This is
episode 6 in a series of informal personal essays about the mysterious
discordance of the apparently nefarious, possibly criminal, life of Sir Thomas
Malory and his seminal Arthurian romance, Le
Morte d’Arthur which is so deeply concerned with Chivalric morality. You can find episode 1 here.
We’re just
back from the Big Meeting at Crow Canyon Southwest Archaeology conference in
Cortez, Colorado, whimsically called “The Big MACC” and I’ll post about it
shortly. During the long drive there and
back again we listened to the recent BBC radio dramatization of the The Once and Future King, T. H. White’s
classic novel which is, among other things, a set of fantasy variations on
Malory. I was happily surprised by the
imagination and strength of the production and its fidelity to its source. I recommend it for long drives through
interesting country.
White’s
Merlin educates Arthur using the natural world.
He turns him into birds, fish, animals and in an especially dark episode,
a belligerent ant. White’s ant world, reminiscent
of the grim prolepses of Orwell and Huxley, was intended to convey the
spiritual and physical oppression of totalitarianism. Arthur as an ant has a horrifically limited
vocabulary (the only qualitatives are “done” and “not done”), is constantly
connected to a distracting Nest WIFi broadcasting orders, organizational
information and banal, patriotic songs.
It’s a superficial cultural life lacking imagination, art, nuance or
contemplation. Now, ironically, the allegory
seems prescient in an entirely different way and contemporary parallels are ominously
pertinent.
I’d
forgotten how magnetic White’s novel is, how creatively he improvised on his source
and how strongly it affects me emotionally.
Yet White isn’t Malory and it’s critical in this personal enterprise to
see them distinctly. White’s Arthur
makes the imaginary leap of combining virtue and knighthood. Malory saw them as integrally bound
together. Le Morte d’Arthur is more concerned with the specific individual dramatic
consequences of that idea, and as a result, the discovery and refinement of
knightly morality through the adventures, conflicts and dilemmas of the individual
Round Table knights. Malory’s Arthur
doesn’t invent the idea of moral Chivalry but he dedicates himself to making it
work.
What was knighthood
in the 15th century and how did it compare to Malory’s vision as he
translated and, a little like White, selected, shaded and elaborated the
sources he was translating? Crecy (1346)
and Agincourt (1415) demonstrated that large traditional and expensive forces
of mounted, heavily armored Chivalry could be defeated by much less expensive
integrated forces of archers, artillery and knights on foot. By the 15th century, fully armored
infantry using highly efficient and deadly poleaxes functioned as a kind of
deadly defensive special forces protecting the more lightly armed archers who
were the primary offense. Many of those bore
the lower rank of “esquire,” as Malory did for a significant portion of his
military career. Jousting on horseback
had evolved into an expensive, ritualized sport. It was a different world.
Yet, Malory
never seems to be looking back nostalgically. Rather, his selection of his
subject and the immediacy of his treatment suggests he saw contemporary relevance
in knighthood and the morality associated with it. Hardyment points to his extended family’s
several connections to the Knights of St. John, the Knights Hospitaller. This seems particularly important. By the middle of the 15th century
when Malory was writing there were and had been several orders of Chivalry and
they functioned, evolved and inflected the basic ideas in very different ways. This is something I may examine more closely
in future posts.
P. J. C.
Fields states in his conclusion to his Life
and Times of Sir Thomas Malory that “any attempted full assessment of
Malory’s personality from his writings…would require another book as long as
this present once, and might still be doomed to failure.” I agree. Hardyment, in her later much longer book
takes a cleverly different tack: she has
written a comprehensive speculative biography.
She explores every possibility for his range of his experience, including
for example, a trip to Rhodes to serve with the Hospitallers as well as the
possibility that he could have been present in the castle in Rouen where Joan
of Arc was imprisoned. The specific development,
nature and quality of his personality is left to the reader which may be
preferable in evaluating the veracity of the defaming charges leveled against
him.
A couple of last comments for this post. Armstrong and Hodges as well as Field make
much of the multinational character of Arthur’s court and the complexity of
rule with multiple factions. That was
the world in Malory’s age. He’d seen it
work relatively well when he was young and watched as it decayed into the
disaster of “The Wars of the Roses.”
Nevertheless, there is never a wistful hint of nostalgia for a simpler,
less complicated world. At the same time
he was writing about Chivalry and its morality he was also very much a man of
his age.
Episode 7 is here.
(Photo of 15th Century Knight with Poleaxe by Skane-Smeden)
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