Sunday, March 8, 2015

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 6: Ants, Hospitallers, A Contemporary Life


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)

No comments: