A1260943204KTyzE

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Caxtons printed edition of Thys noble and joyous
book entitled le morte Darthur, dated 31 July
1485 from the Pierpont Morgan Library
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Wynkyn de Wordes second edition of the Morte,
1498 (John Rylands University Library, Manchester)
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The Daily Telegraph Monday, June 25, 1934
(thanks to Jonathan Evans, University of Georgia)
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Winchester MS of Malory (BL MS Add.59678) (cp.
Caxton, Bk. 3 ch.1)
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Winchester MS of Malory (BL MS Add.59678) (cp.
Caxton, Bk. 4 ch.1)
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From the Winchester MS
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The Nine Worthies

• Three pagans
• Hector
• Alexander
• Julius Caesar
• Three Jews
• Joshua
• David
• Judas Maccabeus
• Three Christians
• Arthur
• Charlemagne
• Godfrey of Bouillon

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Felicity Riddy, Contextualizing Le Morte
Darthur Empire and Civil War, in A Companion to
Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A.S.G.
Edwards, Arthurian Studies XXXVII (D.S. Brewer,
1996), pp. 55-73 70

• The point of this sales pitch seems to be to
  try and locate Le Morte Darthur in a narrow and
  anachronistic idea of the English gentleman, for
  whom Arthurian knighthood provides the pattern.
  The models Caxton proposes are Malorys
  passionate and ignorant characters, members of a
  last generation, who blindly kill the men they
  love most competitive, desiring and violent,
  they perform their roles in a tragic plot, the
  larger shape of which they cannot see. Caxton is
  the salesman of the unexamined life.

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Riddy, pp. 71-72

• Le Morte Darthur circulated in precisely that
  period of moral crisis, that vacuum of
  aristocratic values in the second half of the
  fifteenth century, when the governing elites, no
  longer united against the French and the Scots,
  first fell upon each other in the Wars of the
  Roses and then reassembled themselves under the
  Tudors against their own tenants. The great myth
  of the fifteenth century is the gentility to
  which all these men aspire, and Le Morte Darthur
  is the great repository of that myth.But
  although Malorys book sustains and is sustained
  by the ideology of aristocracy, nevertheless it
  is an aristocracy in crisis,
• The crisis is, I am suggesting, one that is
  figured in Le Morte Darthur as the death-wish of
  a class. The narrative records the aristocracys
  sense that its values are under threat, and
  locates the source of that threat within. The
  estates theory on which Le Morte Darthur rests
  does not provide any way of analyzing the
  changing relations between peasants and
  landlords, and so the aristocracys predicament
  can only be represented as the self-generated
  collapse of its own defining ethos. Brother
  turns against brother, and in the end the Round
  table turns parricidal as well. The last battle,
  which brings in its train the end of everything,
  is a symbol of the chivalric world turning its
  nihilistic energy upon itself, and destroying its
  own possibility of continuity.

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From R.S. Loomis, Edward I, Arthurian
Enthusiast, Speculum 28 (1953)
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Political Uses of Arthur

• I. Exhumations
• A. 1191. Exhumation at Glastonbury, transfer of
  remains to Lady Chapel. Henry II's need,
  executed by Richard I. There were political
  benefits to be gained by the Angevins, only a
  generation established, by pointing to a dead and
  buried Arthur.
• 1. bones of unusual size, lock of hair, wooden
  coffins dug deep
•   2. Glastonbury, id est Avalon (and still is)
•   3. accepted in chronicles by 1205
•  
• B. 1278. Another exhumation by Edward I, on the
  eve of his final assault on Wales (we get the
  idea) translatio to main altar to a tomb that
  would last until the 16th century.
• 1. A way of claiming Arthur, as later (after
  Llewellyn ap Gryffyd's death), he'd be given
  Arthur's crown
•   2. Edward I often compared to Arthur in
  chronicles he owned Arthurian romances
•  
• II. Round Tables (held in 13th c. in Cyprus,
  Austria, Artois, Picardy)
• A. Edward I 1284, 1299, 1302, complete with
  Arthurian entertainment (cf. Loomis quotation)
•   B. Mortimer family
• 1. Roger Mortimer held one in 1279 at
  Kenilworth to celebrate his sons' knighting
•   2. Roger Mortimer his grandson held one at
  Bedford in 1328, with most explicit political
  purposes, since Mortimer had helped
  depose Edward II, was the queen's lover and
  virtually ruled the kingdom
•   3. After 1376 and in 1399 the Mortimers--who
  had married into the Welsh royal family in the
  13th. c.--tried to stake a claim to
  the English throne based on their Arthurian
  descent
•   C. Thomas of Lancaster's alias in a 1321 plot
  to depose Edward II was "King Arthur"
•   D. Edward III
• 1. held a splendid Round Table in 1344, with
  entertainments