271. 35 Ibid., p. 271.

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ably as an omitted element of the text made good by a corrector who checked the Winchester marginalia for omissions. That would make this marginalium part of the copying process in the largest sense.36

The presence of the ‘correct’ reading in Caxton might indeed point to a common exemplar. This is an economical explanation, given Field’s argument that, pace Cooper, all of W’s marginalia, this one included, were carried over from the exemplar.37 But we must still account for the difference in color, design and character between the ‘vertu’ marginalium and the others (of which it appears to be an imitation). These differences, which make the ‘vertu’ marginalium unique in the Winchester manuscript, are two: the inclusion of a ‘talking head’ and the ethical, rather than obituary, function of the commentary. Neither at folio 23r nor in any of the scribal instances are the marginalia motivated by semantic deficiencies in the text; single-word corrections in the Winchester manuscript – cf. folios 139v and 279v – are not showy as a rule.38 Another explanation for the side-note at folio 23r might be that a reader of the finished manuscript chose to draw the marginalium and write in the extract at the beginning of the passage which his decoration commemorates, so that it, like Balyn’s name in the margin at folio 21r, might stand in ‘prophetic’ relation to what follows. In the process, this reader outfitted his extract with the verb missing from the text so that it would read like a sententia (or a sub-title, as Carruthers suggests) and not a fragment. That the ‘vertu’ marginalium is ‘part of the copying process in the largest sense’, however, is enough to go on with: it shows, on the one hand, that the Morte Darthur was of sufficient cultural importance to attract marginal commentary, and, on the other, that the moral content of Balyn’s story was meant to be taken seriously and remembered. explicit excursus While it functions within the category established by the other marginalia, the ‘vertu’ marginalium represents a distinct and further phase in the authorizing of Malory’s book. While it shares with the other side-notes a desire to detemporalize and distil each instance (whether ethical or mortal) of chivalric perfection, it also represents a response rather than an index. In addition, the marginalium on folio 23r responds squarely in the didactic register, and so identifies the manuscript as one produced and read for its didactic value. This marginalium, in short, indicates the perhaps surprising fact that Malory’s book was considered an appropriate theatre for ‘Parson’-like sententiae. But in a literary market which so cherished the form and function of books in the de casibus tradition, such a capability may have been nothing less than the Morte’s literary credentials. An interesting question is whether Balyn’s tale (or Malory’s book) fully merits, or seeks to merit, these credentials, since, as is proper to romance, the 36 ‘Malory’s own Marginalia’, p. 231. 37 Ibid., passim, but especially p. 230. 38 They are important, however; see Takako Kato, ‘Corrected Mistakes in the Winchester Manu-

script’, in Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur, pp. 9–25.

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Morte Darthur challenges at all times the dependability of outward tokens (such as ‘arraymente’). The trouble, in fact, begins right away, since after being praised by the damsel as ‘a passynge good knyght and the beste that ever y founde and moste of worship withoute treson . . .’, Balyn’s first act is to withhold the damsel’s sword from her ‘but hit be takyn fro me with force’. Warned that if he keeps the sword Balyn will with it kill his best and most beloved friend, and that through it he himself will be destroyed, Balyn makes his famous response: ‘I shall take the adventure,’ seyde Balyn, ‘that God woll ordayne for me. But the swerde ye shall nat have at thys tyme, by the feythe of my body!’39

This speech is original to Malory; in the French, Balain’s speech, represented as indirect discourse, runs: ‘Et il dist que l’espee emportera il, se il meismes en devoit estre ochis’ (‘He said that he would carry the sword, even if he himself were to be killed with it’ (my translation)).40 This is a telling example of Malory’s genius for compression: he gives the French Balain’s mention of his own death to the sword maiden of the English so that the English Balyn may pitch his rhetoric even higher. Balyn’s second act, moments later, is to decapitate the Lady of the Lake, who has just requested either Balyn’s or the sword maiden’s head from Arthur, and whose death is commemorated by a pointing hand in the left-hand margin of fol. 24r and by an escutcheoned note in the right: ‘The dethe of the Lady of the Lake’. Balyn is banished and departs, but Arthur soon sends out Sir Launceor, ‘the kynges sone of Irlonde’, to exact revenge on the murderer. The reader is justified, at this point, in wondering when the damsel’s divination-by-marvel that Balyn is without villainy or treachery – if it has any merit at all – will become active. Does it begin at Balyn’s drawing of the sword and thus describe everything after it, including his appropriation of the sword and use of it to commit murder? Or does it describe Balyn’s state before and up to the drawing of the sword, and cease to obtain after his refusal to return the sword and with decapitation of the Lady? A further possibility is that her divination is pure moonshine, since, as Balyn leaves Arthur’s court a banished murderer, there occur in his wake two further unveilings: the damsel who brought the sword is exposed by Merlin as ‘the falsist damesell that lyveth’ whose true agenda is the prosecution of her own blood-feud; and Balyn himself is vindicated by Merlin who tells Arthur that, despite Balyn’s transgression in decapitating the Lady of the Lake, ‘. . . there lyvith nat a knyght of more prouesse than he ys. And he shall do unto you, my lorde, grete honoure and kyndnesse; and hit ys grete pité he shall nat endure but a whyle, for of his strengthe and hardinesse I know hym nat lyvyng hys macche.’41

The sword maiden’s being proved ‘the falsist damesell that lyveth’ apparently does not undo her prophetic declaration of Balyn’s worth, since Merlin backs her 39 Works, p. 64.12–14. 40 La Suite du Roman de Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau, 2 vols (Paris: Droz, 1996), p. 69. 41 Works, pp. 67.24–5, 68.10–15.

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up in this. She will also have been correct, as Merlin seems to affirm, about Balyn’s future. This is indeed strange. If she and her sword-test were right about Balyn’s virtues and right also in predicting his death, then wherein is the sword maiden false? Perhaps it is in her secret prosecution of a blood feud. Whatever the case, the narrative now leaves her in the seemingly impossible condition of being both ‘true’ and ‘false’. Directly following Merlin’s vindication of Balyn to Arthur, Malory describes Launceor arming himself and riding out. The unceremonious shift from Merlin addressing Arthur and his court to the solitary Irish knight arming himself ‘at all poyntes’42 elsewhere in the castle is worth noting. Launceor, because busying himself for combat, has not been privy to Merlin’s unveilings, and Arthur does not, on the basis of these revelations, think to call Launceor back. Launceor thus goes out in authorized pursuit of the appearance of a foe. It is a case of false motivation, bad timing and ill communication altogether characteristic of Balyn’s world. Neither this fact nor the confusing modality of Merlin’s simultaneous rebuke and co-option of the sword-damsel’s prophecies diminishes Merlin’s transcendent credibility in Malory’s book. At the same time, careers such as Launceor’s – short, fiery and nonessential – proliferate in the Morte. Such characters are fully invested with all the privileges of the chivalric hero – including rubricated names and marginal death notices – and they do not fail to acquit themselves in knightly fashion. What they also do, however, is document the discontinuity between a chevalier’s deeds and his aura. In fact, whether dead or alive, these knights occupy, bodily, that ever-widening space between narrative and exemplum. If Launceor’s mission in bringing Balyn back to Arthur’s court is to repair a rift in the order, he succeeds only in widening it, and demonstrating the amnesiac quality of that new space. On a broader arc, of course, this is what Balyn himself will do: his field of action is confined not only by the twisted tale in which Malory finds him, but also by his failing rate of exchange in the exemplary register. The Winchester scribes are on to this: Launceor the knight is forgotten the moment he leaves Arthur’s court (if not before); his name, however, becomes the first in a series of marginal shrines which mark the progress of Balyn’s own surplus chivalry, and his tale’s surplus exemplarity.

The Adventure of Balyn ‘How Balyn slew Launceor’ After the Lady of the Lake’s obituary marginalium, the next one (at f. 25r) is a manicula indicating the beginning of Launceor and Balyn’s combat: ‘ “Make you redy,” seyde the knyght Launceor, “and dresse you unto me, for that one shall abyde in the fylde.” ’43 This is followed by the marginal note, at the top of folio 25v, ‘How Balyn slew lau[n]ceor’ (this two-line note is without a frame). The killing of Launceor – for which Balyn is suitably apologetic – does not in itself prove a stumbling block; Launceor is collateral damage. Though in the French 42 Ibid., p. 68.16ff. 43 Ibid., p. 69.7–8.

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Balain is unwilling to fight Lançor lest, in killing him, he should add offence upon offence (‘si meterai en tel maniere mesfait sur mesfait’44), in Malory’s version Balyn simply observes that the pursuing knight’s complaint is groundless (‘full symple’) since, in killing the Lady of the Lake, Balyn had exacted due justice, and meting justice is after all the duty and privilege of the knight. But it is not only the killing of the Lady that is at issue. In recovering his own ‘grete damage’ Balyn has trespassed on the king’s prerogative. In even the crudest feudal system, it is not for barons to exact justice from one another, but to ask it from their lord. Balyn had just completed a term in prison for another such offence and, given his recidivism, Arthur might well wish to curb him, marvel or no marvel. The maintenance of this ethic is Launceor’s mission, which is one reason why Balyn’s argument about his own ‘damage’ must fall on deaf ears. As the Irish knight has already said, ‘I am com hydir to revenge the despite ye dud thys day unto kynge Arthure and to his courte.’45 If the despite to Arthur was the murder of someone under the king’s safe-conduct, then the despite to his court was the violation of the king’s judicial authority (to which authority Balyn owes his life since, up to now anyway, it has excluded revenge-killings). However confident Balyn is in his own rectitude – as if knighthood were something other than service to a sovereign lord – his adventure swiftly repeats the awkwardness of its origins. Balyn is forced to do battle with Launceor wherein Launceor is slain, and no sooner does Launceor’s paramour, Colombine, discover his corpse than she berates his killer: ‘A! Balyne, two bodies thou haste slain in one herte, and two hertes in one body, and two soules thou hast loste.’ And therewith she toke the swerde frome hir love that lay dede, and felle to the grounde in a swowghe. And whan she arose she made grete dole oute of mesure, which sorow greved Balyne passyngly sore. And he wente unto hir for to have tane the swerde oute of hir honde; but she helde hit so faste he myght nat take hit oute of hir honde but yf he sholde have hurte hir. And suddeynly she sette the pomell to the grounde, and rove hirselff thorowoute the body.46

The (omniscient) damsel is right to hold Balyn responsible for her own death as well as Launceor’s, for Balyn is responsible for the chain of events leading to her own suicide. Or is he? Was it a series of voluntary acts or a series of ungoverned effects? As Jill Mann writes of this passage, ‘it is difficult to decide either at this point or later the relative importance of the items in this miscellaneous series of consequences’.47 Mann, who finds that the suppression of logical explanations is in fact a structural principle of the ‘Tale of Balyn’ (and of the Morte in general), argues that the chief effect of the narrative’s purely paratactic structure is that consequences ‘radiate and proliferate in a manner that defies any attempt to arrange them in a hierarchical order of importance’.48 Moreover, causality at the

44 45 46 47 48

La Suite du Roman de Merlin, p. 80. Works, p. 68.29–31. Ibid., p. 69.22–32. ‘ “Taking the Adventure”: Malory and the Suite du Merlin’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 71–91; 81. Ibid., p. 80.

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narrative level does not yield a parallel logical order; it fails to express analogy. Or perhaps analogy itself – ‘arguments based on the belief that the universe formed an ordered structure of such a kind that the pattern of the whole was reproduced in the pattern of the parts, and that inferences from one category of phenomena to the other were therefore valid methods of approach for the understanding of either’49 – is nowhere to be found in the causes of things. Balyn’s emergence, then, is really a series of emergences, and is thus prone to the historical effect projected by Foucault: ‘The isolation of different points of emergence does not conform to the successive configurations of an identical meaning; rather they result from substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals.’50 And Malory’s materia now provides him with just such pregnant parataxis in the shape of Balyn’s brother Balan, who appears just after the damsel’s suicide. After a happy reunion, and Balyn’s narration to Balan of his adventures since regaining his freedom, the following exchange takes place: ‘Wherefore he sente thys knyght afftir me that lyethe here dede. And the dethe of thys damesell grevith me sore.’ ‘So doth hit me,’ seyde Balan, ‘but ye must take the adventure that God woll ordayne you.’51

That Balyn’s brother should utter the same words, almost verbatim, used by Balyn himself to justify the awkward fallout of Balyn’s keeping the sword is a further instance of parataxis and of a redundancy which is really beginning to show. Importantly, the brothers’ words of justification are acts of interpretation. Interpretations of what? If we say ‘of chivalric code’, we then quickly recall that Balyn flourishes in ignorance of the Pentecostal Oath, which is not taken until much later in the ‘Tale of King Arthur’ (Works, 120.17–27). Balyn and his brother operate according to a more primitive code, according to which a good knight – which Balyn’s debut sword-adventure proved him to be – looks to precedent and convention. That Balan affirms his brother’s ‘taking the adventure’ is, however archaic it might seem, Balyn’s legal vindication: Balan’s speaking the same words confirms that Balyn’s deeds are recognizable within memory and custom. Balan’s speech is parataxis remembering itself, and such was the determination of right in the Middle Ages at least until the twelfth century.52 Balyn’s domination of Launceor, the brothers agree, is the necessary result of Launceor’s attack; the lady was collateral damage. But here again, in the moment of legal interpretation, Foucault’s insight obtains, and, with a certain precision, lays open the entrails of Malory’s parataxis:

49 50 51 52

Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 100. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 86. Works, p. 70.17–20. Cf. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 113–15, 359–74. Also Bloch’s Land and Work in Medieval Europe, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 18; also, Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), chapter VII, passim.

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If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only a metaphysician could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations.53

This effect is suggested also by Merlin’s following Balyn about (in an approximation of Grail-hermit practice) prophesying, verbally or by inscription, as to the just-completed episode’s larger meaning, meaning which Balyn himself need not approve or understand. Just so, this moment in Malory’s narrative is another stage in the book’s ongoing additive proliferation: Malory bears a relation to his text very like Merlin’s to the numerous tombs which he writes upon in this tale. And it is a valuable moment to the reader seeking to understand Balyn’s story: for the stage which follows it demonstrates that parataxis does not always remember itself. After Balan agrees to accompany Balyn against Royns, but before the two are able to set off, Malory slows the pace of the narrative with a bizarre overcrowding of the stage: a dwarf appears to warn Balyn of the vengeance which Launceor’s family will exact; King Mark of Cornwall arrives and, apprehending the tragedy of Launceor and his lady, sets about to build them a tomb, on which is inscribed the story of their death; and, finally, . . . in com Merlion to kynge Marke and saw all thys doynge. ‘Here shall be,’ seyde Merlion, ‘in this same place the grettist bateyle betwyxte two knyghtes that ever was or ever shall be, and the trewyst lovers; and yet none of hem shall slee other.’ And there Melion wrote hir namys uppon the tombe with lettirs of golde, that shall feyght in that place: which namys was Launcelot du Lake and Trystrams. ‘Thou art a merveylous man,’ seyde kynge Marke unto Merlion, ‘that spekist of such mervayles. Thou art a boysteous man and an unlyckly, to tell of such dedis. What is thy name?’ sayde kynge Marke. ‘At thys tyme,’ seyde Merlion, ‘I woll nat telle you. But at that tyme sir Trystrams ys takyn with his soveraigne lady, than shall ye here and know my name; and at that tyme ye shall here tydynges that shall nat please you. A, Balyne!’ seyde Merlion, ‘thou haste done thyselff grete hurte that thou saved nat thys lady that slew herselff; for thou myghtyst have saved hir and thou haddist wold.’ ‘By the fayth of my body,’ sayde Balyne, ‘I myght nat save hir, for she slew hirselff suddeynly.’ ‘Me repentis hit,’ seyde Merlion; ‘because of the dethe of that lady thou shalt strike a stroke moste dolerous that ever man stroke, excepte the stroke of oure Lorde Jesu Cryste. For thou shalt hurte the trewyst knyght and the man of moste worship that now lyvith; and thorow that stroke three kyngdomys shall be brought into grete poverté, miseri and wrecchednesse twelve yere. And the

53 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 86.

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knyght shall nat be hole of that wounde many yerys.’ Than Merlion toke hys leve.54

As Jill Mann writes of this passage, The most memorable and impressive consequences of Launceor’s death are in fact not those which are linked to it by any development of events, but the ones linked to it by the aesthetic connections of echo and reminiscence. It is in the repetition of the pairs of lovers – Launceor and Columbe, Launcelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Isode – or of battles between those who love each other – Launcelot and Tristram, Balyn and his brother – or of the affirmed necessity to ‘take the adventure’, that we are most strongly tantalized with the suggestion of meaning.55

Here, the paratactic grammar of Malory’s tale reveals its ‘unsuitability’ most tellingly, for it blithely leads us into a thematic and narrative quandary. The ‘aesthetic’ correspondences invoked in this passage – though ‘aesthetic’ may rather under-diagnose the problem – point to an excess of situations and bodies (that is, of exempla) rather than resolution of their crises. If everything tacitly points back to Arthur’s court, this ‘everything’ is in no way authorized, or otherwise unified, by its deixis. In the same way, the cause-and-effect of Balyn’s striking the Dolorous Stroke ‘because’ of Colombe’s death (according to Merlin) is so obscure, not to say opaque, that its hypotaxis is here constrained to serve Malory’s immediate need to pile mesfait sur mesfait. The result is a kind of rampant reduplication, as narrative exacts its revenge on exemplarity. The most problematic reduplication is perhaps Balyn’s of Arthur. The reader, and Balyn, will always be able to trace Balyn’s bad luck (if not his raison d’être) to Arthur’s court, and specifically to Arthur’s example. Like Arthur, Balyn is the recipient of a second sword. In the French text, when Artus receives Excalibur from the Lady, he promises in exchange to render an unspecific future service, if possible: Et li rois creante qui; li donra, se che est dons que il puisse douner.56 The king promised he would give it, if it was something he could give.

He thus avoids the imputation, when the time comes, of breaking his word. Malory’s Arthur is not so circumspect: ‘Be my feyth,’ seyde Arthure, ‘I woll gyff you what gyffte that ye woll aske.’57

By not forfeiting the head of Balyn or the sword maiden, Malory’s Arthur (to his credit, we think) does break his promise. And although his receiving Excalibur was contingent on the fulfillment of this promise, Arthur does not, when the time comes, give the sword back. And it is at the moment of not returning

54 55 56 57

Works, p. 72.3–33. ‘ “Taking the Adventure” ’, pp. 81–2. La Suite du Roman de Merlin, p. 51. Works, p. 53.1–2.

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another sword that Balyn’s adventure begins; and Balyn too is soon enough the hapless witness to the violent death of a lady (a position earlier modeled by Arthur when Balyn himself killed the Lady of the Lake). Arthur and Balyn, each questionably entitled to his second sword, both choose to ignore the consequences of their presumed entitlement. If Arthur’s debt to the Lady of the Lake is (somewhat awkwardly) cancelled by Balyn’s killing her, Balyn’s own debt – a more obscure one to be sure – remains, for the duration of his adventures, undischarged. Moreover, it is a debt which, as the French Balain feared – ‘si meterai en tel meniere mesfait seur mesfait’ – tends to be increased, rather than diminished, by further deeds. Balyn’s attempt, for example, to take Launceor’s sword away from the grieving damsel (which looks suspiciously like an attempt to acquire a third sword, and a second attempt to receive one from a lady) is at best an ill portent. What it is a portent of remains open to interpretation; the significance of the present scene is far from clear. This obscurity is wonderfully marked in the French text by the statement that Balyn, on witnessing Columbe’s suicide, ‘ne set que dire’ (didn’t know what to say).58 On the other hand, we may find that it portends nothing but portentousness itself, the transcendent significance of all noble (i.e. aristocratic) actions. Balyn and Balan then go to war against King Rions, which reminds the reader – who may need reminding – that the story is set in time of civil war. But if the war with Rions has thus far been the narrative frame of ‘The Knight with the Two Swords’, that frame is soon to be closed off. With great success, Balyn and Balan ambush Rions and send him prisoner to Arthur; they then serve illustriously in the battle against Kings Lott and Nero in which, thanks also to the deeds of Pellinor, Arthur’s side wins. It is here in the manuscript that the reader encounters the next set of marginalia. Here, at folio 28v, a hand points to the first word on the page, ‘Lott’ from the sentence (beginning on the previous page): ‘And [Pellinor] strake a myghty stroke at kynge Lott as he fought with hys enemyes, and he failed of his stroke and smoke the horse necke, that he foundered to the erthe with kyng [f. 28v] Lott. And therewith anone kynge Pellinor smote hym a grete stroke thorow the helme and hede unto the browis.’59 Then, beginning at folio 28v, line 14, where account is given of the funeral of the vanquished kings and where a prophecy by Merlin is begun, there is a marginal shield-form enclosing the words ‘Here ys the dethe of kynge Lot and of the xii kyngis’. But of all the twelve kyngis kynge Arthure lette make the tombe of kynge Lotte passynge rychely, and made hys tombe by hymselffe. And than Arthure lette make twelve images of laton and cooper, and overgylte with gold in the sygne of the twelve kyngis; and eche one of hem helde a tapir of wexe in hir hond that brente nyght and day. And kynge Arthure was made in the sygne of a fygure stondynge aboven hem with a swerde drawyn in hys honde, and all the twelve figures had countenaunce lyke unto men that were overcom. All thys made Merlion by hys subtyle craufte. 58 La Suite du Roman de Merlin, p. 81. 59 Works, p. 77.11–16.

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And there he tolde the kynge how that whan he was dede thes tapers scholde brenne no lenger, ‘aftir the adventures of the Sankgreall that shall com among you and be encheved.’ Also he told kynge Arthure how Balyn, the worshipfull knyght, shall gyff the dolerouse stroke, whereof shall falle grete vengeaunce. ‘A, where is Balyne, Balan and Pellinore?’ ‘As for kynge Pellinore,’ seyde Merlion, ‘he woll mete with you soone. And as for Balyne, he woll nat be longe frome you. But the other brothir woll departe: ye shall se hym no more.’60

On the manuscript page, the hand at line one indicates the ‘dethe of kynge Lott’ itself, while the side-note ‘brackets’ the description of the funeral, the artistry of the tombs and part of Merlin’s prophecy. But, as I have suggested, the sidenotes’ verbum need not be read as referring (or failing to refer) to the res ipsissima of the adjacent text. The description of the kings’ funeral alone merits the decoration, and this meriting is in itself significant. The solemnity of the funeral passage and, even more, Malory’s ekphrastic lingering over the various metals and sculptural forms of the tombs themselves, create a distinct lull in the tale’s otherwise galloping pace. This marginalium is an extension of the narrative’s contemplative turn, the object of whose contemplation is the death, not of enemy kings, but of nobles. Even apart from its reckoning of symbolic capital, this marginalium also participates in the prophetic. While the language of the commentary does not project into the future, the passage it commemorates is thick with prophetic particulars: Merlin prophesies his own death, whereat the funereal tapers will go out; he prophesies the adventure of the Sankgreall, this being the Grail’s very first mention in Malory’s book; he foretells the Dolorous Stroke; and finally he predicts the death of Balan (or at least that knight’s henceforth permanent absence). In addition the names Balyn, Balan and Pellinore are several times repeated in Arthur’s conversation with Merlin, and these, like ‘Sankgreall’, appear in the ruby ink. The writing and the manuscript-making thus converge to invest this part of the text with memorability. At the same time, noble characters, here and throughout the text, are themselves invested with a portentousness. The things that happen to knights and the things that knights do are understood to have a significance outside of ordinary history. Scenes like the funeral of the twelve kings (or thirteen kings, if you include Lott) serve an aristocratic ideology by knitting together, in a highly visible form, the identity and the history of that class – even if we say that in the fifteenth century this was a class neither stable nor homogeneous. That such knitting is required here is, in fact, one of the insights afforded by Malory’s text. Even as its narrativity must always put a tear in the ruling class’s fictive self-identification, and reveal the historical discontinuity between chivalric privilege and personal merit, Malory’s book must also – especially, it seems, in funereal moments – make that cloth whole ‘again’. By slowing the action down to a ceremonial, ritualized, and exemplum-bearing, pace – and perhaps only by doing so – Malory makes his story able to preserve and produce the inherited privilege of nobility.

60 Ibid., pp. 77–8.

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With the interment of the kings ends the portion of ‘Balyn’ framed by the civil war and also that framed by Balyn’s quest to regain Arthur’s favor. The next part begins with Balyn firmly in Arthur’s favor and employed by the king on a familiar errand: he must go and bring back a recalcitrant knight. This is of course the relation which Launceor bore to Balyn himself at the beginning of the tale. The wayward knight in this case is one who rode by Arthur’s pavilion ‘makynge grete dole’ but who refused to stop and explain himself to the king (who, we are told, is ‘somwhat syke’61). Balyn catches up with the knight, who identifies himself as Harleus le Berbeus, and is now accompanying a maiden. When Balyn guarantees his safe-conduct, Harleus agrees to return with him to Arthur’s pavilion. As they approach the king’s tent, however, ‘there com one invisible and smote the knyght that wente with Balyn thorowoute the body with a spere’. With his dying breath Harleus identifies his killer as Garlonde (emended by Vinaver to Caxton’s ‘Garlon’). And it is here, at folio 29v, that the manuscript has its next side-note, a shield-enclosed statement reading, ‘Here Garlonde yt went invisyble slew Harlews le Barbeus und[er] ye conduyt of Balyn’. The side-note may be understood to commemorate a death (and a murder) and to mark a turn in the tale. This marginalium, like the previous one, marks a death-and-burial sequence,62 but also contains the seeds of further action, namely the joining of a blood feud and the continuation of the dead knight’s unknown quest. These seeds blossom immediately in a mirror-image of the murder we have just witnessed: that is, a new strange knight is encountered and quickly murdered. The attendant marginalium is thus a mirror image of the one just seven lines above, though with a different name: ‘Here Garlonde invisible slew Peryne de Mounte Beliard under ye conduyght of Balyn’ (see Plate 3). Like the previous marginalium, this one abuts the text containing the knight’s familiar-sounding last words – ‘ “Alas,” seyde the knyght, “I am slayne by thys traytoure knyght that rydith invisible” ’ – which words are also indexed in the right-hand margin by a pointing hand (at ‘Alas seyde the’). At the knight’s burial by Balyn and a hermit, the knightly tomb is again a vehicle of portent, even if that portent is of questionable relevance to the present situation:

61 Ibid., pp. 79ff. 62 The escutcheon runs from lines 5 to 13 of the page, which lines include Harleus’s dying words,

Arthur’s building of his tomb and the disposition of Balyn and the maiden who had traveled with Harleus: ‘Alas!’ seyde the knyght,’ I am slayne undir youre [line 5] conduyte with a knight called Garlon. Therefore take my horse that is bettir than youres, and ryde to the damesell and folow the queste that I was in as she woll lede you, and revenge my deth whan ye may.’ ‘That shall I do,’ seyde Balyn, ‘and that I make avow to God and knyghthode.’ And so he departed frome kynge Arthure with grete sorow. So kynge Arthure lette bury this knyght rychely, and made mencion [on] his tombe how here was slayne Berbeus and by whom the trechory was done of the knyght Garlon. But ever the damesell bare the truncheon of the spere with hir that sir Harleus le Berbeus was slayne withall. [line 13] (Works, p. 80.12–25) The last word in line 13, ‘withall’, ends a paragraph in Winchester falling about 14 character-spaces short of the right-hand margin. The next line on the page begins with a two-line capital S (‘So Balyne and the damesell rode into the foreyste . . .’).

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And there the ermyte and Balyne buryed the knyght undir a ryche stone and a tombe royall. And on the morne they founde letters of gold wretyn how that sir Gawayne shall revenge his fadirs dethe kynge Lot on kynge Pellynore.63

It is worthwhile to register once again the significance that has been accruing to the construction of tombs, and to their always being magically invested with prophecy. The occasion of a knight’s death – we are never allowed to forget – reverberates with meaning and merveille; such is the habit of noble ideology. But the transcendence the side-notes confer is of short duration, and the merit they suppose does not bear analysis. In Malory’s England, though the cultural memory of chivalry is strong, social practice is unable to sustain the classidentity, or aura, to which Arthur’s knights are an extended reference. The manuscript, then, continually re-asserts that aura in visual form. Following the death of Peryne de Mounte Belyarde, Balyn and his damsel are made to observe the customs of a strange castle: the damsel donates a ‘sylver disshe full’ of her blood to a sick lady who can only be made whole by the blood of ‘a clene maid and a kynges doughter’. The damsel’s blood does not help, however. (The sick lady’s salvation will be a future healing, effected by Percival’s sister in Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal.) Some days later, Balyn and the damsel are lodged by a gentleman whose son has been wounded by an invisible knight and cannot be healed without some of that knight’s blood. When the gentleman learns the invisible knight’s name from Balyn – whose oath to avenge the dead knights will now dovetail with a second oath: to deliver ‘parte of his bloode to hele youre sonne withall’ – he says he knows where Garlon lives and, the next day, he guides Balyn and the maiden to Pellam’s castle. Here, the reader finds the next side-note, which reads, ‘How Balyn slew Garlon the knyght that wente invisyble’. It abuts the proper episode in the text, which begins with a flyting wherein Balyn shows his wit and, again, the laconic eloquence which makes his speeches always portentous, as if haunting us from the future: And therewith thys Garlon aspyed that Balyn vysaged hym, so he com and slapped hym on the face with the backe of hys honde and seyde, ‘Knyght, why beholdist thou me so? For shame, ete thy mete and do that thou com fore.’ ‘Thou seyst soth,’ seyde Balyne, ‘thys ys nat the firste spite that thou haste done me. And therefore I woll do that I come fore.’ And rose hym up fersely and clave his hede to the sholdirs. ‘Now geff me the troncheon,’ seyde Balyn to his lady, ‘that he slew youre knyght with.’ And anone she gaff hit him, for allwey she bare the truncheoune with hir. And therewith Balyn smote hym thorow the body and seyde openly, ‘With that troncheon thou slewyste a good knyght, and now hit stykith in thy body.’ Than Balyn called unto hys oste and seyde, ‘Now may we fecche blood inoughe to hele youre son withall.’64

63 Works, p. 81.15–18. 64 Ibid., p. 84.1–19.

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Malory sharpens what is already a trenchant passage in the French. Though the French Balain sits at the table pensively in a scene which leads more slowly to the fight with Garlon, the account of the fight, once begun, is both efficient and highly rhetorical. In both versions, Balyn acquits himself of numerous obligations in rapid succession. Avenging the two knights slain under his conduct, he kills and pierces Garlon with the truncheon the damsel has been carrying with her; having spigoted Garlon, Balyn makes the flow of blood available to his host for the healing of his son. Having done these things, Balain of the Suite du Merlin stands up and shouts: Ore ne m’en chaut que on face de moi, car j’a bien me queste achievee!65 Now I don’t care what happens to me, for I have achieved my quest!

Malory’s Balyn makes no such statement, but keeps moving forward as circumstances require. Instantly, Pellam jumps up and says, ‘Knyght, why hast thou slayne my brothir? Thou shalt dey therefore or thou departe.’ ‘Well,’ seyde Balyn, ‘do hit youreselff.’ ‘Yes,’ seyde kyng Pellam, ‘there shall no man have ado with the but I myselff, for the love of my brothir.’66

As if to emphasize the tale’s rampant blood-feud ethic, the Winchester manuscript has a hand in the inside margin of folio 31r pointing directly to the words ‘my brothir’ (i.e. the last two words in the passage just cited). This manicula, the next-to-last marginalium to be found in the ‘Knight with Two Swords’ section of the manuscript, also indicates this tale’s tendency to produce doubles. ‘Added to this narrative doubling’, writes Elizabeth Edwards, is the kinship doubling of brotherhood. Almost everyone seems to have a brother in this tale, and even Arthur has the next best thing, a cousin german. The two damsels [come to Arthur’s court] because they want revenge on and for their brothers; there are Balyn and Balan, Rions and Nero, Pellam and Garlon. Other forms of kinship are also important, but brotherhood in particular asserts a primal bond between individuals, as if brothers complete each other.67

If in general terms this is a tale of brother killing brother, it asserts a bond not only between individuals, but between texts. As Vinaver notes of the Roman de Balain, ‘The basic theme of it is a common folklore motif, best known through the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rustem: the theme of an encounter between two kinsmen unaware of each other’s identity. Geoffrey of Monmouth makes use of it in his story of the war between the two rival brothers, Belinus and Brennius, and there is reason to believe that the author of the Suite du Merlin knew this story’.68 ‘The Knight with Two Swords’ shares this theme not only 65 66 67 68

La Suite du Roman de Merlin, p. 159.34–5. Works, p. 84.22–6. The Genesis of Narrative, pp. 38–9. La Roman du Balain, ed. Legge, ‘Introduction’, by Eugène Vinaver, p. xx. (Citation after ellipsis is of Vinaver’s footnote to the first sentence cited.)

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with Geoffrey’s Belinus and Brennius, but also with Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Theban cycle which is its source; at the same time, it is a theme which takes us precipitately back to Abel and Cain. What seems to be the specific problem here is the redundancy of pairs of brothers, just as a redundancy of swords, quests and corpses also characterizes the story. It may be helpful in fact to propose, in Lee Patterson’s language, the ‘Thebanness’ of Balyn’s story. At the time of composing the Knight’s Tale, Patterson observes, Chaucer had earlier [in Anelinda and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde] defined

Thebanness as having two destructive patterns: the one a fratricidal and self-destructive rivalry that gives full rein to violence of the appetitive self; the other a fatal recursiveness that undermines the progressivity upon which the ideals of secular history are based and condemns chivalric ambition, whether antique or modern, to an endless repetition. If, like the Knight’s Tale, Malory’s book portrays an effort to ‘bring Theban self-replication to a definitive end’,69 that end is not yet in sight. Nor need we presume on Malory’s part any investment in such closure, however much his book may enact the history of such a scheme. Malory’s is still a drama of the old nobility being ‘devoured by the great feudal wars’, and he is powerless, at the moment, to stop the fulfillment of portents or the satisfaction of vendettas. Only in the Grail Quest will the language of closure become available, as when Arthur says to Galahad, ‘Sir, ye be ryght wellcom, for ye shall meve many good knyghtes to the queste of the Sankgreall, and ye shall enchyve that many other knyghtes myght never brynge to an ende.’70 Thebanness, for example, is going ahead full steam in the following sequence, which for most readers epitomizes the ‘Tale of Balyn’: And whan Balyne was wepynles he ran into a chambir for to seke a wepyn and fro chambir to chambir, and no wepyn coude he fynde. And alwayes kyng Pellam followed afftir hym. At the last he enterde into a chambir which was mervaylously dyght and ryche, and a bedde arayed with cloth of golde, the rychiste that myght be, and one lyyng therein. And thereby stoode a table of clene golde with four pelours of sylver that bare up the table, and uppon the table stoode a mervaylous spere strangely wrought. So whan Balyn saw the spere he gate hit in hys honde and turned to kynge Pellam and felde hym and smote hym passyngly sore with that spere, that kynge Pellam felle downe in a sowghe. And therewith the castell brake roffe and wallis and felle downe to the erthe. And Balyn felle downe and myght nat styrre hande nor foote, and for the moste party of that castell was dede thorow the dolorouse stroke. Ryght so lay kynge Pellam and Balyne three dayes. Than Merlion com thydir, and toke up Balyn and gate hym a good horse, for hys was dede, and bade hym voyde oute of that contrey. ‘Sir, I wolde have my damesell,’ seyde Balyne. ‘Loo,’ seyde Merlion, ‘where she lyeth dede.’

69 Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 200. 70 Works, p. 862.16–19.

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And kynge Pellam lay so many yerys sore wounded, and myght never be hole tylle that Galaad the Hawte Prynce heled hym in the quest of the Sankgreall. For in that place was parte of the bloode of oure Lorde Jesu Cryste, which Joseph of Aramathy brought into thys londe. And there hymselff lay in that ryche bedde. And that was the spere whych Longeus smote oure Lorde with to the herte. And kynge Pellam was nygh of Joseph hys kynne, and that was the moste worshipfullist man on lyve in tho dayes, and grete pité hit was of his hurte, for thorow that stroke hit turned to grete dole, tray and tene.71

Of the last paragraph there is no trace in either of the Suite du Merlin manuscripts residing in England, though, as Vinaver notes, something like it may have existed in Malory’s own French text. Several non-Vulgate romances connect Longinus’s spear to the Grail – the Spanish Demanda del Sancto Grial, for example – but these are not among Malory’s known sources.72 (Since this passage represents an instance of Malorian originality, it is worth remarking that it contradicts a corresponding description of the same ‘bedde’ in Malory’s own ‘Quest of the Holy Grail’, which is there occupied not by Joseph of Arimathea but King Evelake.) And it is this passage which, at folio 31r, occasions the last ‘Balyn’ marginalium in the Winchester manuscript. It is a shield-form which abuts the five lines which begin with Galaad the Hawte Prynce and end with Joseph hys kynne, and whose top left corner almost touches the word Sankgreall. Its text reads, ‘here ys a pronosticacion of the Sank Greall’. Just as Arthur’s trials must continue after the Grail is achieved, so must Balyn’s from here. After Merlin coldly bids him a last farewell – ‘nevir in thys worlde we parte nother meete no more’ – Balyn begins his ride through the waste land of his own creation, finding ‘the peple dede slayne on every side’, receiving the curses of all who still live.73 He passes through the waste countries to find a knight mourning beside a tower. When, in this penultimate adventure, Balyn disastrously intercedes on behalf of this knight, the reduplication of portents and signs from throughout the tale becomes wildly accelerated. We learn on Balyn’s finding the sorrowful Sir Garnish that Sir Garnish, too, has been given a sword by a lady: ‘A fayre lady! Why have ye brokyn my promyse? For ye promysed me to mete me here by noone. And I may curse you that ever ye gaff me that swerde, for with thys swerde I woll sle myselff,’ and pulde hit out.74

For the moment, Balyn is successful in preventing the suicide; he convinces Garnish to lead him to the castle where his paramour is lodged so that he may reunite them. Balyn goes into the castle himself and, as he searches for the lady, Malory allows a previous episode to resurface in his description of this one, in which, ‘he went in and serched fro chamber to chambir and fond her bedde, but she was not there’.75 If this sounds familiar, it is because of the passage from

71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 1317, n. 85.21–30. Ibid., pp. 85.31–2, 86.1–6. Ibid., p. 86.20–3. Ibid., p. 87.14–15.

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Pellam’s castle in which Balyn ‘ran into a chambir for to seke a wepyn [and] fro chambir to chambir’ before, as now, discovering a room with a bed in it. As it happens, Balyn discovers the lady elsewhere, in flagrante delicto with ‘the fowlest knyghte that ever he sawe’76; he brings Garnish to the place where the lovers are (now sleeping); Garnish has a spontaneous nosebleed, hacks off their heads, blames Balyn and ‘sodenly’ kills himself. Whether the Winchester scribes made anything of this in the margins we cannot know. From the place where ‘Sir Garnyshe of the Mownte, a povre mannes sonne’ identifies himself and gives the parentage of his lady (Works, 87.7) to where Merlin replaces the pommel of the dead Balyn’s sword (91.17), there is a lacuna in W; C is our only witness. Though we can only guess whether Balyn’s own death was commemorated in W’s margins, there is no reason to imagine it was not. It would also be hard to imagine that the Garnish episode did not merit at least a pointing hand, since it not only produces three corpses but also lays them at Balyn’s feet. As if still haunted by the death of Colombe – despite having discharged the letter of the prophecy attending her death, that is, striking the Dolorous Stroke – and haunted as well as by the deaths of Harleus and Peryne, Balyn is again the helpless witness of suicide and murder. As are Harleus and Peryne, Garnish is anonymous in Malory’s source. If, as seems likely, these knights were named so that their deaths might become recognized in the margins, then Garnish’s acquisition of a name would suggest that the Winchester scribes gave him a death-notice too. Marginalium or not, Malory’s text here shows a heightened preoccupation with the doubling or haunting with which Balyn is met at every turn. That such a cluster of bad memories should re-materialize so closely on the Dolorous Stroke and the Grail prognostication is harrowing indeed. What dénouement, the reader must ask, will this bizarre organization of episodes require? As Balyn rides on, then, he comes to a cross on which it is written in golden letters that ‘it is not for no knyght alone to ryde toward this castel’, which Balyn ignores. If the inscribed cross represents the possible terminus of yet another narrative frame, it is still not the end of the tale. It is fitting, then – if still not very helpful – that Balyn immediately meets an old man on the road who says, ‘Balyn le Saveage, thow passyst thy bandes to come this waye, therfor torne ageyne and it will availle the’, before vanishing. Balyn does not change course and soon hears a third warning, a horn blowing ‘as it had ben the dethe of a beste’. Whereas Balyn greets the first two warnings with silence, the third elicits a speech as remarkable as any other in the Morte for its pregnant obliquity: ‘That blast’, said Balyn, ‘is blowen for me, for I am the pryse, and yet am I not dede.’77 As he says this, a hundred ladies and knights appear before him, greeting him with ‘fayr semblaunt’ and ushering him into a castle, in which ‘ther was daunsynge and mynstralsye and alle maner of joye’. It will be the custom of this place – which has all the suddenness and ‘fayr semblaunt’ of Bercelak’s castle – that causes Balyn and his brother anonymously to kill each other, which they do

76 Ibid., p. 87.19–20 77 Ibid., p. 88.10–12.

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horrendously: ‘alle the place thereas they fought was blood reed’ and ‘doubte it was to here of that bataille for the grete blood shedynge . . .’78 It is ‘semblaunt’ more than anything that allows the bloodbath to occur, for, before going into battle, Balyn is made to exchange his own shield for a blank one, making him unidentifiable and, like hardly anyone else in the story, anonymous. So encompassing is his new non-identity that even Balyn’s clear possession of two swords does not allow Balan – whose red armor is also not his own – to distinguish his brother. Hereafter, the story closes with a marvelously intricate series of symbolic re-engagements, which will be recounted here as succinctly as their nature will allow. Realizing that he and his brother will have slain each other, Balyn curses the customs of the castle which made him unrecognizable to his own brother: ‘And yf I myght lyve I wold destroye that castel for ylle customes.’79 The wish is not purely rhetorical, for in making it Balyn acknowledges, even if unconsciously, that he is a castle-wrecker, he ‘myght’ destroy this one as he did Pellam’s. Next, Balyn speaks a laconic verbal epitaph for himself and his brother which allows the tale a certain symmetry: ‘We came bothe oute of one <w>ombe, that is to say of one moders bely, and so shalle we lye bothe in one pytte.’80

We can only stand in wonder before the typographical error in Caxton’s text (for this passage falls within W’s lacuna) which caused wombe to be replaced by tombe. Apropos of such moments, Jakobson has cited Khlebnikov: ‘ “the typographical error,” he once said, “is often a first-rate artist” ’.81 Following this, Balan dies; the next day Balyn dies too and is buried with his brother in a tomb which bears only the name of Balan, since the lady of the castel ‘knewe not Balyn’s name’. Balyn’s deathbed anonymity is a brutal stroke, but it is this which lets us, finally, reflect on the tale, and on its scribal expression, as an entire thing. At the end of this thing, that is, Balyn is unrecognized by his brother. The Sophoclean character of this tragedy – the chance event ordained by fate – is strong.82 When 78 79 80 81

Ibid., p. 89.28–9, 34–5. Ibid., p. 90.17–18. Ibid., p. 90.27–28, with Vinaver’s emendation of C’s ‘tombe’. ‘What is Poetry?’, in Language and Literature, ed. Christina Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 368–78; 369. 82 Kevin Whetter’s recent article ‘On Misunderstanding Malory’s Balyn’ argues, in fact, that it is closer to tragedy than to romance: the ‘lack of rational or easily explained causation and tragedy is something which occurs both in Sophoklean drama and in Malory’s “Tale of Balyn”. As Vinaver observes, “No rational explanation relieves the gloom of Balyn’s fate”. And if we stop blaming Balyn for events beyond his control, we realize the tragic cast of both his story and the Morte Darthur as a whole.’ In Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur, pp. 149–62; 161. As Vinaver observes elsewhere, the tragic cast of ‘Balyn’ may also be traced to structural contingencies: ‘. . . one no longer feels with Malory, as one does with his source, that each incident is a cross-roads whence numerous tracks may lead in as many different directions. Relieved of some of its ramifications the story moves toward its climax with a greater appearance of design and a greater sense of necessity. And the sacrifice of the cyclic technique is perhaps not too high a price to pay for the discovery of a tragic theme hitherto imprisoned in the intricacies of cyclic fiction.’ Works, p. 1278.

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the brothers meet for the first time in the story, it is precisely by their arms that they know each other: ‘And than was he war by hys armys that there com rydyng hys brothir Balan.’83 When they meet for the last time, their arms displaced by local custom, it is as strangers. Balyn, at the end of his adventure, has in effect become invisible. Like Garlon, he has no apparent identity, and no purpose but to kill. That these two brothers – whose very names are distinguishable only by a single vowel – should go thus from single womb to single tomb is a family tragedy Malory wants us to feel. But, strictly speaking, ‘Tragedy’ is a form whose symmetry and willto-closure converts, provisionally at least, the ill fortune of individuals into an affirmation of the social order. The abiding horror of Balyn’s death-scene, rather, is in the failure of the social order to recognize itself. It is worthwhile to recall here the care with which Froissart, as noted in Chapter 2, inscribes into his account of Geoffroy de Charny’s death that knight’s unmistakable heraldic identity: carrying the king’s banner in one hand, Charny ‘also had his own banner in the field, gules, three inescutcheons argent’; we recall as well Froissart’s observation that, ‘in places there were five men-at-arms attacking a single knight’ – that is, groups of anonymous foot soldiers attacking an individual, nameable, noble knight such as Charny.84 Another historical example of the importance of such recognition was alluded to at the beginning of this chapter: legal action resulting from the confusion of seigniorial arms. The most famous example of such litigation is that occurring in the late fourteenth century between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor. The case, whose action continued from 1385 and 1391, started with the mutual discovery by the knights, while campaigning with Richard, that they bore the same arms, azure with bend d’or. The stakes of this contest – whose antagonists almost resorted to judicial combat – were, as Lee Patterson finds, extremely high. ‘For the nobility’, he writes, arms were nothing less than “tokyns of nobleness,” insignia nobilitatis. Far more

than simply a means of identification for the tournament or the battlefield, they were a statement both of identity understood genealogically and of social privilege justified by heredity. They both refined the self in terms of the current social order and were a constant reminder that that order was legitimate. . . . Any infringement on the secure possession of one’s arms was an infringement on one’s very being and an attack on the foundation of the honor system – on the stalwart, sovereign will as the final ground of value. Since the coat of arms represented each family as an independent dynastic lineage, the coexistence of identical arms subverted the autonomy and sovereignty of the family and hence of the individual who derived his identity from it.85 Two shields bearing the same cote armure is no different, symbolically, from two shields bearing none. The result is the loss of public identity, and so also the loss of class privilege. As Patterson goes on to say, ‘the ritual aspect of the case, its 83 Works, p. 70.3–4. 84 Chronicles, p. 140. 85 Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 181, 183.

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insistence that legitimacy is located in the material sign, was an indication of chivalry’s lack of confidence in itself, a gap where the signified essence ought to be’.86 It was, after all, individual names, and these only, which distinguished Herleus le Berbeus and Peryne de la Mounte, names which may be written in red, enshrined in the margins and magically inscribed on tombs. When Balyn’s proper name gives way to the epithetical ‘Knight with Two Swords’ – gives way, that is, to identification by affect – Balyn himself begins a journey into anonymity, since in the end it is not by the number of swords he carries – a sign which indicates identity only and not affiliation – that he is misrecognized, but by his (absent) coat of arms. That Balyn’s destruction is brought about by the shield he carries, a shield not his own and which announces only his anonymity, may tell us something more of the manuscript’s sensibility. The marginal shield in the manuscript is overwhelmingly a place in which knights are identified, a place, like a tomb, where their red-ink aura might stand in perpetuity. Despite the overwhelming likelihood of there having been an obituary marginalium at Balyn’s death, it is difficult to ignore the accidental, but highly thematic, transference by which Balyn’s blank shield is also a marginal one, his own tomb a blank one.

86 Ibid., p. 186.

4 Usurpation, Right and Redress in Malory’s Roman War

History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. “Effective” history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not allow itself to be transmitted by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. (Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’)

Introduction: The History of the Roman War The production history of the Brut, as Professor Radulescu has shown, gave the late medieval gentry a point of focus for self-fashioning and political debate: it gave them books to own and annotate, leaves on which to inscribe their names and arms.1 Within just this context of book-ownership and book-use, the chronicle tradition of Arthur’s Roman War gave both Malory and Caxton a particular place to express anxieties about England’s political continuity, the civil costs of war (and peace), and the logic of monarchical succession – anxieties, in short, about England’s constitution.2 It is important to remember, however, that the times of Malory’s and Caxton’s respective encounters with this narrative were at opposite ends of the Morte’s production continuum. At the earlier end lies Malory’s adaptation of the fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthure. Whether or not Malory’s version of Arthur’s war with Emperor Lucius was, as Vinaver argues, the first written of the Morte’s sections,3 it is among the very earliest. The political and constitutional crisis nearest in time to its composition, then, was that occasioned by the rise of Richard, the third Duke of York, whose protectorate of 1454–1455 ended with the first battle of St Albans between the duke’s forces and those of Margaret of Anjou. After the Yorkist victory, as A. R. Myers writes, ‘The government ceased to exercise authority in the country and,

1 2

3

The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur, pp. 47–71. A good working definition of constitution is Chrimes’s: ‘The present writer understands a constitution to be that body of governmental rights and duties which exist in a state at any given time in virtue of their recognition or implication by law, custom, convention, practice, or opinion.’ Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xix. Works, pp. lvii–lxiv. Against Vinaver’s hypothesis, see Edward D. Kennedy, ‘Malory’s English Sources’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 28–39.

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by 1459 both parties were ready for civil war.’4 York audaciously claimed the throne from Henry VI in October 1460 only to be killed at the Battle of Wakefield two months later, leaving his son Edward king. At Caxton’s end of the continuum the reign of Edward IV has come and gone. The printer’s much-altered version of Malory’s Roman War appeared in July of 1485, two years into the reign of Richard III and less than a month before that king’s death at Bosworth Field. The most famous alteration – to which we will give more space below – is the changing of the bear who fights a dragon in Arthur’s prophetic dream to a boar, Richard’s sign. The Caxtonian Morte in its time thus took on an immediate social relevance in which Malory himself had no authorial stake. Nevertheless, Malory had produced the book which was important enough to be chosen by Caxton as the vehicle for his own political prophecy. The double history of the Morte’s text enriches the question of Malory’s historiographical capability. But it is not a capability which answers to a single description. As this chapter will argue, the ways in which Malory’s Arthurian romance corresponds to the history of its period are several: they can be found in the Morte’s textual life, its allusive capability, and in its treatment of the traditional narratives which were gaining an ever widening readership. I began this chapter by quoting Foucault’s interpretive reflections upon the passage – from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals – with which I ended Chapter 2, since there must be an elaboration here of things observed there: if Caxton’s preface recognizes that historical materials are used, then in reading the Roman War we recognize the necessity of asking, ‘used how, by whom, and for what purpose?’ Foucault gives us ‘L’histoire “effective” ’ for Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie, and in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ helps us to understand the importance and difficulty of Nietzsche’s concept. The principle of ‘effective history’ is, first of all, opposed to the forms of historiography which the Middle Ages have given us. One may even say that ‘effective history’ is at all times opposed to historiography itself, since it is history utterly de-thematized, requiring a constant reorientation (or de-orientation) of the ‘event’. We know this effect already, of course, having glimpsed just this orientation in the paratactic structure of ‘Balyn’, of which Jill Mann wrote: ‘it is difficult to decide either at this point or later the relative importance of the items in this miscellaneous series of consequences’. Mann might also be describing the various arguments found in Caxton’s preface, or indeed the relic inventory itself: it is the problem of parataxis. This effect, as witnessed by Mann’s properly indecisive regard of the paratactic series, is a disruption inherent in Malory’s prose, and one which Malory’s prose imparts to its subject. His Roman War, we shall observe, springs from a recognition of the irregular logic of usurpation. No longer are the great battles, nor even the question of empire, the featured sites of disruption and change, but rather the legitimacy of claims, and the warped, or rather the always-warping, constitution in relation to which a given seizure of power may be considered legitimate. Despite their many differences, the

4

England in the Late Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 127–8.

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Winchester manuscript and Caxton’s incunable respond to late medieval English history with a common desire for constitutional redress.

Fifteenth-Century Froissart: Textual History and Local Correspondence It might appear that such local, and such timely, commentary as William Caxton’s bear/boar switch (especially in a lengthy prose work as opposed to a lyric or an advertisement) is a specific capability of printed matter – matter which can be produced and distributed rapidly enough that current-event items may be usefully included. Certainly Caxton’s Morte had this capability where the Winchester manuscript did not, the variables being both effective distribution and the means to publish the statement while it was still more or less relevant. In a recent study, however, Laurence Harf-Lancner has demonstrated a similar responsiveness in the fifteenth-century manuscript life of Froissart’s Chroniques. Sometime in 1381, Louis I, Duke of Anjou, confiscated fifty-six quires of a text of the Chroniques then being prepared as a gift to Richard II. At issue was the book’s frontispiece, a curious four-part illustration in whose panels, 1. Froissart offers a book to the King of England, who can be identified as Richard II. 2. Isabelle, Queen of England, who with her son has fled her husband Edward II, is welcomed in France by her brother Charles IV in 1325. 3. Isabelle and the future Edward III disembark in England at Saint Edmond’s Abbey, at the head of an expedition. 4. They lay siege to Bristol.5 It is the first of these images that presents a problem. While the second, third and fourth illustrations depict, in order, events which led to the enthronement of Richard’s grandfather Edward III, the first illustration refers to an event which – if the book in question is presumed to be the Chroniques itself – had not yet taken place and which, at all events, was prevented: that is, the presentation of this (confiscated) manuscript of the Chroniques to the King of England.6 In any case, what offended the duke in 1381 was the friendliness to England expressed in that frontispiece. The text of Book I of the Chroniques is large in its praise of Edward III, and by extension England, during the Crécy and Poitiers campaigns. This is not surprising since Froissart hailed from Hainault, whose ruling family befriended Isabella and helped in the overthrow of Edward II and the Despensers, at the same time giving their daughter Phillipa to the future Edward III in marriage; Phillipa later became Froissart’s patron. But while the political orientation of Froissart’s narrative was not considered subject to change

5

6

‘Image and Propaganda: The Illustration of Book I of Froissart’s Chroniques’, in Froissart across the Genres, ed. Donald Maddox and Sylvia Sturm-Maddox (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 221–50; 221. It is known that Froissart gave Richard another book in 1395: it was not the Chroniques but a collection of his love poems (see Chronicles, trans. Brereton, pp. 402–7).

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or seizure, the illustrations accompanying that narrative constituted a space where local power, local forms of domination, could be asserted, hence the suppression of this frontispiece by the duke. One should say, however, ‘the attempted suppression’, since, whether or not Richard II got his copy, similar illustrations turn up elsewhere. In fact, the illustration which was seized may have been the model for the iconographic content of a specific family of Froissart manuscripts dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, most issuing from the same Parisian atelier.7 Since Froissart’s own politics – especially in the matter of Book I – remain relatively inscrutable, individual copies of his book were able to be colored according to local necessity. As Harf-Lancner goes on to show, variations in copies of the Chroniques are to be found not only in frontispieces but in visual representations of battles and portraits of individuals. These instances of visual mouvance are so many, and so noticeable, because of the large-scale copying of Froissart’s book in the fifteenth century. It is possible, for instance, to compare early fifteenth-century iconographic traditions with late-century ones – a procedure which generally reveals very wide variation. One can also compare the copies prepared in different regions of France, in Burgundy and in England; these, too, bear signs of their political provenance. Few texts have had the opportunity to display such nuanced variations; this doesn’t mean, though, that other texts did not possess them.

Local Memory: Bear and Boar in Arthur’s Dream Thenne the dragon flewe awey al on an heyhte and came doune with suche a swough and smote the bore on the rydge whiche was x foote large fro the hede to the taylle and smote the bore all to powdre bothe flesshe and bonys that it flytteryd al abrode on the see (Le Morte Darthure, Caxton (1485))

If this dream and its interpretation offer the king an opportunity to meditate on the course he is taking, and thus for the story to meditate on its own future, it seemed in 1485 to offer Caxton an opportunity to take a direct part in the story, to be the ‘philozopher’ to Malory’s own dream-text. I refer to the switching, in Caxton’s version, of Winchester’s ‘beare’ to ‘bore’. P. J. C. Field’s account of the switch is very much to the point: In C, the bear is (six times) turned into a boar. The change must have been deliberate, and it created a bold political allusion: the boar was the badge of King Richard III and the dragon that of Henry Tudor. The allusion would only have made sense in or just before 1485, and it is difficult to see who could have been responsible for it but Caxton himself, who four years later was to use a comparable stratagem to pay a compliment to Henry Tudor’s wife, Elizabeth of York: he called the anonymous heroine of a romance he translated for Henry’s court ‘Eglantyne’, which symbolically meant the white rose of York and of England. In 1485, however, his motive seems less likely to have been devotion to Henry, then

7

‘Image and Propaganda’, p. 222.

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an exiled pretender to the throne, than hatred for King Richard, very possibly because one of Richard’s first acts after he seized power in 1483 had been to have [Anthony Woodville, ] Earl Rivers executed. Caxton put the finishing touches to his edition three weeks before Richard was defeated and killed by Henry at Bosworth. It is obvious enough why he did not mention his change to the Morte

Darthur in his preface.8 Malory, who died in 1471, could not have foreseen the need for such an adaptation, but his tale, and his book, was readily brought into service, still in 1485 a viable messenger of ‘bold political allusion’. As 1485 bore out the new symbolic dynamic of Arthur’s dream, the bear/boar switch went beyond allusion to become prophecy. As Susanne Wofford writes, Henry VII made much of his descent from the Welsh Owen Tudor, and at his coronation in 1485 had displayed a banner with the red dragon of Cadwallader on it. Giving the son born in 1486 the name of Arthur only seemed to extend the myth of the once and future king.9

Here, Malory’s book achieves, momentarily, the mercurial allusiveness of a fifteenth-century lyric. It was the lyric mode, after all, and not chronicle or romance, which could cultivate such immediate and volatile symbolology. It was by such means that a poet, in 1449, encoded his apparent desire for Richard, Duke of York’s return from Ireland; the duke’s sign was the falcon (the boore in this poem is Thomas Courtney (d. 1458), the Lancastrian Earl of Devon): The boore is farre in-to þe west, Þat shold vs helpe with shild and spere The ffawkoun fleyth and hath no rest Tille he witte where to bigge his nest.10

In like manner an anonymous prophecy poem of c. 1483 refers to the death of Edward IV (the bull): The yere of our lorde m cccc lxxx iij betuext the departyng of Aprell and not fer from may The bull shall departe & passe away11

And in 1484 the following couplet by Wyllyam Collyngbourne was nailed to the door of St Paul’s: The catte, the ratte, and Louell our dogge, Rulyth all Englande vnder a hogge.

8 9

‘Caxton’s Roman War’, The Malory Debate, p. 132. ‘The Enfolding Dragon: Arthur and the Moral Economy of The Faerie Queene’, in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, ed. J. K. Morrison and M. Greenfield (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 135–65; 154. 10 Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 203. 11 For this and the following extract, see V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1971), pp. 210–13, 386–90.

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In the event that Caxton had not read Collyngbourne’s lines first-hand, he would certainly have heard of them, since the couplet famously occasioned the public (and horrible) execution of its author. (Couplet and execution were also recorded that year in Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France.12) Though there is something essentially local about the insertion of ‘boar’ – almost graffiti-like in relation to the whole – it is a vital moment in reading the Morte Darthur as a fifteenth-century text. Not only are specific historical events inscribed on the face of Malory’s text, and Caxton’s book, but also the ‘boar’ tells us about the life of Malory’s text in its own time: the viability of the Morte’s symbolic register. Life to a medieval text was its being copied, which is always to say adapted. The changing of ‘bear’ into ‘boar’ in fact offers an example of mouvance in its most vibrant form: we know the text had currency because it was worth not only the printing of it, but the modifying. The Morte, then, at the time of its printing, already had a specific audience, and one that could be counted on to read through to the end, to find all the ‘bores’ and thus to reward the ad hoc re-allegorizing of Arthur’s shipboard dream. Yet even at this moment of seemingly straightforward allegory, a greater historical specificity may be glimpsed than that which classical allegory construes between ‘boar’ and Richard III, ‘dragon’ and Henry Tudor: the specificity, that is, of cultural reference which corresponds not to a ‘master code’ but reverberates within an altogether more fleeting dialectic. Accordingly, a historical understanding of the boar in question goes further than the connection in a knowing reader’s mind between a newly spun allusion and events on the political horizon. Caxton, knowing the fate of Collyngbourne, was risking his neck. While he must have been reasonably confident that his ‘knowing readers’ did not include Richard and his circle, advertising his antipathy for the king in his Morte preface was, as Field notes, contraindicated in the current climate. As Professor Field suggests, and as I would emphasize, the bear/boar change is read with greater historical accuracy as an ‘inflection’ than as a perfect allegory. Recognition of the boar is not only a recognition of Richard, but a recognition of other things as well: a culture-wide opinion of Richard, the failure of Richard to be in any way Arthurian or chivalric, the potential of romance to make political statements, the daring of the printer – these communal acts of recognition (and certainly others unrecoverable by us) were occasioned by Caxton’s superimposition of the boar on Malory’s text. After all, the bear/boar switch has perhaps more in common with the symbolic disturbance associated with the Froissart frontispiece than with political allegory: in neither case is the referent itself the effective object of the reading; in both cases, the text or manuscript produced bears the marks of local affiliation and of culturally specific practices in the realm of book-making. While allegory may be present, and while the evidence of contemporary lyrics demonstrates beyond doubt the currency of political allegories, we may discover still more about such textual moments if we consider how diffuse, how ideological, was their force. 12 Ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811), p. 672. The ‘Cat’ and the ‘Rat’ were Ratcliffe and Catesby.

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Right and Redress in Froissart’s Chroniques: An Exemplum By way of introducing my own reading of Malory’s Roman War and of its historical dimension, I will turn again to Froissart’s Chroniques, this time not to its textual history but to its historical narrative. This book was a major cultural force in the fifteenth-century understanding of history, and it is unsurprising that Froissart’s conception of chivalric right and redress is readily discerned in Malory’s second tale. I will start with the description, by a modern historian, of an event which predates Malory’s text by about 120 years. On the other hand, it is an event which Malory and Caxton would have found, textually and bibliographically, quite contemporary with themselves. That is, since it is an event described by Froissart, it truly belongs to the chronicle-audience of the fifteenth century; and since it is an event whose ethical content was to be reproduced in the usurpations and counter-usurpations of York and Lancaster, it was one which offered Caxton and Malory’s generation an analytical basis for its own commentary. My starting place is the description, by Jonathan Sumption, of Edward III’s negotiations with Philip VI over territorial rights in France: The surrender of the English was almost . . . complete when it came to the territorial dispute. Philip VI promised that he would pardon Edward for his dilatoriness in the matter of liege homage and would revoke the decree of confiscation made in the Parlement. He also promised to lift the sentence of banishment which had been imposed on the individuals concerned in the outrage at the bastide of Saint-Sardos. What Philip did not do was pardon Edward’s father for his conduct in that obscure affair. There was to be another joint judicial commission after the model of the process of Périgueux, which had so acrimoniously failed. The commissioners were to be ordered to effect a mutual restoration of territories seized by force of arms in Aquitaine since the war of Saint-Sardos. But that was as far as Philip would allow the clock to be turned back. The conquests made by the French in the war itself were studiously ignored.13

Those who took to heart Caxton’s 1474 exhortation, ‘rede Froissart’, had read about the problem of Aquitaine, both as it first arose between Edward III and Philip VI in 1329, and as it was ‘resolved’ in 1337. The main point of contention was the status of England’s territories in France – including Aquitaine, which the English had held in fief almost continuously since 1152 – following the deposition of Edward III’s father, who was deemed by the French to have forfeited these holdings by irresponsible policy and final defeat. When the young Edward III traveled to France in 1329 for the express purpose of paying homage to Philip VI for the English ducal territories, he and his advisors proceeded with the utmost shrewdness. In the words of Froissart:

13 Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 2 vols (London: Faber & Faber, 1990, 1999), vol. I:

Trial by Battle, p. 117.

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It is hardly necessary to say that King Philip received the young King of England with all honour and dignity, and so did all the kings, dukes and counts who were present there. All these great lords were assembled at Amiens, and there remained for a fortnight. Many discussions were held and arrangements proposed and I believe King Edward paid his homage with words and a kiss only, without putting his hands between the hands of the King of France, or of any other prince or prelate relegated by him. The King of England refused on that occasion, on the advice he was given, to proceed further with his homage without first returning to England to see and study the earlier charters which would throw light on the matter and show how and in what respect the King of England should declare himself the man of the King of France.14

It was this ‘dilatoriness’ which Philip would propose to forgive Edward in 1331, restoring lands in Aquitaine but nowhere else. Redress for land seizures by France during and after the war of Saint-Sardos was not forthcoming. It was only so far, as Sumption has it, that Philip was willing to turn back the clock. For his part, Edward was studying redress with reference to a different timeline. His ambivalence in 1329, and even his surrender of rights to territories other than Aquitaine, were in the service of gaining the time he needed to establish a claim to the French throne superior to Philip’s. It was not enough, in other words, to establish right, but he wanted also to wipe out even those claims of Philip’s which had not previously encroached upon his own. Accordingly, in 1338, Henry Burgersh, Bishop of Lincoln, arrived in Paris to serve King Philip a letter officially declaring war, which, according to Froissart, read as follows: Edward, by the grace of God King of England and Ireland, writes to Philip of Valois: Since it falls out that, in succession to our beloved uncle the Lord Charles [IV], King of France, we are heir to the realm and crown of France by a much closer degree of kinship than yourself, who have entered into possession of our heritage and are holding and desire to hold it by force, although we have several times pointed this out to you and have had it again pointed out by such worthy and eminent advisers as those of the Church and the Holy College of Rome, in agreement with the noble Emperor, head of all adjudications; to which matters and demands you have never been willing to listen, but have held and still hold to your unjustly held opinion. Wherefore we give you notice that we shall claim and conquer our heritage of France by the armed force of us and ours, and from this day forward we and ours challenge you and yours, and we rescind the pledge and homage which we gave you without good grounds; and we now

14 Chronicles, p. 55. In Sumption’s Hundred Years War, vol. I: ‘Edward III’s ministers wanted him

to do homage not only for the lands which he held in southern France but also for those which he ought to hold, by which was meant the ones which had been occupied by French troops since the war of Saint-Sardos. For their part, Philip’s spokesmen declared that homage would not be accepted on these terms. The occupied provinces had been “justly acquired by right of war”. The conflict was resolved by an untidy compromise, tolerated only because there was not time to devise anything better. Edward did homage according to the French formula making no reference to the lost provinces. But his spokesman, the Bishop of Lincoln, was allowed to make a short speech of protest, reserving all his master’s rights and handing over a document setting out the homage which the English government thought ought to have been done. Moreover, Edward’s homage was not unqualified. He refused to join his hands between Philip’s, the ceremonial distinction which marked out ‘liege’ homage from simple homage: Edward was recognizing Philip as his landlord and not as his sovereign’ (p. 110).

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place our domain of Ponthieu, together with our other heritage, under the protection of God, not under yours, since we consider you as our enemy and adversary.15

Edward’s declaration of war is a declaration of intention to redress a violation of his right. It serves him therefore to turn the clock back to the moment that right was violated: the moment of Philip’s own accession. Not only didn’t Edward owe homage to the French crown, but that crown itself was being usurped from him. Despite the boldness of Edward’s power-play, legalities are nicely observed. In order to properly overthrow Philip, Philip must be considered, in theory, already deposed. Thus Edward addresses Philip by his family name only and not by royal title. By asserting a genealogical claim apparently stronger than Philip’s, Edward’s message places history on the side of the English claimant. The authority of the Church and also that of Emperor Louis of Bavaria are invoked (even though the former counted the latter an excommunicated heretic; Louis, at any rate, was brought into the English war effort by an offer of 300,000 gold florins16). Finally, and most importantly, Edward revokes his sworn fealty to Philip, in relation to whom Edward is no longer the Duke of Aquitaine but sovereign lord. Froissart’s account of Philip’s response is memorable. After the letter is read, the king says to the messenger: “Bishop, you have discharged your mission admirably. The letter does not require an answer. You are at liberty to leave when you wish.” “Sire,” replied this Bishop, “I thank you.” He took his leave and went back to his lodging, where he remained all day. In the evening the King sent a safe-conduct for him and his followers, with which he travelled back across France unmolested.17

It reads very much like literature: a young king who has just vanquished his mother and her lover (Isabella, Roger Mortimer) now turns to conquest, pitting himself against the grim stoicism of his cousin, the more seasoned monarch – against a possible older version of himself. The relationship between the two kings – which in Froissart is both political and personal – is particularly well suited to the dramatization of the conflict between legal prerogative and right, at the same time as there is a tacit conflict – or blurring of the line – between right and right-of-conquest. In Froissart, Philip’s quiet response to Burgersh registers the enormity of Edward’s presumption, if not the foreknowledge of his success, as in more pro-English accounts of this exchange, such as John Hardyng’s.18 Another example of this effect may be found in John Hardyng’s Chronicle itself (c. 1457, revised c. 1460), which reports a fraudulent attempt to set back the clock. If relations between Edward III and Philip VI were fresh in the minds of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chroniclers and their readers, it is the rise and vicissitudes of the house of Lancaster that Malory’s generation knew first-hand. In a prose addition, inserted into his c. 1460 account of Henry IV’s

15 16 17 18

Chronicles, pp. 59–60. Sumption, pp. 198, 217–18. Chronicles, p. 60. Hardyng’s Chronicle, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), p. 326.

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rise, Hardyng tells of the attempt by John of Gaunt to elevate his son’s claim to succeed Richard II (over that of the Percys’ candidate, and heir-presumptive, Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March). The idea was to reverse the seniority of Henry III’s male heirs. Hardyng wishes here to undeceive anyone holding the opinion that Edward III’s brother Edmonde erle of Lancastre and Derby wase the elder sonne of Kynge Henry the thride, croukebacked, vnable to haue been kynge, for the whiche Edward his yonger brother wase made kynge be his assente, as some men haue alleged, be an vntrewe cronycle feyned in the tyme of kynge Richarde the seconde be Iohn of Gaunte duke of Lancastre to make Henry his sonne kynge, whan he sawe he myghte not be chose for heyre apparaunt to kynge Richarde. . . . Whiche Cronycle, so forged, the duke dide put in divers abbaies and in freres, as I herde the seid erle [of Northumberland] ofte tymes saie and record to divers persouns, forto be kepte for the enheritaunce of his sonne to the croun . . .19

Edmund’s epithet ‘crouchback,’ or cross-back, refers to the crusading emblem which he wore on his back, and not – as everyone well knew – to a physical deformity. The forged chronicles were instantly recognized as such by the council to whom they were submitted. To form a proper idea of Hardyng’s involvement, we must remember that Hardyng himself was a retainer of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and that his loyalty to his employer colors his entire chronicle, especially in his account of Northumberland’s rivalry with the Derbys; in the latter context he was not above floating quite a lot of partisan hearsay. It should also be remembered that the prose account of this Lancastrian forgery was inserted into the version of his Chronicle written for Richard, Duke of York, and eventually presented to Edward IV. Hardyng could not go wrong, c. 1460, by exposing Lancastrian foibles. If Hardyng was neither objective nor consistent, these deficiencies are unremarkable in a fifteenth-century historiograph. His interest for us is in his awareness of shadowy Lancastrian strategies, and his chronicle forms an index of the information available to a person like him. It is also a record of uses to which a chronicler may put his writing. For example, the cat was long out of the bag as to John of Gaunt’s hoax; it had not fooled anyone in the first place, apparently. But by offering up his gossip-hoard to the new Yorkist king, Hardyng was demonstrating his new loyalty and also the powers of revelation which were at his command. Accordingly, the second edition of his chronicle contains an exhaustive genealogy of the Yorkist line, including assurances of Edward IV’s legitimacy and of his right to the kingdom of France. More generally, Hardyng’s book is a textual cousin of Malory’s since the history of its composition has much in common with that of the Morte. Hardyng was a ‘gentry soldier and courtier’ whose Chronicle, as Radulescu writes, drew mostly on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanie and the prose Brut; his narrative was, however, several stages removed from his sources, as he

19 Hardyng’s Chronicle, pp. 353–4. On this passage see also Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne,

pp. 3–6.

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worked all the different sources into one coherent story. In this respect Hardyng had the same task as Malory, as both authors had to fashion a coherent story out of various and sometimes divergent stories.20

While the Morte’s lack of direct affiliation freed it from any such gestures as the inclusion of fresh genealogies, the problem of right in the Roman War is again one of just how far back one is inclined – or is able – to set the clock. It would seem that the decision is completely arbitrary – or is, at least, the prerogative of the more powerful party, perhaps by definition – and that redress itself is something continually sought, but never effected, in an eternal dialectic between historical contingencies; it is always and forever ad hoc. Without a solid constitution – and Foucault would say, perhaps rightly, even with one – history, like law, was practically indistinguishable from the use to which it is put. Adam of Usk’s chronicle, for example, tells us the procedure by which jurists in 1399 validated both Richard II’s abdication and Henry Derby’s claim to the throne: by recourse to chronicles – that is, certain chronicles, and certain parts of those.21 Recall as well the ad hoc nature of Edward III’s advancement of his claim to France: its legitimacy, too, had to be conjured from ‘earlier charters’.22

Arthur’s War Council: Chronicle and Re-legitimization Just as Arthur’s court is settling into the new tranquility of an utterly pacified England, it is suddenly proposed by an embassy from Rome that Arthur holds his kingdom in fief from the Emperor and owes Emperor Lucius not only monetary tribute, but also his vassalage. Arthur calls his war council immediately and rehearses his claim to the throne: That truage to Roome woll I never pay. Therefore counceyle me, my knyghtes, for Crystes love of Hevyn. For this muche have I founde in the cronycles of this londe, that sir Belyne and sir Bryne, of my bloode elders that borne were in Bretayne, and they hath ocupyed the empyreship eyght score wyntyrs; and aftir Constantyne, our kynnesman, conquerd hit, and dame Elyneys son, of Ingelonde, was Emperour of Roome; and he recoverde the Crosse that Cryste dyed uppon. And thus was the Empyre kepte be my kynde elders, and thus have we evydence inowghe to the empyre of holé Rome.23

The purpose of this meeting is not to decide whether to withhold tribute, but how to confer legality on non-payment.24 Accordingly, the king offers to his war council by way of ‘evydence’ a brief genealogy which links him to the brothers Brennius and Belinus as well as Constantine and Helena – connections which 20 The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 60. 21 The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,

1997), pp. 62–7.

22 Chronicles, p. 55. 23 Works, p. 188.3–14. 24 For an illuminating discussion of counsel in Malory, see Cory Rushton, ‘Talk is Cheap:

Political Discourse in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Disputatio 5 (2002), pp. 67–85.

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Malory’s readers must consider carefully, I think. The stories of Constantine and Helena, his conversion and her inventio crucis, are well-known; and, though we may be surprised to find that these personages were ‘of Ingelonde’,25 we are accustomed to their foundational synthesis of Christianity, militarism and the cult of holy relics. Since Constantine and Helen are so rich in associations, the present discussion will foreground the other family relations who, while more obscure to us, set a clear precedent for Arthur. The pre-Christian (and unhistorical) kings Brennius and Belinus are regularly associated with Arthur in the histories from Geoffrey on. In Geoffrey, as in his followers, these ancestors are invoked by Arthur in response to Lucius’s challenge to his right. In Geoffrey’s war-council scene, Arthur invokes them thus: If the Roman decrees that tribute ought to be paid him by Britain simply because Julius Caesar and other Roman leaders conquered this country years ago, then I decree in the same way that Rome ought to give me tribute, in that my ancestors once captured that city. Belinus, that most glorious of the Kings of the Britons, with the help of his brother Brennius, the Duke of Allobroges, hanged twenty of the noblest Romans in the middle of their own forum, captured the city and, when they had occupied it, held it for a long time.26

Such also, with minor variations, is Arthur’s account of Belinus and Brennius in Geoffrey’s followers. La
amon’s Arthur says that Beline and Brennen ‘biuoren Rome þere stronge heore hisles anhenge’ (‘before mighty Rome itself [they] hanged their hostages’, line 12504).27 The corresponding speech in the alliterative Morte Arthure runs: He askyde me tyrauntly tribute of Rome, Than tenefully tynt was in tym of myn elders, There alyenes, in absence of all men of armes, Couerd it of commons, as cronicles telles. I have title to take tribute of Rome; Myne ancestres ware emperours and aughte it þem seluen, Belyn and Brene and Bawdewyne the Thyrde; They ocupyed þe Empire aughte score wynnttyrs, Ilkane ayere aftyre oþer, as awld men telles; Thei couerde þe capitoile and keste doun þe walles, Hyngede of þeir heddys-men by hundrethes at ones.28 (lines 271–81)

25 ‘According to Geoffrey (Book V, chapter 6) Constantine was the son of a Roman Senator and a

British Princess, and he succeeded to the kingship of Britain. Then he overthrew the Emperor Maxentius and became Emperor. According to legend, his mother, Helen, discovered the True Cross. Arthur claims kinship with Constantine because of his supposed British mother. Constantine actually did proclaim himself Caesar while at York, but he was never king of Britain and not of British descent.’ King Arthur’s Death, ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), p. 265, n. 282. 26 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 233. 27 La
amon’s Arthur, ed. W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 164, 165. 28 The Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Valerie Krishna (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1976), p. 48.

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Obscure as they are now, Belinus and Brennius still had currency in the fifteenth-century historia. The warring brothers’ history is given quite full treatment in Higden’s Polychronicon which, in Trevisa’s translation as printed by Caxton (1482), reads: In [Darius’] tyme Belinus Molimicius his sone, regnede in Bretaigne, and held to hym half Loegria, myddel Engelond, Wales, and Cornewayle, and took þe oþer land by
onde Homber and Scotlond to his broþer Brenicius; and þey tweyne acorded in þe kyngdom fyve
ere wel I-now; but afterward Brenicius was rebel to Belinus, and was overcome of Belinus and fli
to þe duke Allobrog, þat is þe duke of Litel Britayne, and wedded his dou
ter, and [had] þe lordschepe after þe dukes deþ. After þat he hadde þe duchee oon here he come into Engelond wiþ Frensche men and Britouns of Litel Bretayne to werre a
enst his broþer; but hir moder, þat was ful oold, spradde hir heer abrood and schewed hir brestes þat eiþer of hem hadde i-soke, and so sche made pees. Þan after a
ere þese breþren made France to suget, and overcome þe Germayns, and byseged Rome at þe laste.29

The pair are also found in the Middle English prose Brut, or Chronicles of England, which Caxton printed in 1480 and again in 1482. While they are not mentioned by Arthur in his war-council speech, they take their proper place early in the chronicle, inheriting unequal portions of Britain, warring against each other, being reconciled by their mother, then turning their energies on conquering France, where they ‘brent tounes, and destroyede al þe lande boþe in lengþ and in Brede’.30 They go on to conquer Rome along with Lumbardy and Germany (but, as in the Polychronicon, without lynchings). Belinus is twice mentioned in Adam Usk’s Chronicle, once in passing, but elsewhere more dramatically. In Usk’s farewell to Richard II, the king is guardedly eulogized thus: Nunc, Ricarde, uale, ymmo rex, si fas est dicere, ualentissime, cum post mortem laudare licitum sit cuique, si cum Deo et populi tui releuamine actes tua disposuisses, merito laudande. Sed, quamuis cum Salamone dapsilis, cum Absalone pulcher, cum Assuero gloriosus, cum Belino magno precellens edificator existens, ad modum Cosdre regis Persarum in manus Eraclii, sic in medio glorie tue, rota labente fortune, in manus ducis Henrici miserrime, cum interna populi tui maledictione, cecidisti. So now, Richard, farewell! – most mighty king indeed, if I may make so bold – for it is only right to praise the dead; had you been guided in your affairs by God and by the support of your people, then you would indeed have been deserving of praise. Yet, although you were as liberal as Solomon, as fair as Absolom, as grand as Ahasuerus, and as outstanding a builder as the great Belinus, nevertheless, just as Chosroes king of the Persians fell into the hands of the great Heraclius, so too were you, at the height of your glory, cast down by the wheel of fortune, to fall miserably into the hands of Duke Henry, amid the silent curses of your people.31 29 Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. Rev. Joseph Lawson Lumby, 9 vols

(London: Longman & Company, 1865–66), vol. III, pp. 264–7.

30 Brut, or The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS, o.s. 131, 136 (London: Oxford

University Press: 1906, 1908; reprinted as 1 vol. in 2000), p. 26.

31 The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson, pp. 90–1.

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It is with a characteristic spirit of rhetorical accommodation that Usk somewhat blandly memorializes the fact that, according to the Historia Regum Britanniae, Belinus built roads,32 and so calls him (and Richard) precellens edificator. This is perfectly in line with the tone of the entire passage, whose treatment of Henry is equally ambivalent. The subordinate clause in Usk’s last sentence on the subject, ‘cum interna populi tui maledictione’, seems to suggest that the murmurings could be against either king. Here, it seems, Belinus is invoked at a moment of de-legitimization, when Usk apparently wishes to cast a cloud on Richard’s right, but also to involve the Lancastrian claim in the same cloudiness. The chronicler has another occasion to express his disenchantment when, at the close of his book, he casts a pall over Henry V’s war in France – a war for which Usk himself, insofar as he helped to create the conditions of Richard II’s deposition and Henry IV’s enthronement, can feel partially responsible.33 Hardyng’s Chronicle, a text, as we have seen, strenuously engaged in legitimizing royal claims (first Lancastrian and then Yorkist), relates the Roman conquest in Chapter 32: Thei sieged Rome, wherfore their councellours, Galbo and Porcenna, came it to rescue, With hostes greate, wher then these emperours Slewe syr Galbo and Porcenna the trewe, And Rome thei wanne, that alway was vntrewe. Italye throughout obeyed theyr dominacion, Without more stryfe or altercacion. Kynge Belyne there no lenger would abyde, But lefte Brenny alone with all that lande, And home he came with mykill ioye and pride, And Albyon he seased in his owne hand, And so kyng and lorde of all Brytayn lande. A citee fayre he made, that Kaire Vske hight, Which men nowe callen Carlyon by name ful right.34

When, in Hardyng’s Chapter 80, Arthur recounts his genealogical claim, ‘Belyn and Brenny’ (who ‘sleugh themperour by their great maistrie’) are buttressed not only by Constantine and Helena (which ancestry Hardyng clearly considers Arthur’s real trump), but also by Brutus on the one side and Maximian on the other.35 It is worth noting also that one of Hardyng’s own sources was Edward I’s 1301 letter asserting to Pope Boniface VIII the English king’s right to Scotland. His argument relies not only on Arthur’s conquering there, but on the ‘filii Dunwallonis scilicet Belinus et Brennius’ (‘The sons of Dunwallo, namely

32 Historia Regum Britannie I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D. S.

Brewer, 1984), pp. 26, 30.

33 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 11–13, 19–23.

34 Hardyng’s Chronicle, p. 63. 35 Ibid., p. 141. Essential reading on Hardying is in Moll, Before Malory, ch. 6: ‘Making History:

John Hardyng’s Metrical Chronicle’.

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Belinus and Brennius’) who inherited Scotland from their father.36 (The Pope remained unconvinced.) Though many of Hardyng’s documentary sources were forgeries, this one can be verified. In another fifteenth-century book, Arthur’s warlike ancestors have a different set of associations. Caxton’s epilogue to Lull’s Ordre of Chyvalry (1484) invokes the warring brothers as ancient – if not originary – exemplars of chivalry itself: . . . the noble actes of the knyghtes of Englond that vsed chyualry were renomed thurgh the vnyuersal world / as for to speke to fore thyncarnacion of Jhesu Cryste / where were there euer ony lyke to brenius and belynus that from the grete Brytayne now called Englond vnto Rome & ferre beyonde conquered many Royammes and londes / whos noble actes remayne in thold hystoryes of the Romayns / And sith the Incarnacion of our lord / byhold that noble kyng of Brytayne kyng Arthur with al the noble knyhtes of the round table / whos noble actes & noble chyualry || of his knyghtes / occupye soo many large volumes / that is a world / or as thyng incredyble to byleue /37

Caxton here does something quite interesting to the concept of chivalry, making it continuous with conquering, even though Lull does not make a virtue of, or even treat, foreign invasions in his book.38 Nor is this the end of Caxton’s continuum of chivalrous leaders, for he continues: O ye knightes of Englond where is the custome and vsage of noble chyualry that was vsed in tho dayes / what do ye now / but go to the baynes & playe atte dyse And some not wel aduysed vse not honest and good rule ageyn alle ordre of knyghthode / leue this / leve it and rede the noble volumes of saynt graal, of lancelot / of galaad / of Trystram / of perse forest / of percyual / of Gawayn / & many mo / Ther shalle ye see manhode / curtoyse & gentylnesse / And loke in latter dayes of the noble actes syth the conquest / as in King Rychard dayes cuer du lyon / Edward the fyrste and / the thyrd and his noble sones / Syre Robert Knolles / syr Johan hawkwode / Syr Johan chaundos / & and Syre gaultier Mauny rede froissart / And also behold that vyctoryous and noble kynge harry the fyfthe / and the capytayns vnder hym his noble brethren / Therle of Salysbury Montagu / and many other whoos names shyne gloryously by their vertuous noblesse & actes that they did in thonour of || thordre of chivalry . . .39

To great effect, Caxton contrasts the magnificently public activity of bygone defenders of the realm with the obscure and disreputable practices of contemporary knights, who apparently do nothing but gamble and bathe. Caxton brings Belinus and Brennius into continuity with the likes of Arthur, and then with

36 Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. and trans. E. L. G. Stones

(London: Nelson & Sons, 1965), p. 98.

37 Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 82–3. 38 Later, Lull expressed different views on chivalry, castigating all knights for their violence, to

which he could no longer impute any Christian virtue. Lull became opposed to the militarism of the crusades and sought to convert Muslims by learning their language and preaching among them; he was apparently executed by some of his intended converts. 39 Prologues and Epilogues, pp. 82–3. See also The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry translated and printed by William Caxton, ed. A. T. P. Byles, EETS, o.s. 168 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp.122–3.

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Edward III and Henry V, at the same time fashioning the recent kings of England (with the unsurprising exception of Edward II) as contemporary Belinuses, Brenniuses and Arthurs. As Jennifer Goodman observes, ‘Caxton’s list of historical figures brings him from the legendary past to a point very close to the date of his own birth (between 1424 and 1425)’.40 Caxton wishes to make chivalric history continuous with the present, to make old legends prescriptive of contemporary practice. His is also a job of reestablishing the legitimacy, even the naturalness, of chivalry as a politically viable model, and re-staking England’s claim to being the repository of this naturally occurring form of rightness. So Caxton – following the prose Brut rather than the alliterative version – disassociates Belinus and Brennius from barbarism by styling their sacking of Rome as continuous with chivalry. Malory does a similar thing by having Arthur recognize the nobility of the Roman ambassadors (which his sources also do) and also eliding his ancient ancestors’ tendency to lynch Roman senators (which his sources do not). Caxton’s vigorous, if selective, deployment of chivalric exemplarity here stands in some contrast to his posture of skepticism in the preface to the Morte, published the following year, but in either case – and in all the post-Geoffrey accounts we have mentioned – textual authority, the veracity of the old chronicles, is adduced to make the texts at hand, and the behaviors these texts promote, sine mendacio. These refinements of attribution elide (and thus indicate to us) what was undesirable (or at least not immediately useful) in the old chronicles – such as public executions, perhaps, on which citizens of London might well have surfeited by 1485. At the same time they emphasize what was desirable and useful: a cultural continuum which, with exempla from its earliest history, could determine and legitimize present undertakings. While it would seem impossible to conceive of a single, governing concept of chivalry which applied equally to Belinus and Arthur (who are, at any rate, fictional) and to Edward III and Henry V, there is here some faith that, like relics, chivalric exempla have an accumulative value. Of course, Caxton does not aim for semantic unity, nor does he encourage his reader to comb through ancient chronicles for stories about Belinus and Brennius. Rather he says ‘rede froissart’, in whose chronicle it is easy to find passages in which that author praises the English for their nobility and for the quality of their chivalry. The goal of Caxton’s Lull epilogue (and harangue) is to conjure historical truth by acts of selective historicizing, of, in other words, ‘setting back the clock’. At stake is a re-legitimizing of courtly culture, a social project mirrored by the Roman War itself; the method (one, generally, of obscuring real relations) is also mirrored in the Morte Darthur itself as it seeks, in its Roman War, alternate, more politically legible, origins.

40 Malory and Caxton’s Prose Romances of 1484 (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 60. Why Caxton

should have brought this list only up to the time of his birth, instead of – as with Polychronicon and Brut – up to the present moment, is unclear; in this book presented to Richard III, however, the resulting absences of Henry VI, Edward IV and Edward V may have been convenient.

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Taking the Exemplum: Arthur Answers the Ambassadors By placing the Roman War so early in the book, Malory supplies a distinct shock to the sheltered, insular fictionality of Arthur’s Britain. That world, the romance-world, is now rudely awakened from its dream of unreflective aristocratic right. What Malory’s reader must try to discover, on the one hand, is the history of this dream and, on the other, the nature of the boundary it draws between dream and history. Following the visit of the Roman ambassadors, the Roman War episode suggests the violence which is always present in a nation’s founding moment, and exposes the arbitrary, accidental nature of power. Merlin’s magic and prophecy, from this perspective, already seem to belong to that fiction from which one must return in order to participate in history. As was the case at this moment in the Morte’s composition, one puts down the romance source and takes up the chronicle source. But as Richard Moll observes, these sources do not remain discrete. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Awntyrs off Arthure interweave fictive adventures with the narrative of the ‘Brutus bokez’ in order to utilize the interpretive conventions of British history within an individual romance. The lines of influence, however, work in both directions, and both Sir Gawain and The Awntyrs encourage the reader to re-evaluate Arthurian history in light of Arthurian fiction.41

Malory’s juxtaposition of the magical narratives of the Vulgate Merlin and the historiographical Roman War may in fact be compared to the trajectory of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, since there, unable to renounce this or that contradictory element in his character, Gawain ceases to be identical with his romance-self; he must make decisions and take his losses. In Sir Gawain there is no return to the innocence of Arthur’s feast, which is to a certain degree corrupted by Gawain’s experience. Similarly Malory’s Roman War – like no other version of that narrative – tacitly proclaims the already-narrated rise of Arthur (that taken from the Vulgate) to be insufficient. Even within the overall fiction of the Morte Darthur, Arthur’s rise according to the Merlin is an illusion. Accordingly, Arthur here has no memory of drawing a sword from an anvil, nor could anything of that nature be adduced to justify an invasion. Here, Arthur operates in the way Edward III did in 1329 and 1337–38; the way Henry V did in 1415 – that is, with a highly developed consciousness of feudal custom, and with an equally keen sense, within that custom, of his own potential right. Malory’s Roman War seems to mark the entrance of realpolitik into Arthur’s court. Up to this point, Arthur’s rise to power has been governed by the ancient prophecies and the counsel and machinations of Merlin. Even after Arthur is accepted as king, Merlin directs his military consolidation of Britain, instructs him in diplomacy and dictates policy generally. At the same time as they are

41 Before Malory, p. 218.

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utterly expedient, Merlin’s activities obscure historical relations. In devising the sword-in-the-stone display, Merlin ends a period of dangerous anarchy by unveiling something carefully prepared in advance, that is, when he causes it to be the case that ‘Whoso pulleth oute this swerd of this stone and anvyld is rightwys kynge borne of all Englond.’ Merlin thus elides the ordinary political process. He does so again when he withholds from everyone, including Arthur, the identity of Arthur’s father, and then his mother. It is reasonable of Merlin to wait until after Arthur draws the magic sword before disclosing his patrimony: at the moment of proof young Arthur would have no political affiliations, and thus would have inherited none of his father’s enemies. His lineage can then be produced to satisfy the ruling class. (It is less clear why Merlin waited to tell Arthur who his mother was, since that information might have prevented Arthur’s simultaneous adultery and incest with Morgawse (Lot’s wife), and thus prevented the begetting of Mordred. Instead, Merlin waits until that sin is accomplished before – disguised, strangely, as an old man, which Merlin is anyway – accosting Arthur with the news: ‘. . . you have done a thynge late that God ys displesed with you, for ye have lyene by youre syster and on hir ye have gotyn a childe that shall destroy you and all the knyghtes of youre realme.’42) This kind of mystification – familiar both to Sophoclean tragedy and to medieval fortuna – is characteristic of the Vulgate books. Though rather understated in Malory’s translation, this prophetic logic does tie the beginning of the Morte Darthur to its conclusion, and even accommodates the tales of Sir Gareth and Sir Tristram (by thematic analogy to Perceval and Lancelot, respectively). What it cannot account for is the political shrewdness of Malory’s Roman War. Accordingly, this second tale in the Morte supplies its own, alternate origins, and it is the presence of alternate origins that makes this Roman War so problematic. The tale is a troubling re-visitation of what for Arthur was supposed to be a settled issue: his right to the throne. When Malory’s Arthur invokes Belinus and Brennius, their public executions of Roman senators, which in his sources had greatly increased in number (from Geoffrey’s viginti to the hundrethes of the alliterative Morte Arthure), are omitted. Perhaps this is because such details would add nothing to the specific body of evidence which the king wishes to adduce, and indeed might detract from it insofar as their violence might speak against the legitimacy of Arthur’s inheritance. Only the word ‘ocupyed’43 is retained by Malory in recognition of the fact neither brother was ‘rightwys kynge borne’ to the imperial throne. To be of any use in Arthur’s speech, Belinus and Brennius must be warlike, but they must also be agreeable to Arthur’s present task, that is, the claiming of a birthright and of a corresponding right of redress. Malory’s account of Arthur would hardly have been serviceable to his particular audience if that account had not told of foreign campaigns and righteous conquest. How far those two quantities are able to coexist is another question for Malory to answer. There are numerous passages in the Roman War which seem 42 Works, p. 44.16–19. 43 Ibid., p. 188.8.

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to address such a question. We have suggested that the war council answers the expectation of legality in a king’s behavior. Arthur’s decision is not only legal, but supported by a ‘parliamentary’ gathering of his knights. It is less vital in the present context that the council resemble an actual parliament, than that it show Arthur to be, as both Henry VI and Edward IV were, unable to proceed without the help of powerful subjects. Only when everyone has spoken, and pledged all the ‘helmys and haubirkes’ at their command, does Arthur express the collective will of the nation, which he does with characteristic litotes: ‘Now I thanke you,’ seyde the kynge, ‘with all my trew herte. I suppose by the ende be done and dalte the Romaynes had bene bettir to have leffte their proude message’.44

That understatement is particularly well-placed since it immediately precedes the fullness of Arthur’s answer to the senators. That answer, in fact, is a marvel of rhetoric – Yeatsian in the power of its images, and delivered with a calculated unhurriedness which sets in terrifying relief the huge destruction which it promises. Malory continues: So whan the sevennyghte was atte an end the Senatours besought the kynge to have an answere. ‘Hit is well,’ seyde the kynge. ‘Now sey ye to youre Emperour that I shall in all haste me redy make with my keene knyghtes, and by the rever of Rome holde my Rounde Table. And I woll brynge with me the beste peple of fyftene realmys, and with hem ryde on the mountaynes in the maynelondis, and myne doune the wallys of Myllayne the proude, and syth ryde unto Roome with my royallyst knyghtes. Now ye have youre answere, hygh you that ye were hense, and frome this place to the porte there ye shall passe over; and I shall gyff you seven dayes to passe unto Sandwyche. ‘Now spede you, I conceyle you, and spare nat youre horsis, and loke ye go by Watlynge strete and no way ellys, and where nyght fallys on you, loke ye there abyde, be hit felle other towne, I take no kepe; for hit longyth nat to none alyauntis for to ryde on nyghtes. And may one be founde a spere-lengthe oute of the way and that ye be in the watir by the sevennyghtes ende, there shall be no golde undir God pay for youre raunsom.’45

The first gesture of defiance in this answer would not have been missed by the senators, that is, Arthur’s ‘youre Emperour’.46 This has the same effect as when Edward III, according to Froissart, called Philip VI ‘Philip of Valois’, and when Henry called Richard II ‘Richard of Bordeaux’. At this point in his speech, Arthur’s answer to Lucius has already been communicated – the rest is poetry. With the same paratactic juxtaposition that characterizes the speech itself (which contains thirteen ‘ands’), Arthur yokes the Tiber and his table; he will then conquer high (ride on the mountains) and low (mine down the walls of Milan). 44 Ibid., p. 190.10–12. 45 Ibid., pp. 190–1. 46 Malory would not have omitted to bring this over from his alliterative source, which has:

‘Gret wele Lucius, thi lorde, and layne noghte þise wordes’ (ed. Krishna, line 419; my emphasis).

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As in the Belinus and Brennius section of the Brut, where the brothers conquer boþe in lengþ and in Brede, Malory’s campaign requires geography itself to be conquered: a declaration in images, if not specific language, of Arthur’s imperial capabilities. Arthur then brings his listeners shortly back to the present time by suddenly voicing concern for their speedy passage out of England. Safe conduct is a conventional feature of such exchanges, a standard feature of chronicle accounts (cf. Philip’s granting of safe conduct to the Bishop of Lincoln, whose own message also placed him, de facto, in enemy territory). The very ground they walk on is hostile to the messengers. Their journey will render them susceptible to countryside dangers from which the king himself cannot protect them, and which he does not specify – but, tellingly, the margin of grace along the road to Sandwich is a ‘spere-lengthe’. This passage – echoing, as it does, exchanges found in the chronicles – serves to demonstrate Arthur’s fluency in matters of protocol. The safe conduct offered is not of the most reassuring kind, and Arthur’s bullying the messengers is clearly part of his answer to Lucius.47 And it is a rhetorical feature which the messengers do not fail to transmit to their lord: . . . that we have ascaped on lyve we may thonke God ever; for we wolde nat passe ayen to do that message for all your brode londis. And, therefore sirres, truste to our sawys, ye shall find hym your uttir enemye; and seke ye hym and ye liste, for into this londis woll he com, and that shall ye find within this half-yere, for he thynkys to be Emperour hymself. For he seyth ye have ocupyed the Empyre with grete wronge, for all his trew auncettryes sauff his fadir Uther were Emperours of Rome.48

Since the ambassadors report more information than Arthur’s speech to them contained (and also deliver letters not previously mentioned, to whose content we are not privy) we may assume that Malory chose not to repeat himself in the matter of Arthur’s claim, and that – as a skilful story-teller might well do – he defers his readers’ hearing of it until we have the pleasure of watching its effect upon the Emperor (who, reading those letters, ‘fared as a man were rased of his wytte’49). The episode of the ambassadors, then, for all its comparative terseness and understatement, renders quite a full diplomatic picture. Arthur has turned back the clock further than his challenger and so reversed their prerogatives; he has already rhetorically annexed Rome; the Emperor rages, Arthur is sang froid. These, in part, are the dynamics which Malory did not find fully enough 47 Cf. Sumption’s account of Edward II’s 1324 embassy to France: ‘The Earl and the Archbishop

. . . were received frostily in the presence of the whole royal Council. After they had spoken their piece they were banished to a waiting room while the matter was discussed, and when they were recalled it was to hear an angry harangue from the French Chancellor. Charles [IV], he said, was astonished by the impertinence in proposing a compromise in the matter of Saint-Sardos as if a king could compromise with a subject about the performance of his public duties. The conduct of Edward [II]’s Gascon officials and the incident at Montpezat were acts of treason and insulting to the Crown. They could not be overlooked without dishonour. So the Chancellor continued until the ambassadors endeavoured to adjourn the proceedings to the following day when tempers might perhaps have cooled. But the proceedings were not adjourned.’ The Hundred Years War, vol. I, pp. 93–4. 48 Works, p. 192.2–10. 49 Ibid., p. 191.22–3.

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expressed in the Suite du Merlin, but which his fifteenth-century telling of the Arthur story could not do without. A century and a half, roughly, had intervened between the composition of the Vulgate cycle and Malory’s own occasion for composing an Arthur book – and it is fitting that Malory himself also plays the architect by inserting the more modern alliterative poet’s campaign into the plan. The story did not need a mere bringing up to date but a shock to its system. For this reason Malory has the Roman War preempt the king’s honeymoon – such is the effect, at any rate, of the embassy’s timing.

The Conclusion of Malory’s Roman War That Arthur does not die at the end tells us something that is also ‘shocking’: that tragedies do not befall to tell us when something big has happened. Dame Fortuna does not appear, as in the alliterative Morte, to make an example of the over-reacher. Histories of empires, however haphazardly they are stitched together, must aspire to an appearance of seamlessness. Malory brings this political lesson to the forefront of the Arthur story. This effect is produced by highly allusive means. The alliterative Morte Arthure had introduced the motif of Arthur’s being offered the Empire (by an ad hoc committee of cardinals and senators), as opposed to his seizing it of his own will (lines 3176–90); it is then agreed that Arthur will be crowned in a week’s time, on Christmas day; Malory follows suit: ‘I assente me,’ seyde the kynge, ‘as ye have devysed, and comly by Crystmas to be crowned, hereafter to reigne in my asstate and to kepe my Rounde Table with the rentys of Rome to rule as me lykys . . .’

That the fortuna dream is replaced by these feudal maneuvers in the Morte could be explained in a number of ways. Vinaver suggested that the omission is a side effect of Malory’s new ending: Malory was interested in Arthur as a great hero and ‘conqueror’, not as an illustration of the relentless motion of the Wheel of Fortune, and possibly had in mind as a parallel the military and political triumphs of Henry V, who, like Arthur, had won his most resounding victories away from home. Malory suppresses not only the final disaster, but all that might suggest its approach . . .50

Unlike Caxton, Malory is not characteristically sententious or gnomic: the one sermonic outburst, occurring toward the end of the whole book,51 is famous because it is out of character. Malory omits the Wheel of Fortune, a preacher’s commonplace, in order to free Arthur from its always-foreseeable grind. If Arthur does fall, there will be specific causes for it which are too complex to be represented by the Wheel, even the Wheel in the alliterative poem, loaded as it is with Worthies. Like the Nine Worthies themselves, the Wheel of Fortune is a

50 Ibid., p. 1367. 51 Ibid., p. 1229.6–14.

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feature of Caxton’s vocabulary, not Malory’s; and here we might observe that the manuscript and the print versions are both more ‘Malorian’ than ‘Caxtonian’. Another reason for Malory’s omitting the Wheel of Fortune is very likely his tale’s prophetic silence. It does not wish to weigh matters in their present form. Accordingly, the one prophecy which the tale does contain – the interpretation of Arthur’s shipboard dream – is fulfilled, even doubly so, and closed off. The workings of fate, like the motivations of his characters, remain inscrutable in Malory. But perhaps it is in this inscrutability that Malory’s politics are readable. Roman War naturalizes Arthur’s foreign policy. As it does so, however, it introduces to the whole history – and to Arthur’s ‘history’ within it – an unresolved ethical problem: What necessity distinguishes ‘right’ and ‘right-ofconquest’? The tale’s first movement revises Arthur’s original, ‘romance’ claim to the throne; the final movement tacitly withdraws the ethical basis of that claim. Fifteenth-century politics were a realm of similarly shifting justifications. If there was any contemporary political career that closely resembled Arthur’s in the Malorian Roman War, it was that of Richard, Duke of York. York advanced his claim politically and militarily and, finally, in Parliament, dialectically. Having at length convinced the Chancellor and Lords that his claim was the stronger, Richard, in an Act of Accord (28 October 1460), was named protector and heir to Henry VI, who would remain king for the span of his life. About a month thereafter, York and his supporters met loyalist forces marshaled by Queen Margaret at what is called the Battle of Wakefield. Badly outnumbered, the Yorkists were defeated and Richard killed; his head was mounted on the walls of York wearing a paper crown. It is possible that, for Malory, the outline of Arthur’s Roman War was suggestive of Richard of York’s rise and fall. If so, it should be remembered that Richard’s fall is also the story of Edward IV’s rise (as Uther’s is of Arthur’s). This might have motivated the ‘happy ending’ which Malory supplies, since Malory was Edward’s subject and, through Caxton at least, connected to his court. But if this connection holds, it does not tell us whether Malory himself was a ‘Yorkist’ or a ‘Lancastrian’ (nor whether a Cambridge or Warwickshire man). It would, however, tell us something about the problem of succession as conceived by Malory. P. J. C. Field has suggested a reference to Richard of York elsewhere in the Morte. It too occurs at a crisis in succession: just after the death of Uther. During Arthur’s minority, ‘Thenne stood the reame in grete jeopardy long whyle, for every lord that was mighty of men maade hym stronge, and many wende to have ben kyng.’52 To Field’s thinking, the passage points ‘particularly at the one man in England who above all had been “mighty of men” and for years conspicuously “weened to be king”: Richard Duke of York’. The reference, as he understands it, is a criticism of York by a Lancastrian Malory in York’s son’s prison; hence its discretion (i.e., concealing the duke within a reference to the class of

52 Ibid., p. 12.11–13.

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lords).53 This interpretation is not implausible, but the passage could just as easily refer to the period of Henry VI’s minority, when ‘many’ ruled England by committee under the protectorate of Gloucester, who himself was Henry VI’s ambitious heir and a great war-monger. With Field, I believe that Malory’s part of the century was so dominated by the personality of Richard of York that the duke is necessarily ‘in’ the Morte Darthur, but more in the form of a concept than an individual, and more like an ideology than an idea. The abiding fear in the passage cited by Field, it seems to me, is not of one or the other bully, but of the condition of constitutional mayhem, not only not having a king, but having no protocol for choosing one. In this way the scene is classically set for Arthur’s advent: he has no past, no party; when the time is ripe (that is, dangerously out of joint), Merlin pulls him out of a hat to quell that fear (though not to explain it). This is also the fear expressed at the end of the book, since Arthur leaves no heir and all his knights have been ground up in civil war. The dead bodies on the battlefield are not being buried, but picked over by spoilers. This is a yet darker realization of that same fear. And it is this fear which is masked in Malory’s Roman War. That his Arthur survives the usually fatal Roman scenario can tell us two things about Malory’s reading of history, which are described in the two concluding sections of this chapter.

The national narrative of usurpation The history of power struggles within England achieved a new and terrible capability with the events of 1326–27. The first deposition of an English king since 1066, Edward II’s dethronement established a specific kind of fear surrounding the monarchy, and also a specific protocol for repressing that fear. But if the reign of Edward II could be elided in national memory (as his name is in Caxton’s epilogue to Lull’s Ordre of Chyualry), the precedents which it established remained a living fact. They remained so not only as legal precedent, but also as civic recourse. ‘Echoes of the ideas which had justified [Thomas, Earl of] Lancaster’s rebellion and the deposition of Edward II’, writes Jonathan Sumption, ‘were to be heard in 1341 and again, with refreshed violence and bitterness, during the dotage of Edward III and in the reign of his ill-starred grandson Richard II.’54 These ideas were not the sole property of the nobility, and they cropped up not only during the reign of a weak king, as witnessed by Edward III’s constitutional crisis of 1341. The principle formulated by that king’s baronial discontents – ‘Lex stat; rex cadit’ (The law stands; the king falls) – may have remained a baronial prerogative, but it was one executed by those barons’ peasant-and-soldier constituents. One might add, then, that the echoes of 1327 are to be heard in the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) and in Cade’s Rebellion (1450). But, as also demonstrated by the Wars of the Roses, if the English did have a protocol (or at least a protocol for fabricating protocols) in place for deposing them, placing a king upon the throne was ad hoc in the extreme. This constitutional imbalance is much more noticeable in the deposition of 53 ‘Fifteenth-Century History in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge:

D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 53.

54 The Hundred Years War, vol. I, p. 55.

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Richard II than in that of Edward II. In the case of Edward, who had withdrawn so far from political reality that he felt he could massacre nobles with impunity, there was a general consensus that he was a bad king. His right by descent was not in doubt – though, when convenient, it was said he was a changeling; the same, and worse, would also be whispered of Richard – but his behavior made his reign untenable. He had very clearly ceased to be the king, by definition, before he was deposed. And as to the deposition, since there was an heir, there was no good reason to delay. In the case of Richard II, however, there was no such consensus, nor was there a ready heir, and his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby, had to operate with stealth and foresight to make it all look legal. In the end, Richard was no more difficult to depose than Edward – perhaps easier, in that he did not run away – but the necessity of that deposition required a great deal more explaining on the part of the deposer. Though Richard II was not the first but the second post-conquest English king to be deposed, his deposition was the occasion of great and not-before-felt anxiety. Perhaps this is the anxiety to be recognized in the Elizabethan stage’s obsession with regicide, regarding which Shakespeare found no shortage of material in fifteenth-century history. I think the same anxiety is recognizable in Malory’s Morte, particularly in Malory’s positioning and revising of the Roman War narrative. The two most noticeable and exciting differences between Malory and the tradition are the ‘happy ending’ (which term we have had occasion to revise) and, in Caxton, the replacing of ‘bear’ with ‘boar’. I would like to consider a third difference. After Arthur has been crowned emperor and is dispensing ‘londis and rentys’ in a feudal style, he cautions Lancelot and Bors to ‘take kepe unto their fadyrs landys’ which they shall inherit. In this speech, original to Malory’s text, I think it is possible to see the real moment of closure which Malory attempts to give the story: ‘Loke that ye take seynge in all your brode londis, and cause youre lyege men to know you as for their kynde lorde, and suffir never your soveraynté to be alledged with your subjectes, nother the soveraygne of your persone and londys.’

At his moment of imperial triumph, Arthur dispenses advice for maintaining domestic order. Somewhat prosaically in this context, the king advises the young inheritors to take ‘seynge’ or seisin in their lands – that is, to establish themselves at the top of the feudal administrative hierarchy, to collect revenues from their barons. It is not enough, in other words, to inherit the land; one must also take it. Accordingly, the inheritor must ‘cause’ his subordinates to recognize him as their ‘kynde’ lord. The inheritors must also – as if they were not inheritors but conquerors – publicly legitimize their ‘right’. ‘Kynde’ here may be glossed ‘proper’, or, as in G. L. Brook’s Glossary to Works (in telling apposition) ‘natural, lawful’.55 55 Middle English Dictionary: (a) In accordance with the ordinary course of nature, natural. . . .

c1450(?a1400) Destr.Troy 8797: So hit [embalming fluid] soght to the sides & serchit with-in, And keppit hom full cleane in hor kind hew, Þat as a lede vpon lyue to loke on þei ware; . . . (c) innate, instinctive, characteristic. . . . c1450 Lychfelde Comp.G. 614: Sweete lord, winke..how kinde and proper it is to þee, On sinful men..to haue mercy. a1500 (?1425) SSecr. (1) 106/7: Þe

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Finally, Arthur advises a course intended to justify the kind of demonstration of his right that he himself has just been forced to make. That is, with explosive violence, Arthur has not allowed his sovereignty to be ‘alledged’, confuted or lessened, in the understanding of his de facto subjects. To do otherwise would be to risk the fate of an Edward II or Richard II. Apropos of this effect, Sumption writes: The problem for a ruler who knew the business of government was not so much the danger of rebellion as the formidable power of the nobility to resist by sheer inertia any great enterprise of the Crown. ‘The baronage is the chief limb of the monarchy,’ an unfriendly contemporary biographer of Edward II wrote; ‘without it the King can do nothing of any importance’.56

A king cannot afford to view history as his unconstrained inheritance; but that alone does not mean it is not his inheritance: that inheritance must be – and can be – plucked from war and chaos. In here is the shadowy logic of fifteenth-century usurpation. Which brings us again to Richard, Duke of York, whose rhetoric of legitimization was strenuously engaged with setting back the clock: ‘. . . though right for a time may rest and be put to silence’, he argued, ‘yet it rotteth not nor shall it perish. . . .’ Though Richard was an audacious claimant who managed, even when recognized as heir, to make himself obnoxious to his supporters, the stage for his tenacious power-plays was set by Henry IV’s own seizure of the crown. The proceedings of the parliamentary debate in which Richard of York successfully argued his claim turn precisely on the terms of Henry IV’s accession. The sitting Lords’ final trump was reminding Richard of the oath of allegiance which he had taken to Henry VI, and that his (York’s) claim was blocked by certain acts of Parliament: The said Richard Plantagenet answereth and saith, that, in truth there been none such actes and tailles made by any Parliament herebefore, as it is surmised; but only in the 6th year of King Herry the Fourth, a certain act and ordinance was made in a Parliament by him called, wherein he made the realms of England and France amongst other, to be unto him and to the heirs of his body coming, and to his four sons and the heirs of their bodies coming, in manner and form as it appeareth in the same act. And if he might have obtained and rejoiced the said crowns, etc. by title of inheritance, descent or succession, he neither needed nor would have desired or made them to be granted to him in such wise, as they be by the said act: which taketh no place, neither is of any force or effect against him that is right inheritor of the said crowns, as it accordeth with God’s law, and all natural laws.57

As S. B. Chrimes notes, this passage speaks quite loudly of a constitutional void where royal succession is concerned: Mule..stood on farre, and whenne he saw his meyster, by kynde techinge he come negh toward hym. 56 The Hundred Years War, vol. I, p. 57. 57 Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et petitiones, et placita in parliamento, 6 vols (London, 1767–77), vol. V, pp. 375–9.

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Whilst there was probably unanimity upon the matter of the indispensability of the monarchy, the same cannot be said of the lawful mode of accession to the royal estate. . . . It does indeed seem that no such public law existed. In the absence of a direct and competent heir, politics, not law, determined the succession. Hence, both judges and commons avoided the topic.58

While this ‘avoidance’ (or repression) was most likely a matter of survival for Justices and lesser public servants, it created the shadowy space in which Henry IV and Richard of York made and executed their plans. It is here that Malory’s Roman War has traffic with this zone of judicial ‘absence’. Both in its redundancy as an account of Arthur’s political origins and as a narrative critical of conjuring imperial necessity from such origins, Malory’s second tale suggests an incipient crack in the concept of royal prerogative. It invades the constitutional blind spot which caused and allowed ‘judges and commons to avoid the topic’, and divulges its secret: that the difference between right and right-of-conquest is a mystery.

The Function of Historia And Malory’s message is also that this is a secret, that history does not reveal justice, vindicate violence or bear out claims of right. How he is able to communicate such a message – the unlikely story of a secret both divulged and maintained – must be considered in the light of both the political narrative of the Roman War and the Morte Darthur’s unique textual history. In England’s Empty Throne, Paul Strohm speaks of ‘amnesiac texts’, texts which ‘stand dumb in relation to the past, expending much labor and ingenuity in the service of forgetfulness’. If, as Strohm admits, such amnesia is a condition to which all texts are prone, he finds it especially characteristic of texts produced in the wake of 1399. Strohm observes that Henry and his sons were committed from the outset to a program of official forgetfulness: a forgetfulness embracing their own dynastic origins, their predecessor’s fate, the promises and opportunistic alliances which had gained them the throne. I say ‘program,’ because they did not lack for willing participants. Initial and impressive Lancastrian successes rested, not only upon the adeptness of their propaganda machine, but also upon the short-term problem experienced by the English populace in ‘processing’ the displacement and subsequent murder of Richard II. For the English people, including many of Richard’s formerly loyal subjects, now found themselves confronted with ‘impossible history’ – a set of circumstances beyond the capacity of existing explanatory frames or repositories of meaning. Lancastrian self-perpetuation effectively required an exploitation of this initial bewilderment, a prolongation of the somewhat stunned acquiescence with which Henry IV’s seizure of the throne was greeted in the beginning.59

Le Morte Darthur is not an early Lancastrian text; nor is it outwardly invested, like Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, in the success of either warring faction. But 58 Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century, p. 22. 59 England’s Empty Throne, p. 196.

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since Malory’s England saw repeated, to an almost uncanny degree, the events of 1399, the reader of Malory might well wonder to what extent his own England was the inheritor, or the product, of such ‘bewilderment’. Hoccleve himself, as Strohm observes, seeks to ‘anesthetize’60 the deposition of Richard II by attributing it to Fortune’s ‘brotilnesse’ instead of to any human agency. But Malory, as we have seen, dispenses with Dame Fortune in his Roman War. Specifically, Malory’s reading undercuts the presumption of necessity which Hoccleve’s invocation of Fortune makes. Hoccleve’s Fortune turns accident and overthrow, political contingency and private war, into ‘Tragedy’ in the literary sense. Because Malory’s book is not invested in the status quo, as Hoccleve’s poem is, it does not say whether Fortune would have preferred one outcome over the other. Indeed, the Morte Darthur – with its particular Roman War – seems specially designed to withstand the rude successions of its time.

60 Ibid., p. 197.

5 No Hint of the Future

Metrum 11 “. . . And thanne thilke thing that the blake cloude of errour whilom hadde ycovered schal lighte more clerly than Phebus himself ne schyneth. For certes the body, bryngynge the weighte of foryetynge, ne hath nat chased out of your thought al the cleernesse of your knowing; for certeynli the seed of soth haldeth and clyveth within yowr corage, and it is awaked and excited by the wynde and by the blastes of doctrine. For wherefore elles demen ye of your owene wil the ryghtes, whan ye been axid, but if so were that the norysschynges of resoun ne lyvede yplounged in the depe of your herte? And if so be that the Muse and the doctrine of Plato syngeth soth, al that every wyght leerneth, he no doth no thing elles thanne but recordeth, as men recorden thinges that been foryeten.” Prosa 12 Thanne seide I thus: “I accorde me gretly to Plato, for thou recordist and remembrist me thise thinges yet the seconde tyme; that is to seye, first whan I loste my memorie be the contagious conjunccioun of the body with the soule, and eftsones aftirward, whan Y lost it confounded by the charge and the burdene of my sorrowe.” (Chaucer, Boece, Book III)

Introduction: Memory and the Book Because Malory’s book is a composite of different texts and traditions, consistency in the Morte Darthur is frequently at odds with local necessity. In Chapter 3 I argued that the making exemplary of Malory’s whole book, a task carried on at many levels and at different times in the book’s production history, was attended by the application of certain external features such as marginalia and rubrication. Despite pains taken to shore up the book’s morality and strengthen its exemplarity, however, the discursive and the unpredictable, and the forgetful, show through. Balyn’s exemplarity, then, that about him which is worthy of remembrance, is shown not to be identical with his ‘aura’. Finally, Balyn himself becomes anonymous. Malory’s re-crafting of the Roman War, as discussed in Chapter 4, makes for similarly precarious moments, in which one explanation of Arthur’s right to the throne is ‘challenged’ by a subsequent one: but since both explanations are allowed to stand in the Morte, the reader is forced to ponder the legitimacy, in constitutional terms, of either. In Chapter 4 also we considered, with Professor Strohm, how a text can be ‘amnesiac’. In this chapter I will extend these discussions of romance exemplarity and of historiographical memory to the ontology of the book. By reading with especial care Malory’s original passages – which include non-discursive authorial acts falling under compilatio – and by observing the new frames of memory, or non-memory, with which they invest the whole book, we can illustrate the special problems of memory

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attending Malory’s death of Arthur. It is here where, for the protagonist as well as for the reader, the ‘blake cloude of errour’ becomes most ominous, since it obscures something we know is close by, that is, the end. It is here also where the ‘contagious conjunccioun’ of spirit and matter, of text and book, is most harrowing. Malory’s book is frequently concerned with both reading and memory: Caxton’s preface takes pains to promote the exemplarity of King Arthur’s ‘hystorye . . . whyche ought moost to be remembred emonge us englysshemen tofore al other crysten kynges’;1 the tale of Balyn is full of memoria, both in the margins and within the narrative; in the Roman War Arthur appeals to national memory by consulting, and finding his justification in, written chronicles and genealogy. Reading and memory are vital, as Dame Philosophy tells the prisoner, to apprehending the truth. Malory’s characters, of course, demonstrate very uneven faculties of both. The same may be said of Malory’s book itself: it sometimes remembers itself and sometimes does not. The knight Harleus le Berbeus, for example, is slain at folio 29v in the Balyn section, and, notwithstanding that his death is accorded full decorative honors in the margin of that folio (see Plate 3), that knight appears again at folio 267r in ‘Tristram’ to fight Alexander the Orphan.2 The Morte’s ability to forget is not limited to the comings and goings of minor characters: the very fact that the book is a compilation enables a series of collusions which, as revealed in the ‘Piteous Tale of the Morte Darthur Saunz Guerdon’, may be considered as part of what Freud would call the book’s (and Arthur’s) ‘residual survival instinct’ – that is, the Morte’s unwillingness, despite the teleology to which it is committed, to assimilate the condition of death. One might chart this effect in a series of repressions. Merlin early warned Arthur (in the ‘Tale of King Arthur’) that ‘Gwenyver was nat holsom for hym to take to wyff. For he warned hym that Launcelot sholde love hir, and sche hym agayne’ (Works, 97.29–31). To exclude knowledge which would be traumatic to its own narrative arc – much as Arthur’s death at the end of the Roman War would be – Malory’s book introduces deferments, evasions, non-recognitions, to prevent its being ‘reminded’ of the disaster which lies ahead. As Dame Philosophy would put it, ‘al that every wyght leerneth, he ne doth no thing elles thane but recordith, as men recorden thinges that ben foryeten’.3 Like the things plunged in the deep of the prisoner’s heart, the things which Malory’s book seeks to defer are inseparable from the matter at hand. To seek an analogy elsewhere in Chaucer, Malory’s conflict is very like that of the poet constrained to narrate ‘how Criseyde Troilus forsook’: For which myn herte right now gynneth blede, And now my penne, allas, with which I write, Quaketh for drede of that I most endite.4 1 2

3 4

Prologues and Epilogues, p. 92. See Works, p. 1502, n. 646.4. Another ‘death and resurrection’, that of Maris de la Roche, is the result not of amnesia but of scribal error: see Works, pp. 30.8–9, 36.7, and p. 1292, n. 30; also, P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory and his Scribes’, Arthuriana vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 2004) pp. 31–42; 39. Boece, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 437. Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV, Riverside Chaucer, p. 538.15,12–14.

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Without Chaucer’s discursive, authorial safety-valve, however, Malory is less able to separate the knower (his book) from the known (his story). The result, as I shall argue, is a tendency to bury memory within the successive narrative frames of his tales. Even as Malory’s story elsewhere disturbs the continuity prescribed by exemplarity, his book keeps secrets stowed in the ambiguities which haunt that exemplarity.

Contingencies of Fifteenth-Century Prose Before moving on to Malory’s text, I would like to historicize Malory’s Morte Darthur, as several critics have done,5 by simply considering that it is an English Prose Romance, a literary form which in English emerges precisely in the fifteenth century. While this fact seems simple enough, it bears contingencies instructive to the reader of Malory’s book. One such contingency is the Morte’s belonging to a period in which prose translation was a burgeoning practice. Samuel Workman notes that although fifteenth-century translators shared neither a ‘prevailing consciousness of innovation’ nor a ‘philosophy of composition’, there was yet ‘a great shift, and a rapid one, to native prose as a medium, and also a slow growth in sophistication of style’.6 Verse romances, as Larry Benson observes, were not going out of style, but for history (and the Arthurian romances were regarded as such) the fifteenth-century was an age of prose. As Léon Gautier wrote of the Charlemagne cycle, “In the fifteenth century, there is a frenzy, there is a rage against verse and in favor of prose.” The same is true of the Alexander romances, which gained new popularity in fifteenth-century prose redactions. And this is preeminently true of Arthurian romance, as shown not only in the survival and continued popularity of the older prose romances but in the production of new redactions of the older prose versions and of new prosifications of originally verse romances.7

The proliferation of these texts gave rise to what Benson calls ‘almost a distinct genre of one-volume histories that were produced by combining, condensing and reordering the materials of several older volumes in order to produce a single volume shaped to the taste of its time’.8 We noted in Chapter 2 the affinity between Michel of Gonnot’s Arthurian volume (BN MS fr. 112) and Malory’s compilation, and that the importance of Gonnot’s manuscript to the study of English prose romance is not limited to the consideration of source texts. As Cedric Pickford has observed of such books, 5

6 7 8

Cf. P. J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971); Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in the Morte Darthur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); and especially Helen Cooper, ‘Counter Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Grey, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 141–62. Fifteenth-Century Translation as an Influence on English Prose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 1. Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 20. Ibid., p. 23.

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. . . les scribes ont fourni au public du quinzième siècle des rédactions et des compilations nouvelles. Le roman arthurien de la fin du Moyen-Age n’est pas une simple copie de la version du XIIIe siècle. La langue est rajeunie, et nous avons voulu examiner de quelle manière la structure du roman lui-même à evolué. Cette évolution révèle à la fois le goût des lecteurs et celui des remanieurs. Elle explique peut-être aussi la popularité de la matière de Bretagne.9

In Malory’s book not only the redactio, but the compilatio, has been transmitted as a category of composition. This is not to say that compilatio is the exclusive capability of prose: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Langland’s Piers Plowman and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, are all compilations, and all except Piers are, broadly speaking, translations. These poetic examples of compilatio, in turn, inform the social reading within which, as we have seen, Caxton’s and Malory’s text production is to be understood. If compilation is already in the fifteenth century a contingency of the production of didactic literature, we shall go on in this chapter to consider how it is similarly contingent in the production of romance texts. A further contingency is that Malory’s Morte is enabled specifically by the structures of fifteenth-century prose, which itself confers certain limitations and possibilities on it.Vernacular prose models other than chronicle or homiletic ones were not numerous, nor did the writings of Fortescue or Pecock or Love – whatever their merits – furnish useful examples of narrative. The Morte Darthur therefore could only emerge within a certain style: that of the chronicle. The chronicle style is, as Field writes, a very limited one, unsuitable for reflecting the movement of a sophisticated mind, or organizing complicated material, or delivering ironic judgements, and it is doomed to extinction by the proliferation of the printed word. It was broadly in this “non-tradition”, already in his time a little old-fashioned, that Malory wrote.10

In addition, Malory was writing ‘lay prose’, helped only by the traditions of the spoken language and not by those extra resources which accumulate in a tradition of written prose, and which were to come to dominate in Elizabethan English. There is no hint of the future in Malory’s prose.11

Into the ‘non-tradition’ of vernacular prose chronicle-writing, then, Malory in the fifteenth century brings the French tradition of vernacular prose romance. This synthesis already takes us quite far from the world of metrical romance. The generic imperatives of insular metrical romance – the circular journey of the hero, the final upholding or restoration of a king, the proving of the courtly lover – are now crowded in with national history and myths of statehood. Thus, a new

9 L’Évolution du Roman Arthurien en Prose vers la Fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Nizet, 1960), pp. 9–10. 10 Romance and Chronicle, p. 35. 11 Ibid., p. 36.

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set of imperatives seems to have arisen. In tracing the ‘cultural impetus behind the belated appearance of prose romance in England, over two centuries after the form had emerged in France’, Helen Cooper makes the following observations: The prose romance was the major contribution of the fifteenth century to the development of the whole genre in English, and its keynote is very different [from that of the metrical romance]. Treachery and murder within the body politic or the kin group, the slaying of father by son, the failure to pass on good rule in a strong and righteous order of succession, and sometimes also incest, are repeated and urgent themes in these works. . . . The testimony of these works indicates that their authors found a new literary form in which to express a more realistic and bleaker view of the world they lived in. The most famous of them, Sir Thomas Malory, makes the parallel explicit as he relates the civil war that marks the collapse of the Arthurian world to his own times, in his castigation of ‘ye all Englysshemen’ who have not yet lost the custom of being discontented with their king. The typical metrical romance ends with the succession of the true heir; the disrupted successions of the fifteenth century are more accurately reflected in the prose romances.12

What is reflected, of course, is ‘the state of disruption’. It is interesting that ‘Lo, ye all Englysshemen’ is the only place in his book where Malory does make the parallel explicit. And now, at the book’s end, it is the Morte’s resistance to precisely those effects enumerated – treachery, murder within the family, incest – which prompts some of Malory’s most deliberate cutting and pasting. These exertions take the form of a series of deferments, evasions, non-recognitions – collusions, in short – whose attempt is to stave off the inevitable mort itself. As we consider the necessity of such exertions, we are reminded of Malory’s own investment in, and desire for, the very social order whose death his tale forces him to envision. In Larry Benson’s pregnant observation, ‘The new interest in prose romance, it should be noted, was an aristocratic concern.’13 In the following pages, I will discuss first a set of large-scale deferments which occur at the level of compilation, and which deal in large units of narrative, and I will conclude with an examination of instances of compilation which occur a great deal more minutely.

May in Malory’s Prose Morte In May, whan every harte floryshyth and burgenyth (for, as the seson ys lusty to beholde and comfortable, so man and woman rejoysyth and gladith of somer commynge wyth his freyshe floures, for wynter wyth hys rowghe wyndis and blastis causyth lusty men and women to cowre and to syt by fyres), so this seson hit befelle in the moneth of May a grete aungur and unhappe that stynted nat tylle the floure of chyvalry of alle the worlde was destroyed and slayne. (Works, p. 1161.1–8)

12 ‘Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing’, in Companion, pp. 141–2, 144. 13 Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 20.

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Malory’s May-passage is another occasion to ponder memory. May is auspicious in the Morte Darthur, where there are in fact two May-passages; both demonstrate a keen grasp of springtime’s sensory and literary effects. Elsewhere, Mordred was born in May; Guinevere is abducted by Mellyagant in May; Lancelot and Guinevere are exposed in May; and, the following May, King Arthur and Mordred kill each other. In the passages treating of May itself, that season is said to restore ‘stabylité’ to the warring cold and hot of man’s winter and summer; May teaches ‘vertuouse love’. May makes ‘every harte floryshyth and burgenyth’ and also engenders the ‘grete angur’ which annihilates ‘the floure of chyvalry of alle the worlde’.14 In his prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer also demonstrates the effects which May can have on the mind: And as for me, though that I konne but lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that there is game noon That from my bokes maketh me to goon, But yt be seldom on the holyday, Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules synge, And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge, Farewel my bok and my devocioun!15

Like the Goliardic poet who forsakes his studies at the first breath of spring, Chaucer remains subject to the ‘contagious conjunccioun’ of soul and body. But the stakes in Malory (and in Chaucer) are more Boethian than Goliardic. In ‘Slander and Strife’ May causes both remembering and forgetting. In the speeches of Arthur and Gawain in this section we can hear the secrets becoming unkeepable and the chinks appearing in the collective armor of silence which has allowed Arthur not to reckon, thus far, with Guinevere and Lancelot’s betrayal. After that silence is made impossible by the rashness of Mordred and Aggravain, causing ranks to close around Arthur and Lancelot, the reader is given a remarkable instance of remembering in Bors’ counsel to Lancelot. As we shall see, Bors, unlike Arthur, can not only remember the history of the whole book leading up to that moment – which requires remembering across the borders of Malory’s various source-texts – but, together with Lancelot, demonstrates the utility of this kind of recall. It is the kind of memory which is enabled, specifically, by written history, in this case by the contents of Malory’s book.

Lancelot and Guinevere Malory’s own reckoning, or non-reckoning, with his narrative’s conclusion can register in deferments of closure, delayed submission to the teleology necessitated by the story itself. These deferments are valuable for the logic they reveal 14 Works, pp. 1119–20, 1161. 15 Legend of Good Women, Text F, Riverside Chaucer, p. 589.29–39.

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at work in the compilation of the Morte Darthur: they index sites of potential catharsis which instead become occasions of cathexis. We have already seen how Malory prolongs Arthur’s life beyond the frame of the Roman War scenario, a deferment necessary to the overall plan of Malory’s book, which is committed to the French version of things and must therefore end with the Lancelot drama. The adulterous love between Lancelot and Guinevere, then, is the next great threat, and the one longest avoided. It is a threat to Arthur-the-protagonist, and also to the life of Malory’s book. Since the crisis emerges as the divulging of a secret, the erstwhile dwelling place of that secret is a matter of interest. On the one hand, we may say that the secret has dwelt within the memory of Malory’s book itself, since when Lancelot returns from the Grail quest, neither he nor Guinevere, and certainly not the reader, needs any introduction to the fact of their relationship; the textual memory of this affair (‘as the booke seyth’) precedes Malory’s own book by more than two hundred years. As Malory tells us, even while other things are forgotten, this one stays in the memory: Than, as the booke seyth, sir Launcelot began to resorte unto quene Gwenivere agayne and forgate the promyse and the perfeccion that he made in the queste; for, as the booke seyth, had nat sir Launcelot bene in his prevy thoughtes and in hys myndis so sette inwardly to the quene as he was in semynge outewarde to God, there had no knyght passed hym in the queste of the Sankgreall. But ever his thoughtis prevyly were on the quene, and so they loved togydirs more hotter than they dud toforehonde, and had many such prevy droughtis togydir that many in the courte spake of hyt, and in especiall sir Aggravayne, sir Gawaynes brothir, for he was ever opynne-mowthed.16

While the love between Lancelot and Guinevere is retained in the memory of Malory’s book – and his source ‘booke’ as well – it is not, however, a past event, but one occurring now in the narrative’s present, making it not only memory, and formerly a secret memory, but simply knowledge, and common knowledge at that. In its present-time existence, it is neither forgotten nor a secret. It remains ‘invisible’ then because of a general collusion on the part of the court to keep it so; Arthur, as we will see, is complicit in this collusion, and so is the very structure of Malory’s book. Malory’s book is able to assume a non-recognition of the forces which compel its conclusion because it is adapted from, and is itself, a sequence of more or less discrete tales. Like a sentence, any one of its constituent units may be subject to contingent disturbances. A humorous example of such a contingency is found in Herodotus, who reports of the Samian appeal to the Spartans that ‘they went to the authorities and made a long speech, in view of the greatness of their need’: At the first meeting, the Spartans said in answer that they had forgotten the first words of the request and could not understand the last. After that, the Samians had another meeting with the Spartan government, and this time they said nothing but, carrying a sack, said simply, “The sack needs grain.” At this the

16 Works, p. 1045.10–21.

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Spartans answered, “You did not need to say ‘sack.’ ” But they resolved to help the exiled Samians.17

Across cultural lines (in our case across the lines of Malory’s various source texts) the coherence of the proposition is subject to failure at the level of the individual unit (‘the first words’, ‘the last words’, ‘sack’). Malory’s book, being a compilation of units whose totality is meant to cohere, is similarly at risk. Since the Morte’s sequential structure is so very much like the grammatical structure of the sentence, it is worthwhile to borrow from Roman Jakobson’s descriptions of sentence-level linguistic disturbances. The blindness, or forgetting, which we discover in ‘Slander and Strife’ in fact recalls the symptoms of what in speech pathology is called the similarity disorder, a type of aphasia which Jakobson also describes as ‘selection deficiency’. In this type of language disturbance, sentences are conceived as elliptical sequels to be supplied from antecedent sentences uttered, if not imagined, by the aphasic himself or received by him from the other partner in the colloquy, actual if not imaginary. Key words may be dropped or superseded by abstract anaphoric substitutes. A specific noun, as Freud noticed, is replaced by a very general one, for instance, machin or chose in the French aphasics. In a dialectical German sample of “amnesic aphasia” observed by Goldstein, Ding (thing) or Stückel (piece) was substituted for all inanimate nouns, and überfahren (perform) for verbs which were identifiable from the context and thus appeared superfluous to the patient.18

In the Morte’s most prodigious demonstration of this effect, Malory on the one hand employs a Sheherazade-like deferment-by-digression, and, on the other, instantiates an aphasic non-recognition of thematic homology, of the metaphorical potential of that digression: that is, in the 396 manuscript pages of the ‘Tristram’ section. Both absurdly long and fragmentary, the presence of this tale in Malory’s book, as Thomas C. Rumble notes, has always raised suspicions in Malory’s readers: ‘Because it seems so disproportionately long, so needlessly interruptive of the central story, and so casually abandoned before the well-known tragic end, Malory’s “Tale of Sir Tristram” is perhaps difficult to see as belonging integrally to the larger structural and thematic plan of Le Morte Darthur.’19 Though Rumble goes on to demonstrate thematic continuities between ‘Tristram’ and the rest of the Morte, the structural disturbance occasioned by the tale is difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy. Given the tale’s theme, however, it is fitting that ‘Tristram’ should only give (to borrow Rochester’s phrase) imperfect enjoyment: any delight afforded by the tale’s love story is overturned in the present codicological context by what that tale instructs: that adultery is punished. ‘Tristram’ would thus constitute an evasion – an imperfect 17 The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 231–2. 18 ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Distrurbances’, in Language in Literature,

ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 94–114; 101. 19 ‘ “The Tale of Tristram”: Development by Analogy’, in Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), pp. 118–13; 118.

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one perhaps – of the undesired truth. Felicity Riddy summarizes this narrative’s presumptive blind alley in this way: It is not the adventures of Lancelot but of Tristram which occupy much of the central part of Le Morte Darthur, allowing the themes of adulterous passion, of

jealousy and madness to be explored primarily at the expense of the inept King Mark of Cornwall, and not of Arthur.20 This blocking-off of analogy – which coincides here, in textual terms, with the boundaries of various source-texts – temporarily (but protractedly) protects Arthur from the knowledge, and the book from the consequences, of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery. The story of Tristram and Isode, which is in many ways simply that of Lancelot and Guinevere with the names switched, thus takes its place within a blind series of ‘elliptical sequels’21 whose aphasic discontinuity allows Lancelot and Guinevere to escape the consequences, the cause-and-effect, of their adultery (for the moment). It is parataxis itself which facilitates the narrative’s ‘escape from sameness to contiguity’.22 Even as Balyn and Balan recognize and support each other through traditional law’s recognition of the ‘sameness’ between precedents – parataxis remembering itself – Lancelot and Guinevere escape such recognition by ‘becoming’ athematic: parataxis forgetting itself. Another such escape is suggested in Malory’s ‘Knight of the Cart’ in the triangular relationship which develops between Mellyagant, Lancelot and Guinevere. This tale also stages a drama of treason and adultery which seems imperfectly to mask the ultimate catastrophe lying in wait. The peculiar, willful opacity of this tale’s ‘mask’, even as it tries to thwart a metaphorical reading of Arthur’s history, nevertheless serves to articulate relations which will come to bear on Arthur in his own death drama. In this tale, Guinevere is abducted by the treacherous knight Mellyagant; in the act of breaking into Mellyagant’s castle to rescue her, Lancelot cuts his hand and, spending the night with Guinevere, bleeds in her bed. The discovery, the following morning, of Guinevere’s bloody bed plunges Mellyagant into a kind of private hell which Paul Strohm has connected to Freud’s idea of the ‘primal scene’. This is Freud’s evocation of the young child’s real or imagined witness of parental intercourse, with its accompanying confusion about the event witnessed, uneasy surmise that violence is somehow involved, inevitable feelings of rivalry, and guilty fear of punishment springing from those feelings and from a sense of impermissible viewing. Excluded by the curtained bed, forced boisterously to intrude by thrusting the curtains aside, then required to engage in an after-the-fact reconstruction of an imperfectly understood event, Mellyagant is discovered in a situation similar to that of Freud’s Wolf Man. This is the patient who, tormented by his sense of being veiled from reality, is aided in his own

20 ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in Companion, p. 63. 21 ‘Two Aspects of Language’, p. 101. 22 Ibid., p. 105.

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reconstruction of what occurred during the parental siesta one early childhood afternoon.23

Mellyagant’s inability to account for the blood on Guinevere’s bed – which bed he is shamed by Lancelot for having seen in the first place – places him in an infantilized relation to Guinevere and Lancelot; the Wolf Man is humiliated before Guinevere and then physically overmastered (and later killed) by Lancelot. Despite his protest that Guinevere has been ‘a false traitouras unto my lorde Arthur’,24 it is Mellyagant, not Lancelot or Guinevere, who suffers the penalty for treason. That Lancelot is the giver of correction is ironic, but somehow not absurd. Strohm continues: Lancelot and Guinevere, after all, enjoy a provisional entitlement to share her bed. I say “provisional” because they are not, in fact, a marital or parental couple, but an adulterous one. Nonetheless, Lancelot occupies the place of the king, and even, when lecturing Mellyagant, presumes to speak on his behalf concerning matters of bedroom decorum, and Guinevere is indeed the Queen. They are, in a sense, a satisfactory metonym for the parental couple, with its full rights of private enjoyment – enjoyment from which, needless to say, Mellyagant is structurally excluded.25

If Mellyagant is left out by the provisional legitimacy of Lancelot and Guinevere’s coupling, King Arthur is excluded by that same structure. It is the very sameness of that structure, however, that makes it indecipherable to the aphasic Arthur, to whom Mellyagant must appear perfectly opaque as the villain; Mellyagant’s punishment for abducting Guinevere thus effectively closes off the episode. This type of aphasia, again, is characterized by a ‘selection deficiency’, also called the similarity disorder, wherein the subject cannot infer similarity between analogous sets. ‘Metaphor’, Jakobson notes, ‘is alien to the similarity disorder.’26 The thwarting of the metaphorical potential of ‘Tristram’ and ‘The Knight of the Cart’ is a capability of Malory’s text which belongs to a specific set of textual conditions: translation, compilation, prose and, within that prose, parataxis. Each of these conditions affords opportunity for collusion, for delay, and each may be productive of just that false consciousness which will allow the narrative to continue. It must continue differently, however. In tragedy, the exposure of the secret generally results in catharsis, through which a repressed criminality, or secret knowledge of criminality, is purged. What the Morte presents instead is cathexis, a deepening of the secret, but, as we have seen, that secret is protected at a cost. Freud’s word for that protection is anti-cathexis, the internal adjustments made to stave off the total breach of a suppressed memory. We might, in fact, consider whether, in Malory’s text, as in Freud’s traumatized patient,

23 ‘Mellyagant’s Primal Scene’, in his Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 204–5.

24 Works, p. 1132.16. 25 ‘Mellyagant’s Primal Scene’, p. 205. 26 ‘Two Aspect of Language’, p. 109.

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cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An ‘anti-cathexis’ on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced.27

Such, in fact, are the complications which, in Malory’s ‘Slander and Strife’, attend Arthur’s embattled non-recognition of Guinevere’s adultery. On the one hand, the goal of Mordred and Aggravain’s faction is to bring the truth to light: there is nothing unsubstantiated about their accusation of Guinevere and Lancelot. On the other hand, something about this particular truth has always recommended against disclosure. Arthur’s elaborately maintained ignorance of Guinevere’s adultery is perhaps the last shred of mystery left in the kingdom, and Gawain’s counsel to his younger brother and his co-conspirators tries, but fails, to communicate something of this. ‘I lyve you wel,’ seyde sir Gawayne, ‘for ever unto all unhappyness, sir, ye woll graunte. And I wold that ye leffte all thys, and make you nat so bysy, for I know’, sayde sir Gawayne, ‘what woll falle of hit.’ ‘Falle whatsumever falle may,’ seyde sir Aggravayne, ‘I woll disclose hit to the kynge!’ ‘Nat be my councyle,’ seyde sir Gawayne, ‘for, and there aryse warre and wrake betwyxte sir Launcelot and us, wyte you well, brothir, there woll many kynges and grete lordis hold with sir Launcelot. Also, brothir, sir Aggravayne,’ sayde sir Gawayne, ‘ye muste remembir how oftyntymes sir Launcelot hath rescowed the kynge and the quene; and the beste of us all had been full colde at the harte-roote had nat sir Launcelot bene bettir than we, and that hathe he preved hymselff full ofte.’28

That Gawain foresees not only local strife (between Lancelot’s faction and the Orkneys) but civil war (between Lancelot and Arthur) is indicated by the lament which he and his brother Gaheris make when the conspirators go to the king: ‘ “Alas!” seyde sir Gawayne and sir Gareth, “now ys thys realme holy destroyed and myscheved, and the noble felyshyp of the Rounde Table shall be disparbeled.” ’29 Gawain’s prudence is both pragmatic and profoundly knowing. In the short term, Gawain wishes to avoid conflict with the strongest warlord in the kingdom; he warns his younger brother, as Achilles did his friend Patroclus, not to pit himself against so dangerous a fighter. But his worries also run deeper: Gawain knows that in a civil war Lancelot would command a great many allies: a fact whose exposure alone might be ruinous, to say nothing of the war itself. What Gawain does not quite find expression for, but which the reader is made to understand here, is the fact that beneath the secret of Lancelot-andGuinevere lies another even more destructive one: that the power of the monarch is not divine but arbitrary and easily overthown. (Finally, due to a contingency which Gawain cannot foresee, the conspiracy to expose Lancelot

27 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 24. 28 Works, pp. 1161–2. 29 Ibid., p. 1162.31–3.

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and Guinevere will lead to his own consuming desire to kill Lancelot himself, whatever the consequences.) The undesirability of the truth is also expressed in Arthur’s private reaction to the co-conspirators’ promise to make it known: For, as the Freynshe booke seyth, the kynge was full lothe that such a noyse shulde be uppon sir Launcelot and his quene; for the kynge had a demyng of hit, but he wold nat here thereoff, for sir Launcelot had done so much for hym and for the quene so many tymes that wyte you well the kynge loved hym passyngly well.30

Of this passage Vinaver notes, Neither the French romance nor the English poem has anything corresponding to this paragraph. On the eve of the first episode of the ‘piteous tale’ M[alory] is anxious to stress Arthur’s affection for Lancelot and his reluctance that ‘such a noyse shulde be uppon’ him.31

Malory clearly does wish us to know that Arthur’s love for Lancelot outweighs the latter’s offenses, and that the king would wish for some other way of adjudicating the matter. It is important to Malory for Arthur to have been cognizant of the ongoing betrayal: Arthur’s knowledge tinges his impotence with suffering, and it makes explicit his aphasic relationship to the historical sequence of his own past. Wilfred L. Guerin suggests, in less pathological terms, that this episode tells us ‘something of Arthur’s wide vision, his magnanimity, and his self-restraint’.32 While this description will sit well on Arthur on the Day of Destiny, the king seems here more blinded, compelled and constrained than any of the things nobly suggested by Guerin. Arthur will not widen his vision to encompass his own complicity in the keeping of the destructive secret; his magnanimity will not prevent his ‘giving Guinevere the law’; nor can he restrain himself or Gawain from an irrational, or at least loosely reasoned, double war on Lancelot. Still, the love Arthur bears his enemy does, for the moment, keep the blood-feud poignantly in check. What the thoughts of Gawain and Arthur also reveal is the magnitude of the implications of this ‘noyse’. The publication of the affair will force Arthur’s hand, and the unconstrained civility between Lancelot and himself will come to an end. Now made public, the adultery is criminal and actionable. The crimes which will follow this exposure – the murder by Lancelot of Gareth, for example – will also force Arthur, as a weakened feudal lord, to support Gawain’s petition for redress. In Malory’s own reading, the noise also signals the approaching end of Arthurian romance itself; Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair is one of the most abiding particulars of that literature, already recorded in Dante’s annals of Hell, and now this affair takes on its hellish aspect. There is now nothing (no prophecies, no marvels) to mediate between presumption and history, treason and culpability, no veil dividing courtly love and adultery. All this will cause 30 Ibid., 1163.20–25. 31 Ibid., 1629–31. 32 ‘The Tale of the Death of Arthur’, in Malory’s Originality, p. 264.

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Arthurian polity to violently ‘remember’ the nature of the power which sustains it. If the great secret is the arbitrariness (and, potentially, the illegitimacy) of power, the exposure of that secret can only lead to the violence necessary to sustain (or replace) that power; that ‘anti-cathectic’ violence will arise to meet the present need, but it cannot restore the past. Arthur himself must forsake his love both of Guinevere and of Lancelot in order to ‘give the law’ to one and to make war on the other.

At Joyous Gard: Gawain’s anger and Lancelot’s reason There still follows, however, a series of heroic collusions against both the letter of the law and Arthur’s duty to Gawain. These are literal deferments of individual deaths, which, while they save the lives of Guinevere and Arthur, do nothing to heal the divide between law and chivalry in Arthur’s kingdom. One such resistance to Arthur’s violent reassertion of order is Lancelot’s rescue and abduction of Guinevere at the moment she is to burn for treason. While the execution of Guinevere would have provided the season of ‘slander and strife’ with a certain closure, such closure is intolerable to Lancelot, the model chivalric lover (and certainly intolerable to Malory). Now the great warrior becomes concerned with the prevention of killing. In a passage original to Malory, when Lancelot and Bors are planning the rescue, and contemplating how best to negotiate afterwards, Lancelot expresses a wish to keep Guinevere with him after the rescue. To this Bors makes a remarkable reply: ‘Sir, that shall be the leste care of us all,’ seyde Bors, ‘for how ded the moste noble knyght sir Trystram? By youre good wyll, kept nat he with hym La Beall Isode nere three yere in Joyous Garde, the which was done by youre althers avyce? And that same place is youre owne, and in lyke wise may ye do, and ye lyst, and take the quene knyghtly away with you, if so be that the kynge woll jouge her to be brente. And in Joyous Garde may ye kepe her longe inow untyll the hete be paste of the kynge, and than hit may fortune you to brynge the quene agayne to the kynge with grete worshyp, and peradventure ye shall have than thanke for youre bryngyng home where othir may happyn to have magré.’33

Bors, wise now as when he warned Lancelot not to visit Guinevere that day because he feared ‘som treson’,34 demonstrates the kind of reading which seems constitutionally beyond the grasp of Arthur. That is, Bors makes the parallel explicit between ‘Tristram’ and present circumstances. Bors goes freely back and forth between zones forbidden to the damaged memory of King Arthur; and Bors demonstrates thereby that it is possible for Malory’s characters to remember, to be reading the book, as it were. Not that Bors’ reading here is necessarily the correct one; Lancelot, continuing to reflect on the example of Tristram and Isode, counters Bors’ suggestion: ‘That ys hard for to do,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘for by sir Trystram I may have a warnynge: for whan by meanys of tretyse sir Trystram brought agayne La Beall

33 Works, pp. 1172–3. 34 Ibid., p. 1164.28–9.

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Isode unto kynge Marke from Joyous Garde, loke ye now what felle on the ende, how shamefully that false traytour kyng Marke slew hym as he sate harpynge afore hys lady, La Beall Isode. Wyth a grounden glayve he threste hym in behynde to the harte, which grevyth sore me,’ sayde sir Launcelot, ‘to speke of his dethe, for all the world may nat fynde such another knyght.’35

Since, in the end, the Lancelot-figure, Tristram, is murdered by the Arthur-figure, Mark, Lancelot doubts the wisdom of Bors’ advice, showing an apparently keener grasp of precedent. But, if Lancelot has demonstrated a firm grasp of history, he yet has a blind spot, as witnessed by Bors’ correction: ‘All thys ys trouthe,’ seyde sir Bors, ‘but there ys one thynge shall corrayge you and us all: ye know well that kynge Arthur and kynge Marke were never lyke of condycions, for there was never yet man that ever coude preve kynge Arthure untrewe of hys promyse.’36

Lancelot shows himself free of Jakobson’s ‘selection disorder’, but at the same time he succumbs to a second type of aphasia, called the ‘contiguity disorder’, in which ‘the syntactical rules organizing words into higher units are lost; this loss, called agrammatism, causes the degeneration of the sentence into a “word heap” . . .’ This disorder causes an inability to understand particulars; as Jakobson puts it: ‘to say what a thing is, is to say what it is like’.37 This is the opposite of Arthur’s disorder. Lancelot has recognized the symmetries only to miss the particulars: he reasons that if he (Lancelot) is like Tristram, then Arthur is like Mark. Both kinds of disorder (the ‘selection’ and the ‘contiguity’) belong to the larger consciousness of Malory’s book, which, as a compilation, is at all times somewhat fragmented. Now, however, the clear-sighted Bors corrects the mistake, Lancelot learns, and the action moves to Joyous Gard. What has happened in Bors and Lancelot’s exchange is not the curing of the book’s disorders, but a sharpening of the diagnosis. Arthur is the one who is unable to learn from history, and who receives no correction in this from a Bors-type. There is a sense that the conversation between Lancelot and Bors is also part of the reality from which, since Merlin’s death perhaps, Arthur has been always (and necessarily) veiled. Arthur is once again the boy whose future is under discussion by magnates. As, in the ensuing siege, Lancelot negotiates from the battlements of Joyous Gard, he becomes ever more suggestive of the father which we might have expected Arthur, as king and law-giver, to be. The colloquies between Arthur and Gawain and the besieged Lancelot serve to screw up the tension between Arthur’s ‘death wish’ (and Gawain’s) and Lancelot’s guiding patience (which, in relation to Gawain, will later give way to punishing violence). The following exchange is highly descriptive of these relations: ‘Com forth,’ seyde kynge Arthur unto sir Launcelot, ‘and thou darste, and I promyse the I shall mete the in myddis of thys fylde.’ 35 Ibid., p. 1173.12–20. 36 Ibid., p. 1173.21–5. 37 ‘Two Aspects of Language’, pp. 106, 107.

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‘God deffende me,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘that ever I shulde encounter wyth the moste noble kynge that made me knyght.’ ‘Now, fye uppon thy fayre langayge!’ seyde the kynge, ‘for wyte thou well and truste hit, I am thy mortall foo and ever woll to my deth-day; for thou haste slayne my good knyghtes and full noble men of my blood, that shall I never recover agayne. Also thou haste layne be my quene and holdyn her many wynters, and sytthen, lyke a traytoure, taken her away fro me by fors.’ ‘My moste noble lorde and kynge,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘ye may say what ye woll, for ye wote well wyth youreselff I woll nat stryve . . .’38

When Lancelot’s army does finally issue out of Joyous Gard, Lancelot’s restraint continues to distinguish him from Gawain. While Gawain’s first deed in that battle is to smite Sir Lionel ‘thorowoute the body, that he daysshed to the erth lyke as he had ben dede’, Lancelot’s efforts demonstrate both superior skill and a saint-like refusal to spill blood: ‘. . . and ever sir Launcelot ded what he myght to save the people of kynge Arthurs party . . . And ever was kynge Arthur about sir Launcelot to have slayne him, and ever sir Launcelot suffird hym and wold nat stryke agayne.’39 That Lancelot’s efforts both preserve life and prolong the war is not a paradox: war is the proper setting for a perfect knight, and the medium in which he dispenses both justice and mercy. The episode’s most dramatic deferment of narrative closure occurs later in this battle when Bors has unhorsed Arthur and stands ready to kill him when – initiating an operatic suspension of action – he asks Lancelot, ‘Sir, shall I make an ende of thys warre?’ (For he mente to have slayne hym.) ‘Nat so hardy,’ sayde sir Launcelot, ‘uppon payne of thy hede, that thou touch hym no more! For I woll never se that moste noble kynge that made me knyght nother slayne nor shamed.’ And therewithall sir Launcelot alyght of hys horse and toke up the kynge and horsed him agayne, and seyd thus: ‘My lorde the kynge, for Goddis love, stynte thys stryff, for ye gette no worshyp and I wold do myne utteraunce. But allwayes I forbeare you, and ye nor none off youres forberyth nat me. And therefore, my lorde, I pray you remembir what I have done in many placis, and now am I evyll rewarded.’40

Lancelot’s speech is calculated to melt Arthur’s anger, and in fact Arthur is so chastened that ‘the teerys braste oute of hys yen’. The relationship between Arthur and Lancelot is now plainly analogous to that between Mellyagant and Lancelot: again, Lancelot has stepped into a parental void to chastise the infantile folly of others. Following this war, which concludes when another father, the Pope himself, orders the return of Guinevere, Arthur’s viability as a chivalric type is at its lowest ebb. The king commands no fear, has almost no negotiating power and no erotic potential. As Felicity Riddy notes, ‘It is as if, once Guinevere’s faithlessness ceases to be an issue, after she has been returned through the mediation of

38 Works, pp. 1187–8. 39 Ibid., pp. 1191.35–1192.1, 1192.4–11. 40 Ibid., p. 1192.14–27.

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the pope, then Arthur’s impotence is no longer obscured.’41 After this, Arthur’s attempts to enforce his law, both national and domestic, are co-opted by Gawain in his drive for revenge on Lancelot, then parodied by Mordred’s campaign to ‘unify’ Britain under himself. Arthur’s aphasia has moved into present time. But perhaps a word or two should be said in reply to these assertions (Riddy’s and mine) of Arthur’s infantilization and impotence. They correspond to assertions of Arthur’s general weakness by readers both of Malory and of his source-texts. Frappier sees Artus in the Vulgate Mort as an emotional wreck who alternates between ‘une grandeur farouche’ and immoderate weeping.42 Peter Korrell finds in the English stanzaic Morte a King Arthur who wallows in sorrow and is too reliant on the advice of others.43 Such observations assume that there is a model which Arthur is failing to read or remember, and that that model is the chivalric code. Edward Donald Kennedy points out that the English poet carefully mellows that farouche grandeur, and that Arthur’s reliance on advice is less a sign of weakness than of contemporary expectations, both literary and political, since ‘an Arthur who relies upon advice is consistent with kings who follow advice in speculum regis literature’, adding that the stanzaic poet was ‘presenting a king who was acting as one might expect an English king to act’. Kennedy also reminds us that epic heroes weep copiously (cf. Chanson de Roland), and that Lancelot himself weeps several times in the stanzaic Morte, ‘yet no one, to my knowledge has interpreted this as weakness in his character’.44 We must be careful, that is, not to falsify the standard by which heroes may disappoint us. For Malory’s King Arthur, however, as for the hero of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the very existence of such a standard is no longer a sure thing. For the one who must step outside the system of chivalry in order to bang it back into shape, the model offered by Lancelot is useless. Arthur’s tears derive not from his weakness but, with his weakness, from the damaged memory of an aureate protagonist. Arthur’s diminished powers of speech and comprehension – his aphasia – inhere, that is, precisely within his aura. King Arthur cannot ‘learn’ as Bors and Lancelot do – far less learn from them – since his path is altogether different. Discussing King Arthur as a figment of symbolic capital, Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman attribute his ineffectuality not to weakness but to his position in an imaginary economy which ‘demands the exclusion of the monarch from participation in exchange – most notably the exchange of violence’,45 but also, as we have seen, in the exchange of information, of historical interpretation, and of sex. In Malory’s book, Arthur’s deeds always have

41 ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in Companion, p. 66. 42 Étude sur La Morte le Roi Artu (Geneva: Droz, 1971), pp. 282–3, 328. 43 An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Origin, Development, and Characterization of Arthur,

Guinevere, and Modred (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), pp. 228–7.

44 ‘The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience’,

in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 91–112; 98, 99. 45 ‘No Pain, No Gain: Violence as Symbolic Capital in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur’, Arthuriana 8.2 (1998), pp. 115–34; 120.

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more at stake than Lancelot’s. This is partly because the Morte, a long narrative in the chronicle and not the love-aunter style, requires the king’s enduring political patronage; and partly because Arthur is, as Finke and Shichtman put it, ‘the privileged and excluded bearer of all value’.46 Arthur’s death-drama is traumatic because he is, as we have suggested, always non perfectus, but also because he is the principle of unity (both literary and political). If he fails at times to be a ‘worthy man’ it is because he exists in a much more dangerous space, and on a different timeline, than Lancelot or Bors. It is within a similarly dangerous space that we find Malory composing his book. Malory has undertaken to express, per argumentum, a vision of English history which is both redemptive and damning. The process of de-interlacing the ‘good’ and the ‘evyl’, then, has left his book with something of a divided consciousness. The estrangement of the Morte’s hemispheres is, on the one hand facilitated, even insured, by artificial structures of sequence and closure; on the other hand, those structures are provisional, and their collapse effects losses which, at the end, characters are reluctant to reckon, and which Malory must rush to count. That Britain collapses simultaneously with Malory’s psychoscribal structures of division is perhaps a function of what Vinaver called in Malory ‘the unexpounded miracle of style’.47 Certainly, that common collapse is something we may witness, almost in real time, in the closing sequences of the Morte Darthur.

Return and/or Arrival In these closing episodes we see a great many instances of returning. Patterns of return are present at the narrative level in protagonists who enact both spatial and mental return, and, at the textual level, in the increasingly deliberate nature of Malory’s acts of compilation. At the end of the first war against Lancelot, Arthur seems to have returned to the boyish condition of being advised by dominant personalities, Merlin being replaced by Gawain, the Pope, and by Lancelot himself. By means of this advice, the return of Guinevere is secured. After the siege of Joyous Gard is concluded, Lancelot returns home and to the political prerogatives which he exchanged for his seat at the Round Table, for the privilege of serving Guinevere. Gawain, who is dead to reason, now openly pursues death itself, Freud’s ultimate return. Other patterns of return might also be suggested: Mordred’s (perversely enough) to the womb, Guinevere’s to bridal status, Gawain’s from the dead. The text itself is also enacting a series of returns. After the lengthy digression that is ‘Tristram’ there is the return – to the reader’s relief, as Thomas Rumble confesses – to the matter of Arthur in the ‘Tale of the Sank Greal’. The Grail quest is itself a gesture of retrieving a lost perfection. With the return of the quest’s survivors (which allows the amorous reunion of Lancelot and Guinevere) the Round Table is glimpsed (even if the glimpse is illusory) in its former complete46 Ibid., pp. 119–20. 47 Works, p. lxiv.

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ness, the Galahad chapter being closed off. But also, Malory has returned to the Vulgate proper as his source-text, and to the theater in which the prophecies of the Merlin may be fulfilled, Arthur’s death-drama enacted. If there is no other return than that to death, as Freud tells us,48 then the Morte Darthur also, in these last books, must look to its own perfection. There is indeed a sense that Malory’s vast compilation is now making reference to an earlier, more perfect state of things, perhaps attempting to retrace the steps of its own ‘complicated detour’ to death. In the act of combining his source texts, Malory has disrupted those texts’ own internal economies, and taken on the job of maintaining them in their new configurations. He has opened them up to his reader and to each other in a series of, as it were, opening brackets, without thus far encountering the need to begin closing them again. After the Grail Quest, and especially in the ‘Piteous Tale’, however, the need for closure is making itself felt. As an effect of his book’s variously unresolved series of plots, Malory’s compilatio seems to arrive at a finer degree of articulation. According to Robert H. Wilson, Malory, having the French Mort Artu as a kind of back-drop source for the last tales, ‘may easily have drawn more or less on [the stanzaic Le Mort Arthur], to supplement [the Mort Artu], as his fancy struck him’.49 Wilson rightly observes that Malory shows a new tendency to interweave his sources more minutely, according to local necessity or inspiration. By way of qualifying and extending Wilson’s observation, we might point out here that Malory’s recourse to that ‘fancy’ becomes noticeable only after ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’ when the total book has gathered a momentum perhaps difficult to control, and the strain of closing off that momentum’s numerous constituent forces requires local action – which Malory can, increasingly, answer with precision patchwork – as if an all-encompassing resolution were now somehow out of the question. Kinds of composition previously practiced one at a time and in large, recognizable units – translation of French prose, adaptation of English poetry, original composition – he now practices in more rapid alternation. Malory stages the ‘Day of Destiny’ section, for instance, by means of the French, where Mordred has usurped the throne of England. Immediately upon setting this stage, however, Malory begins compressing the French prose by adding in compressions of the English poem. The French account, for instance, narrates Mordred’s gradual consolidation of power in Arthur’s absence: his summoning of the barons, his campaign for their hearts and minds, his assumption of royal prerogatives and his actual falling in love with Guinevere: Si repera tant Mordrés avec la reïne qu’il l’ama de si grant amour qu’il ne veoit pas qu’il n’en moreust, s’il n’en eüst ses volentez; si ne li osoit dire en nule maniere; si l’amoit si tres durement que nus ne poïst plus amer sanz mort par amors.50

48 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 28–37. 49 ‘Malory, the Stanzaic ‘Morte Arthur,’ and the Mort Artu’, Modern Philology vol. 37, issue 2

(November 1939), pp. 125–38; 130, 137.

50 Mort Artu, p. 171.

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Mordred was so often with the queen that he fell in love with her and did not see how he could fail to die of love, if his desires were not satisfied. However, he did not dare to admit it, but loved her as deeply as it was possible to love without dying.51

This is followed by Mordred’s falsification of letters to make Arthur report to Guinevere, somewhat absurdly, his own death at Lancelot’s hands, his concern for England’s future, his disavowal of Mordred’s incestuous double relationship to himself (‘Mordret que ge tonoie a neveu – mes il ne l’est pas’52 ‘I treated Mordred as my nephew – but he was not’), and his dying wish that Guinevere now marry the regent (Mordred), lest Lancelot should form designs on a fragmented, vulnerable England. All this Malory renders objectively, as bare chronicle: As sir Mordred was rular of all Inglonde, he lete make lettirs as thoughe that they had com frome beyonde the see, and the lettirs specifyed that kynge Arthur was slayne in batayle with sir Launcelot. Wherefore sir Mordred made a parlemente, and called the lordys togydir, and there he made them to chose hym kynge. And so was he crowned at Caunturbyry, and held a feste there fiftene dayes. And aftirwarde he drew hym unto Wynchester, and there he toke quene Gwenyver, and seyde playnly that he wolde wedde her (which was hys unclys wyff and hys fadyrs wyff).53

Of the two (Vinaverian) paragraphs cited, the first contains the following semantic parallels with the poem: a parlement (line 2978), made . . . hym kynge (line 2981), Caunturbyry (line 2982), hylde a feste there fiftene dayes (line 2985, where it is a ‘fourtenyght’ instead). The second is a paraphrase of the poem’s lines 2984–7: And after that to Wynchester he wente; A Ryche brydale he lette make bowne; In somyr, whan it was fayr and bryght, Hys faders wyfe than wolde he wedde54

The amount of compression in these ten lines of adaptation is characteristic of Malory’s last episodes, and also of Malory’s originality. When the writer is a compiler, such deliberate pruning, though it is a non-discursive form of authorship, is every bit as creative as the composition of new material. The most famous example of the latter type of authorship is in fact the next to be considered: And muche people drew unto hym [Mordred]; for than was the comyn voyce amonge them that with kynge Arthur was never othir lyff but warre and stryff, and with sir Mordrede was grete joy and blysse. Thus was kyng Arthur depraved [i.e. disparaged], and evyll seyde off; and many there were that kynge Arthur had brought up of nought, and gyffyn them londis, that myght nat than say hym a good worde. 51 52 53 54

Death of Arthur, trans. James Cable (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 160. Mort Artu, p. 172. Works, p. 1227.1–10. Le Morte Arthur, ed. J. D. Bruce, p. 90; and see Works, p. 1646, n.1227.1–7, 8–10.

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Lo ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what myschyff here was? For he that was the moste kynge and nobelyst knyght of the worlde, and most loved the felyshyp of noble knyghtes, and by hym they all were upholdyn, and yet myght nat thes Englyshemen holde them contente wyth hym. Lo thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom. Alas! thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.55

If the sermon momentarily disrupts the narrative, it does not go against the grain of the book itself. Such passages are not alien to chronicle writing, to Malory’s commitment to the ordering of his facts, or to the exemplarity which that ordering (at times) promotes. Mordred’s feelings about Guinevere are unnecessary to the Morte’s account, are not the stuff of historia: therefore they go unchronicled. Malory’s compression is indicative precisely of his prose model – that is, chronicle – which is not concerned with the interiority of protagonists but posits the ‘obdurate facticity of history itself’.56 In Malory we are given no opportunity to habituate ourselves to these facts: their ontological status is assured in the moment of their telling. As in the opening phrase of his entire book, which, as Field observes, is a chronicle (‘Hit befel’) and not a romance (‘whylom’) opening, Malory here writes ‘with matter-of-fact exactness; he might be continuing a set of annals. . . . He does not make us suspend our disbelief: he assumes our belief, and gains it by the very absence of suasions.’57 Malory’s quotidian touches – parliament, Canterbury, ‘fifteen days’ – are characteristic of his style, and they identify the present text as one concerned not with abstractions or with transcendence, but with particulars. Hence Malory’s own insistence on the here-and-now of his historical audience, and his stated wish for them to know he is addressing them specifically. The effect is similar, in fact, to that produced by Dante’s second-person address to his audience in Canto IX, lines 61–63 of the Inferno: O voi ch’avete gl’ intelleti sani, mirate la dottrina che s’ aconde sotto il valame degli versi strani O you who have sound reasoning consider the doctrine which is hidden beneath the veil of these strange verses

Dante – who refers his readers to the passage that has come before, in which Vergil protects the poet from the sight of Medusa’s head by double-veiling the poet’s eyes (placing his own hands over Dante’s) – does less than Malory to make the parallel explicit. Indeed, his intention seems to be to frighten his reader by pointing out that there is an allegory at work, even if an invisible one. Lydgate, in his own ‘exclamacion a
eyn men þat been vnkynde to þeir kynrede’, which follows the Arthur section of his Fall of Princes, does it less covertly, 55 Works, 1228.34–1229.14. 56 Maura Nolan, ‘The Art of History Writing: Lydgate’s Serpent of Division’, Speculum vol. 78, no.

1 (January 2003), pp. 99–127; 101.

57 Romance and Chronicle, pp. 37–8.

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keying his ‘exaumple’ to his own historical audience by momentarily taking on himself the role of auctor. In just the same way, Malory binds his audience to the historicity of his text, and himself joins the reader, momentarily, on the outside of a book which he, after all, is reading too. The textual condition of the ‘Lo ye all’ passage, which comes neither from ‘Freynsshe book’ nor English poem but is an interpolation, shares in this readerly perspective.58

Death of Gawain and Arthur’s dreams Suffering from the all-but-mortal stroke delivered by Lancelot in Benwick, Gawain lands at Dover with Arthur and helps beat back Mordred’s army. Receiving another blow to that ‘olde wounde’59 Gawain dies, or rather begins to die. He does not give up the ghost until he has confessed his fatal ‘wylfulness’60 to Arthur, is shriven, and writes – not dictates – a longish letter to Lancelot begging him to come help Arthur against Mordred, whose usurpation is also described in some detail. In his closing, Gawain, who has already mentioned the date, 10 May, now gives the time of day: it is ‘but two owrys and an halff afore my dethe’ which he knows will have occurred ‘by the owre of noone’61; Malory thus lets us compute the minute of the letter’s completion, 9.30 a.m. Finishing the letter, Gawain weeps with Arthur, receives the sacraments and dies precisely at noon. In the French, Gauvains makes a speech whose content is similar, but without causing anything to be written down, and without mentioning dates and times. What his speech does contain is a warning to Artus: . . . por Dieu, se vos vos poez garder d’assembler contre Mordret, si vos en gardez; car ge vos di veraiement, se vos morez par nul home, vos morroiz par lui.62 For God’s sake, if you can avoid fighting against Mordred do so, because I tell you truthfully that if you die at the hands of any man you will die at his.

This information is withheld by Gawain in Malory as in Malory’s English source, where Gawayne has no dying speech. In the stanzaic poem, in fact, Gawayne’s death is explicitly a silencing: Syr gawayne armyd hym in that stounde; Allas! to longe hys hede was bare; 58 Malory’s passage also contains a distinct literary echo of Chaucer’s ‘O stormy peple! Unsad

59 60 61 62

and evere untrewe!’ speech in the Clerk’s Tale, as spoken by the town’s ‘sadde folk’: Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane! Delitynge evere in rumbul that is newe, For lyk the moone ay wexe ye and wane! Ay ful of clapping, deere ynogh a jane! Youre doom is fals, youre constance yvele preeveth; A ful greet fool is he that on yow leeveth. (Riverside Chaucer, p. 150.995–1001) Since it is uttered from behind numerous veils of fiction, however, and since it is aimed inward (at the fictive populace) rather than directly at Chaucer’s readers, this speech, in context, is more conspiratorial than sermonic. Works, p. 1230.22. Ibid., p. 1230.20. Ibid., p. 1230.24. Mort Artu, p. 220; Death of Arthur, p. 199.

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he was seke And sore vnsound; hys woundis greuyd hym full sare; One hytte hym vpon the olde wounde With A tronchon of An ore; There is good gawayne gone to grounde, That speche spake he neuyr more.63

Malory brings the plangency of Gawain’s death-scene over from the French account, but still with a suggestion of the stanzaic Gawayne’s aphasia: though he is thinking of the future when he tells Lancelot to come to Arthur’s aid and to visit his own tomb, Malory’s Gawain does not predict the future, he has not yet the gift of prophecy. In Malory, as in the stanzaic poem, Gawain does not acquire this gift until he appears to Arthur in a dream-vision on the eve of the final battle (in the French also Gauvains appears, but there he essentially repeats what he said before dying). On that eventful night, ‘Trynyté Sunday’ as Malory (following the poet) tells us,64 Arthur has a dream in which he saw uppon a chafflet a chayre, and the chayre was faste to a whele, and thereuppon sate kynge Arthure in the rychest clothe of golde that myght be made. And the kynge thought there was undir hym, farre from hym, an hydeous depe blak watir, and therein was all maner of serpentis and wormes and wylde bestis fowle and orryble. And suddeynly the kynge thought that the whyle turned up-so-downe, and he felle amonge the serpentis, and every beste toke hym by a lymme.65

In Vinaver’s words, ‘The symbolism of the dream, obscure in the English rendering, is made perfectly clear in the French’;66 in Larry Benson’s, ‘Though [Fortune] does not appear in Arthur’s dream, her wheel does, and in this context only the most obtuse fifteenth-century reader could have missed its implications.’67 Both observations are correct, I think. The symbolism of the dream in Malory is certainly obscure in relation to the French version, in which the Dame is present to interpret the symbolism in a highly no-nonsense fashion: «C’est, fet ele, la roe de Fortune. . . . tel sont li orgueil terrien qu’il n’i a nul si haut assiz qu’il il ne le coviegne cheoir de la poesté del monde.» Et lors le prenoit et le trebuschoit a terre si felenessement que au cheoir estoit avis au roi Artu qu’il estoit touz debrisiez et qu’il perdoit tout le pooir del cors et des menbres.68 ‘This, she said, is the wheel of Fortune. . . . such is earthly pride that no one is seated so high that he can avoid having to fall from power in the world.’ Then she took him and pushed him to the ground so roughly that King Arthur felt that he had broken all his bones in the fall and had lost the use of his body and his limbs.

63 64 65 66 67 68

Le Morte Arthur, p. 93.3066–73. Works, p. 1233.11; Le Morte Arthur, p. 96.3160. Works, p. 1233.13–21. Ibid., p. 1649, nn. 1233.11–1234.19. Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 237. Morte Artu, p. 227; Death of Arthur, p. 205.

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In comparison, Malory’s (and the poet’s) version is rather obscure. But, especially in Malory’s case (where some other version could easily have been spliced in), the symbolism has the feeling of being left obscure rather than conceived in vagueness. Benson is correct in that the wheel is unmistakably Fortune’s (and as ‘perfectly plain’ as in the French). The difference between the two versions is that, in one text, Fortune is present and applies her force to the wheel, while in the other Dame Fortune is not there to name and claim her wheel. If she is there, out of sight in the dream’s chiaroscuro, she is not chronicled. The effect in Malory is to place the dream and its symbolism squarely in the history of the narrative. It particularizes rather than generalizes; it does not punish any one transgression specifically, but merely plunges down. It is really more an image than a symbol. There is also the strong suggestion that Arthur himself does not recognize it as Fortune’s wheel. In the French after all, Artus doesn’t know what the wheel signifies until the Dame tells him. Nor can we assume for Malory’s Arthur the savoir faire of a fifteenth-century reader. The protagonist’s mentality is opaque, and, without instruction (that of a Dame Fortune, or a Vergil, or a Sibyl), he does not possess the vocabulary of transcendence needed for the explication of images and symbols. In the historical moment of Arthur’s dream – within the historical moment of the Morte Darthur – the king is as if cast out of all recognizable forms of judgement, and journeying through a space in which justice (if it is that) is stripped of its comforting, socializing, generalizing functions. This too is a condition of aphasia. Speaking again of the ‘similarity disorder’, Jakobson observes: In the theory of language, since the early Middle Ages, it has repeatedly been asserted that the word out of context has no meaning. The validity of this statement is, however, confined to aphasia or, more exactly, to one type of aphasia. In the pathological cases under discussion, an isolated word means actually nothing but “blab.”69

As when Merlin delivered prophecies and dream interpretations in the habit of a young boy or an old peasant, the message is out of context and thus unintelligible or irrelevant; only now, Merlin (or, analogously, the Dame) does not appear to establish or re-establish context. Nothing in Malory’s subsequent narration, in fact, suggests that Arthur had the first idea of what kind of wheel he was supposed to be on; the king’s only verbal response to the dream is: ‘Helpe! helpe!’70 Nor does the king seek a philosopher, or talk about the dream to anyone, but stays waking in bed until dawn when ‘he felle on slumberynge agayne, nat slepynge nor thorowly wakynge’.71 At this time he has his second vision, that of Gawain and a host of fair ladies. Malory has waited until now – after the ‘wheel’ dream – to interpose Gawain’s warning and advice: that Arthur must not fight Mordred the following day but send for Lancelot who, in a month’s time, will 69 ‘Two Aspects of Language’, p. 102. 70 Works, p. 1233.22. 71 Ibid., p. 1233.26–7.

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come and ‘sle sir Mordred and all that ever wyll holde wyth him’,72 for, if the king fights Mordred the next day he will surely die. Quite unlike his counterpart in the Mort Artu, Arthur agrees readily and dispatches an embassy to Mordred with generous terms. When Mordred agrees to the terms, by which he is to take Cornwall and Kent now, and the rest of England after Arthur’s natural death, the Morte Darthur has managed to defer its conclusion once more.

The Last Fight When Arthur and Mordred meet on Salisbury Plain, it is for the purpose of normalizing relations; Arthur is content, for the moment, that there should be peace instead of war: ‘ “I am glad that thys ys done”; and so he went into the fylde’. That the peace is illusory, however, Malory tells us immediately: And whan kynge Arthur shulde departe he warned all hys hoost that and they se ony swerde drawyn, ‘loke ye com on fyersely and sle that traytoure, sir Mordred, for I in no wyse trust hym’. In lyke wyse sir Mordred warned hys oste that ‘and ye se ony maner of swerde drawyn, loke that ye com on fyersely and so sle all that ever before you stondyth, for in no wyse I woll nat truste for thys tretyse’. And in the same wyse seyde sir Mordred unto hys oste: ‘for I know well my fadir woll be avenged uppon me.’73

Even if Arthur’s suit for peace had not been conceived treacherously – since his wish is only to postpone battle until Lancelot comes – the détente is less than promising. But the manner in which the truce explodes into violence is a marvel against which neither Arthur nor Mordred could have warned his host. And so they mette as their poyntemente was, and were agreed and accorded thorowly. And wyne was fette, and they dranke togydir. Ryght so cam oute an addir of a lytyll hethe-buysshe, and hit stange a knyght in the foote. And so whan the knyght felte hym so stonge, he loked downe and saw the adder; and anone he drew hys swerde to sle the addir, and thought none othir harme. And whan the oste on bothe partys saw that swerde drawyn, than they blewe beamys, trumpettis, and hornys, and shoutted grymly, and so bothe ostis dressed hem togydyrs. And kynge Arthur toke hys horse and seyde, ‘Alas, this unhappy day!’ and so rode to hys party, and sir Mordred in lyke wyse. And never syns was there seyne a more dolefuller batayle in no Crysten londe, for there was but russhynge and rydyng, foynynge and strykynge, and many a grym worde was there spokyn of aythir to othir, and many a dedely stroke.74

This snake has been variously understood to arbitrate between the forces of accident and history, contingency and cause-and-effect, and, less often, fate and justice. Larry Benson sees the adder’s appearance as another stage in ‘the recurring suggestion of accident in Malory’s version’ which ‘clearly implies that

72 Ibid., p. 1234.18–19. 73 Ibid., p. 1235.7–17. 74 Ibid., p. 1235.18–33.

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Arthur is helplessly caught in forces beyond his or anyone’s control’.75 Mark Lambert suggests that in the absence of a strong moral axe to grind against Arthur, the text offers only facets of possible explanations: ‘. . . the essential point is that even if Arthur dies in one sense because he is, e.g., wrathful, he dies in another sense because an adder came out of a little heath bush and stung a knight in the foot’. Lambert seems to warn against a modern presumption of dominance for any one of the forces at play in the death sequence. ‘Many things could have prevented the ruin’, he writes, ‘but no one thing made it inevitable: the fate of the Round Table is fixed only at the very last minute’.76 The truce with Mordred is, as Elizabeth Edwards notes, ‘thrown over by the adder of contingency’. Contingency, she argues, operates from without the Morte’s closed system of meaning, and ‘only something outside the patterns of narrative that the book has ceaselessly reiterated can finish it’.77 Since Malory’s version follows the stanzaic Morte Arthur, we might also lend an ear to the critical treatment of that text. In her essay on the poem, Sherron E. Knopp observes: At first glance, the adder’s appearance in the ring of truce at the very moment Arthur is exercising his prerogative to choose seems to suggest the triumph of fate, as the incarnation of blind fortune slithers towards its hapless target. Yet if human choices had not already contributed to the decay of trust and loyalty among the once strong fellowship, how vulnerable would the target have been? The adder merely represents the extent to which men have destroyed the possibility of choice.78

Knopp’s observations, I think, provide a strong antidote to readings which favor the ‘accident’ theory of the end of Arthur’s history.79 Taking the ‘truce ring’ – which is actually a meeting between two fully outfitted armies, both of which have been instructed to begin hostilities at the slightest provocation – as a tableau emblematic of political relations between the two ‘partys’, it is difficult to attribute the outbreak of hostilities to contingency. The form of the snake does not provide a unique or necessary cause for the total war which attends the misrecognition of the bitten knight’s sword-flash. The war was inevitable anyway, since Arthur is just holding out for reinforcements. The snake, therefore, is a feature of artifice, and one whose symbolism is, to borrow Augustine’s word, multiplex. 75 76 77 78

Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 240. Style and Vision, p. 172. Genesis of Narrative, p. 175. ‘Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’, English Literary History vol. 45, issue 4 (Winter 1978), pp. 563–82; 580–1. 79 As do C. David Benson’s: ‘To consider the fall of the Round Table as a series of unhappy accidents that might well have been avoided . . . is to diminish Malory’s tragic vision. He may be a sentimentalist, but, for all his novelistic tendencies, he is a man of the Middle Ages who knows that no one lives happily ever after. The Arthurian court is a human institution and like all things of this world must come to an end: much more fitting that it be brought down by its champions than by its villains, by its virtues than by its vices’ (‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur’, in Companion, pp. 221–38; 233). One could object that, in the Augustinian theory of human history invoked, there could be, where Malorian chivalry is at stake, little if any distinction between virtue and vice, since, in Maura Nolan’s words, ‘In a history of this postlapsarian world, any episode monadically replicates the master narrative of fall and judgement’ (‘The Art of History Writing’, p. 113).

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C. David Benson lists the snake’s typology of the serpent in the Garden of Eden as part of the Morte’s ‘Christian coloring’.80 The snake must also be some cousin of the ‘serpentis and wormes’ which, in the ‘hydeous depe blak watir’ of Arthur’s dream, waited to seize him at his descent on the wheel. Among his direct sources Malory’s adder derives only from the stanzaic poem, and it retains a highly poetic economy, saying much in little space. It says much not only as a snake, but as a thing which – by ‘stinging’ a soldier whose name and affiliation always go unchronicled – brings with it a fatal act of misrecognition. Whereas the correct understanding of the soldier’s sword-flash would have excused it as intending ‘none othir harme’ than that to the snake, and having nothing to do with the truce or anything else, here the act of killing a snake brings, with harrowing swiftness, the abortion of peace talks and commencement of total war. That supposed ‘correct interpretation’, however, would have relied to an impermissible degree on intentionality. The difference between what the sword-flash intended and what it meant is nowhere to be found in the event. A sword has left its sheath: for this community of readers, the act has only one possible meaning. Here, the voluntarism represented by Arthur’s decision to sue for peace – wherein resided any hope for the future, any plan for deferring the end – is finally, explicitly cancelled. In his description of the battle itself, Malory favors the stanzaic version, which is shorter and, unlike the French, has the virtue of giving Mordred a central place in the battle. The poem’s account of the main battle is comparatively succinct; and Malory’s is even shorter. The poet concludes his account of battle with the following three stanzas: (424) Sythe bretayne owte of troy was sought And made in bretayne hys owne wonne, Suche wondrys neuyr ere was wroght, Neuyr yit vnder the sonne: By evyn leuyd was there noght That euyr steryd with blode or bone But Arthur and ij that he thedyr broghte, And mordred was levyd there Alone. (425) The tone was lucan de botelere, That bled at many A bale-full wound, And hys brodyr, syr bedwere, Was sely seke and sore vnsounde. Than spake Arthur these wordys there: “Shall we not brynge thys theffe to ground?” A spere he gryped with fell chere, And felly they gan to-gedyr found. (426) he hytte mordred amydde the breste And oute At the bakke bone hym bare; 80 ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur’, in Companion, p. 235.

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There hathe mordred hys lyffe loste, That speche spake he neuyr mare; But kenely vp hys Arme he caste And yaff Arthur A wound sare, In-to the hede throw the helme And creste, That iij tymes he swownyd thare.

Between the matter of stanzas 425 and 426, Malory inserts an amplification of his own: ‘Jesu mercy!’ sayde the kynge, ‘where ar all my noble knightes becom? Alas, that ever I shulde se thys doleful day! For now,’ seyde kynge Arthur, ‘I am com to myne ende. But wolde to God,’ seyde he, ‘that I wyste now where were that traytoure sir Mordred that hath caused all thys myschyff.’ Than kynge Arthur loked aboute and was ware where stood sir Mordred leanyng uppon hys swerde amonge a grete hepe of dede men. ‘Now, gyff me my speare,’ seyde kynge Arthure unto sir Lucan, ‘for yondir I have aspyed the traytoure that all thys woo hath wrought.’ ‘Sir latte hym be,’ seyde sir Lucan, ‘for he ys unhappy. And yf ye passe this unhappy day ye shall be ryght well revenged. And, good lord, remembre ye of your nyghtes dreme and what the spyryte of sir Gawayne tolde you tonyght, and yet God of Hys grete goodnes hath preserved you hyddirto. And for Goddes sake, my lorde, leve of thys, for, blyssed be God, ye have won the fylde: for yet we ben here three on lyve, and with sir Mordred ys nat one on lyve. And therefore if ye leve of now, thys wycked day of Desteny ys paste!’ ‘Now tyde me dethe, tyde me lyff,’ syde the kyng, ‘now I se hym yondir alone, he shall never ascape myne hondes! For at a bettir avayle shall I never have hym.’ ‘God spyede you well!’ seyde sir Bedyvere. Than the kynge gate his speare in bothe hys hondis, and ran towarde sir Mordred, cryyng and saying, ‘Traytoure, now ys thy dethe-day com!’81

Whereas the stanzaic poet makes the action of the battle lead directly and without hindrance to Mordred’s death, Malory introduces at this moment an epic colloquy in which the king is urged to refrain from the fight. Lucan’s speech, long by Malorian standards, seeks to defer once more the ultimate event. Interestingly, Arthur’s behavior is very much like Gawain’s toward Lancelot. The settling of the score is more important now than what the consequences of that settling will be. One wants less to live than to satisfy the blood-feud; as Gawain says savagely, ‘lat us ease oure hartis!’82 In either case the protagonist has realized how tricky is his quarry, that timing is everything. The decision also finds both heroes resigned to death. Like Achilles in Iliad XXI, Arthur has no plans for the future; we hear this in his speech in this passage, where ‘now’ is repeated six times. The moment in which Mordred and Arthur close is also amplified by certain details, at turns quotidian and nasty, of Malory’s own invention. Compare the following with stanza 426 (cited above):

81 Works, pp. 1236.16–1237.11. 82 Ibid., p. 1216.9.

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. . . and there kyng Arthur smote sir Mordred undir the shylde, with a foyne of hys speare, thorowoute the body more than a fadom. And whan sir Mordred felte that he had hys deathys wounde he threste hymselff with the myght that he had upp to the burre of kyng Arthurs speare, and ryght so he smote hys fadir, kynge Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet and the tay of the brayne. And therewith Mordred daysshed downe starke dede to the erthe.83

Details remind us on the one hand that Malory was a writer who had seen swords and spears, and knew what they did do: a ‘foyne’ under the shield, the cubit measure of the spear poking out of a back, ‘burre’ of the spear, the anatomic specificity of ‘tay of the brayne’. These details are gory, but quotidian. On the other hand, these details lend the scene its tragic (and, to some degree, transcendent) power. We are, finally, allowed to witness a cathartic shuffling-off of mortalities and of hatreds: Mordred’s pulling himself up to the ‘burr’ of Arthur’s spear is Malory’s own detail and one of the most memorable in the book. The burr is the metal ring just above the spear’s grip-area, so we must imagine the ‘fadom’, or cubit, of spear protruding from Mordred’s back to increase its length accordingly.84 That the painful journey which Malory causes Mordred to undergo, up the length of a spear, ends with a successful (if not instantaneous) parricide makes it a journey worthy of a Sophoclean protagonist. The same may be said of Arthur, who does implicitly what Mordred, in thrusting himself along the spear, does explicitly: he too has chosen death and vengeance. In the description of this moment, as Helen Cooper has observed, Malory uses the dual apposition ‘Hys fadir, kynge Arthure’ for the first and only time in his book: ‘and he holds it back’, she notes, ‘until the stroke that cuts down the whole Arthurian world’.85

The Myrmidons of Death !ll+, f8lov, q+ne kai s_ No, friend, you die too.

(Achilles to Lycaon, Iliad, XXI.106)

Malory introduces a further variation to the last battle when he drops the Morte Arthur poet’s reference to Troy. The stanzaic poet, like the Gawain-poet in the first line of his poem, looks backward to Brutus’s arrival as Britain’s historical ground zero; he places Arthur at the ‘center’ of that history and his own act of narration on the forward edge (see stanza 424, cited above). In his system of historical comparisons the poet gives both the terminus a quo (‘sythe’) and 83 Ibid., p. 1237.13–22. 84 John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) visualizes this scene with gruesome fidelity, though the

weaponry is reversed: Mordred has the spear and Arthur the sword. Thus Arthur, wounded first, pulls himself the length of Mordred’s spear to dispatch him with Excalibur. Despite its rewiring of patent Freudian implications, the switch was probably meant to bring the battle scene into line with the film’s title, since it allows Arthur to wield Excalibur in the climactic scene. 85 ‘Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing’, in Companion, p. 155.

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terminus ad quem (‘neuyr yit’). By contrast Malory has: ‘And never syns was there seyne a more dolefuller batayle in no Crysten londe.’86 At this moment, Malory not only exchanges ‘Trojanness’ for Christianity, but shifts the historical orientation of the remark. Instead of ‘turning back the clock’ to Brutus, Malory turns it back only to Arthur’s time. Malory sees Arthur’s battle with Mordred as the touchstone event. While the Gawain- and stanzaic poets establish a typological, or genealogical, link between Brutus and Arthur, Malory simply says of the battle that, up to the present day, nothing ‘dolefuller’ has been seen. Whereas the poem’s narration is free to operate in a present which coincides with the action, Malory’s is not; the Morte’s present coincides strictly with that of the fifteenthcentury storyteller and his audience. (This sense of the Morte narrative’s ‘now’ may still be fresh in the reader’s mind from the ‘Lo ye all Englysshemen’ passage.) Just as significant is the implicit rejection by Malory of an identification of Arthur with Brutus. This is perhaps an effect of the historical, geographical and ideological nexus which Malory stipulates: Christendom. Battles of equal fury, the construction implies, may have occurred in pagan times and places, but such a precedent would be outside the scope of this analogy. Since Malory is not in the habit of Christianizing his material, however, this explanation seems only partially satisfying. Instead, the absence of the ‘bretyayne owte of troy’ motif in the Morte must have its motivation in Arthur’s own relation to that founder in British chronology and genealogy. Their typologies, analogized by the poet, are not, in fact, parallel. Since it is always as a father-killer that Brutus founds Britain – exiled from his gens for the (prophesied and yet accidental) murder of his father Silvius – Brutus is more a type of Mordred than he is of Arthur. For that matter, Brutus is more like Oedipus than he is like Aeneas. Aeneas and Brutus each wander in exile before founding a new Troy, but, unlike Silvius, Anchises dies a natural death, and is buried by a pious son according to all the customs. Brutus is, like Oedipus, like Mordred, ill-favored in prophecies.87 Mordred, also conceived in a ‘secret’ relationship, and whose birth was also attended with prophecies of parricide, is himself similarly distanced from the royal family. As Malory’s whole book has been aware, Mordred will now, on the destined day, fatally close that distance. To suggest to the reader, however, that Mordred’s is the dominant typology would run counter to Malory’s project. The outcome of the Day of Destiny must be precisely that no new Troy arise. We thus have, in the absence of a mention of Brutus and Troy, a more particularly constituted historical moment. This is the end not as repetition, but as the last stop, the completion of the death drive which, up until the last battle, has only been childishly repeating itself. Malory’s opening up for consideration the time between Arthur and his own age, and constituting it as void of sufficiently heroic battles, is perhaps to be read as a declarative rather than as an intensifier: the age of transcendent action, with its typologies, with its ideas of heroic privilege, is now reduced to a historical particular. Quoting Felicity Riddy,

86 Works, p. 1235.30–1. 87 History of the Kings of England, pp. 54–5.

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The last battle, which brings in its train the end of everything, is a symbol of the chivalric world turning its nihilistic energy upon itself, and destroying its own possibility of continuity. The mutual murders of Arthur and Mordred recall the much earlier murders of Balin and Balan, but now these close off history: there are no allusions forward, as there had been in Balin and Balan’s story, to other succeeding narratives.

Riddy finds here Malory’s figuration of ‘the death-wish of a class’.88 That the final battle between Arthur and Mordred depicts the fulfillment of each combatant’s death-wish appears obvious, and Riddy goes the next step quite persuasively. The ‘class’ in question is not only that constituted by Arthur and his knights, but also Malory’s historical audience, Caxton’s customers, whose age witnessed the ‘mutual murders’ of civil war, of whose desire the Morte Darthur is ostensibly a fulfillment. There remains a problem with this formulation, however: murder is not a proper expression of the death drive. ‘Murder’ is rather a symptom of the pleasure principle, whose engagement with the reality principle in a constant dialectic of conflict-and-repression, leads, if we follow Freud’s logic, to ‘the mysterious masochistic trends of the ego’.89 In order for Felicity Riddy’s insight to obtain, which I believe it must, we cannot call Arthur and Mordred’s death-exchange ‘murder’. The deaths in question – like the deaths-in-combat of other nobility – do not reside in individual bodies only: they reside in the disappearance of a spirit; they are not effected by the criminal agency of a murderer, but by the effective history of Arthurian texts. If we recall Freud’s characterization of the death instinct cited in this book’s Introduction, we find a strangely accurate description of Arthur’s last battle: What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life [the instincts], too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly – by a kind of short circuit.

Riddy is right about the ‘death-wish of a class’ because killing among the nobility was not murder: ‘leve thy babelynge and com off,’ says Gawain, ‘and lat us ease our hartis!’ William, Lord Berkeley, also uses this phrase, we recall, in his letter of 19 March 1469, to Thomas ‘The English Achilles’ Talbot: ‘I will appoint a short day to ease thy malitious heart and thy false counsaille that is with thee.’ ‘Babelynge’ and ‘false counsaille’ are effects of the aphasic disturbances we have observed: speech acts which badly approximate the proper desire, and in which reside the memories of injury. To ease one’s heart, then, is to cancel the memory of one’s injury; this Gawain, Mordred and Arthur all do.

88 ‘Contextualizing the Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in Companion, p. 72. 89 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 12.

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Conclusion Along the clouded path to consolation which Dame Philosophy expounds to the prisoner, forgetfulness must always be conquered a ‘seconde tyme’. In like fashion, Arthur’s memories, Malory’s memories of Arthur, and the cultural memories which diverse gentlemen wish Caxton to remember for them – all approximated by the form and content of Malory’s book – can be said to have been forgotten twice: once by the ‘contagious conjunccioun’ of book with the text, translation with the source, material object with the cultural desire. In each of these relations, the approximate identification between the one and the other – the ‘body with the soule’ in Chaucer’s Boece – provides ‘secret’ hiding places for necessary repressions. Memories are forgotten the second time, as the prisoner says, ‘by the charge and the burdene of my sorrowe’. The redundancy of ‘charge’ and ‘burdene’ is utterly thematic, since mesfait sur mesfait has habituated the ‘organism’ to its history of deferment. It is at the conclusion of this history that some of Malory’s most deliberate artistry emerges, when it is necessary to remember, however inefficiently, the forgotten causes of mesfaits.

Epilogue: Two Gestures of Closure . . . an adventure is, by both etymology and convention, an incident that cannot be known in advance. Logically then, if adventures disappear, the outcome of present events may become predictable. (Norris Lacy, ‘The Morte Artu and Cyclic Closure’)1

And what a nightmare that would be! Thus the possibility of adventures is the element most carefully tended by authors of romance. The technique of interlace provided that no one adventure in the Vulgate Cycle would end without another remaining in the balance. Malory’s de-interlaced version keeps the possibility alive by means of architectural innovation and strategically oblique prophecy. In either method, theoretically, the necessary conditions for adventure can be maintained world without end. Even so, whether in Malory or in the Vulgate, there is a structural point at which Arthurian adventure must disappear, and that point is the conclusion of the Lancelot-and-Guinevere drama. That conclusion may be considered either the demise of the characters themselves, or the deadly malaise which permeates the Mort Artu generally; one could also speculate from this point as to the end of the genre itself. In any case it is the era beyond which Arthurian narrative may not progress. Accordingly, the author of the French Mort provides for the non-continuation of the story so that it might not be amended: Si se test ore atant mestre Gautiers Map de l’Estoire de Lancelot, car bien a tout mené a fin selonc les choses qui en avindrent, et fenist ci son livre si outreement que aprés ce n’en porroit nus riens conter qui n’en mentist de toutes choses.2 Up to this point, then, Master Walter Map authorizes the Story of Lancelot, because he has guided everything to a proper conclusion according to the things that happened; and he finishes his book here so completely that after this no one can tell any more of the story without falsifying the whole thing.

By this, of course, the Post-Vulgate continuators took Walter to mean that nothing further could be added to the end, and they were right not to meddle with his ne plus ultra. Malory also recognizes the necessary finality of the end, so much so that, as I have argued, his book incorporates various doomed strategies for avoiding that recognition. His final sequence, then, obeys the generic requirements in the important things. His book, like his characters, ‘makes a good end’. The end, however, remains a disturbance.

1 2

In The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Texts and Transformations, ed. William W. Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 85–97; 87. Mort Artu, p. 263. (My translation.)

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That disturbance is due in part to the health, at Malory’s moment, of the genre itself. The difficulties of closing off the life of King Arthur were related in the previous chapter to memory: genre itself is a literary memory, binding texts by recollection. Within the generic field, texts may vary their materials, but the memory, the genre, is always defined, as Lucretius might say, by certain deep-set boundary marks, outside which a story is not properly remembered, understood or written. As such, paradoxically, the genre defies the most important element of romance: adventure. This is especially so when we consider translation as an element of romance textuality, when we consider all of Malory’s attributions (true or false) to his French book. If the outcome of present events – of present literary projects – is predictable, to meddle with Lacy’s formula, then adventures disappear, and thus so does the genre. Jean Frappier seems to detect this self-destruct mechanism operating in the Mort Artu. Despite the limitations of his vocabulary and the monotony of his expression, the author of the Mort Artu commands a style dignified and at times vivacious

and dramatic. But it is not adequate to the richness and beauty of the theme. This ‘Twilight of the Gods’ needs all the resources of an orchestra and the thunder-peal of organs; one has to be content with a flute.3 Norris Lacy observes rightly that such Wagnerian thunder-peals as Frappier desires ‘could be nothing more than misplaced bombast’ – Shaw suggested they were so in the Götterdämmerung itself4 – and observes further that drama itself is hard to find in the Mort. ‘The drama of the cycle’, Lacy writes, ‘occurred earlier, and we are now witnessing its harvest.’5 This harvest is the future, in other words, of romance. As Frappier suggests, there is more here than a text: there is a theme, for Frappier a ‘rich and beautiful’ theme. Does Malory’s translation transmit such a theme? The end of Malory’s book, then, is an occasion to think about the contingencies of translation itself. Jacques Lezra charts the difficulty of such determinations. For when we judge the felicity and effects of a translation, do we not also need to know, as it were, a history of the translation’s (and the work’s) effects

yet-to-come? How might these be reckoned? What temporal and imaginative “translation” is required of us in order to inscribe upon the translation that we are evaluating the history of its effects-to-come?6 Looking at translation, then, is like looking at romance, whose ruling principle, adventure, provides that events ‘cannot be known in advance’. In Malory’s own act of translation, we discovered a provisional theatre for entertaining such a

3 4 5 6

‘The Vulgate Cycle’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 295–318; 313. George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite (New York: Dover, 1967), pp. 83–5. ‘The Morte Artu and Cyclic Closure’, pp. 88, 95. ‘The Indecisive Muse’, in Divided Loyalties: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Routledge, 2006) (forthcoming).

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future by situating Malory’s composition of the Morte at one end of a production-narrative and Caxton’s publication of that composition at the other. Malory, dead in 1471, could not have foreseen the exact utility of his book as the surface which would bear Caxton’s 1485 anti-Richard III ‘graffiti’, but it is partly his book’s translation-ontology which allowed ‘bear’ to be changed to ‘boar’. Indeed, if not for the consistency with which this change was made (six times) in Caxton’s text, the discrepancy might be attributed to an infelicity in translation, in copying, or in typography – just as we called Caxton’s printing ‘tombe’ for ‘wombe’ in ‘Balyn’ a felicitous infelicity (Was it?). But the changing of bear into boar is consistent, and not only that: it creates a double disturbance since the rest of the dream-creature’s anatomy remains unchanged: Caxton’s boar, in other words, has not hooves but, quite unnaturally, paws. Of course, the effect of ‘boar’ is enhanced by this incorrectness: the boar in question is a badge, not a taxonomy. And the ‘thing’ whose badge it is is Richard III, who was himself, from Caxton’s point of view, an unnatural disturbance. If the specific details of these disturbances were unforeseeable to anyone in 1471, the future of Malory’s book was even then taking shape in the rubricated names of knights, places, feasts and ‘Sankgreall’. Readers, the scribes knew, would read and recognize these names, and in that recognition converge on some principle of political unity. ‘In a time of crisis,’ writes Lezra, ‘certain names act as compensatory and therapeutic fantasies: names like “Excalibur” or “the Alamo”, “World Trade Center” or “Hiroshima” establish and affirm the existence of an imagined community . . . capable of recognizing a common allusion, and of recognizing themselves as a community in and by means of that name or allusion.’7 Names collectively read and recognized thus become stabilized in their ideological coloring, their aura. If Caxton could not reproduce the rubrication (in the sense of ‘making red’) in his incunable, he still preserves it in his ‘rubrics’. His thematic table of contents, and their corresponding textual divisions, identified his printed version as belonging both to Chaucerian exemplarity and to that poet’s high-literary translatio. Such was Caxton’s ‘translation’, such was the ‘future effect’, of Malory’s translation, and of the Winchester scribes’ red names. Those names, that translation, then, would authorize the bear/boar switch whereby the body of Richard III could be, symbolically, smitten ‘all to powdre bothe flesshe and bonys that it flytteryd al abrode on the see’. Returning to Lancelot-and-Guenivere, then, we are again faced with reading a specific set of decisions in the realm(s) of translation and of naming. Malory translated from the stanzaic poem and the French original so that Lancelot’s request for a final kiss, Guinevere’s refusal of that kiss, and Lancelot’s promise to become a hermit would be occasioned by a recollection of the Holy Grail. ‘And God deffende but that I shulde forsake the worlde as ye have done! For in the queste of the Sankgreall I had that tyme forsakyn the vanytees of the worlde, had nat youre love bene. And if I had done so at that tyme with my harte, wylle,

7

Ibid.

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and thought, I had passed all the knyghtes that ever were in the Sankgreall8 excepte syr Galahad, my sone. And therefore lady, sythen ye have taken you to perfeccion, I must nedys take me to perfection, of ryght. For I take recorde of God, in you I have had myn erthly joye, and yf I had founden you now so dysposed, I had caste me to have had you into myn owne royame. But sythen I fynde you thus desposed, I ensure you faythfully, I wyl ever take me to penaunce and praye whyle my lyf lasteth, yf that I may fynde ony heremyte, other graye or whyte, that wyl receyve me. Wherefore, madame, I praye you kysse me, and never no more.’ ‘Nay,’ sayd the queen, ‘that shal I never do, but absteyne you from suche werkes.’ And they departed; but there was never so harde an herted man but he wold have wepte to see the dolour that they made, for there was lamentacyon as they had be stungyn wyth sperys, and many tymes they swooned. And the ladyes bare the queen to hir chambre.9

Apart from his own excellent touches – ‘. . . stungyn wyth sperys’ is Malory at his best – the Morte, in its brightly rubricated manuscript, effects one last time the fetishistic ruby cluster of ‘Lancelot-Guinevere-Grail’.10 If the word ‘fetishistic’ implies the impropriety of such a feature, that impropriety is a contingency fully appreciated in Malory’s text: Lancelot’s impropriety in asking for a kiss is akin to the English stanzaic poet’s (and Malory’s) improper inclusion, or invention, of that scene in the first place. The thematic, generic reader says: ‘There should be more at stake here than the quality of a kiss!’ There should be either Frappier’s Wagnerian climax or Lacy’s dignified renunciation (note the pregnant oxymoron of his essay’s title: ‘Cyclic Closure’). Malory conceives neither. He intensifies the fetish to include that other, perhaps ultimate, fetish object, the Holy Grail, which looms absently over Lancelot’s lame gambit. After this, with the exception of a Petrarchan moment of morbid communion between Lancelot and Guinevere’s corpse,11 their deaths are more or less text-book. That is one gesture of closure; another follows. While Malory also observes, in Vinaver’s words, ‘the age-long rule according to which when the action is completed no characters should be left unaccounted for’,12 he accounts for them differently. The book’s last paragraph reads: And somme Englysshe bookes maken mencyon that they wente never oute of Englond after the deth of syr Launcelot – but that was but favour of makers. For the Frensshe book maketh mencyon – and is auctorysed – that syr Bors, syr Ector, syr Blamour and syr Bleoberis wente into the Holy Lande, thereas Jesu Cryst was quycke and deed. And anone as they had stablysshed theyr londes, for, the book saith, so syr Launcelot commaunded them for to do or ever he passyd oute of

8

This ‘Sankgreall’ is the last word in the Winchester manuscript, except for the catchwords ‘except sir’ at the foot of the page (f. 484v); the remainder of Works is based on Caxton. 9 Works, p. 1253.11–33. 10 See also f. 35r (Works, p. 97.29–32). 11 Works, p. 1256.21–39; an original passage. 12 Ibid., pp. 1662–3.

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thys world, there these foure knyghtes dyd many bataylles upon the myscreantes, or Turkes. And there they dyed upon a Good Fryday for Goddes sake.13

Nor are we surprised when, despite Malory’s appeal to auctoritas, Vinaver remarks that ‘in no French version do Arthur’s knights appear as crusaders fighting “myscreauntes or Turkes” ’.14 The Mort Artu, if we date it at c. 1230–1235, was written in the era of the Fourth Crusade’s Latin Empire (c. 1201–1261) and that crusade was fought not against Turks but Greek Christians. Since that particular crusade devolved so famously into looting, atrocity and scandal, and resulted in the excommunication of its Venetian backers, recollection of French involvement in it, which was wide, might well not have been desired. More to the point, the Mort romancer would have no more use for a crusade at this moment than for a Grail hermit or a lycanthrope: the matter, the genre, the ‘theme’ all rule out such extra-generic elements implicitly (with or without a ne plus ultra). The close of the Mort Artu, as ‘Walter’ tells us, is the end of l’Estoire de Lancelot and as such it has the job of putting the brakes on the whole thing (‘de toutes choses’), on the massive momentum of the entire cycle. It is emphatically not the occasion for a sawed-off crusade story. In Malory’s time, crusade-wise, not much was on the horizon. Hoccleve had in 1412 urged Henry V to take the cross, as Henry IV had talked of doing: Vppon þe mescreantys to make werre, And hem vnto the feith of crist to brynge, Good were; therynne may ye no thyng erre, That were a meritorye werryng; That is the wey vn-to the conqueryng Of hevenes blysse, that is endeles, To which yow brynge the auctor of pees.15

But Henry never went. More contemporary with Malory was the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and its ‘recovery’ by Christian forces in 1456, so that in the later fifteenth century the significant nationality to be associated with crusading would be the Turks. In fighting Turks and miscreants, then, Malory’s four knights would not only be carrying on an ‘ideal’ form of the crusade, but also continuing the continental work begun in Malory’s Roman War. Malory forgets – or as Larry Benson suggests, simply does not care16 – that three of these four were, up until this moment, hermits. As Meg Roland reminds us, however, it is not necessarily Malory who forgot or did not care: our only witness to this passage is Caxton’s 1485 edition. In a paper delivered at the 2005 Congress of the International Arthurian Society in Utrecht, Professor Roland demonstrated the overwhelming likelihood of

13 Ibid., p. 1260.5–15. 14 Ibid., p. 1663, n. 1260.5–15. 15 Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s. 72 (London: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1899), lines 5433–9. See also Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, pp. 222–3.

16 Malory’s Morte Darthur, p. 247.

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Caxton’s authorship of this final passage (Works, pp. 1295.34–6 – 1260.1–15). Her thorough stylistic analysis reveals, among other things, that while the word ‘Turks’ appears nowhere else in the Morte Darthur, the yoking of ‘turkes’ and ‘myscreauntes’, and of ‘sarasyns’ and ‘myscreaunts’, appears in Caxton’s prologues and continuations of Brut (1480), Godeffroy of Bologne (1481), and Charles the Grete (1485). Furthermore, Malory’s Morte Darthur is written in the arc of an ascending fear of the Turks, an arc that reaches its zenith just as Caxton publishes Malory’s work in the mid 1480s when Europe was still awash in uncertainty as to the repercussions of Mehmed II’s death.

Like the rise of Richard III, the death of Mehmed II (1481) was a specific problem Malory himself could not have pondered, but it was during Malory’s lifetime that, with his father Murad II, Mehmed was advancing across Europe.17 While arguing that the Morte’s final passage ‘bears the unmistakable stamp of Caxton’, then, Professor Roland asserts that Malory was ‘part of this arc of Mortal contest with the Turks, and also participates in the shift from the positioning of Crusade as militaristic campaign to the Holy Land, to that of apocalyptic defense of European Christian civilization’.18 As in the case of the ‘bear’/‘boar’ switch in the Roman War, Malory’s book was here for Caxton a live channel of political communication. And it is thus less surprising that Malory and Caxton should have departed from their sources at this moment. Le Morte Darthur had not the same freight as the Mort Artu. Malory’s book – from the moment of its first composition to its publication in the summer of 1485 – was concerned with the political regeneration of English knighthood. It was not ‘thematic’, then, for the book to end with Lancelot and Guinevere, the adulterous imps of Arthur’s downfall, but to show that, at the level of individual knighthood, the kingdom retained a fully oriented scrappiness; that neither dead lovers, nor a dead genre, nor even hermetic vows, would force knights to sit in peace if, somewhere, there was war-work to be done. That these four horsemen all die on Good Friday, then, ends the book on an upbeat note. Whoever wrote it, perhaps no ending could be more proper to the book Caxton thought Malory was writing. If Frappier wanted symphonic thunder and groaning organs, it is not surprising that, to him, the conclusion of the French Mort sounded flutelike. Malory heard, and made, different and less predictable music for the occasion. After the death of King Arthur, the members of the orchestra fade, as in Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony (no. 45), their number dwindling dramatically to two. In the symphony’s first performance, in a hall illuminated only by candles perched on music stands, Haydn had each member of the orchestra extinguish his candle as his instrument dropped out of the score; by the conclusion, two candles stayed

17 The Crusades: A Short History, Jonathan Riley-Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987),

pp. 228–30.

18 My thanks to Professor Roland for allowing me to quote from her manuscript.

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lit while the symphony, reduced now to violin duet, played out its last notes. Lancelot and Guinevere are given similar directions. But the Morte Darthur really ends, as if not giving a damn for generic piety, with a brief, robust quartet – the four knights in Jerusalem – noisy and anachronistic.

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d’après le manuscrit 112 du fonds français de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris: Nizet, 1960) Pollard, A. J., Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (London: Longman, 2000) ———, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Palgrave, 2001) Radulescu, Raluca L., ‘John Vale’s Book and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur: A Political Agenda’, Arthuriana vol. 9, no. 4 (1999) ———, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003) Riddy, Felicity, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987) ———, ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in Companion (1996), pp. 55–73 Ross, Charles, Edward IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Rumble, Thomas C., ‘ “The Tale of Tristram”: Development by Analogy’, in Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), pp. 118–83 Rushton, Cory, ‘Talk is Cheap: Political Discourse in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Disputatio 5 (2002), pp. 67–85 Sargent-Bauer, Barbara, ‘Veraces Historiae aut Fallaces Fabulae?’ in Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris Lacy (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 25–39 Scanlon, Larry, ‘The King’s Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes’, in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 216–47 ———, Narrative Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Scattergood, V. J., Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1971) Shichtman, Martin B., see Finke, Laurie A. Stones, E. L. G., Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965) Strohm, Paul, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) ———, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) ———, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) Sumption, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War, 2 vols (London: Faber & Faber, 1990, 1999) Sutton, Anne F., ‘Malory in Newgate: A New Document’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Seventh Series, vol. I., no. 3 (September 2000), pp. 244–62 Taylor, John, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987) Vinaver, Eugène, Malory (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1929) ———, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) ———, ‘A Note on Malory’s Prose’, in Aspects of Malory (1981), pp. 9–15 Whetter, K. S., ‘On Misunderstanding Malory’s Balyn’, in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur, ed. K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 149–62 Wilson, R. H., ‘Malory, the Stanzaic “Morte Arthur,” and the Mort Artu’, Modern Philology vol. 37, issue 2 (November 1939), pp. 125–38

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167

———, ‘Malory’s “French Book” Again’, Comparative Literature vol. 2, issue 2 (Spring 1950), pp. 172–81 ———, ‘Notes on Malory’s Sources’, Modern Language Notes vol. 66, issue 1 (January 1951), pp. 22–6 ———, Characterization in Malory: A Comparison with his Sources (Norwood Editions, 1977) ———, ‘More Borrowings by Malory from Hardyng’s Chronicle’, N&Q, n.s. 17 (1970), pp. 208–10 Wofford, Susanne, ‘The Enfolding Dragon: Arthur and the Moral Economy of The Faerie Queene’, in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, ed. J. K. Morrison and M. Greenfield (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 135–65 Workman, Samuel K., Fifteenth Century Translation as an Influence on English Prose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940) ¥i]ek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) Zumthor, Paul, Parler du Moyen Age (Paris: Minuit, 1980)

Index Adam of Usk 104, 106–7 Armagnac, Jacques, Duke of Aurner, Nellie S. 32

16–17

Batt, Catherine 50 Bede 30, 34–5, 52 Bedford, John, Duke of 18, 20, 55 Bel, Jean de 38, 39, 49 Benjamin, Walter 68, ‘aura’ 86, 93, 154 Benson, C. David 145 n.79, 146 Benson, Larry 31, 69, 123, 125, 142, 144–5, 156 Bible Romans 15:4 59 Mark 13:21–23 59 Blake, N. F. 41–2, 45 Boccaccio, Giovanni De casu principium (Fall of Princes) 47, 52–5 De genelogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods) 42 Boethius 121–2, 126, 151 Bornstein, Diane 20 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 68 Brewer, Derek 31 Brut, or Chronicles of England 30, 37, 38, 39–40, 46, 67, 94, 106, 109 Burgundy, Bastard of 19–20 Burgundy, Charles the Bold, Duke of 20 Busby, Keith 66–7 Cade’s Rebellion 91450) 116 Carley, James 47–48 Carruthers, Mary 64, 76 Caxton, William, Chapter 2 passim Brut, or Chronicles of England 37, 40, 46, 157 Canterbury Tales 41 Charles the Grete 32, 46, 157 Godeffroy dee Boloyne 32, 46, 157 History of Jason 58 Morte Darthur 24–30 Ordre of Chyvalry 58, 108–9, 116 Polychronicon 30, 37, 40, 42–44, 106 in Burgundy 20 and Anthony Woodville 18, 20–21 Charles IV (of France) 96 Charny, Geoffroy de 38–9, 92 Chaucer, Geoffrey 20, 41, 57, 69, 154 Boece 121–2, 151 ‘Clerk’s Tale’ 141 n.58 Ellesmere MS 68 ‘Knight’s Tale’ 88 Legend of Good Women 124, 126 ‘Parson’ 76 ‘Troilus’ 122–3

Cherewatuk, Karen 58 ‘chivalrous history’ 38–39 Chrétien de Troyes 25, 37, 46, 61 Chrimes, S. B. 94 n.2, 118–19 Christine de Pisan Livre du corps de policie / Body of Policye 20–1 Cicero 42–3 Collyngbourne, Wyllyam 98–9 compilatio 9, 34, 70, Chapter 5 passim Cooper, Helen 75–6, 125, 148 Coote, Leslie 7 Dante

67, 132, 140

Edmund ‘Crouchback’, Earl of Lancaster and Derby 103 Edward I 38, 107–8 Edward II 96, 109, 116–18 Edward III 38, 96, 100–2, 109, 110, 112, 116 Edward IV 3, 15, 16, 18–19, 50, 57–8, 62, 95, 98, 103, 112, 115 Edward, Prince of Wales (1470–c.1483) (Edward V 1483) 19 Edwards, Elizabeth 11–12, 145 Eusebius 33, 34 Fabyan, Robert New Chronicles of England and France 99 Fichte, Jeorg 31–2, 48 Field, P. J. C. 97–8, 124, 140, et passim on authorship 14–16, 17 on textual questions 27–30 on marginalia 62ff Finke, Laurie 136–7 Foucault, Michel 7–8, 80–81, 94, 95, 104 Frappier, Jean 136, 153, 155, 157 Freud, Sigmund 129–31, 138, 150 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 8–9 Froissart, Jean 3, 37, 49, 92, 96–7, 100–2, 112 gentry 6–7, 13, 39–40, 56, 103 Gildas 33, 34–5 Glastonbury 46–9 Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of 55, 116 Goffart, Walter 33–4 Gonnot, Michel 17–18 Goodman, Jennifer 109 Gower, John 124 Grail 49, 54, 88–9, 137–8, 154–5 Gramsci, Antonio 70–1 Griffith, Richard R. 18–21 Harf-Lancner, Laurence

96–97

170 Hanning, Robert W. 33–4, 36 Hardyng, John 27, 54, 102–4, 107–8 Henry III 103 Henry IV 102–3, 104, 107, 112, 117–20, 156 Henry V 109, 110, 156 Henry VI 3, 95, 112, 115–16, 118 Henry (Tudor) VII 97–8, 99 Herodotus 127–8 Higden, Ranulph see Polychronicon Historia Brittonum 33, 34, 52 Hoccleve, Thomas 56, 69, 119–20, 156 Howley, Martin 47–8 Hundred Years War 37, 39, 100–2 Battle of Poitiers 39 Isabella of France (Edward II’s Queen, Edward III’s mother) 96, 102 Isidore of Seville 43 Jakobson, Roman 91, 128ff, 143ff Jameson, Fredric 1, 6 John of Gaunt 103 jousting 19–20 Kelleher, Hilton 57, 58, 63 Kennedy, Edward Donald 136 Kennedy, Elspeth 38–9 Ker, N. R. 66 Kim, Hyonjin 6, 13, 18 Knopp, Sherron E. 145 Kretschmar, William 32, 44, 59 Krochalis, Jean 48 Kuskin, William 40 n.31, 46 Lacy, Norris 153ff La
amon 46, 105 Lambert, Mark 145 Lezra, Jacques 153–4 Lull, Ramon 38, 108–9, 116 Lydgate, John 60, 69 Dance Macabre 56 Fall of Princes 52–8, 124, 140–1 Secrees of Old Philosoffres 56 Serpent of Division 56 Lynch, Andrew 68 Malmesbury, William of 33 de antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesie 48 De gestis regum Anglorum 36, 43, 59–60 Malory, Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire 3, 14–17, 22–3, 28 Malory, Thomas of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire 15, 18–21, 28 Mortimer, Roger, 3rd Earl of March 102–3 Mann, Jill 79, 82, 95 Manuscripts BL MS Royal 14.E.III 20 BL Add. MS 59678 7, 11 n.1, 15–16, 24, Chapter 3 passim BN fr. MS 122 17, 123 Margaret of Anjou 94–5, 115 Marx, Karl 4, 61–2, 72

INDEX Matthews, William 24 The Ill-Framed Knight 12, 16–18 ‘A Question of Texts’ 12, 26–30 McCarthy, Terence 12–13 McGann, Jerome 5, 23 Meale, Carol 20–1 Mehmed II (Ottoman sultan) 157 memoria 43, 64–7, 76, 84, 122 Moll, Richard 6, 110 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 33, 36–7, 46, 47, 51, 103 Morte Arthure (alliterative poem) 105, 109 Morte Arthur, Le (stanzaic poem) 136ff Mort Artu (French prose romance) 138ff mouvance 97, 99 Murad II (Ottoman sultan) 157 Myers, A. R. 94–5 Nennius see Historia Brittonum Nibley Green, Battle of 1–5, 6, 7, 53, 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 60, 80, 95 ‘Nine Worthies’ 45–6, 58, 114 Orosius, Paulus 33, 37 Pachoda, Elizabeth 31 parataxis 8–9, 79–82, 95 Parkes, M. B. 67 Patterson, Lee 23, 24, 88, 92–3 Pearsall, Derek 46, 56 Peasant’s Revolt (1381) 116 Percy, Henry, 1st Earl of Northumberland 103 Philip VI (or France) 100–2, 112–13 Phillipa of Hainault (Edward III’s queen and patron of Froissart) 96 Pickford, Cedric 123–4 Piers Plowman 23–4, 29–30, 67, 124 Polychronicon 37, 38, 40, 42–4, 46, 47, 106 Radulescu, Raluca 6, 13, 18, 39–40, 56, 94, 103–4 relics 47–9 Richard II 96–7, 103, 104, 106–7, 112, 117 Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Richard III 19, 95, 98–99, 116–20, 154, 157 Riddy, Felicity 8, 129, 135–6, 149–50 Roland, Meg 156–7 Ross, Charles 3 Rumble, Thomas 128, 137 Sargent-Bauer, Barbara 36, 43 Scanlon, Larry 57, 70 Shichtman, Martin see Laurie Finke Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 59, 61, 69, 110, 136, 148–9; Bercilak’s castle 90 ‘social reading’ 1–9 St Alban’s, first battle of 94 St Pol, Jacquetta (Duke of Bedford’s widow, wife of Richard Woodville) 18 Strohm, Paul 119–20, 129–30 Sumption, Jonathan 100, 101 n.14, 113 n.47, 118 Sutton, Anne F. 22–3 ‘symbolic capital’ 84, 136–7 Taylor, John

37–8, 39

INDEX tragedy 91–2, 120 Sophoclean 91, 148; ‘Oedipus’ translatio 20, 153–2 Trevisa, John of see Polychronicon

149

Vinaver, Eugène 5–6, 11–12, 21, 23–30, 87, 132, 137, 142, 155–6 Wace 37, 46 Wagner, Richard 153, 155 Wakefield, Battle of 95, 115 ‘Walter Map’ 152, 156 Whetter, K. S. 91 n.82 Williams, Raymond 70–1 Wilson, R. H. 44, 59, 138

171

Wofford, Susanne 98 Woodville family 18–19 Anthony (Lord Scales, 2nd Earl Rivers) 6, 18–21, 50, 58, 98 Elizabeth (after 1464 Edward IV’s queen) 18 Richard (1st Earl Rivers) 18 York, Richard 3rd Duke of 94, 98, 103, 115–16, 118 Zumthor, Paul 31, see also mouvance

ARTHURIAN STUDIES I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI

XVII

XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII

XXIV XXV XXVI

ASPECTS OF MALORY, edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer THE ALLITERATIVE MORTE ARTHURE: A Reassessment of the Poem, edited by Karl Heinz Göller THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, I: Author Listing, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last THE CHARACTER OF KING ARTHUR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, Rosemary Morris PERCEVAL: The Story of the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Nigel Bryant THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, II: Subject Index, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last THE LEGEND OF ARTHUR IN THE MIDDLE AGES, edited by P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford and E. K. C. Varty THE ROMANCE OF YDER, edited and translated by Alison Adams THE RETURN OF KING ARTHUR, Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer ARTHUR’S KINGDOM OF ADVENTURE: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur, Muriel Whitaker KNIGHTHOOD IN THE MORTE DARTHUR, Beverly Kennedy LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome I, edited by Renée L. Curtis LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome II, edited by Renée L. Curtis LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome III, edited by Renée L. Curtis LOVE’S MASKS: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems, Merritt R. Blakeslee THE CHANGING FACE OF ARTHURIAN ROMANCE: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in memory of Cedric E. Pickford, edited by Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern and Kenneth Varty REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS IN THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES AND LYRIC POETRY OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE: Essays presented to Kenneth Varty on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, edited by Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy CEI AND THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND, Linda Gowans LA
AMON’S BRUT: The Poem and its Sources, Françoise H. M. Le Saux READING THE MORTE DARTHUR, Terence McCarthy, reprinted as AN INTRODUCTION TO MALORY CAMELOT REGAINED: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849, Roger Simpson THE LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR IN ART, Muriel Whitaker GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG AND THE MEDIEVAL TRISTAN LEGEND: Papers from an Anglo-North American symposium, edited with an introduction by Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey ARTHURIAN POETS: CHARLES WILLIAMS, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds AN INDEX OF THEMES AND MOTIFS IN TWELFTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARTHURIAN POETRY, E. H. Ruck CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES AND THE GERMAN MIDDLE AGES: Papers from an international symposium, edited with an introduction by Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey

XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV XLVI XLVII XLVIII

XLIX L LII LIII LIV LV

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: Sources and Analogues, compiled by Elisabeth Brewer CLIGÉS by Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR THOMAS MALORY, P. J. C. Field T. H. WHITE’S THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, Elisabeth Brewer ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, III: 1978–1992, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Caroline Palmer ARTHURIAN POETS: JOHN MASEFIELD, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds THE TEXT AND TRADITION OF LA
AMON’S BRUT, edited by Françoise Le Saux CHIVALRY IN TWELFTH-CENTURY GERMANY: The Works of Hartmann von Aue, W. H. Jackson THE TWO VERSIONS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR: Multiple Negation and the Editing of the Text, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade RECONSTRUCTING CAMELOT: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition, Michael Glencross A COMPANION TO MALORY, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards A COMPANION TO THE GAWAIN-POET, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson MALORY’S BOOK OF ARMS: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur, Andrew Lynch MALORY: TEXTS AND SOURCES, P. J. C. Field KING ARTHUR IN AMERICA, Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack THE SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, edited by D. Thomas Hanks Jr THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Elizabeth Edwards GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND THE ARTHURIAN TRADITION, edited by James P. Carley THE KNIGHT WITHOUT THE SWORD: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry, Hyonjin Kim ULRICH VON ZATZIKHOVEN’S LANZELET: Narrative Style and Entertainment, Nicola McLelland THE MALORY DEBATE: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda MERLIN AND THE GRAIL: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian romances attributed to Robert de Boron, translated by Nigel Bryant ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY IV: 1993–1998, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Elaine Barber DIU CRÔNE AND THE MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN CYCLE, Neil Thomas KING ARTHUR IN MUSIC, edited by Richard Barber THE BOOK OF LANCELOT: The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles, Bart Besamusca A COMPANION TO THE LANCELOT-GRAIL CYCLE, edited by Carol Dover THE GENTRY CONTEXT FOR MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Raluca L. Radulescu

LVI LVII LVIII LIX LX LXI LXII LXIII LXIV LXV

PARZIVAL: With Titurel and the Love Lyrics, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, translated by Cyril Edwards ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P. J. C. FIELD, edited by Bonnie Wheeler THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL, translated by Nigel Bryant THE GRAIL LEGEND IN MODERN LITERATURE, John B. Marino RE-VIEWING LE MORTE DARTHUR: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, edited by K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu THE SCOTS AND MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN LEGEND, edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan WIRNT VON GRAVENBERG’S WIGALOIS: Intertextuality and Interpretation, Neil Thomas COMPANION TO CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert THE FORTUNES OF KING ARTHUR, edited by Norris J. Lacy A HISTORY OF ARTHURIAN SCHOLARSHIP, edited by Norris J. Lacy