A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 17: Distance and Context

This is the 17th  episode in my investigation of the discordant life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

An American criminal court is a particularly terrible kind of public theatre for a juror.  You sit with a group of strangers a short distance from someone accused of crimes which can be terrible.  You watch and listen as the prosecution and defense carefully construct damning and exonerating narratives.  The prospect of deciding between the two “concentrates the mind wonderfully” to appropriate Johnson’s observation about the prospect of being hanged.  During the last weeks whilst I’ve studied the accusations of rape against Sir Thomas Malory, I found myself recalling my own experience as a juror and falling into the same frame of mind.   I’ve read and reread and studied, working to be honest, objective, and uncertain, to see how the evidence fits together, but not force it to do so.

To complete my investigation of this difficult and controversial aspect of Malory’s life, I decided to take a step back, to verify and improve my overall knowledge of the crime of rape in 15^th century England.  To that end, I’ve been carefully studying Caroline S. Dunn’s 2007 Ph.D. dissertation Damsels in Distress or Partners in Crime?  The Abduction of Women in Medieval England to see what extent it contradicted or corroborated my earlier research and to see if the context of her incisive and comprehensive study illuminated Malory’s case further.  I also decided to look again at the closest thing to recent writers for the  prosecution, Catherine Batt’s paper “Malory and Rape” and Jonathan Hughes Arthurian Myths and Alchemy:  the Kingship of Edward IV as well as Edward Hicks 1970 biography Sir Thomas Malory His Turbulent Career which details the discovery of the Nuneaton indictment.

Dunn searched every volume of the patent roles from the early 1200’s to the year 1500, both the records of the King’s Bench and the Gaol Delivery in order to cast her net as widely as possible.  She was able to classify 821 of 1,283 cases as abduction (730) or rape (90) or kidnapping followed by rape (37).  Further, she was able to identify motive in 344 cases.  Sexual assault and violent abduction could be detailed in both appeals and indictments, and she uses such ancillary information for her classification.   This corroborates Hardyment’s observation that the absence of such details in the accusations against Malory, both in the Nuneaton indictment and Hugh Smyth’s subsequent appeal at Westminster, argues the possibility that if there was sexual relationship between Malory and Joan Smyth, it was consensual.  Indeed, according to Dunn, over half the instance of wife abduction were women going willingly with a lover.

Henry Ansgar Kelly suggests the severe legislative act of 1382 which enables family members, not just the victim, to appeal the crime whilst precluding trial by combat supersedes the earlier acts, particularly Westminster I and II.  Dunn argues, persuasively, that instead, the latter act supplemented the earlier legislation.  In particular, her examination of the evidence shows that whilst women could not appeal their husbands of rape, they could appeal others after 1382.  Hence, Joan Smyth could have appealed Malory, contrary to the assertion made by Catherine Batt.  Further, statistics show and it was known to the legal community at the time that appeals by the victim were more successful than those made by others. Indeed, prosecution under all the acts was possible, not just the act of 1382.  Obviously, there are many reasons Joan Smyth may not have chosen to do so.  But that both Buckingham at Nuneaton and Smyth at Westminster chose to accuse Malory only under the 1382 act  further corroborates Kelly’s assessment that the decision  was an admission that any relationship between Malory and Joan Smyth was consensual.

Hardyment disputes there was any sexual relationship at all and I was skeptical of her argument.  However, I now consider it the most probable of the possibilities for the following reasons.  First, surprisingly, the accusation of the attempted assassination of the Duke of Buckingham was classified in the indictment as a trespass, not as a felony, possibly because no one was injured in the incident and the ambiguity of the events.  The specific addition of the accusation of a sexual relationship, consensual or not, to the accusation of abduction with theft of property meant it merited classification as a felony, justifying arrest and imprisonment.  Second, and more importantly, there is the curious collection of companions included with Malory in the appeal:  Adam Brown, a Coventry weaver, Thomas Potter, a small farmer, and William Weston, gentleman.  None of the three served Malory directly or were members of his family, as is often the case in other cases of rape and abduction in which groups are involved.  Hardyment suspects Joan Smyth may have originally been Joan Weston, William Weston’s sister, and that Malory may have been helping Weston rescue his sister from an unwanted marriage.  Third, Malory was never tried for any of the accusations.  However, in subsequent negotiations for bail and comprehensive pardon, the accusation of felonious rape, the most notorious charge, is never mentioned.  It’s a particularly telling clue in evaluating the charge’s merit.

For all these reasons, and my earlier discussions on the topic, my verdict is that Malory was most probably innocent of sexual assault (and definitely was never explicitly charged with such.)

In closing I want to note that the literary arguments of both Catherine Batt and Jonathan Hughes focus more on the Le Morte d’Arthur itself rather than the events of Malory’s life and deserve more careful consideration in that context.  Batt, in particular, states that Malory’s portrayal of rape is not “incompatible with the perspective of an apparent rapist” which logically begs the difficult, possibly unanswerable question is there any literary work that definitively is?  The fact remains that the Pentecostal Oath, which Malory invented for the Round Table Knights, specifically proscribed sexual violence and that he portrayed rape as horrific and terrible as in the incident with the Duchess of Britany.  To my mind, Batt is working her way to a very different question anyway:  is Malory’s code of Chivalry inherently sexist?  It’s a viable and important question that I’ve added to my list of topics for a future post.

Episode 18 can be found here.