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

What's Next, Ridley?

One day, my uncle and I were perched at the top of “Number 9 Express,” at the top of the Supreme Chair at Alta and looking across at clouds streaming past Mount Superior.  “Skiing is more like flying than flying is,” he said.  “I’ve always preferred skiing.”  Then he disappeared, sailing smoothly down the steep track between the trees.

I knew exactly what he meant.  Actual flight isn’t what it is in dreams until you’ve actually done it.  And then, of course, it changes.  I still have dreams in which I’m managing difficult landings.  But my uncle’s comments were a surprise, nevertheless.  He flew for much of his life and he loved it.

When I think about flight and what captures the experience at its deepest and most beautiful, two books come to mind Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind Sand and Stars and Charles Lindbergh’s We.  Both are classics, easily found and often read, at least by those with an interest in aviation.  They capture, the novelty, brash-heroism and beauty of the endeavor when it was new.  Saint-Exupéry remains a particularly powerful example of how the exploration of a new physical and scientific frontier can also summon the intellectual best of those who pursued it.  Flight, particularly in a single engine plane,  makes Newtonian physics visceral and philosophical in a way it isn’t ordinarily.

Here’s a simple example.  One day I was flying with my instructor over Antelope Island, practicing emergency landings.  (We weren’t actually landing, just going through the procedures, choosing a landing site and then flying low over it to see how good the selection was.)  We were in one of the school’s  3 Piper Tomahawks, a low-wing trainer with a nice big tail.  My instructor mentioned that they’d originally had 4.  The fourth had been flown in inappropriate conditions as a storm was coming in.  The pilot attempted to return to the airport but the storm’s wind velocity exceeded the maximum airspeed of the Tomahawk.  The little airplane was blown gently backwards into the side of a hill on the island.  The injured pilot survived but a spent the greater part of a miserable night with the wreckage.

When I think of the best books about space flight, a forgotten and neglected classic comes to mind:  A House in Space by Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.  Cooper’s book is a history of Skylab , a set of manned missions in the cesura between the Gemini and Apollo programs utilizing the Gemini capsule technology and a space station improvised from an Atlas booster second stage.  Cooper was one of the first to look at all aspects of space flight and recognized the importance of simulation and engineering.  His wide purview enabled him to identify questions and issues which are at the technological and physical heart of the pursuit of manned flight.  It’s surprisingly pertinent today when robotics is offering a viable alternative for many missions.  And Cooper, through the words of the astronauts, like Saint-Exupéry and Lindbergh before him, gives you a sense of what it’s really like to fly in space, from the explosive creaks and pops of an orbiting spacecraft as it sails through a 400 degree temperature change with every sunrise and sunset every twenty minutes to the relentless astronaut preparation to make flying and dealing with the most knotty and obscure emergencies natural.  It’s a neglected classic worthy of rediscovery.

I think my favorite line in “The Right Stuff” belongs to Sam Shepard portraying Chuck Yeager.  “What’s next, Ridley?”  (Comet Lovejoy by Dr. Robert Jensen).

Just Reading

Lynn and I have been exchanging emails with a great old friend of mine, a member of the legal profession and a judge, about Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp.” Both Lynn and I consider it one of the great short stories in English.  In one of our exchanges, my friend speculated about how his professional reading, necessarily highly focused and meticulous, affected his reading of Hemingway’s story.

It’s a deep and interesting issue, deserving of serious analysis and attention.  And, it alludes to the even more important question of how we read in general and how we should read.

One of my two Bachelor degrees is in English Literature, granted by a University and the faculty of “the Department of English.”  In fact, the department would have been more accurately named a department of Literary Criticism and Analysis (which dabbled in Linguistics and Creative Writing.)  These days, I find I would much rather have a Bachelor’s degree in Reading.

“Reading?”  Just “Reading?”

Yes.  Consider how many ways there are of reading.  For example, there is the immersive, velocitized reading for recreation, often brought to Science Fiction or Fantasy where a primary goal is to imagine as completely and viscerally as possible a world the author has labored to imagine.  Often, language is meant to be a pure transport mechanism, innocuous and transparent, though not always.  In contrast there is Kingsnorth’s “The Wake” or Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” in which a peculiar, sometimes difficult language is almost a character itself, claiming its own share of the reader’s attention.

But there are so many more ways of reading and ways a text is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to be read.  One can read for rhetorical structure, identifying how rhetorical strategies and structures are employed.  One can read for selection of detail and the consequences of those choices.  One can read with attention to point of view.  One can read for story structure or character arc.  Or one can read in the context of how a work engages with a well-defined audience, it’s effect and meaning for them.  One can read purely for definition, logic and persuasiveness of argument, even fiction can be read this way.

One can read historically, attempting to read in the context of a particular time in the past, bringing to it the insights and limitations one would have had at that time.  It’s no small achievement to do that well.  I’m reminded of Ricky Jay’s masterful demonstration of how a card trick would have been performed four different ways at four different points in history.

Simply, there are an infinite number of ways to approach a text and read it.  How should one read it?  How do you make an intelligent determination?  How many times do you read it?  How do you know you’re executing your reading strategy, perhaps paradigm is a better word, effectively?

That’s what I would expect from a college degree in “Reading.”  Further, I’d argue that it’s never been more important.  Consider the number and diversity of texts you engage with each day, some are even properly hyper-texts and need to be understood in that context.  Unless, everyone becomes more accomplished readers do democratic societies, of which I personally happen to be particularly fond, have a chance of surviving?

Last November I read “Professor Borges:  A Course on Literature” a collection of lectures given by the great literary figure recovered and edited by Martin Hadis et al.  More than anything it was a course in reading and how a great mind read carefully, well and differently.  Reading as others have read, decades or even centuries ago can be surprisingly helpful in making the particular weaknesses, obsessions and biases of the present apparent.

A Fine and Terrible Mystery

There is a book I want to read but it hasn’t been written.  It’s a book which solves an important mystery, or at least provides the likely solution to the mystery embodied in the known life, deeds and works of a man who lived in the 15^th century.

Call him Thomas.  He was born in 1416, approximately, near the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt, in Stretton-under-Fosse in Warwickshire.  A minor noble, he was knighted sometime before 1441 (commonly at the age of 21) and in that year served as an Elector in Northamptonshire.   When he was 27 he and one Eustace Barnaby were accused of stealing  £40 from one Hugh Smyth.  (At that time £40 purchased £29,440 worth of goods at 2015 prices, but corresponded to £230,600 in the relative value of labor.)  It wouldn’t have been a minor theft yet it wasn’t prosecuted.

Thomas married Elizabeth Walsh in the same year and together they had a son, Robert and possibly 1-2 other children later.  In 1443 he was elected to Parliament as one of two “Knights of the Shire” for Warwickshire and was appointed to the Royal Commission for the distribution of funds to impoverished Warwickshire towns.  That trust could suggest the earlier accusation was frivolous and without merit.  In 1449, at the age of 33, he was elected Member of Parliament for the Duke of Buckingham’s safe seat of Great Bedwyn.

In 1451, when Thomas was about 35 years old, his life changed.  He was accused, along with 26 others, of trying to murder the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most powerful Lancastrian magnates in the land.  Thomas probably owed allegiance to the Earl of Warwick, a powerful Yorkist supporter.  The accusation was never proved.  Later in the same year he was accused of extortion twice then of breaking into the home of Hugh Smyth of Monkskirby, stealing £40 and raping Smyth’s wife and attacking her in Coventry 8 weeks later.  (Rape at that time could mean abduction or consensual sex with a married woman.)  His arrest was ordered but nothing was done.  In the following months Thomas was accused of over 100 serious crimes, mostly violent robberies.

He was finally brought to trial in August of that year in Nuneaton, the heartland of Buckingham’s power and imprisoned in infamous Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in spite of pleas to be tried by a new jury from Warwickshire.  Over the next several years he escaped was imprisoned again, escaped, was imprisoned until he was released on £200 bail (worth £147,000 of goods at 2015 prices) gathered by Warwickshire magnates.

From 1460 until 1470 he was imprisoned at Newgate for further alleged crimes, including joining with the Earl of Warwick in a plot to assassinate the Yorkist King, Edward IV.  He was explicitly excluded from two of Edward IV’s general pardons afterwards but was finally released during the short period when the Earl of Warwick returned Henry VI to the throne.  He died in 1471, about the age of 55.

While Thomas was in Newgate he had access to the library of the Greyfriars Monastery adjacent to the prison, one of the finest libraries in western Europe at the time.  And he wrote a book, arguably the greatest achievement of prose literature in the 15^th century, “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

Here is just one quote from Sir Thomas Malory’s book,  (there are many others that would have served just as well),

“Wherefore, as me seemeth, all gentlemen that beareth old arms ought of right to honour Sir Tristam for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use, and shall do unto the day of doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villain.  For he that gentle is will draw him to gentle thatches (virtues) and to follow the noble customs of gentlemen.”

There are several obvious mysteries.  First, what happened in 1451 that caused a young knight with family, income and good prospects to turn into an apparently notorious outlaw?  If he was such an outlaw, why did the magnates of Warwickshire pay such a great sum for his bail?  Finally, most importantly, why is it that someone who was accused of such crimes wrote a book so intimately concerned with the issue of knightly morality?  Was he a redeemed sinner, a hypocrite, a Robin Hood, a rare honest man caught in an age in which everything, including the justice system was freely and cruelly manipulated by partisan politics (as the Paston letters indicate)?

I expect reasonable cases can be made for most, if not all, of the above.  As of late the study of Sir Thomas Malory’s life has become a bit of back water in spite of his importance to English letters.

Ian Mortimer has written a unique, thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening historical work:  “1415:  Henry V’s Year of Glory.”  The book chronicles everything that occurred on every day in 1415 in the world as far as Henry could have known it.  What makes the book so extraordinary is how a nuanced, complex and deep characterization of Henry Vth emerges from meticulous examination of that detail.

It seems to me that the life of Sir Thomas Malory, so important to understanding one of the seminal works of English literature and the English literary imagination might yield to a similar approach, particularly a close  examination of 1451 and the actions of the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Warwick and Queen Margaret as well as those more immediate to Malory himself. It's easily worthy of Sherlock Holmes, don't you think?

Episode 2 is here.