THOMAS MALORY AND THE WARWICK RETINUE ROLL

Abstract

Although Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur has long been recognised as revealing in a special way the spirit of 15th-century England, its author's place in the history of the time remained obscure for an extraordinarily long time. This obscurity was caused by John Bale's guess, three generations after the completion of the Morte, that Malory came from Maelor in Flintshire, a view that was first questioned in 1890, when Heinrich Sommer noticed in Burton's Description of Leicester Shire a Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire who had lived at the right time to have been the author. Four years later, George Lyman Kittredge, in a remarkably thorough survey of the record evidence, showed that Bale's Malory was a figment of Bale's imagination, and that the Newbold Revel knight was the only man of the right name and rank who was known to have been alive between 3 March 1469 and 4 March 1470, when the author of the Morte at the end of the book described himself as ‘Syr Thomas Maleore, Knyght’. Subsequently, other scholars have suggested other Thomas Malorys as author. The most notable of these are Thomas Malory esquire of Papworth St Agnes in Cambridgeshire, proposed by A.T. Martin in 1898, and a Thomas Malory of no ascertainable rank from Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire, proposed by William Matthews in 1966. Neither Malory, however, was a knight at the necessary time. The Cambridgeshire man is repeatedly called esquire after his death, and in the summer of 1471 the Yorkshire man is mentioned without a rank in a record of court proceedings that would certainly have called him a knight. if he had been one. The argument has, I hope, been closed by i recent essay of mine in which I argue that the surviving records are sufficient to show that there was no unknown Sir Thomas Malory alive in 1469/70, and that the one Sir Thomas Malory we do know of, the knight from Newbold Revel, must therefore have been the author.