Doubting Sir Thomas BOOKS

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Le Morte Darthur has been prized as the English classic of chivalry ever since Caxton published it in 1485. A better text than Cax- ton's, though like his thrice-removed from the original, was discovered in Cambridge in 1934. This—known as the Winchester text—forms the basis of Eugene Vinaver's standard three- volume edition of 1947, now available in one cheap volume, which is infinitely superior to any modern prose rendering or rehash (the fifteenth century English is perfectly easy to read). Using thirteenth century French prose romances and two English poems, the author artfully and poetically turned the Arthurian cycle into a series of interconnected but self- contained stories. Since he added little com- ment of his own, the exact way in which he successfully left the indelible mark of his own literary personality on this material is some- thing of a mystery. Certainly he celebrates loyalty to a cause, and an English heroic past; beyond this nothing is agreed. Sometimes argu- ments about his meaning even become confused with arguments about the mythological origins of his material.

Who was the author? Caxton said that he was 'Sir Thomas Malorye,' and his edition ended with a prayer for deliverance by `Syr Thomas Maleore, knyght.' The manuscript discovered in 1934 is more explicit: `for this [The Tale of King Arthur] was drawyn by a knight presoner sir Thomas Malleore.'

Although there were originally two other candidates, a Welshman and a Huntingdon- shire man, since the 1890s critical opinion has generally accepted the American scholar George Lyman Kittredge's identification of the author of Le Mode Darthur with a Warwick- shire knight of Newbold Revel. Neither Vinaver in his one-volume edition nor Robert Graves in his excellent introduction to a paperback paraphrase even questions it.

In the course of the next forty years other facts were discovered about this Sir Thomas Malory, some of them highly disconcerting. For the author of the passage

'What?' seyde sir Launcelot, 'is he a theff and a knyght? and a ravyssher of women? He doth shame unto the order of Knyghthode, and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pytd that he lyvyth' turned out to have been not only a frequent political prisoner involved in the Wars of the Roses but also, and more to the point, robber-with-violence, attempted murderer, member of a gangster-band, extortionist, cattle- thief and rapist (twice). Strictly speaking, he was at various times charged with these offences—there is no proof that he actually committed them; but the startling frequency with which he appears in the records in an undoubtedly criminal capacity provides at least some good prima facie presumption of guilt. Surely, wrote a worried Sir Edmund Chambers, the Warwickshire Sir Thomas 'could not have written [the above-quoted passage] without a twinge.'

In a delightful and never dully written

book, The 111-Framed Knight (Cambridge Uni- versity Press 52s 6d), sub-titled 'a skeptical in- quiry into the identity of Sir Thomas Malory,' Professor William Matthews of the University of California seriously questions, after seventy years, this identification. The 111-Framed Knight (so-called because the name Malory may have its origin in the old French verb orer, to frame; hence Maloret: ill-framed) consists of a lively summary and evaluation of the present evi- dence, a learned discussion of whether the linguistic localisms in the two extant versions of Le Morte Darthur are likely to have come from an original text written by a Warwickshire man, and the tentative proposition of a new Northumbrian candidate. It is fair to say, first, that whether one finally agrees with Professor Matthews or not, his book is exemplary in that it deals with very specialised philological material in a manner that keeps it well within the scope of the general reader. And on the strength of his linguistic evidence, at least on the face of it, Professor Matthews must be allowed to have effectually reopened the question of authorship.

Instead of starting from the outside, from the hypothesis of a Warwickshire author, and working inwards, Professor Matthews has started from the inside: he has studied the language of the two Le Morte Darthur texts with a view to establishing, from this and from no other evidence, the region from which the author was likely to have come. Relegating the technical details to substantial appendices, he argues persuasively in favour of, not a Mid- lands man, but a Northerner. This is on the strength of the number of northernisms of various kinds (amongst them, variants from standard spellings, peculiarities of syntax and morphology) that survive in the Winchester— and to a smaller extent in the Caxton—text. Both texts are three times removed from the original; but Professor Matthews concludes that the original script must have been even more thoroughgoingly northern. He further suggests that a Warwickshire man would have been unable to understand the alliterative English poem Morte Adhure, which is indis- putably a source of Le Mode Darthur.

None of this linguistic analysis is less than impressive, and it will be interesting to see how experts react to it: Professor Matthews's argument depends on it. Its weakest aspect may well prove to be the supposition that a par- ticular northern scribe (or two of them) could not have so changed the standard English of the original as to have given it its present northern flavour: Professor Matthews has only to be shown to have exaggerated by a small degree the extent of northernisms present in the received texts for this to seem quite a simple explanation.

It is a pity, then, from the point of view of his case, that Professor Matthews has not been able to be more specific about his own new Northumbrian candidate. True, he has proved that a Yorkshireman called Thomas

Malory was alive at the time Le Mode Darthur was written—a fact which had pre- viously been universally denied—but he cannot

tell us anything definite about him, except that

he was a son of Sir William Malory of Hutton and Studley. He may have been a knight, he may have accompanied the usurper Edward IV on a siege, and he may have been exempted from a royal pardon of 1468. But none of this

is certain; and Professor Matthews can only hazard the guess that he was a prisoner of war—one of his arguments against the War- wickshire Malory's authorship is that he was

a prisoner in Newgate at the time he com- pleted Le Morte Darthur, and could not there

have gained access to all the books he needed; prisoners of war were treated with much greater laxity.

Professor Matthews began his quest for another author because he believed that, on balance, the Newbold Revel Malory was likely to have been the highly immoral man the records make him out to be. He sees no way out of what he calls the moral paradox. I think that here his arguments—and those like them—are weak. They seem to rely more on

what Caxton said about Le Movie Darthur's

moral intentions (`wryton for our doctryne') than on the work itself, which, beneath a thin veneer of Christianity, tells of a thoroughly pagan world in which incest, murder and 'illicit' love flourish.

It is the kind of world that the War- wickshire knight, whose life had been so turbulent and adventurous, might well have felt at home in. He lived in an age of semi-anarchy, and if we take this into account then the only really disagreeable charges against

him are those of twice raping—felonice rapid! et cum ea carnaliter concubuit—one Alice

Smith. But the complainant was her husband, who may have been lying. Even if he was not, Malory's behaviour may well have been what Coleridge (in another connection) called 'an escape of venial vanity in the flush of wine,' and one (or two) deeply regretted by him after-

wards. It would be foolish to dismiss the knight of Newbold Revel from the author- ship of Le Morte Darthur on this evidence. There is plenty of sin and repentance in the work.

We cannot possibly in any case deduce any man's state of mind from accounts of him drawn up by people who were his enemies, or by lawyers or other such rascals. What can certainly be said is that there is a plausible case for connecting such a man as Sir Thomas Malory seems to have been—an adventurer at

least—with such a work as Le Alone Darihur. The 'moral paradox' is an artificial one, in- volving a number of prejudices about Chris- tianity, non-Christianity and the relationship of men's misdeeds to their expressed beliefs.

But, unless Professor Matthews's linguistic arguments are rejected out of hand—which seems unlikely—we can never be as certain about the authorship as we had been. Only the name certainly connects the Warwickshire knight with Le Mom Darthur; the same applies to Professor Matthews's Yorkshire man. Perhaps further details of his career will come to light which will make his candidature seem likely. The 111-Framed Knight at least succeeds in casting doubt on the current assumption, and at the same time in arousing interest in a classic of English prose. It is a sensible and wholly worthy book.