A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 10: Armiger Literatus

My last post narrated the incident which had such profound consequences for Sir Thomas Malory’s later life and career and previous posts have discussed equally dramatic episodes earlier in his life.  The circumstances raise questions which may be impossible to answer conclusively with the extant evidence.  The words “fine” and “terrible,” which I chose to describe this topic, weren’t chosen with insouciance.  You can find the first post here.

It’s apropos now to take a short but careful look at his whole life up to this point.  Doing so reveals some important additional surprises and insights and suggests aspects of his character which may prove essential when we come to the end and address the central question of who he really was.

He was born around 1401 to a wealthy Warwickshire family, the Malorys of Newbold-Revel (the issues surrounding his date of birth are discussed in Episode 3.)  Warwickshire is sometimes called the “heart of England” if by chance you’re not familiar with it.  Not only is it beautiful and geographically central, it has always played an important role historically and culturally.  Shakespeare was born there, for example, and aspects of his life and Malory’s have some curious correspondences, but that’s a topic for a later post.  Malory had three uncles, Thomas, Simon and Robert. each of whom may have served as a different kind of chivalric paradigm, from the martial, to the urbane, to the spiritual.

Around the age of fourteen he served as one of several squires under Richard Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, as part of the Calais garrison which was England’s largest, best organized and most disciplined standing fighting force (David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison War and Military Service in England, 1436-1558.) He probably witnessed Warwick’s participation in the December 1414 “12^th Night Tournament” outside Calais.  Indeed, Eugène Vinaver, (the first editor of Le Morte d’Arthur Winchester manuscript) believed the tournament in the tale of Sir Gareth was written in remembrance of Beauchamp’s deeds then.  (I can’t help thinking of the Winsor tournament in my own book As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields and the effect watching Henry of Grossmont had on the young Black Prince.)

I’m certain Malory’s life at that time was filled with physical training and practice.  We know how critical training was for long bowmen (the distortions in their skeletons prove it.)  I’m certain the same is true for men-at-arms.   If you’ve ever fenced, you know how critical daily training and practice are.  I can’t believe medieval sword-to-sword combat was any less intense; success was a matter of life and death.

In November of 1415, after Agincourt, one of the most important military events of the century, Henry V and his exhausted, victorious “band of brothers” arrived in Calais.  Malory probably witnessed it.  If so, it was certainly as inspirational and emotionally important to him as witnessing the moon landing was for those who witnessed that event in 1969.  When Henry died in 1422, King Arthur’s coat-of-arms were displayed along with the Plantagenet royal arms and Malory’s experience of Henry V must have informed his depiction of Arthur.

Muster rolls indicate that Malory returned to France with Henry V’s grand invasion of Normandy in 1417 as a fully armored and equipped squire under Lord Grey of Codnor and later under Warwick.  (In scale it was a kind of medieval “D-Day.”)  After the winter siege of Falaise with the King, he was part of a lightning force under Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester that captured 32 castles in six weeks.  (George Patton’s accomplishments with the US 3^rd Army in WWII comes to mind as an apt analogy.)   Malory may have served at the siege of Rouen and been part of its garrison when Joan of Arc was imprisoned there.  He returned to Warwickshire in 1421.  By then his father, John Malory, had been Sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire (1416-1417) and had served twice as a member of Parliament for Warwickshire.  In 1420 John was one of 13 knights and esquires deemed most able to defend the realm in the King’s absence.  The Malorys were becoming a preeminent family.

What was Thomas himself like in his twenties?  He was an experienced soldier who’d served with elite units under capable, sometimes inspiring officers and there is nothing in the record to suggest he served other than honorably.  Perhaps, he was not unlike Shakespeare’s conception of Sir Henry Hotspur:  vainglorious, heroic, quick-tempered, romantic.  Some authors have judged him as such and it’s an easy, perhaps natural rationalization for later events.

I disagree.  Two incidents in the 1420s are why.  In 1422, newly returned from France he and others pursued a suit to recover property taken possession by Richard Clodeshall but enfeoffed or owned by Malory and his co-appellants.  This shows Malory’s considered use of the legal system as a young man to address a grievance as opposed to taking the law into his own hands as he will be accused later.  Further, in September 1427, his father was chosen to sit in the Commons as MP for Warwickshire when parliamentary elections were held at Warwick, his 5^th election as MP.  However, one William Petyo, a soldier who’d also served in France, marched into the sheriff’s court with a threatening retinue and insisted his name be sent in instead, which was done.  It was a direct political assault on Malory’s immediate family.  Nevertheless, it was addressed legally in 1428 when Warwick returned again from France and Peyto’s election was legally voided.

There is much less known evidence of his life in the 1430s and 1440s than one would like.  We know the extended family flourished, exhibiting fiscal conservatism and pragmatism.  We know he was married and knighted in the 1440s although there are no specific extant records of either event.  In late 1446 or early 1447 he had a son, Robert.  Nevertheless, his knighthood in his 40s is telling.  The Malorys were moderately wealthy but not so much so that knighthood was an idle honour.  Rather, it was almost certainly a life goal the achievement of which at the end of a long military career suggests dependability and responsibility as well as courage.

During that time he also served in Parliament twice, first for Warwickshire, then for Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire.  The latter appointment is interesting.  P. J. C. Field in 1993 speculated that it was as a result of the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, Malory’s later nemesis.  Christina Hardyment, in 2004, dug deeper and showed that it was just as likely the possible patronage of the Bishop of Winchester.  This is a perfect example of how Malory scholarship remains dynamic.

Hardyment makes the further point that there may have been a literary connection betwixt Malory and the Bishop of Winchester and summarizes a list of 34 sources (some over 1,000 pages) in at least 3 languages that he used.  Le Morte d’Arthur could have been a life-long project, not just a product of his prison years.  Certainly he was one of that very rare species, like Xenophon or T. E. Lawrence:  an armiger literatus, a literary knight.

What we know of Malory’s character to this stage is far from sufficient to explain what happened next, beginning on Sunday, 25 July, 1451.  It seems particularly important to consider what other events were transpiring then, particularly in the life of Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham and Richard Neville, the relatively new Earl of Warwick which is what I intend to focus on until my next post.

Episode 11 can be found here.

Lions in Tower, Wolves in the Hall

From time to time, experience dishes up a small, delicious irony.  I’m currently experiencing one.  Every few days I’m startled awake in the middle of the night.  I lay perfectly still, listening.  I’ve always wondered if it’s possible that destiny exists, but only in subtle things.  As I think about it, that’s not inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics.  But I digress.

Is it illness?  Fears about money, a friend, a lover, mortality?  We all have those sometime or other.

Fortunately not.  Here are the first two lines of my historical novel As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields:  “There were lions in the tower that summer and fall.  Their hollow roars woke me every morning before the sun came through the lancet window into my room.”  I hadn’t had that experience when I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again those sentences.

I have now. 

We have the curious fortune to live just above a zoo and recently they acquired two new adolescent lions.  Every few days I’m wakened suddenly by their “hollow” roars; the adjective, by the way, is exactly right.  What to make of it?  It’s obvious.  The thing to do is enjoy it.  It’s a startling pleasure to be wakened by lions.

A different kind of startling pleasure is the BBC mini-series of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall which we’ve been watching.   There is so much to praise about it.  The acting is phenomenal:  each performance is revelatory, from Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell, to Anton Lesser’ Thomas Moore to Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn to pick just three.  The drama Rylance creates by what he hides and what he shows of Cromwell’s character is totally absorbing.  Claire Foy’s Anne  is seminal, which is amazing when you consider the great actresses who’ve played the role in so many contexts.  She discovers an imperious vulnerability coupled with a ferocious ambition that is convincing not just in the context of the drama but the history itself.  Lesser’s Sir Thomas Moore is an effete, cruel, intellectually vain narcissist.  Nevertheless, Lesser’s performance and a very finely wrought script lead me through an arc to a point of  compassion, sorrow and understanding at his death.  (And I’m not an easy sell, by the way:  I’m familiar with Moore not only through Utopia and Robert Bolt’s famous play but the biography of his son-in-law William Roper as well.)  Indeed, that’s one of the great beauties of the series.  You feel you know these people as you know people in real life.

Perhaps, the most surprising subtle beauty of the production is the way it captures the spatial and temporal texture of Tudor life.  It conveys a unique sense of the passage of time, of lives lived in closer proximity to the natural world than ours, at the same time it develops political drama that is as frightening and compelling as any I’ve ever seen.  I’ve read that one of the appeals of HBO’s series “Game of Thrones” is the danger:  anything can happen to anyone at any time.  No one is safe in “Wolf Hall,” either, but, for me, it’s more frightening and compelling.  It’s dangers often arise from the common place, what’s partly known or guessed at which is so much a part of the human social condition.

On the spur of the moment, Lynn and I ran down to the zoo early this morning to take a couple of photos of the culprits and one of them is above.  Later, over huevos rancheros at the Oasis Café we were discussing “Wolf Hall” and she offered a provocative thesis:  if Henry hadn’t married Anne we (meaning we North Americans) would be speaking Spanish.  Her reasoning being that if it hadn’t been for the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys that came as a consequence of the Boleyn marriage, England might not have had the capital to develop into the maritime power that was essential for colonization.

A Fine and Terrible Mystery Continues

On January 24^th I posted a short précis on the perplexing, dramatic life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.   Why did someone with such an ostensibly extensive criminal history write a book so deeply concerned with chivalric morality?  Was he defamed?

Since then, partly as a result of interest expressed by M. Watkins, R. Lajeunesse and Lynn, I’ve been following up with what has been slight spare time.  I decided to do so by re-reading two versions of Le Morte d’Arthur, the Caxton and Winchester, and have acquired two historical texts:  The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory by P. J. C. Field written in 1993 and Christina Hardyment’s 2004 Malory:  The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler.  My goal is to develop an informed personal opinion of the relation of Malory’s life to his exceptional book.

Consider, this a short update, possibly one of several.  I’m not an historian nevertheless I intend to give the topic my best critical shot.  I admit to feeling a bit like Josephine Tey’s detective in Daughter of Time.  “The game’s afoot,” as someone more notable was want to quote.

The two histories are well reviewed.  Field is a preeminent academic text (and expensive unless you find a used copy as I did.)  In contrast Hardyment (no academic slouch:  Newnham College Cambridge, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford) intentionally wrote a more accessible and casually readable book.  There are more recent contributions to the literature which I’m surveying and I’ll report on them as they become pertinent.

Malory’s life story is immediately difficult, literally: my two sources disagree dramatically on his date of birth.  Field devotes a careful chapter to it and places it between 1414 and 1416.  Hardyment places is around 1401 and disperses her reasoning for it throughout her book.  The consequences for developing a picture of his life are profound.  Remember 1451 was the signal year in which Malory fell from grace and was accused of so many crimes.  Was he 35 or 50?  When he was fourteen was he part of Henry V’s Agincourt campaign, one of the Earl of Warwick’s retinue or was he at best in swaddling clothes at that time?

One piece of primary evidence sited by both Field and Hardyment is Sir William Dugdale’s 1656 The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated, which is available online.  On page 56, Dugdale writes,

“…(John Malory) left issue Thomas; who, in King Henry Vth’s time, was of the retinue to Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick at the siege of Caleys, and served there with one lance and two Archers; receiving for his lance and 1.Archer xx.ii per an. And their dyet and for the other Archer x.marks and no dyet.

“This Thomas, being a Kt in 23. H. 6, served for this Shire in the Paliam. …”

Dugdale’s book was published 240 years after the event.  Both Field and Hardyment go to Dugdale’s references:  the muster rolls for the campaigns and draw different conclusions.  I’ve read both their arguments multiple times and am not yet ready to express a personal opinion.  But the issue is of such obvious importance I will continue worrying it.

I feel like I’m walking across unsteady, shifting  ground.  I remember feeling this way several times when I was researching As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields.  The difference is that then I could appeal to my imagination for resolution for what were much, much smaller issues.

I must finish with a caution.  Everyone has read stories or novels about dangerous books, books that reveal sacred information or summon devils.  Dugdale’s book is one of those.  It’s particular hazard is that it devours and collapses time.  If you decide to look at it, watch out particularly for the illustrations.  You’ve been warned.  (The image above is from Antonioni's superlative 1966 film "Blow-up" which concerns an unintentional amateur detective.)

 Episode 3 is here

Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time"

As a consequence of my sui generous undergraduate education centered on Mathematics and English Literature the only novel I’ve ever read in the original Russian is Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.  Though last week was a traveling weekend I managed to finish reading it again, this time in translation.

My sense is that most people in the west, if they know Russian literature at all, know Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekov or Pasternak but at best may have heard of Lermontov which is a great shame.  A Hero of Our Time, his only novel, is at once a complex psychological portrait of an appealing, and disturbing character, a brilliant picaresque and a visceral travel novel.  Pechorin, the protagonist, is more complicated, self-aware and interesting than Pushkin’s Onegin.  He poses much more interesting questions about psychology, friendship and societal structure.  And he travels through finely rendered extraordinary landscapes.

He is also much more relevant today.  Pechorin is a 19^th century Russian officer in the Caucasus, a region now bearing the weight of international strategy and politics once again.  More importantly, he is part of an imperial occupying force and experiences the ambivalence, ironies and danger that necessarily follow.  I found myself thinking about Phil Klay’s characters from Redeployment and how much they shared.  Lermontov’s expressive, clear and physical language foreshadowed Hemingway and they have much in common technically and aesthetically.

A big surprise for me was to discover how Lermontov had affected my own fiction.  As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields has merited some praise for how the character’s introspection is integrated with the action.  That came from Lermontov.

A Russian mini-series was made of the novel in 2006 and a central episode, Pechorin’s duel, is available on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Raf8_VJX0 .  It’s definitely worth a look.

Lermontov, a Russian military officer who had much in common with his protagonist, died in a duel when he was in his twenties, as did Évariste Galois.  A quote (my translation):

"Passions are just ideas at the moment of their birth."  - Lermontov