Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World's Classics)

by Malory, Thomas

  we have evidence enough to the empire of whole Rome: Arthur’s other counsellors advise him similarly (omitted here). That he consults his knights before taking action marks his rule as good kingship rather than tyranny.

  Walling Street: the Roman road (reputedly built by Belinus) from the Channel ports to the upper Severn, much of it now the A2 and A5.

  many giants of Genoa: the association of giants with Genoa probably has less to do with folklore than with the demands of alliteration, j- initial sounds being comparatively scarce in English.

  with my good knights: the Emperor’s assembly of his forces is omitted.

  I shall thoroughly destroy it: the Emperor’s further plans are omitted.

  Sir Constantine, that after was king after Arthur’s days: the story followed by the alliterative Morte is that of the historical tradition based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, in which Mordred is made regent in Arthur’s absence; Malory, following the romance tradition, holds over the making of Mordred regent until the war against Lancelot. It is therefore Malory himself who substitutes Baudwin and Constantine at this point, but it is curious that he does so with what looks like a retained alliterative line: ‘For to counsel and comfort Sir Cador’s son of Cornwall.’

  Sir Lancelot was passing wroth: this is one of the most striking of Malory’s cross-referencing interpolations that offer parallel chronologies for the various stories he tells: see X. 22 (pp. 238–9).

  that falleth for the war: some details of the embarkation are omitted.

  flying on wing out of the west parts: compare the passage in the alliterative Morte Arthure on which this is based:

  The king was in a grete cogge with knightes full many,

  In a cabane enclosed, clenlich arrayed;

  Within on a rich bed restes a little,

  And with the swogh of the se in swefning he fell.

  Him dremed of a dragon, dredful to behold,

  Come drivand over the deep to drenchen his pople,

  Evenwalkand out of the West landes.

  nigh of thy blood: Malory follows the tradition that identifies Howell, or Hoel, as son of a sister of Uther Pendragon, therefore Arthur’s cousin. Geoffrey of Monmouth describes him as Arthur’s nephew.

  Sir Bedivere: in this section, and occasionally elsewhere, the name is spelt ‘Bedwere’; I have standardized to ‘Bedivere’ as that is Malory’s (or the scribe’s) preferred form at the end of the work, where he appears in his most famous episode of throwing Excalibur into the lake.

  this corsaint: Arthur is joking that the giant is St Michael himself, patron saint of St Michael’s Mount; a ‘corsaint’ (corps saint, holy body) is a saint’s body or relics such as might be worshipped at a shrine.

  all the commons of this country may behold it: the heads of malefactors were commonly displayed above city gates. Two short passages of further instructions relating to the giant’s treasure are omitted.

  thank ye God … and no man else: compare Henry V’s instruction after the battle of Agincourt, some fifty years before Malory was writing, to give the glory to God alone.

  war is at hand: a short summary of the defeat is omitted.

  many good towns: an episode follows in which Gawain overcomes a pagan knight named Sir Priamus. Priamus assists Arthur’s knights in a skirmish, and after being christened is made a knight of the Round Table.

  that for us all on the Rood died: Arthur may be announcing his intention to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or, more likely in view of his intention of taking ‘good men of arms’ with him, to go on crusade to recover the Holy Land for the Christians, as the last survivors of the Round Table do after the deaths of Arthur and Lancelot. If a ‘historical’ Arthur of the fifth or sixth century had gone to Palestine, however, he would have found that it was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The need for a crusade was an urgent issue in Malory’s time, but in order to attempt to stem the Turkish advance across the Mediterranean rather than to reconquer the Holy Land.

  as the romance tells: the romance in fact tells nothing of the sort: in the alliterative Morte Arthure, as in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur is recalled by the news of Mordred’s usurpation before he is crowned (a sequence of events that helps to avoid the issue of why Arthur does not appear as emperor in histories of the Roman Empire). The only other text to have Arthur crowned as emperor is John Hardyng’s metrical Chronicle, composed just before Malory was writing and which he could possibly have known.

  to part betwixt you even: i.e. they are to take possession of him as prisoner and divide equally between them the ransom paid for his release.

  ever be his own: Sir Priamus is also rewarded, with the duchy of Lorraine: see the first note to p. 93 above.

  A NOBLE TALE OF SIR LANCELOT DU LAKE

  The title is taken from the explicit to the tale. Sir Lancelot has as yet played little part in the work, but from this point forwards he takes over from Arthur as its hero. His adventures were told at the greatest length in the Lancelot section of the French prose Vulgate Cycle, where it is his love for Guenivere that is the primary focus of interest. Malory here selects just three short episodes from this, and those show him in a chivalric rather than an amatory light; Lancelot’s insistence that knights errant should not love par amours is Malory’s own addition, and is typical of his shift of emphasis in his own version from sexual love to knightliness. The repeated accusations that he does indeed love Guenivere, however, both give substance to the reader’s own foreknowledge of the story and foreshadow its later development.

  The three episodes occur at a late point in the original, after the moment when Lancelot rides in a cart to rescue Guenivere; Malory does not recount this episode until near the end of his own work, after the Grail Quest (XIX. 1–9). A few passages bear close verbal resemblances to another French romance, the non-Vulgate Perlesvaus.

  an abbey of white monks: i.e. Cistercian monks, who wore white habits. This is the monastic order most frequently cited in the French Vulgate Cycle, especially in the Quest of the Holy Grail: see note to p. 321 below.

  lodged together in one bed: it was normal practice to share beds in the Middle Ages; illustrations of hospitals show even the sick lying two to a bed. In fourteenth-century France a member of a sect that required him to get up in the middle of the night to pray was required by his fellow-travellers to sleep on the outside of the communal bed in the inns where they stayed, so that he would disturb them less. The richest or highest ranking might sleep alone if they chose, but the ‘old gentlewoman’ seems not to have the wealth to offer such a luxury.

  departed and thanked his host: an encounter between Lancelot and three knights is omitted, as is their arrival at court at the end of the book (p. 118).

  many fair rich shields turned upside down: the implication is that the knights have been overcome and killed, and their reputations dishonoured: displaying a shield upside down is an insult to the bearer of the arms it carries.

  the fair Périgord falcon: both Winchester and Caxton read ‘falcon Perigot’, which suggests a resistance to the obvious easy correction ‘peregrine’. ‘Périgord’ (the area around Périgueux, in the Dordogne) seems a reasonable guess, though it does not seem to have been particularly noted for its falcons. Perigot could be a proper name, but no other animal is given a name by Malory—not even the horses, which are often named in other romances.

  he had escaped that hard adventure: there follows an incident in which Sir Lancelot fails to save a lady from her jealous husband, named Sir Pedivere.

  THE TALE OF SIR GARETH OF ORKNEY

  The heading is taken from the colophon. Malory’s source for this section is unknown, though there are a number of analogues in both French and English; it is possible that he made it up himself on the model of these. One such analogue in French that he certainly knew, since he includes it later in his own work, is the story of the young knight nicknamed La Cote Mai Taillé, ‘the ill-fitting coat’, which occurs in the course of the prose Tristan; because of its s
imilarity to the story of Gareth, and because it forms a largely self-contained digression within the Tristram, it has become one of the victims of abbreviation in this edition. An English metrical romance based on a French original, entitled Lybeaus Desconus—‘le bel inconnu’, the fair unknown—tells a somewhat similar story, this time about Gawain’s son Gingalin. Another English romance, Ipomadon, has its unrecognized hero travel and fight in the company of a scornful damosel, and makes much of its hero’s fighting in a tournament in different colours of armour. The attractive portrayal of Gawain up until the very end of the tale argues for an English source, whether a lost romance or Malory himself.

  the fairest hands that ever man saw: the fair hands are an indication of his true nature, since they are a sign of someone not used to manual labour. Sir Kay nicknames the young man more truly than he knows.

  fostered up in some abbey … and hither he is come for his sustenance: the association of monasteries with good food is a recurrent item of medieval satire; Chaucer’s Monk is another example. The speech as given here summarizes an original conversation that makes reference to the similar story of La Cote Mai Taillé.

  set him at a side board, and set himself before him: as distinguished visitors, Gareth and the damosel would normally be seated with their host at the high table on the dais. When the damosel objects to Beaumains’ being placed above her—that is, given precedence of honour in the order of seating—the knight moves himself as well as Beaumains to one of the lower tables, so acceding to her wishes without dishonouring his other guest.

  the good knight Sir Lamorak: Sir Lamorak is to be one of the key characters of the Book of Sir Tristram, and of the working out of the whole history of the Round Table; it is significant that the first thing that we should be told about his actions (his existence was earlier mentioned, with approval, by Merlin in I.24) is that he is a ‘good knight’. His introduction here marks Malory’s concern to make his work a ‘whole book’: other adventures of Arthur’s knights are happening simultaneously offstage, and will come to the fore when their turn comes to be told.

  lest ye shall catch some hurt … the siege about my lady: this is the first speech in which the damosel addresses Beaumains by the courtly or polite you, rather than the familiar or insulting thou used to inferiors, enemies, or (on very rare occasions in Malory) intimates.

  in war or in peace: the phrase is a technical one from the world of fifteenth-century chivalry: ‘in war’ indicated combat potentially until one combatant was dead or disabled, ‘in peace’ a purely friendly encounter.

  to do Sir Persant such a shame: a man’s honour (his reputation and standing in the eyes of the world and himself) depended in part on the honour (unblemished chastity) of the female members of his family. Sir Persant offers Gareth the most precious gift he can, in the shape of the body of his daughter, despite the cost to himself. Although daughters were officially at their father’s disposal in the Middle Ages and beyond, the offer here seems to have wandered into the narrative from a different culture—except, of course, that the key point is Gareth’s chivalric refusal.

  hale and ho: this was cited as the typical shipman’s call for centuries, and occurs later as a refrain in sea-shanties. It seems to have been used as a chant to co-ordinate the sailors’ pulling on the ropes that raised and lowered the sails.

  a horn … of an elephant’s bone: a horn made from an elephant tusk had high heroic associations beyond its mere size: Roland, at the battle of Roncesvalles, was equipped with an ‘olifaunt’.

  my fellow: ‘fellow’ is used by Malory as a mode of address both to inferiors and between knights: there seems to be something of a suggestion here that the dwarf is in full chivalric ‘fellowship’ with Gareth.

  [25/6]: Caxton’s chapter numbering skips one at this point; other editors accordingly use one or other of the two numberings.

  the Assumption of Our Lady: 15 August. The feast, one of the leading Marian festivals of the medieval church, celebrated the belief, developed by the sixth century, that the Virgin had been taken up bodily into heaven.

  the knights of either party rescued other: some details of the tournament are omitted, here and later.

  ye would not have smitten me so: the manuscript reads ‘would have smitten’; the ‘not’ is imported from Caxton. The scribe omits another ‘not’ just below.

  that hated Sir Gareth: this paragraph foreshadows the events of the Book of Sir Tristram, with which the Tale of Sir Gareth intersects chronologically—witness the presence of Tristram at the tournament. See in particular X.58 below. The character of Gawain changes radically in different sections of Malory’s work to correspond with the very different portraits of him drawn by his various sources: see the Introduction, pp. xvi-xvii, and the headnote to this tale.

  and it were better: other offers of service arc omitted.

  none that were wedded should joust at that feast: the request is premissed on the high rates of injury and mortality in tournaments: Dame Lyonesse wants to preserve husbands (including Gareth) for their wives (including herself)- An account of the tournament is omitted.

  THE BOOK OF SIR TRISTRAM DE LYONESSE

  The great French prose Tristan was one of the most widely known of all the Arthurian romances in the late Middle Ages, and had largely replaced the earlier, simpler love story. The prose romance provided Malory with what he needed for the great central section of his own Arthuriad in a way that the earlier version could not have done: it gives an extended narrative of what happens to the fellowship of the Round Table between Arthur’s military victories and the Grail Quest. The parallelism of the stories of Tristram and Lancelot has a double ancestry: the story of Lancelot was originally modelled in part on that of Tristan, and then Tristan’s own story was reworked to bring in ideas and motifs from the Lancelot. Malory makes the most of the opportunities this offers to elevate Lancelot as the leading knight of the Round Table: Lancelot is the ideal by which Tristram measures himself.

  The French Tristan survives in a large number of manuscripts, and a print of 1489 for which the manuscript copy text is no longer extant (there is a modern facsimile of this edition). No single surviving manuscript represents the text as Malory appears to have known it; his version is at times closest to the print, presumably because its text was based on a manuscript similar to the one he himself used. The first modern edition, in multiple volumes, is now available, but only parts of this correlate closely with Malory’s text. The original Tristan is about six times the length of Malory’s, and in some versions has an extension that includes the Grail quest as well. Malory reverts to the Vulgate Cycle for his own Grail section, but incorporates the begetting and birth of Galahad from the interlaced narrative of the Tristan (which had itself borrowed the episode from the prose Lancelot).

  Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram contains a number of more or less self-contained narratives—those of Sir La Cote Mai Taille, Alexander the Orphan, and Sir Palomides’ adventures at the Red City—that are omitted in this edition. Malory was also writing for a readership with an insatiable appetite for the details of tournaments, of which there are a great many; these are here cut heavily, partly in order to highlight the events of the extraordinary tournament at Lonazep, when the personal and social tensions within the broader Arthurian fellowship and in Tristram’s own group begin to express themselves in a violence at odds with the ostensible ceremony of the occasion. The adventures contained in the Tristram are in some ways the archetypal ones of the Arthurian world, of knights meeting in forest glades to engage in fierce combat, of quests undertaken and diverted into further quests. Reading the Tristram complete, however, can begin to seem itself like an endless digression; I have concentrated on the main threads of the continuing story of the fellowship, and the processes that first show it beginning to break.

  Caxton divided the Tristram into some 200 chapters, themselves divided into five books of widely varying lengths; Vinaver offers a fifteen-part division based on the individual
stories. The manuscript contains thirty-eight large capitals, occasionally with a blank line preceding them; the breaks in the narrative in this edition follow those divisions.

  Here beginneth … King Mark of Cornwall: this neat heading to the ‘first book’ does not announce any consistent structural division: Malory’s ‘second book’ seems to correspond to a volume of his French exemplar, or the exemplar of that, and is divided from the first in the middle of a speech. The ‘third book’ connects Tristram’s adventures to the Grail, and Malory changes to a different source at that point.