In Our Time - Le Morte d'Arthur

Episode Date: January 10, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur", the epic tale of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Sir Thomas Malory was a knight from Warwickshire, a respectable country gentleman and MP in the 1440s who later turned to a life of crime and spent various spells in prison. It was during Malory's final incarceration that he wrote "Le Morte Darthur", an epic work which was based primarily on French, but also some English, sources. Malory died shortly after his release in 1470 and it was to be another fifteen years before "Le Morte Darthur" was published by William Caxton, to immediate popular acclaim. Although the book fell from favour in the seventeenth century, it was revived again in Victorian times and became an inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite movement who were entranced by the chivalric and romantic world that Malory portrayed. The Arthurian legend is one of the most enduring and popular in western literature and its characters - Sir Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin and King Arthur himself, are as well-known today as they were then; and the book's themes - chivalry, betrayal, love and honour - remain as compelling.With: Helen Cooper Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of CambridgeHelen Fulton Professor of Medieval Literature and Head of Department of English and Related Literature at the University of YorkLaura Ashe CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College at the University of OxfordProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. It was an age of chivalry and romance, a time when knights fought dragons and saved damsels in distress. So it went in the romances of the day.

The legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table has captured people's imaginations since at least the 12th century, but it wasn't until the end of the 15th century that the first prose account of the Arthurian tales appeared in English. The author was Sir Thomas Mallory, a knight-errant, who wrote his version of the stories entitled Lemo d'Arthur, which meant the death of Arthur in Middle French, while he was in prison for plotting to overthrow the House of York.

But Mallory never lived to see his epic work in print. It was 15 years after his death that William Caxton published the book to immediate popular acclaim, a popularity that has scarcely waned with time and has been the inspiration for writers, poets, artists and filmmakers ever since. With me to discuss Mallory's more d'Arthur are Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, Helen Fulton, Professor of Medieval Literature and Head of the Department of English

and Related Literature at the University of York, and Laura Ash, University Lecture and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. Helen Cooper, can you give us some sense of what kind of place England was in the 15th century and Mallory was writing his book. It was a pretty disturbed place. It started off quite well with Henry V's victory at Ashinghor, but then the second half of the hundred years war saw England losing France. Henry the sixth, Henry V's child, came to the throne age nine months, and so for the rest of his life, England was plagued by weak kingship, culminating in pretty much the complete breakdown of law and order.

Initially on a local level, there'd be disputes between different lords, almost in the way of warlords. And those coalesced into the great factions of Lancastrians supporting Henry the 6th and Yorkists who supported the claim of Richard Duke of York. And the Yorkists won out

with the accession of Edward VIII. And Mallory, across those later stages from the loss of the English lands in the Hundred Years' War. Also the loss of Constantinople, the great eastern bastion of Christendom to Islam in 1453. And through the 1460s and therefore halfway through the Wars of the Roses as well. But the Wars of the Roses, that great clash between the Orchitz and Lancasterians, dominated his adult life. Can you give us some idea of the carnage and the disruption involved in the wars of the roses?

You've said there was breakdown of law and order and these are accurate phrases, but can you specify in certain ways that we will know how much damage was being done to this place? In terms of absolute casualties, there was only one especially appalling battle, the Battle of Tauton in 1461. Many of the others were comparatively small scale. The problem was more that with no strong central government, there were so many small local feuds and disputes. And Mallory himself was almost top thug in an age that specialised in producing thugs.

He lived a fairly normal life, so far as we can tell, because if 15th century gentry lived normal lives, they didn't leave much trace in the records. And he became an MP in the late 1440s. But from the 1450s onwards, everything went to pieces. And he committed the most extraordinary series of outrages, rapes, abbey-breaking, cattle rustling, attempted assassination of the Duke of Buckingham.

He raped the same woman twice, though it should be noted that a charge of rape could be a charge brought by a husband against an adulterous wife, a way of getting round that when a charge of actual violence might be more difficult. And so the consequence of that was that Mallory spent most of the 1450s when the Lancastrians, Henry VI, was running the country, and also at least some of the 1460s in prison.

And he was certainly in prison at the end of the 1460s too when he was writing the Mortarthur. So he was on the wrong side of both. parties in a way. And the affinity system whereby the great barons would sign up a group of gentry into their own party. Various lords seem to have sniffed at Mallory and then dropped him as fast as they could. Well the word thugs pretty strong anyway, but coming from a professor of medieval literature at Cambridge, it's very strong indeed. Before I move on, it is fair to say that there was a war going on and taking stuff away

from the clergy was something that had been going on with the blessing of certain sections, radical sections of the church for a while. The Lollard thought the church should not be fleshed out with material goods. It didn't say that in the Bible. So you can give him with that. Capturing the Duke of Buckingham, well that seems to be a sort of fair

sport really. In the Wars of the Roses. Rossling cattle, well I come from the borders it's what people did in that time of year, so the raping is obviously a very, very serious charge. But you You gave an explanation yourself that this is a cry that went up when adultery was the case. It's a possible explanation.

Yeah, but you give the surges explanation. I'm just interested, Professor. I'm just interested. Let's move on to Helen Fulton. No, we can come back. I want to move on to Helen Fulton for a moment. So we're talking about Mallory being in prison, being in prison several times, trying to escape a couple of times, failing.

And when he was in prison, we're told. and we've got proper evidence for this. He sat down and wrote this very substantial book. Why do you think he did it? I think he wanted to create a story for his times. Sorry, sorry, I'd say this and then you can get on with it. Was there any evidence that he'd done any writing before? Was there evidence that he was a well-read man?

He was a knight. It was night early. He had land and so on. Did he know scholars? Had he had a good education, do it? Anything about that at all? Or does he just arrive with the book? We know very little about his life. In fact, a lot of what we do know comes from the things that he said in the manuscript, in the story, in the Mortarthur. At the end of each book, he writes a little thing about himself. And at the end of the last book, he says he's a knight and a prisoner. And he wrote this work in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, which would make it somewhere between March 1469 and March 1470. So it was towards the end of his life And he wrote it in prison

It's an early example of prison fiction And as to why he wrote it Well I suppose he had a lot of time on his hands And when we say he was in prison It doesn't mean he was shackled into some dungeon He was imprisoned in a library Yeah he was probably under house arrest In a gentry house that would have had a library

So he had books that he could refer to And he clearly used a lot of sources That were available to him while he was in prison So let's talk about the sources, first of all. What would be brought to me? It was a very range of sources. Can we just to emphasise this a bit more? He had a huge range of sources.

You all seem to agree with. And so he must have been in a very... There weren't many great houses with Bigel Arbishop in those days, not many. So it must have been in prison somewhere rather grand. Where does that take us? Well, it would have been a gentry household, and I think many gentry households had copies of manuscripts, particularly of romances, which is mostly what Mallory was drawing on.

He drew on the big French prose cycles about the Arthurian legend. Those were his major sources, along with a number of important English sources. Can you give us a brief summary about the more d'Artha for the very few people who don't recite it most evening? It's probably the earliest complete, coherent account of the Arthurian legend. in English that we have. It's very long. It's in eight very large books. So it's like a series of sequels. And it's about the whole Arthurian story from start to finish, the start being the conception and birth of Arthur and the finish being the death of Arthur and the death of most of the people he loved, including Lancelot and Gwynnevere. So it covers the incredibly

passionate love affair between Lancelot and Gwynnevere. And then it covers a number of of the lives of different knights of the Roundtable, including Tristram and Isolder, the other famous adulterous love story of the Arthurian legend. It covers the quest for the Holy Grail, how the Roundtable Knights go on the Quest for the Holy Grail, and it covers the downfall of the Roundtable society that Arthur worked so hard to create.

It's an extraordinary epic, isn't it? It is an epic. And he brought in Laura Ash, turn at you now. He brought in quite a few sources from outside England and Britain and he amalgamated a lot, didn't he, as well as reshaped it and perhaps invented some of it. Yes, absolutely. I mean, for the origins of the Arthurian legend,

you have to look back to the 12th century when clearly historians living at the time believed that Arthur had been a great British king, but they knew that he was surrounded with Welsh fables and so on. Did that make him less of a great British king? It meant that, well, William Monsbury famously said of Arthur, he was a great British king who helped his people and he deserves to have the truth told about him, not all this rubbish that the Welsh make up.

That was his comment on it as an English historian. Oh dear. Complaints, yes. Yes, no, no, it's very good. So, but that's, but what really brought Arthur into the mainstream and just the mainspring of the entire legend as it goes through in Middle Ages was Geoffrey of Monmouth. who wrote in the 1130s his history of the kings of Britain, which is full of the, I mean, it's the idea of the founding of Britain by Brutus,

who has come from Troy, and then the successive kings who follow him. And then Arthur is the culmination of this line of British rule. He conquers all of the British Isles and half of Europe and is on the point of defeating the Roman Empire when treachery at home, Mordred at home, draws him back. and leads to a final battle. So that was the historical, the pseudo-historical version. Why, what, did Geoffrey of Monmouth draw on any,

what could be called hard evidence? Well, what you would call, as a historian nowadays, hard evidence. He tells us that he drew on a very ancient book in Welsh, in British. And for a long, I mean, early on people thought that this might have been true. Then there was a long period, recent critical period, when people, academics have been very skeptical about this and thought he must have made it up. But actually more recently,

people have begun to find scraps of evidence in other places that might... Well, that he might have... I mean, he must have had something because either, given the length of his book, either he had sources from somewhere or he had an unfeasibly fertile imagination. I mean, it's very long and it's full of details

which we also find elsewhere. So... So I interrupted you. You've got Geoffrey of Monmouth, but he added more than that, didn't he? Well, you mean Geoffrey? No, Mallory. When he's putting it together. Yes, no, absolutely. In prison, he's putting it together.

About two centuries after Geoffrey of Monmouth. Well, yes. Two and a half centuries. Quite some time. So Geoffrey writes in Latin, gets translated into French by Wesse and into English by Lachman. And then that story, this historical author, gets retold in English as the alliterative Morte Arthur. And that is one of Mallory's chief sources. or as it happens, only one section of the book,

because it's a two-part legend and the other part. So that's the pseudo-historical part. The other part, which flowers in France from the late 12th century and the early 13th century, is the romance. And it's that that we think of when we think of the classic author, Lance Osse and Gwynnevere tale,

because the romance is a fundamentally differently-structured narrative. It's a narrative, which isn't about history in battles and kings, it's a narrative about individuals and their lives and their individual quests and hopes. And so what Mallory did then was try and combine, try and just glue together the pseudo-historical story of Arthur who almost defeats the Roman Empire and then fails with the romance tradition,

the individual knights of the round table, their exploits. And that's developed more in France, and Crettaire. Yes, exactly. This is really, it is a French development, which is then really fundamentally not brought back into England properly until Mallory, and it's his attempt to glue the two together that creates this vast epic work.

We have to remember that French was a dominating language from 1066 until the end of the 14th century. So it would have been part of a joint, seamlessly joint tradition in that sense. Yeah, well, I don't think you could say seamless. The fascinating thing about it is that you're absolutely right. Crette-and-tois French works and the French prose romances, I mean, those are Mallory's sources.

They're red in England. And as you say, the French is, after the Norman conquest, French is the social language of the aristocracy. It's the status, elite language. But at the same time, oddly, the stuff that is written in England, in Latin, in French, and then later in English, tends to take a different line. So instead of Lancelot, we have the hero Gawain. Gawain was in the legend from the beginning. And it's only really Mallory.

I mean, there's a less well-known poem slightly earlier than him, but only slightly, which he also uses as a source in English. translation of the death of Arthur. But really it's only Mallory who brings Lancelot in and the whole romance tradition into England despite the fact that it's read all the way through. Helen Cooper, I didn't give you a right of reply on the charges towards Malory's character,

but can you just refresh it? Say a little more of that before we go on with the programme because it is very interesting that this man should suddenly emerge doing this, given almost given the thuggery that you graphically describe or there's no reason why thugs shouldn't write, I suppose. Perhaps that's all happening all around the place as we speak. But still.

I don't think of it as being equivalent to sweet old ladies writing murder mysteries. The life doesn't have to match with the work. That's absolutely true. We don't have any evidence that Mallory did anything, any of his bad deeds for ideological or other approvals. reasons. What he does do, though, clearly, is have this intense inner imaginative life by which he can transform these vast and unwieldy French sources into a concise, compressed, beautiful account of Arthur that's dominated the whole tradition ever since. And the French

romances disappeared from sight. They were printed. Caxton was the first person to print an Arthur romance and that was Mallory's. The French ones were printed later in the 16th century, but then they disappeared from sight. Mallory, well, he did disappear for a bit, but as anyone knows, Arthurian material is back around now

in a big way. But that's because of Mallory, either as direct parent or indirect parent. And that's because of the quality of what he does. The quality of his style, really. I mean, did it come, Caxon printed, it did it come as a

A refreshing change, Mallory's prose, the directness of it, the swiftness of the telling of the story, the leaving one thing moved to another, and you have to work out for yourself what happened between sentence three and sentence four, because it really moves very quickly, doesn't it? It does move very quickly. And Mallory then very often summarizes

that you have to work out for yourself. But the first interesting thing about his style is that he's very nearly, not quite, but very nearly the first person to translate a prose romance into English prose. Before that, fictional narrative had been in verse, as in Chaucer, for instance. And the Arthurian romances in English before Mallory are almost all in verse. So that's the first big change. But then he does not follow the style of the French prose romances.

And he can say in a sentence things that they, take 10 pages to say he's especially good on the tragic moments and those really leap out of the page at you. Whereas when you read the French then it just goes on forever.

Like for instance there's an early story of two brothers called Berlin and Berlin and some sticky ending they finally kill each other not knowing who their opponent is but it takes about 10 pages in the French to say what Mallory says like this when Ballin is speaking and he realizes he's on

some path to destiny and he doesn't know what and he says I may not turn now again for shame and what adventure shall fall to me be it life or death I will take the adventure that shall come to me and that just sets up so many resonances in your own imagination you want to fill in And that, I think, is one reason why modern writers have rushed to fill in all the things that Mallory doesn't say. Helen Fulton, one of the main themes in the Mordaitha is chivalry. Can you give us some examples, first of all, and explain why it's such a big part of Mallory's intention to implant that in the books? I think to some extent it was a social reality, the idea of chivalry, the idea of a chivalry code among knights, the idea that especially military knights

were constrained by particular social codes. But we're in the Wars of the Roses. And Helen Cooper said earlier that they're cattle rustling, they're attacking monasteries, they're attacking each other's land. It's a fair bit of mayhem. So maybe it's curious that the idea of chivalry by a man who is himself in prison

and had been, as we understand it, far less than chivalrous, should emphasise this so strongly. Well, it was an idea. way to behave, I suppose. People can't always live up to an ideal or a set of ideals. But in the absence of a strong state social control like a police force or a centralised judiciary or something of that nature, then it was really the only way of producing some kind of social control over people who were actually just trained to be killers. So it was a way of trying to get knights

to behave in a particular way according to ideals of prowess and generosity. and loyalty and things like that. Because you do point out, I think in your notes, that they were in massive armour on great war horses, which are also in armour, with huge broadsorts, fighting mostly against men dressed in bull and trousers and jackets, often in their bare feet. So when they went into a village,

they could just smash it to pieces without thinking much about the opposition. They could, and often they did. So you think Maori is saying, don't do this, there's a better way to do it? I think he's talking more about interpersonal relationships between knights and how they should

treat each other and treat women as well how they should treat other people in society that's really what the Shavaric Code was about was about dealing with other people in society He does spell it out once at twice doesn't he in paragraph saying this is what ascribe speeches to Arthur and others saying this is the way you should behave to people

as you've said. Laura? Yeah I just wanted to come in on that and add to that to say that there is a lot critical approach of citizenshipry that says it was the church's attempt to control the uncontrollable behaviour as you say Helen these people who are just fundamentally more powerful and capable of exerting violence all around the place but I think it's also underestimated the degree to which it becomes just the art of success I mean if you conduct an ambush and it fails then you've been uncivilrous but if you conduct an ambush and it succeeds then you're a brilliant

martial warrior who has achieved perfectly. And so there is this tension in chivalry. And of course the extent to it chivalry is seen as an ethical ideal. It always advertises itself as a Christian ideal. Your sword is blessed in church when you're in a church. Right. And it's profoundly important to Mallory. And yet, of course, when we think of chivalry, we think of display and pride and violence and conspicuous consumption and adulterous love. And so I think there's a tension in inherent which actually goes some way to explaining how there could be this clash between how knights behaved in the Walls of the Roses and what their supposed ideals were. Because what's surprising is not actually the gap. What's surprising is how capacious the idea of chivalry is. And we can see that, Helen Fulton, in the behaviour the way he treats Lancelot, which poses, gives him a problem. Well, it does because Lancelot is supposed to be the best knight in the world.

The truest. Yes, the truest. the most loyal, the exemplar of all the chivalric values. And Lance Lott often draws attention to his own chivalric values, his commitment to those values, and other people refer to him as the best knight in the world as well, which means he's not necessarily the most spiritually pure night. And we see through the quest for the Holy Grail

that he isn't the most spiritually pure knight. Because he isn't allowed to find it. No, that's right. He doesn't achieve the Holy Grail because of his adulterous love with Gwyn. So he's torn between his commitment to Gwynnevere, which is part of his chivalry to be utterly loyal, utterly faithful to Gwynnevere, and torn between that and his king to Arthur. Who is Gwynabia's husband and his best friend. That's right.

Don't you just hate it where that happens? Lancelot, I think, is fundamental because he is the best knight in the world. What we're dealing with the romance structure, I think that actually the tragedy is inherent. to this legend from the very beginning because in this world whom should the best knight love but the best lady and the best lady is the queen

and the problem with the romance unlike the history so in the history King Arthur is king he doesn't you know he has right-hand men and he has generals that's not a problem is there people around the round table for start his bodyguards in a way aren't they and he leads them into battle and he wins wars and he makes laws and

so on but in the romance all Arthur does is hold court and the knights themselves have to go out on quests and prove themselves and come back. And so by definition, in the sense that knighthood is not something you have, it's something you have to do. In that sense, Arthur is not the best knight, can never be the best knight. Lancelot is. And so I think, I believe that the tragedy, the adultery of Lancelot and Grenoviour is just structurally inherent

to the notion of the romance, along with the idea that if the romance is about individual individual perfectability, becoming the best night you can be, then it also becomes about individual fulfilment on an emotional level. And that's where it draws in love. Malory, as I understand it, Helen Cooper, makes great efforts to square this in Lancelot, who seems to me to be his favourite character, is protecting him, and not only protecting him, but he's got this problem. How does he tweak or change or the text?

that he inherits in order to do this? The great thing about Lancelot and Gwynnevere is that their love is faithful. And the adultery is less important than that. Excuse me. Even for women, you'd think that sexual unfaithfulness in a woman tends to be culturally worse than for men. But Mallory sums up Gwynnevier by saying

she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end. And that means that because she was so faithful to Lancelot, she went to heaven. And that is an extraordinary strong statement. And it's that quality of truth and faithfulness that for Mallory, that for Mallory, overrides the adultery question. In the French, the roundtable falls because of sexual sin of various kinds, the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere, the incest involved in the birth of Mordred. In Mallory, it doesn't happen like.

that the downfall is because of internal divisions among the Fellowship of the Roundtable and that the knights are envious of Lancelot in particular and so insist on bringing the whole affair out into the open in a way that Arthur can no longer ignore. Helen Fulton, there are strong women in this, aren't there? Gwynnev is obviously, one of them, but there are others and when we're talking about the Chevalry Code

He isn't only talking about being careful about war if that sentence makes any sense whatsoever But there's a lot about treat women properly You have to love them Only through the love of women, should you go to war And so on, can you develop that a little place? There are some very strong female characters And I think that's one of the great things about the Mortarthur

It's not just about the knights going around Biffing each other on the helm and things like that It's to do with the women as well And they often take a leading role And take a leading part in what's going on Guinevere is a wonderfully developed character. She has all the emotional ups and downs of a woman that you would imagine in that difficult situation. So sometimes she's very loving to Lancelot.

Another time she's quite cold and angry and they have terrible rouse where she orders him out of the court and he has to go away for a while. So she's an incredibly well-developed character. Isolder, in the story of Tristram and Isolder, has her own very particular personality as well. And then of course they're the enchantresses like, Morgan Lefei, Morghors, these other very strong queen-like characters who play a political and social leadership role. You believe the word political. Was it in any sense intended at the time, or does it come across now, as a political

book given the circumstances in which he wrote it, in which politics was fighting for a coherence, really? There are certainly some political comments in it. I wouldn't say myself that the whole thing added up to being any kind of coherence. political statement. But he does, for instance, comment at one point that in those days justice was exercised without favour, love or affinity, affinity being this system of the great baron's packing juries on behalf of their clients. And he has the most extraordinary excurses addressed to all ye Englishmen who are too ready to exchange one king for another

towards the end when Mordred has usurped the crown. but those are the ones that really stand out. I think without being able to ascribe any particular intention to Mallory, I think nonetheless, in a modern context, you can read it politically in terms of it being a story for those times of the Wars of the Roses.

Mallory's concern with the idea of kingship has to be relevant to what was going on in his own time when kings were being exchanged one for the other. And his concern with factionalism as well, It's a very powerful theme throughout the whole of Mortarthur is the idea of these two big factions, one around Arthur, one around Lancelot. So Garwain and the whole betrayal of Garwain and Mordred

are all to do with a kin group that they belong to that's the same as Arthur's, whereas Lancelot has his own faction around him. So the idea of kingship, loyalty, factionalism, violence, outbreaks of small-scale, localized violence. are very much comments on his own time, I think. On perhaps a superficial scale, he's saying we would all be better off if I had one king and obeyed him

rather than having these great barons, more lords roving the land. Yes. And even Arthur can't keep control of those rival factions within the court. Laura, Asch, before we go on, you said earlier that, nowadays, as it were, contemporary historians are saying,

well, there may be some evidence for a real Arthur. just develop that a little. It niggles away at me. And what is this evidence? And does it stand up in court? Well, it mostly amounts to one line and a scrap of manuscript that says there was a battle at which Arthur and Mordred fell. So we don't know where or why or what they were fighting over or if they were fighting on the same side or against each other. But that does mean that we're confident.

that there was a war leader in the 6th, 7th century who may have been called something like Arthur. But there's the persistent notion, now this is probably leisure, is that somewhere on the Celtic fringe after the Roman Empire, after the Roman forces had gone, and its hold on this country had fallen apart, so this country had fallen apart, either Roman, certain Roman state or certain British generals imitated them

and took over places like Carlisle, were, for instance, which was a great Roman fortress, and why shouldn't they take it over, a massive place to take over? And we, up there in the north-west, there are the little traces of people say that are, of it being a real thing, and there are massively across Wales, and so it goes.

Do they add up to anything? Not that would tell us anything directly about King Arthur as such. I mean, obviously, as you say, more recently there's been a great interest in reciting Arthur, a possible Arthur at the time of the slow withdrawal of the Roman Empire. But I think really what's most striking about the insertion of Geoffrey Monmouth's King Arthur into early medieval history is that he had to crowbar open periodicity as we know it, because he had to say that after the Anglo-Saxons arrived, the British nevertheless still held on to these islands for 200 years.

And it's Arthur who makes that happen, Arthur who keeps subjecting them. Whereas in fact, the Anglo-Saxons arrived and more or less swept across. But that's still debatable. I better move on here. Helen Cooper, the more doubt, there's one of the first books printed in England, printed by William Caxon, of course, in 1485, on the Battle of Bosworth is going on.

We're getting a sort of centralised state that Mallory might have approved of. No, develops into that. Anyway, that's as may be. He edited the text and presented the text, and it had a terrific impact. Can you tell us something about what Caxon did? He had certainly two manuscripts of it in his printing shop to work from, and we have one of those still surviving, which is the only manuscript we do have.

It's known as the Winchester manuscript. But he must have had another because he correct some things that are clearly wrong in the Winchester manuscript. The main thing he did, though, was edit it, in the sense that he divided it up into manageable bite-sized books and chapters so that you could read a little bit every night for a very long time, like watching EastEnders or some other kind of soap opera. And the fact that he did print it means that it's the first great English classic

to be disseminated through print rather than through manuscript. And it was reprinted a good many times in the decades immediately following. And you see it being read aloud in houses and places, like the Bible was really. Yes, but even though it was printed, it probably would still be read aloud mostly as household entertainment and because still not a high proportion of the population could read, though that was increasing. And he also gave it a wonderful preface and introduction that's become almost as famous as the text itself. in which he explains what Mallory was doing, reducing the French, why he himself, Kaxton, wanted to print it,

to give the story of Arthur in English, as we hadn't had it before. And insisting on its moral value, which is to say that although it contains all sorts of good things, courtesy, humanity, love, friendship and so on, it also contains a lot of bad things, cowardice, murder, hate, and the rest of it. And you have to do after the good and leave the evil.

And that's the instruction that he sends his readers out to follow. He doesn't specify which things he finds good and which things he finds evil. Laura. Just on that, he wonderfully says, as he says, all is written for our doctrine.

We can learn morally from this. And then he says, but for to believe that all the matters contained herein are true, ye be at your leisure. So work it out for yourself, still, right? It was great impact, great success.

Curious enough, when the civil wars came along in the 17th century, quite a few connections with the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century, it dropped away after that for a while, which we haven't time to go into. But it's sort of fairly obvious, really. Things had changed, particularly the place of the king had changed. The execution of King Charles I first was radical and different, and Helen Thornton wants to come in. Well, only to say that it was to do with the Reformation as well.

I mean, part of the reason why Mallory fell out of favor in the 17th century and 18th century was partly because it was seen as so Catholic. The whole quest for the Holy Grail, for example, incredibly sort of spiritual bells and smells kind of Catholicism, and that was just seen as unacceptable to people, especially in a civil war context, very Puritan, very pared down form of Christianity.

The exuberant Catholicism of Mallory was completely out of place. Sorry, Laura. Well, I just wanted to say on Mallory's treatment of the Grailquest that, I mean, you're absolutely right. Obviously, the Grailquest is inherently Catholic, inherently medieval in that sense. But I think Mallory, maybe what saved Mallory, was that he doesn't have the feeling for the Grail quest that his sources did.

I mean, as far as he's concerned, he wants to rescue Lancelot from that one failure and say, but chivalry, worldly chivalry is still a high ideal. And that may have saved him. Helen Fulton, let's move forward to the 19th century when it was re-energized in a profound way by Tennyson. Can you tell us how he did that, Perot Tennyson, Per Lorette, Lord Tennyson and so on? Yes, after a long period of no text of Mallory really being available, it was republished in 1816, and then a number of other publications of it ensued. and it really appealed to the 19th century

sort of post-romanticist imagination, the sentimental idea of the chivalric gentleman, partly to do with values of empire, of governance, of self-control, self-discipline, and also a very deep high Anglican faith were all things that Tennyson brought to the Arthurian legends, and those were parts of the reasons why those legends appealed to him.

So it was partly because of the empire that the idea of Arthur's empire and the way in which Mallory is saying this is the way you must conduct the empire appealed as an aim of conduct anyway for the Victorian. It did a set of ideals and a template of what was right and what was wrong, a set of values and ideals,

which Tennyson took very much to heart. And he was fascinated by the Arthurian legends. He wrote a number of poems based on various aspects of Mallory over most of his life. Over more than 40 years, he produced a series of poems They're now known together as the Idols of the King,

though that was a title he only used for four of them, four poems about four of the female characters. And again, it's very interesting that Tennyson was so interested in the female characters, and he shows them as trying to be both a model for womanhood, but also he's interested in the fallen characters, the idea of fallen women. And there's a most wonderful poem about Guinevere, where Tennyson invents an episode that doesn't actually happen. in Mallory, where Arthur comes back to visit Gwynnevere after she's retreated to a convent.

In Mallory, Arthur's already dead by then, but in Tennyson, Arthur comes to visit her in the convent and upbraids her, and she prostrates herself flat on the floor, arms out, as a gesture of total humility and submission and a kind of groveling act of asking for forgiveness. It's a very powerful poem. So Tennyson did wonderful things with the Mortarthur. Helen Cooper, it's amazing to think that Caxons, as it were, Caxon's version of Marbury's Moore-Darthur was the only text in existence until as late as 1934, when something that's now called the Winchester Manishcript

that was discovered in the Library of Winchester College. What was that and what difference did it make? Well, it certainly gave an interest in scholarly Arthurian material, a big boost that is to go back to. to Mallory's text behind everything the Victorians had done to it. It gave us a different version of just one section, the section known as the Roman Wars, where Mallory was drawing very, very closely on the alliterative mortar Arthur,

that poem that we've mentioned already. It's more difficult linguistically because the alliterative mortarthor was a northern poem and that dialect comes through. and it fits rather awkwardly, stylistically speaking, into the rest of the work. And either Kackston himself rewrote it to modernise the language and bring it more into the line with the rest of the text or it's just possible that in that other manuscript that he must have had in his workshop somebody had already done that work on it, possibly Mallory himself.

Otherwise the text are fairly similar. So it hasn't made a significant difference? The big difference is in how you divide it up. Vinava, who edited the Winchester manuscript, believed it was divided into eight separate tales. And he published his edition of the manuscript under the title of The Works of Sir Thomas Mallory Plural. Kaxton had unified it and turned it into the whole book of King Arthur.

In the 20th century, Loras, it repeatedly arrived on our stages and our screens and in our books. So the passion for it was revived And it's a fairly obvious question I'm sure there's a direct answer Why do you think it was so powerful? I think that the power resides in several astonishingly different strands So on one hand there's the strand of formative history Foundation history and the idea of a glorious past

And that obviously was very strong in the 19th century Along with high chivalric ideals What happened in the 20th century, of course, was the First World War and Wilfred Owen famously said, you know, that it's the chivalric ideals they learnt from the stories of Arthur that sent these men to their deaths. And then you have this astonishing revival of a completely different strand, which is a focus on the Grail quest and therefore on failure on the wasteland, of course, modernism, the idea of the fragments of what remains to us. and so the tragic aspects of Mallory's story came through very strongly. And then now, I suppose, you could say that it's come back round

and now we have modern programmes about Merlin and Fun Nights hitting dragons. Well, unless that's all we've time for. Thank you very much, Helen Fulton, Helen Cooper and Laura Ash. Next week we'll be talking about comments. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 Arts and Discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website. ABC.co.uk

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