King Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory and a radio programme

“Yet som men say in many p[art]ys of Inglonde that kynge Arthur is nat ded, but h[ad] by the wyll of oure Lord Jesus into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne and shall wynne the Holy Crosse.  

Yet I woll nat sat that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey; here in thys worlde he changed hys lyff.  And many men say that there is ys written upon the tumbe thys;
HIC IACHET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS”

Now there will be those who mutter pretentious old duffer beginning the blog post with a quote from a book written in the English of 1471, but I am unrepentant.

The lines were written by Sir Thomas Mallory while under house arrest for consistently backing the wrong side in the English civil war.  During his incarceration he produced a rattling good story of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and the love affair between Arthur’s wife Guinevere and Lancelot.

I bought my edition in the winter of 1968 and regularly go back to it and while in places it is hard going there is nothing quite like reading the story in the way Mallory set it down.  All of which makes the chap quite special in my eyes, particularly as the book out lines that chivalrous code which was supposed to pertain on the battle field.

All of which was fine until I listened to Melvin Bragg’s Radio 4 In Our Time Programme and discovered that Mallory had been banged up not just because he was on the wrong side but was in the words of one of the contributors “top thug in an age of thugs.”

Which I have to confess was a bit of a surprise, but none the less made for an interesting discussion and one that you can listen to at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot

And in the mean time there are always the notes from the programme to start you off.

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 Cambridge
Helen Fulton
Professor of Medieval Literature and Head of Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York
Laura Ashe
CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College at the University of Oxford

Picture; English: Illustration of the Battle of Barnet (14 April 1471) on the Ghent manuscript, a late 15th-century and a French illustration of Thomas de Fauconbergh beseiging London while inturn his forces are  attacked by Edward IV and his troops, circa 1471, from MS 1168 at the Besançon, image from French Ministry of Culture