THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Malory and Caxton
In October 1471 Margaret Paston, the wife of a Norfolk gentleman, wrote to her husband in London to describe the
violent incursions of armed men employed by the Duke of Norfolk on their property. The Duke’s men had not simply
ransacked the Pastons’ estate and other manors in the area, but they also desecrated the local parish church by
standing on the altar, pillaging the images, and taking away anything of value that they found. The Pastons’ troubles
were scarcely unique, given the multiple uncertainties of political and social life in medieval England and the frequent
intimidations of the less by the great. Nevertheless, their difficulties were compounded, and national uncertainties
accentuated, by the manifold disruption of England by what subsequent generations have known as the ‘Wars of the
Roses’. The Pastons, a large number of whose family letters have been preserved for posterity (a selection was first
published in 1787), played a relatively insignificant part in the highly divisive national politics of their day. Their
social position nevertheless rendered them first-hand witnesses to much of the turbulence of the
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fifteenth century, intent as they were on preserving what they could of their estates and their domestic security while
cautiously advancing the prestige of their family.
By the 1450s the English Crown’s hopes of establishing a permanent hegemony over France were ending in
ignominy. The battle of Castillon, fought in July 1453, finally extinguished the grand ambitions which had fired the
notable triumph of Henry V at Agincourt some thirty-eight years earlier. England’s once extensive territorial
possessions were steadily reduced to a mere foothold at Calais. Parallel to these disasters in France was the gradual
disintegration of the domestic political order established by the Lancastrian kings, Henry IV and Henry V. The latter’s
untimely death in 1422 left the realm under the nominal rule of his heir, a 9-month old child. The reign of King
Henry VI was the most disrupted of any in English history, marked not only by a grave disillusion with French affairs
but also by a slow but inexorable slide into civil war. Once he attained his majority in 1437, it became evident to his
friends and potential enemies alike that the devout Henry VI believed more in the power of prayer than in the
advantages of policy. His conspicuous piety, which took concrete form in royal educational foundations at Eton and
Cambridge, belatedly earned him a reputation for saintliness (the formal claims to which were pursued at Rome by
certain of his royal successors, and, latterly, by Old Etonians). His political impotence, which was accentuated by a
brief lapse into insanity in 1453 and a more serious collapse in 1455, led inevitably to a series of power struggles
between factions led by aristocratic magnates. These bitter struggles centred on the legitimacy of Henry’s claim to the
throne through descent from Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and the rival claims of Richard,
Duke of York (descended from an elder brother of Gaunt’s). The ‘Wars of the Roses’, which erupted into armed
conflict at the battle of St Albans in May 1455, take their name from the fabled adoption of a red rose as an emblem
by the Lancastrian faction, a white by the Yorkist. The long-drawn-out wars, which involved the deposition of Henry
VI in 1461, his replacement by the Yorkist King Edward IV, his restoration in 1470, and his murder under the
restored Edward IV in 1471, also finally claimed the lives of some 12 princes of the blood, some 200 noblemen, and
some 100,000 gentry and commoners. When Edward IV died in April 1483, the effective usurpation of the throne by
his brother Richard III brought a further period of extreme political instability. This instability was only eliminated by
the invasion, success in battle, and subsequent political skill of Henry Tudor, who claimed the throne as Henry VII in
August 1485. Henry’s somewhat specious ancestral claim to the crown of the Plantagenets was purposefully brushed
aside by Tudor propagandists who preferred to lay stress on his Welsh blood and his somewhat improbable line of
descent from King Arthur.
From a literary point of view, the ‘matter’ of Britain - the accounts of the legendary exploits of Arthur and his
knights - reached its apogee in the work of Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) and William Caxton (?1422-91), men of
quite
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different social class and outlook. Malory appears to have finished the composition of his Le Morte Darthur in 1469-
70 during a period of imprisonment on charges of violence, theft, extortion, and felonious rape. It was printed and
published in July 1485 by the adventurous Caxton who had not only edited and excised Malory’s text but also
reordered it into twenty-one books. The text of the original version (in eight sections) was rediscovered only in 1934.
If the Sir Thomas Malory, to whom the authorship of the Morte Darthur is generally accredited, was indeed the
Malory held in prison on a charge of decidedly unknightly violence, it is but one of several profound ironies which
attach themselves to the book. Rape and robbery scarcely sit well with the high chivalric principles which are extolled
in the text. If this Malory was also the faithful liegeman of successive earls of Warwick, he saw service under