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.

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 9: The Attack in the Coombe Abbey Woods

This is episode 9 in a series of posts researching the mystery of the dramatic life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

The winter of 1449-1450 was brutal.  It came early, in October, bringing heavy snows and killing the olive trees in France.  Three days after the new year, Sir Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Constable of England, Knight of the Garter and his retinue were riding through the Coombe Abbey woods when they were set upon and ambushed by twenty-six men armed with long bows, cross bows, spears and swords.  The attackers were “jacketed,” (presumably wearing brigandines or gambesons) and wore helmets.  Even today the woods are close and if they were the same in the snowy January of 1450, they would have been treacherous.  The attackers’ goal was to murder the Duke, the plan simply to shoot him down on the path as he rode by.  It was unlikely to fail.

Yet, by miracle the Duke and his followers escaped totally unharmed.  Perhaps, the woods had been cleared to either side at that place to prevent just such attacks, as some statutes required , although why then would the attackers have chosen that place?  Perhaps, the attackers were simply incompetent although at least one of their number, their leader,  probably was not.  He was a veteran of the French wars and a knight in his late forties, Sir Thomas Malory.

What is stranger still is what happened immediately after:  nothing.  Eighteen days later, both the Duke of Buckingham and Sir Thomas Malory, who’d attacked him, sat in Parliament.  There is no record of either speaking or acting on the attack at that time.  This is particularly surprising in the context of what had happened nineteen months before.  The same Duke of Buckingham and his son Richard, in Coventry for the Mystery Plays, had encountered Sir Robert Harcourt and his followers in the street.  They had argued and come to blows.  Buckingham’s son Richard was knifed in the back and killed by one of Harcourt’s servants, John Aleyn.  Harcourt, Aleyn and several others were indicted that same day.

Is it possible the attack by Malory and 26 others never happened?  Why would a modest middle-aged Warwickshire knight stage a surprise attack on one of the most powerful magnates in the land who, by the way, often traveled with a retinue four times his accused attacker’s numbers?  Why was Buckingham riding through the Coombe Abbey woods in dead of winter?  Whether or not the attack occurred, Malory’s indictment for the incident 15 month later is the beginning of his great legal troubles which led to his imprisonment.

Christina Hardyment in The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler offers a third possibility.  Buckingham had a history of using brute force as well as politics to extend his power in Warwickshire.  For example, on September 23, 1449, the day elections were announced, eighty of his men assaulted Thomas Ferrers of Groby and attempted to break into his castle to get at Ferrers’ father, the Sheriff of Staffordshire and it worked:  two of his supporters were subsequently elected for Staffordshire.  Was Buckingham attempting a similar intimidation of a minor knight in Warwickshire on that January 4^th when he encountered surprising, organized resistance that forced him to back down and, consequently, possibly loose face?

You can find episode 10 here.

(Details of the winter of 1449-1450 are from Des Changements dans le Climat de la France, Histoire de ses Révolutions Météorologiques, Paris, 1845 by Joseph-Jean-Nicolas Fuster)

(Orson Wells as Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight”)

The Library of Babel and the Hawaii Project

Lately, I’m surprised at how prescient and pertinent the stories of Jorge Louis Borges have become.  “The Library of Babel,” published over sixty years ago envisions a kind of infinite library filled with not only the greatest books ever written but assemblages of total random characters and everything between.  One of the most interesting aspects of the story is its foresight of humanity’s response to the existence of an apparently infinite library.  Librarians are understandably suicidal, cults arise, some seeking to purify the collection others to search for the perfect, all-knowing critic, “the Man of the Book.”

Internet access and the vast collection of books accessible through online book sellers as well as more particular sites mean that we live day to day with an approximation of Borges’ abstraction.  Crushing, international price and margin competition exacts not just a financial toll from the traditional book publishing industry as it struggles to adapt and reinvent itself.  New strategies for manipulating, even corrupting the book reviewing  process emerge constantly.  One of the most important innovations in retail, democratic starred reviewing is actively and fiercely gamed.  In 2013, Forbes reported the existence of companies specializing in elevating  books to the New York Times Best Seller’s List.  At the same time, the Humanities have become balkanized.  The question of what one should read has probably never been more fraught with controversy.

I worry the most for difficult books, books which are not pleasant or compelling at first, books that are a struggle, that nevertheless are sometimes the most important ones we ever read.  If there’s no one you respect telling you it’s worth the effort, why try?

Sadly, there are very few reviewers I trust these days, among them are George Packer, Nick Paumgarten and Adam Gopnik.  Whilst they’ve pointed to some very important books, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, for example, their purview doesn’t completely intersect with my own.  Finding and identifying not just pretty good books, but extraordinary ones remains incredibly difficult.

A good friend and former colleague, Mark Watkins, shares my concern.  He’s passionate about it.  For years he’s imagined solving it with an online system built to serve the reader and the reader only.  And not just a generic reader, but each, necessarily unique reader with her or his particular interests, requirements and aspirations.  And now he’s building it.  I have had the privilege of beta testing it for the last several months:  each morning I have an email with a selection of new books and stories about books which his system has created by crawling the web for the previous 24 hours and matching them to my particular interests.

And it works.  It finds extraordinary books, books I feel I have to read.  And, by the way, it is way more fun, first thing in the morning, to look through a small collection of new good books instead of mostly tired, often horrific news.  That can come later in the day, don’t you think?

Mark has just launched a Kickstarter project to support the project.  Why Kickstarter?  Remember, I said it serves the reader and the reader only.  It serves you.  Go take a look at the Hawaii Project.

It’s one of those “things to come” that was never more needed.  (Apologies H. G. Wells.)