Le Morte d’Arthur

*Le Morte d’Arthur* is a compilation of Arthurian romances put together by Sir Thomas Malory. It contains both old English legends and original work written by Malory himself. The 1450s are considered the start of Malory’s writing of the book. The first edition was published in 1485 by William Caxton.  It is the best-known English Arthurian legend.

Malory had engaged in criminal activities including theft, attempted murder of Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, accusations of rape, and robbery. Malory was imprisoned in several prisons and managed to escape multiple times. In 1461, King Henry VI granted him a pardon. He was imprisoned again in 1468 because of his allegiance to the House of Lancaster and his plot to overthrow King Edward IV. He was imprisoned at Newgate Prison in London, where he most likely wrote ''Le Morte d'Arthur.* Henry VI returned to the throne in 1470 and Malory was released from prison again.

## Manuscript history 
William Caxton’s printed edition of 1485 was thought to be the earliest surviving version of Malory’s text. In 1934 Walter Oakeshott (a librarian at Winchester College) was collecting the college’s most interesting books when he discovered a manuscript. The text had been written in years between 1471 and 1483 by two scribes working together.

Clues on its pages proved this was one of the manuscripts used by William Caxton in the preparation of his *Le Morte D'Arthur''. Pages fresh from the press had been laid on the manuscript. The wet ink accidentally transferred reversed images of Caxton’s distinctive typefaces. So it is probable that the manuscript was in Caxton’s Westminster workshop during the early 1480s. The printer may even have borrowed the manuscript from one of Malory’s family members. Roland argues that the differences between the Caxton and Winchester versions suggest that Caxton "overwrote his copy text to comply with his world view, just as Malory had overwritten his source texts before him." The Roman Wars accounts in both Caxton and Malory's versions are informed by "almost four hundred years of struggles for dominion over the east and a gradual slipping away of the conquests made by the First Crusade". According to Roland, Caxton's version of the Roman War and his possible amendments to the Morte are a direct response to contemporary fears of Turkish expansion. he discovers that Malory's *Morte* was "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, a time when Europe was awash in uncertainty as to the repercussions of Mehmed II's death". For these reasons, the emphasis on crusades and on fears of foreign invasion begin to take on a deeper significance. The printing of the first edition was in 1485. It has been of great significance, since Caxton’s printed version allowed for further distribution and printing by other printing houses. Thomas Malory has been both criticized and praised for his rich usage of connecting words such as “so–and–then,” usually used to transition between stories, and for his lengthy and repetitive sentences and phrases, which some scholars condemned as too simplistic. Others have praised it to be of high aesthetic quality.

## Influence from other sources 
### Book I 
Malory's first book's storyline is mainly based on the Prose Merlin in the *Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin*.

### Book II 
This book is based mainly on the first half of the Middle English heroic poem *Alliterative Morte Arthure*, which is mostly based on  *Geoffrey of Monmouth*’s p*seudo-chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae.*

### Book III 
This book is based on parts of the French *Prose Lancelot*, mostly its '*Agravain*' section, along with the chapel perilous episode taken from *Perlesvaus*.

### Book IV 
This is not directly based on any preexisting literature. Instead, it is inspired by several Arthurian romances of the Fair Unknown genre, also known as *Le Bel Inconnu*, or *Sir Gingalain* 

### Book V 
That is the longest of his eight books, it is based primarily on the lengthy *Prose Tristan* in French, or the lost English translation of it, and also could be from the Middle English verse romance *Sir Tristram*.

### Book VI 
The main source is *The Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal*, which details the exploits of numerous knights in their mythical search for the Holy Grail.

### Book VII 
Malory explicitly mentions the adultery of Guinevere and Lancelot. He combined the story from both the *Vulgate Cycle prose Lancelot* (counting the story of the Fair Maiden of Astolat and an abridged retelling of *Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart*) and his own creative setups.

### Book VIII 
For writing his final book, he used the version of Arthur's death derived primarily from parts of the *Vulgate Mort Artu*, and as a secondary source, he used the *English Stanzaic Morte Arthur.*

## References