Malory's earliest source is Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote History Of The Kings Of Britain around 1136 - already six hundred years after the real Arthur's death. Geoffrey claimed an even older Welsh text as his source, and contains several key elements that survive all later versions: Merlin as Arthur's advisor, Guinevere as his wife, and Mordred as the antagonist. However, the Round Table itself wasn't added until a translation into French twenty years later. This is important, because details seem to slip in and out of the various tellings of the tale, which gives suspicion to any of their claims to having a degree of historical accuracy.

Another important source was Chretien de Troyes, who wrote Eric and Enid, Cliges, Yvain, Lancelot, Perceval between 1170 and 1182. This added more details to the story. It introduced the quest for a grail, though it was not necessarily the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper. It also introduced the love between Guinevere and Lancelot, possibly at the request of Marie de Champagne, the patron of de Troyes. This has come to be a key trope in Arthurian legend, yet it didn't exist in every version of the story. These works were romances, tailored for a particular readership, again making us doubt their historical authenticity.

Malory's main source was the Vulgate Cycle, written in the early-to-mid thirteenth century. It immediately Christianised the grail, and made Lancelot and Guinevere's love for each other instrumental in the fall of the Round Table, which became important in Malory's version too - but all elements that didn't even feature in Geoffrey's original text. The Vulgate Cycle was episodic, lacking a chronology and with battle scenes of interminable length. Malory simplified the tales, reducing them, omitting certain details and adding others, such as naming anonymous characters. So Malory can't really be trying to create a viable historical record, because he is acting more like an editor and a writer than he is a historian.

This didn't stop him frequently referring to the Vulgate Cycle in his stories, though: "as the Freynshe booke seyth" - a phrase "Malory uses not infrequently when he is departing from his original - a sort of reverse confession of guilt", to quote E. Talbot Donaldson. He refers to the French book to give his own work credence, especially when he's added something. This charge has also been levelled at Geoffrey of Monmouth, who claimed his work was based on that ancient Welsh text but was suspected of making things up too. It's as if they believe the closer a source is to Arthur's time, the closer to truth it becomes. This is actually a fair argument, because Malory's main sources were a succession of writers who, in the centuries preceding him, took someone else's work and added to it as they saw fit. The further back we go, the closer to a primary source the text will become, and the more historically accurate it would be. Malory's sources were historical fiction themselves.

However, if it appears that Malory was merely bastardising the fiction of others, and exasperating the story's inauthenticity by adding even more to it of his own creation, then we have to ask the question of why. Historical fiction is more informative about what the period it's written in wants to do with the past than it is about the past itself. The literature of Malory's pre-Renaissance period wasn't so much poetic as it was didactic. Texts weren't written (or read) for the beauty of the writing, but what could be learnt from them. If Malory's consciously adapting history, then it begs the question what he's adapting it for.

A clue to his intentions might be in the sheer number of otherwise clumsy anachronisms in his work that would seem to place the tales more in his own time than in that of the real Arthur. Surely Malory would have known that cannons hadn't been invented almost a millennium before, even if he didn't know jousting, lances and plate armour didn't exist either - all of which feature in his works. The two biggest anachronisms, however, are knights and Camelot. There were no knights in Arthur's time, and Camelot, if Winchester (as Malory frequently insists), was abandoned when the Romans left Britain in 410AD and wasn't revived again until Alfred the Great made it his capital in the ninth century. This means the city was left to go to ruin in the intervening period - during which the real Arthur reigned. Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that Arthur held court at the City of the Legions, now Caerleon in Wales, but Malory deliberately ignored this. Again, the question is why. Perhaps Malory did not know Winchester's history, but that is not the issue. He contradicted another source, so Winchester must have had some meaning for him.

It's important here to look at the historical context in which Malory was writing. In the third quarter of the fifteenth century, England was torn apart by the War of the Roses, in which two rival claims to the throne (one by the house of York, one by the house of Lancaster) led to prolonged civil war. In this war, Malory first sided with the Yorkists, following the Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville (also known as Richard Beauchamp, and popularly as Warwick the Kingmaker) into battle, and later switching sides to the Lancastrians with him. Some critics believe Warwick was Malory's basis for Lancelot. Warwick was a noble knight who captured the Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, but later mercifully released him. Meanwhile, Malory himself was getting frequently imprisoned for theft, rape and conspiracy to murder. The impression we get of England is one exhausted by centuries of dynastic quarrels, private wars and general anarchy.

But in the midst of that, Malory wrote stories about an English people united under one king, where knights practice chivalry, spreading Christianity and creating a binding sense of loyalty to the idea of England. Looked at in the context that Malory must have written at least part of his Arthurian works in prison, they would seem to be escapist literature: both from his circumstances, and the problems of the age. His works represented an ideal, a golden age, before things went wrong, and, given the downfall of the Order of the Round Table by the end of his work, an account of how things went wrong in the first place, as if there could be something to learn from the mistakes that people made centuries before.

If Malory's using history, then, as a means of both reflecting and commenting on the present, then history is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. He chose to use the Arthurian legend not because it related, unchanged, to his own time, but because it was a popular story already, by which he could reach people. They probably already knew the particulars of the tale, but by updating it for his time, he was showing how it could still be relevant. He was trying to communicate his ideal, even if that didn't exist in the past any more than it did in his present.

The Sankgreal, the Holy Grail, is an important symbol here. This is perhaps the most fictional element of the entire Arthurian legend. The concept that the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper had survived didn't even arise until the twelfth century, yet it forms one of the most important parts of Malory's narrative. This is because it is the crux of Malory's Christian message. Only the worthy can find it, which gives credence to Arthur's reign (and, conversely, makes any subsequent reign without it seem unworthy - perhaps a comment of the warring monarchies of Malory's day). It's also important because of Lancelot's failure to find it. Lancelot is unworthy, a sinner (unlike Galahad), who is more loyal to Guinevere than he is to either God or his king. He even goes up against Arthur in tournament to defend Guinevere's honour. This is high treason, and adultery's a sin to begin with. By lifting from Vulgate how the love between Lancelot and Guinevere is a crucial factor in the fall of the Round Table, Malory's overarching moral is of how the ungodly destroyed Arthur's Christian kingdom. Chivalry was supposed to be about creating a binding sense of loyalty to England (of which Arthur is symbolic), the main purpose of chivalry being to spread Christianity, yet by harking back to this imagined age of chivalric knights, Malory is warning how contemporary England could yet be destroyed again by ungodliness and disloyalty.

The main problem with this approach by Malory is that fifteenth century England was not the same place conceptually as it was in Arthur's sixth century. For a start, England wasn't even called England until centuries after Arthur's death, for it was merely a collection of various kingdoms without a single ruler under which everybody could unite, as Malory suggests they did for Arthur. In fact, he was just one of many kings, and the first one to claim to be the Bretwalda, or overking of all England, was Edwin, from Northumbria, in 626AD. Coincidentally, he was also a Christian, having married the daughter of the first Christian king in England, Eadbald of Kent in return for an alliance. He was converted by St Paulinius in 627. However, Malory's suggestion that England was a worthy Christian country under Arthur is entirely erroneous. The first proper Christian English king was Oswald in 635, who defeated the Welsh after praying to the Christian god for victory, then went on to defeat the Mercia, declared himself the new overking of England and set himself the task of converting the country to a Celtic form of Christianity. But it wasn't until the Synod of Whitby in 664 that it was decided England should be Roman Catholic, the importance of this date being, it's over a century after Arthur's death.

It becomes clear that Malory has a Christian agenda without even looking at the text, but further evidence can be found in his use of dates. The Vulgate Cycle lacked a chronological narrative, so Malory adds one of his own, this time based around a Christian calendar for allegorical reasons. Uther Pendragon's knights first discover the sword in the stone on Christmas Day, but Arthur doesn't pull it out until New Year's Day. In the Christian calendar, this is the Feast of the Circumcision, the eighth day Christ spent on Earth, on which, according to Jewish tradition, he was taken to be circumcised, symbolic of being received into the faith. Malory is portraying Arthur as a Christ-like figure, who on the eighth day becomes a new man, ascending to this higher position he was born to attain.

Arthur is also called upon to repeat the pulling of the sword from the stone on Epiphany, Candlemas, Easter and finally Pentecost. These dates are also important, most notably Pentecost, because in the Christian calendar this is the celebration of the awakening of the world after Christ ascends to Heaven. It also marks the descent of the Holy Spirit to Earth, and the coming of the new order of the Christian Church. It's perhaps also not surprising, then, that the oath taken at the first meeting of the Order of the Round Table is "sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste". The Knights of the Round Table are meant by Malory to symbolise the Christian Church, with Arthur as Christ as their leader. It's a member of the Round Table that is disloyal to Arthur, and therefore God, that leads to the break up of the Round Table, and the collapse of a united England - presumably, eventually, into the state Malory finds it. So Malory's using this fictionalised history as both explanation as to how things got the way they did, and as warning that it could happen again.

It's a fact that little is known about the real King Arthur. He predates most reliable historical records. There are scant, often contradictory references to him in the Annals of Wales, Nennius and other sources. Some say he died fighting Medraut (perhaps Mordred), others that he died fighting the invading Saxons. Historically speaking, the presence of Guinevere, Merlin (who predated even Arthur in Welsh mythology), Lancelot, Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table can not be verified. There is more fiction (or speculation) than there is fact, but having endured so long, the division between the two has become blurred.

Perhaps, in attempting the definitive, completist Arthurian text, Malory knew he was writing more of a history of the historical fiction of Arthurian legend than he was the history of Arthur himself. But perhaps that wasn't his main concern. A key speech in Malory is at the end of the chapter on Torre and Pellinor, the one where Arthur sets out the chivalric rules by which the Knights of the Round Table will act: loyalty to the king, mercifulness, respect and protection for women, and fighting no battles for love or worldly goods. It didn't appear in any of Malory's sources. He invented it. Of course Malory's text is historical fiction, in that it takes place in the past, even from Malory's point of view, but even more so, it is a fable. Whilst creatively England was on the verge of entering the Renaissance, physically the country was in turmoil. Malory harks back to an ideal past, that like all ideal pasts, never actually existed, but which serves to comment and warn about everything that's wrong in his contemporary society. From our perspective, this makes it archetypal historical fiction, because it tells us as much, if not more, about Malory's time as it does about the legendary King Arthur's.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Kim, H. The Knight Without The Sword: A Social Landscape In Malorian Chivalry, 2000, Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Radulescu, R. The Gentry Context For Malory's Morte Darthur, 2003, Boydell & Brewer

Reiss, E. Sir Thomas Malory, 1966, Twayne Publishers, Inc.

NOTES:
Not a very textual essay, but when I was planning the thing, I was getting bogged down in analysing certain passages closely. Then I realised that what I wanted to say was more contextual, because my main argumentive thrust was the differences between the 1460s and 530s, and the changes in between. You're not going to find those in the text. A short bibliography, compared to previous essays, and to be honest, I used the Reiss book far more than the other two put together, along with a very useful website about north-eastern history that I can't for the life of me find anymore, so couldn't credit it. This was another pre-1830 unit I was under duress to do to meet my quota, but having no other work due in this week, I was able to give it proper due attention. I'm glad it didn't have to be any longer than this, however, because I found my grip on the material slipping at the 2000 word mark. And yes, the Middle English quotes are real, and yes, the entire "Morte Darthur" is written like that, and yes, I had to read it. The trick is to read it a bit like "Trainspotting" - read it so quick it all just slips into your higher consciousness. Ha. The essay ended up getting 53%, my worst mark since the first year. You win some...