A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 16: But did he do it?

This is the 16th  episode in my investigation of the discordant life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

But did he do it?  Bear with me.  While we were rambling around the Colorado Plateau, recently, after my last post on this topic, I continually felt I still hadn’t done justice to this more than difficult issue of the two accusations of rape against Malory.  In particular, while I’d read and discussed some important research, I’d stopped short of expressing a personal conclusion.  Further, what I’d learned generally, failed what I might call “the novelist’s test” which is to say that I didn’t feel that I could write a fictional narrative of the events which properly served what is actually known and Sir Thomas Malory himself.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I was concerned that I, like some more adroit scholars before me, were attempting to discover and elaborate exculpatory evidence rather than discover the truth.  Of course, I didn’t want Malory to be guilty.

To address this, I decided to do three things.  First, to reread Henry Ansgar Kelly’s important paper as carefully and critically as possible.  Second, to research the topic of rape in medieval England generally, for greater perspective and finally, to find and read the work of the best contemporary scholar I could find who took the position that Malory was probably guilty.

No scholar I’ve found has professed absolute certainly of his guilt or innocence.  Some see rape as part of a spectrum of historical patriarchal strategies for controlling women’s bodies and lives which is subsequently used to diminish the particular literary importance of the question of whether Malory was guilty of sexual assault.  Nevertheless, that is the question I’m addressing at this stage.  Further, in defense of my focus on that specific issue at this stage, I would quote Catherine Batt, (Malory and Rape, 1997), Le Morte d’Arthur “develops a rhetoric for rape as signal of the anti-social, the threat from the margins, that against which the community defines itself.”  Of the scholars I’ve discovered and read so far, Batt is the most skeptical Malory’s innocence but her concerns are primarily literary, not historical.  Nevertheless, two of her observations are particularly important.  First, following Sir William Stanford, writing in 1557, she reviews the case of a woman raped in prison who was not allowed to appeal (personally bring suit) for the crime because she has a husband who must do so for her.  In the context of Malory’s case this might mean the absence of a suit from Mrs. Hugh Smyth offers no circumstantial evidence of Malory’s innocence of sexual assault but is rather an indication of legal precedent.  Second, and more central to her paper, is that contention that the portrayal of rape in Le Morte d’Arthur “is not incompatible with the perspective of an apparent rapist.”  I, personally, don’t agree that the evidence she cites, (nor anything else in my own reading of Le Morte d’Arthur) justifies that conclusion, but, more importantly, I would echo P. J. Field’s observation about the danger and difficulty of using Malory’s work as primary evidence of his guilt or innocence of this particular crime.

Henry Ansgar Kelly’s comprehensive review of the statutes show how abduction generally was conflated with sexual assault.  His review of specific cases shows how the statutes were used to prevent wives from fleeing oppressive marriages, nuns from fleeing religious houses and even for extortion.   He makes the important point that statute of 1382 was enacted to cover cases in which women consent afterwards and it is so stated in the Rolls of Parliament.  He writes of Malory specifically,

… He was accused in 1451 of twice having had felonious sex with another man's wife and, on the second occasion, of feloniously abducting her. Later, the woman's husband accused Malory and named accomplices of ravishing her, and since he invoked the 1382 statute of Richard II, he was admitting that the wife consented to the ravishment. We do not know who was more in the right, the woman's self-proclaimed husband or Malory. But, given the track record of other such accusers, I put my money on Malory.

We may never know more about Malory's relations with the wife of Hugh Smith, but they may have been as complicated as those between Lancelot and Arthur's queen in the French romances that he would translate during his stays in prison, which he may have already read in 1450.

To quote George Smiley, “we’re almost there.”  I concur with Kelly’s deduction of the meaning of the use of the 1382 statute in Malory’s case.  But the question which remains for me, is how representative are the selection of cases which Kelly cites?  Fortunately, there is a relatively recent work which examines that question in detail and also sheds light on Batt’s first point.  It is the excellent 2007 Fordham University doctoral dissertation of Caroline S. Dunn, Damsels in Distress or Partners in Crime?  The Abduction of Women in Medieval England which I’m currently reading.  I expect to review it in my next Malory post when I also expect to make a final statement on the accusations of rape.  Then is will be time to move on to his imprisonment, the latter part of his life, the concurrent events in England and, of course, observations about Le Mort d’Arthur itself.
 

 
Episode 17 can be found here.