Literature: Thomas Malory

c. 1415/18-1471

A knight about whose life little can be said with any certainty. He is most famous as the author of the Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by Caxton in 1485, and for many the classic Arthuriad. Caxton's preface to this work states that Malory was a knight, that he finished the work in the ninth year of the reign of King Edward IV (1470), and that he 'reduced' it from a French book.

It is possible that he was the Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, whose quarrels with a neighbouring priory and (probably) Lancastrian politics led to his imprisonment. Of Caxton's black-letter folio, only two copies now exist. An independent manuscript was discovered at Winchester in 1934.

Le Morte d'Arthur is the best prose romance in English and was a happy attempt to give epic unity to the whole mass of French Arthurian romance.