It can hardly be doubted that Spenser, while drawing largely from Geoffrey of Monmouth, was acquainted with Malory’s story of Arthur, if not with the earlier romances also. We might have known this with certainty, if Spenser had completed his great design which he sketched in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to the first three books of the Faerie Queene, and after labouring ‘to pourtrait in Arthur before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve Morall Vertues,’ he might have been ‘perhaps encouraged to frame the other part of Politick Vertues in his person, after that he came to be King.’ He farther identifies his hero as the son of the Lady Igraine, and the infant charge of Merlin, and his description of the Redcross Knight and his claim to the adventure of Una, must forcibly recall Malory’s story of Beaumains and the lady Linet, notwithstanding the differences between the two. Beyond this, there is the evidence of general literary probability. Spenser’s ideals of knighthood and knight-errantry are so much in harmony with those of Malory, while they rise into a far higher moral life, that it does not seem unreasonable to suppose a relation between the two, and to believe that we owe to Malory the transmission from the earlier romances of all that was worth preserving in these to the generation which could give birth to the Faerie Queene.
And while Spenser strove to carry forward the national life of his countrymen by presenting the noblest ideals of chivalry under the old forms of romance, Shakespeare was embodying them in the new forms destined thenceforth to take the place of the old, and showing us in a Ferdinand, a Prince Henry, or a Hamlet, the ideals of the Gentleman, while the Sydneys and the Raleighs were presenting the counterpart in actual life. Ben Jonson, too, though he makes fun of ‘the whole sum of Errant Knighthood’ in his Execration upon Vulcan, elsewhere describes the old training of pages and squires in chivalry, as ‘the noblest way of breeding up our youth in all the blazon of a gentleman.’
Of Milton’s debt to Malory there is no less probability. He no doubt knew the other legends of Arthur, but Malory’s book must surely have had some part in taking that hold on his imagination, and exercising that influence in the formation of his character and life, of which he himself tells us. In his poem addressed to Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, the friend of Tasso, and of himself when he visited Naples, he says:—
The like hope and purpose of writing an Epic poem of British story is to be found in the Epitaphium Damonis. And in his defence of his life in the ‘Apology for Smectymnuus,’ he says:—
‘Next, (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown over all christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expence of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befel him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn; and if I found in the story afterward, any of them, by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet, as that which is attributed to Homer, to have written indecent things of the gods; only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to stir him up both by his counsel and his arms, to secure and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living; I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation of virtue.’
In a word, not the fears of Ascham but the hopes of Caxton were now fulfilled in Milton’s study of the old romances.
And though it were idle and mistaken to wish that the poet had finally chosen the Death of Arthur rather than Paradise Lost, the lovers of the story of the Round Table may be forgiven if they wish it were possible to call up him who left untold that story as it would have been seen in the light of his genius.
Such a transformation has, indeed, been effected for us by Lord Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. He who has been familiar with the old Morte Arthur from his boyhood, must consent to let the poet transport him into a quite new region of the imagination, and must in a manner and for the time forget the old before he can read the Idylls of the King without a somewhat sad feeling that these are not the old knights whom he has always known. I have already likened Malory’s work to a mediæval castle, and, if I may be allowed to vary my parable a little, I would say this: There are some of us who in their childhood lived in, or can at least remember, some old house, with its tower and turret stairs, its hall with the screen, and the minstrel’s gallery, and the armour where it was hung up by him who last wore it: the panelled chambers, the lady’s bower, and the chapel, and all the quaint rambling passages and steps which lead from one to another of these. And when in after years he comes to this same house, and finds that it has all been remodelled, enlarged, furnished and beautified to meet the needs and the tastes of modern life, he feels that this is not the very home of his childhood, and that a glory has departed from the scenes he once knew: and yet, if the changes have been made with true judgment, and only with a rightful recognition of the claim that the modern life should have full scope for itself while preserving all that was possible of the old, though not letting itself be sacrificed or even cramped and limited, for its sake: if he is thus reasonable, he will acknowledge that it was well that the old order should yield place to the new, or at least make room for it at its side. And such are the thoughts and sentiments with which the lover of the old Morte Arthur will, if he be also a student of the growth of our national character and life, read the new Idylls of the King.
Of Sir Thomas Malory himself we know nothing more than can be inferred by probable conjecture from his book. His name occurs in it three times, and with the three variations of Malorye, Malory, and Maleore. These variations are not singular, for the spelling of proper as well as of common names was very much at the fancy of the writer; and we know that Shakespeare, Marvell, and Pym, wrote their own names in various forms. Sir Thomas Malory tells us that his book was ended in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, or 1470 A.D.; and at that time there was an old and important Yorkshire family of the name at Hutton Coniers and High Studley, near Ripon; for Leland, early in the next century, speaks of the ancestors of Malory[17], and in 1427 and 1472 the death or burial of two persons of the same name is recorded at Ripon[18]. Andrew Mallorie of Middlesex armiger is among the contributors to the funds for defence against the Spanish Armada (1588)[19]. At the beginning of the seventeenth century we find Sir John Mallory of Studley, and son of Sir William Mallory, M.P. for Thirsk and Ripon, and a subscriber to the second Virginia Charter[20]: in 1622 Burton speaks of the pedigree, arms, and lands of Sir Thomas Malory in Kirby-Malory, Winwick, Newbould, and Swinford in Leicestershire[21]; and about the same time two scholars of the name were elected to Winchester College[22]; and reasonable conjecture may connect our author with these Malorys, although no links of actual pedigree have been found.
The Biographia Britannica (article ‘Caxton’) says:—
‘If this Sir Thomas Malory was a Welshman, as Leland and others after him assert, he was probably a Welsh Priest; as appears not only by the legendary vein which runs through all the stories he has thus extracted and wove together, but by his conclusion of the work itself, in these words: “Pray for me, whyle I am on lyve, that God sende me good delyveraunce; and when I am deed, I praye you all, praye for my soule; for this booke was ended the 9th yeer of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth, by Syr Thomas Maleore, Knyght, as Jesu helpe him for his grete myght, as he is the servaunte of Jesu, bothe day and nyght.”’
But no references are given as to where this supposed assertion by ‘Leland and others’ is to be found; in fact, it is not to be found in any of Leland’s writings. And the origin of the statement remained an unexplained puzzle, until Dr. Sommer has now apparently discovered the key to it in a passage which he quotes from Bale’s Illustrium Maioris Britanniæ Scriptorum, &c., first edition, folio 208. In this passage, Bale, after praising Thomas Mailorius and his history of King Arthur, goes on to say, ‘Est Mailoria in finibus Cambriæ regio,’ on the authority of Leland[23]. I have not myself verified these references, but I infer from what Dr. Sommer tells us, that Bale, perhaps writing from an imperfect recollection, supposed that he had the authority of Leland for a connection between Mailorius, and the Welsh place of the like name: and then the writer of the Biographia Britannica, still more inaccurately, converted the possible suggestion of Bale into the direct statement that Leland had asserted Malory to be a Welshman, while Bale himself is referred to as ‘the others.’ Nor is there any reason to suppose from Malory’s own book that he was a Welshman. Though Caxton tells us that there were books in Welsh about Arthur and his Knights, Malory never quotes any but the French and English books. He shows no acquaintance with Welsh legends or traditions, unless it be with those in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote in Latin, nor of any local knowledge of Welsh places. Then as to the fanciful and inconsequent conjecture that he was a priest, he himself tells us that he was a knight, and thus implies that he was not a priest, while the words that ‘he is the servant of Jesu by day and by night,’ which suggested the notion that he was a priest, are evidently put into that form in order to give a rhythmical ending to the book. Nor did the priest’s usual title of ‘Sir’ make him a knight. What we may say of Sir Thomas Malory is that he was probably of an old English family: that he was a knight both in rank and in temper and spirit, and a lover alike of the gentle and the soldierly virtues of knighthood. He was a man of genius, and a devout Christian: he wrote for gentlewomen as well as gentlemen, believing that they would read his book ‘from the beginning to the ending,’ and that it would call forth in them a sympathy which would properly express itself in prayers for the pious writer.
Of William Caxton we know more. A native of Kent, he became an apprentice, freeman, and livery man of the London Guild of Mercers, and was for many years resident in the English factory at Bruges, which was under their chief authority, though it represented and controlled all English trading interests in the Low Countries. Such factories were the usual, and indeed essential means of carrying on trade with foreign nations in the Middle Ages. Thus charters were granted by Henry IV and his successors to ‘Merchant Adventurers’ trading in Flanders, which, in giving them a corporate character, enabled them to treat with the authorities of the country more effectually than would have been possible to private individuals, and also to exercise needful control over, and give protection to, their own countrymen in the place. Though these Merchant Adventurers included many of the City Guilds, the majority were Mercers, and the factory at Bruges, while called ‘the English Nation,’ and its house ‘the English House,’ was practically under the management of the London Mercers’ Guild. Mr. Blades has given an engraving from Flandria Illustrata of the ‘Domus Anglorum’ at Bruges as it was in Caxton’s time; and he thus describes the mode of life of its inhabitants:—
‘A great similarity prevailed in the internal management of all foreign guilds, arising from the fact that foreigners were regarded by the natives with jealousy and suspicion. The laws which governed the Esterlings in London, who lived in a strongly-built enclosure, called the Steel Yard, the site of which is now occupied by the City station of the South Eastern Railway Company, were much the same as those under which the English Nation lived in Bruges and other cities. The foreign merchant had, in Caxton’s time, to brave a large amount of popular dislike, and to put up with great restraints on his liberty. Not only did he trade under harassing restrictions, but he resigned all hopes of domestic ties and family life. As in a monastery, each member had his own dormitory, whilst at meal-times there was a common table. Marriage was out of the question, and concubinage was followed by expulsion. Every member was bound to sleep in the house, and to be in-doors by a fixed time in the evening, and for the sake of good order no woman of any description was allowed within the walls[24].’
To this house of the English in Bruges Caxton went to live in the year 1441, being then probably about twenty years of age. In 1462 he was acting as ‘Governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries,’ and certainly in full possession of that office and title two or three years later. And in 1465 he was appointed by Edward IV one of two envoys with the title of Ambassadors, to negociate a renewal of the existing treaty of trade with the Duke of Burgundy. We do not know at what time he began to combine his literary studies or his acquaintance with the new art of printing with the prosecution of his official duties: but he tells us that in 1471, at the request of Margaret, sister of Edward IV and wife of the Duke of Burgundy, he completed his translation of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye which he had begun, but laid aside unfinished some time before. And then, in order to meet the desire of many friends to have copies of this translation, he printed such copies for their use.
He was now in the service of Margaret, and married; and about the year 1476, after thirty-five years’ residence abroad, he returned to England, there to introduce the Printing Press, and to make himself famous to all ages by so doing. Caxton was not only a printer, but a translator, an editor, and the publisher of the books which he printed in unfailing succession, during the remaining fifteen years of his life. He was the first of that honourable order of publishers who from his day to our own still share with authors the gratitude of men for that inestimable boon, the Printed Book. There are still publishers among us who, like Caxton, are themselves authors and editors of no unimportant ability: and not only to them, but also to those who aspire only to be the publishers of other men’s books, do we owe—what even the art of printing could have done little towards giving us—that broad spreading[25] of knowledge which has become to us like the common light of day in which we live and move, only half conscious of its blessings. Mr. Blades justly defends Caxton against Gibbon’s censure of him because he did not print the ancient classics. He did far better. He printed and published translations from those classics for men who could not read the originals; and it was surely no loss, but the greatest gain, to Englishmen that he enabled them to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Polychronicon of English History (which latter he carried down to his own time) rather than if he had printed Virgil and Livy in the original Latin. He laid the foundations of popular English literature in the best possible way. He taught his countrymen to read, by giving them a large and judiciously selected succession, year by year, of books which they could and would read. He gave them books of piety and devotion, poetry and history, of chivalry and romance, of morals and manners, including his own translations of Cicero’s Old Age and Friendship; of proverbs, fables, and classical legends; of statutes of the realm; and the Game of Chess, an allegory of civil government. We cannot read down the list of ninety-nine books, including several second and third editions, which Caxton printed, without wonder and respect for the genius and the judgment of the man whose choice of subjects was so wide, so high-minded, moral, religious, and generous, and at the same time so popular. He was indeed, in all senses, the first of English publishers. He died in 1491, occupied (as his chief workman and successor, Wynkyn de Worde, tells us) on the last day of his life in finishing his translation of the Lives of the Fathers from the French. Mr. Blades conjectures, with apparent probability, that his wife was the Mawde Caxton whose burial is recorded in the parish books of St. Margaret’s in 1489, and he adds:—
‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why he in that year suspended printing the Fayts of Arms until he had finished a new undertaking, The Arte and Crafte to Die Well.’
The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the growth and progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and directed in certain epochs of our history by great men who have yet themselves been made what they are by those very laws. Among such laws are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold aspect of self-sacrifice and of self-assertion. And not least among the men who have given to the spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of duty and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton.
§2. The Text, and its several Editions.
The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E. Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at the sale of the Osterley library in 1885[26]; and the other to Earl Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph ‘Oxford’ on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5s. by Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of the Earl of Jersey[27]. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr. Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy with remarkable skill[28], though on collation with the original I have found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton’s books but one, has no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first page[29].
The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde, the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of Contents. This edition, which has numerous woodcuts, is not an exact reprint of Caxton’s; there are differences of spelling and occasionally of a word; and the passage in the last chapter but one, beginning ‘Oh ye mighty and pompous lords,’ and ending with ‘turn again to my matter,’ which is not in Caxton’s edition, appears here, as in all later editions[30]. The edition of 1529 is in the British Museum, and wants the Title, Preface, and part of the Table of Contents.
In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of ‘The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaūte knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij. ¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.’ And on the title-page, above the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that on the title-page of Southey’s edition is a bad copy. A copy of this edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one with a title which the annotator has seen.
A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British Museum.
The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in 1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East’s folio, Mr. Wright concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton; but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton’s, we find the variations almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words, there are a number of more or less considerable variations and additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole; and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without farther reference to his ‘copy,’ but in the others from a desire to improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls ‘a more eloquent and ornated style and phrase.’
No new edition seems to have been published till 1816, when two independent editions appeared, one in two, and the other in three 24mo volumes. Both are modernised for popular use, and are probably the volumes through which most of my own generation made their first acquaintance with King Arthur and his knights; but neither has any merit as to its editing.
In 1817 Messrs. Longmans and Co. published an edition in two volumes quarto, with an introduction and notes by Southey, who says,’The present edition is a reprint with scrupulous exactness from the first edition by Caxton, in Earl Spencer’s library[31].’ As it appears from a note[32] that he had nothing to do with the superintendence of the press, which was undertaken by Mr. Upcott, he was probably unaware that eleven leaves were, as I have mentioned above, then wanting in the copy from which this reprint was made. These had not then been restored in fac-simile; for Earl Spencer’s copy contains a note, signed by Messrs. Longmans and dated 1816, which gives a list of the pages then wanting; and, in fact, the substitutes for them which actually appear in Southey’s edition differ widely from the restored, or the original, text. Thus in chapter xii. of the last book, besides the interpolation of the long passage ‘O ye myghty and pompous lordes,’ &c., which is not in Caxton, there are in the first eleven lines thirty-five variations of spelling and punctuation, besides the introduction of the words ‘but continually mourned un—’ and ‘needfully as nature required,’ which are not in Caxton, and the change of Caxton’s ‘on the tombe of kyng Arthur & quene Guenever’ into ‘on kynge Arthur’s & quene Gwenever’s tombe.’ And thus throughout the pages in question—seventeen in number[33]—the spelling constantly, and words and even sentences occasionally, differ from the real text of Caxton[34].
When at page 113 of volume i. the editor introduces the words ‘certayne cause’ to complete the sense, he is careful to call attention, in a foot-note, to the fact that these words are not in the original, but taken from the ‘second edition,’ by which I presume he means that of 1498. But when he subsequently supplies seventeen pages which were also not in his original, he gives no hint of the fact; and his reticence was so successful that for fifty years the interpolations passed as genuine among learned critics, who quoted from them passages wholly spurious as Caxton’s genuine text. It was only in 1867 that, in collating Earl Spencer’s copy with the edition of Southey, I discovered that these passages—to which my attention was directed by Messrs. Longman’s note above mentioned—did not correspond with Caxton’s text, as represented by Whittaker’s restorations: and on afterwards collating them with the Osterley text itself I found the like result. It remained to trace them to their real sources. This was not so easy as might be supposed, for though it was evident that Mr. Upcott must have had recourse to one or other of the existing editions, the interpolated passages in fact agree exactly with none of them. But a careful collation of the last four chapters of the book (which include more than half the interpolations, and may be taken as a fair specimen of the whole) with the old texts, leaves no doubt that, with the exception of the first thirty-six lines of chapter x, they were taken, like the two words mentioned above, from the first edition of Wynkyn de Worde, but with the spelling occasionally altered, and here and there a small word put in, left out, or changed. These alterations throw an ingenious disguise over the whole; but if we penetrate through this we find that in these four chapters there are only thirteen words differing from those in Wynkyn de Worde’s first edition, and these unimportant; while in his second edition, and in those of Copland and East, the variations from Mr. Upcott’s text of the same chapters are respectively fifty-seven, fifty-six, and fifty in number, and many of them important in kind: and if we go to the edition of 1634 we find the differences still greater, except as to those thirty-six lines, which are supplied from this edition, as they were wanting in the other copy. But the colophon, or concluding paragraph of the book, Mr. Upcott could not take from any of the editions which followed that of Caxton; for though Wynkyn de Worde might, and in fact did, supply at least one or two of the first words, the latter part of his colophon relates to his own edition, and departs widely from that of Caxton, while those in the later editions are still more unlike; and yet Mr. Upcott’s colophon is a tolerable, though not an exact, representation of that of Caxton. But his other materials can be ascertained beyond a doubt. They are, the colophon as given by Ames, and repeated by Dibdin in a modernised and otherwise inexact form[35], and that which first appeared in the Catalogue of the Harleian Library[36], and was thence copied in the article on Caxton in the Biographia Britannica, and also in Herbert’s Additions to Ames. The colophons of Ames and of the Harleian Catalogue have important variations from each other and from that of Caxton; and as Mr. Upcott adopts some portions of each which are not found either in the other, or in Caxton, we see the manner in which the paragraph in question was compounded. Each stone of the ingeniously fitted mosaic may be referred to the place from which it was taken. We cannot indeed choose positively between Ames and Dibdin, or among the Harleian Catalogue, the Biographia, and Herbert; but as the two paragraphs which are required in addition to that of Wynkyn de Worde are both found in Herbert’s Ames, it seems most probable that Mr. Upcott had recourse to that work, though another combination would have served the purpose equally well. That the interpolated passages are not taken from the Osterley Caxton itself, even in the roughest and most careless manner, is quite evident[37].
In 1858 and 1866 Mr. Wright published successive editions reprinted from that of 1634. His learned introduction and notes are of considerable interest; but nothing can justify the reprinting the most corrupt of all the old editions when the first and best was within reach, though perhaps at greater cost.
In 1868 was published the first edition of the present volume, with the purpose of giving the original text in a form available for ordinary readers, and especially for boys, from whom the chief demand for this book will always come. It is a reprint of the original Caxton with the spelling modernised, and those few words which are unintelligibly obsolete replaced by others which, though not necessarily unknown to Caxton, are still in use, yet with all old forms retained which do not interfere with this requirement of being readable. For when, as indeed is oftenest the case, the context makes even an obsolete phrase probably, if not precisely, known, I have left it in the text, and given its meaning in the Glossary, in which I have chiefly followed Roquefort, Halliwell, and Wright. In the Glossary I have also added a few geographical notes for those readers who may care for them. And for the like reason—of making the book readable—such phrases or passages as are not in accordance with modern manners have been also omitted or replaced by others which either actually occur or might have occurred in Caxton’s text elsewhere. I say manners, not morals, because I do not profess to have remedied the moral defects of the book which I have already spoken of. Lord Tennyson has shown us how we may deal best with this matter, in so far as Sir Thomas Malory has himself failed to treat it rightly; and I do not believe that when we have excluded what is offensive to modern manners there will be found anything practically injurious to the morals of English boys, for whom I have chiefly undertaken this work, while there is much of moral worth which I know not where they can learn so well as from the ideals of magnanimity, courage, courtesy, reverence for women, gentleness, self-sacrifice, chastity, and other manly virtues, exhibited in these pages.
The omissions, not many, nor in any sense constituting an abridgment of the original, were thought desirable to fit the book for popular reading. And if any one blames the other departures from the exact form of that original, I would ask him to judge from the specimens of the old type and spelling which I have given at the end of each book, and of the volume, whether a literal and verbal reproduction of the whole would not be simply unreadable except by students of old English[38]. And if some departure from the original was necessary, it was reasonable to carry it so far as, though no farther than, my purpose required. And, subject to these conditions, the present volume is in fact a more accurate reproduction of Caxton’s text than any other except those of Southey and Dr. Sommer. I have, indeed, made use of Southey’s text for this edition, having satisfied myself by occasional collation with the Althorp and Osterley Caxtons that it is a sufficiently accurate reprint excepting as to the passages above mentioned; and these have been taken by me from the original in the way I have said.
In 1862, 1868, 1871, 1880, abridgments of Malory’s book were edited by J. T. King, E. Conybeare, B. M. Ranking, and S. Lanier, respectively. And in 1886 Mr. Ernest Rhys edited a reprint of fourteen of the twenty-one books, from the version of Mr. Wright, with further modernisations and an introduction.
In 1889, 1890, and 1891, Dr. H. Oskar Sommer edited, and Mr. Nutt published, in three volumes, what will henceforth be the best, if not quite the best possible, edition of Caxton’s original text, for the scholar and the student. It would be hard to over-rate the industry, the learning, and the munificent public spirit of these worthy representatives of Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. The first volume gives the text of the Althorp copy, page for page, line for line, word for word, and letter for letter, with no change but that of Roman for black letter type. It is, indeed, too scrupulously exact, for it reproduces the mistakes in Whittaker’s fac-simile pages which now form part of the Althorp copy, only correcting these by collations with the Osterley original, given in the second volume. Whittaker has no more authority than any other mere copyist; and the direct correction of his mistakes would have made Dr. Sommer’s reprint a perfect representation of the original while making a reprint of the collations unnecessary. Besides these collations, and others of the second edition of Wynkyn de Worde with the text of Caxton, Dr. Sommer’s second volume contains a complete bibliography of the original text and all its after editions; an Index of names of persons and places; a Glossary, or indeed dictionary, of words, whether obsolete or still in use; and an Essay on the language of the book.
In the third volume, after a graceful essay by Mr. Andrew Lang on the literary merits of Malory, Dr. Sommer gives us a series—an original and very important series—of ‘Studies on the Sources’; and he prints from MSS. in the British Museum the only two of those ‘sources’ which had not been so made accessible already, either by ancient or modern editors. Into this hitherto chaotic mass of mediæval romances, French and English, prose or verse, Dr. Sommer has now first brought light and order. With an almost inconceivable amount of thoughtful and learned labour, he has collated the various manuscripts with the printed editions and with Malory’s book, in a detail which, great as it is, represents, as he tells us, a still more minute investigation of which he only gives the main results. With the exception of the story of Beaumains, which is an enlarged narration of that of La Cote Male Taile, and subject to the changes made by Malory’s own genius, all the adventures and incidents of Malory’s Morte Darthur are now shown to be found in one or more of these ‘sources,’ often translated literally from French, or transferred word for word from the English, yet still oftener so compressed and fused into a new shape that the finished work is but a tenth of the bulk of the original matter. Dr. Sommer arranges these sources into the four groups of the Merlin, the Lancelot, the Tristan, and the Prophecies of Merlin, and shows the relations of each group to the corresponding portions of Malory. He thinks, with M. Gaston Paris, that Malory had a now lost form of the ‘Lancelot,’ comparable to the ‘Suite de Merlin’ discovered only fifteen years since; and indeed believes that he has found some pages of this missing ‘Lancelot’ imbedded in a ‘Tristan’ MS. in the British Museum. But the work of this learned critic must be studied in itself, not in a summary. Of the light which these investigations throw upon the genius of Malory, and on the character of his art, I have already spoken.
There is no title-page, as I have already mentioned, to the Caxton, that which is given by several bibliographers being only an extract, not very critically selected, from Caxton’s preface. But it is stated in Caxton’s colophon that the book was ‘entytled le morte Darthur,’ and he explains that it was so ‘entitled’ notwithstanding it treated of Arthur’s birth, life, and acts as well as death, and also of the adventures of his knights of the Round Table. And the concluding words of Malory, ‘Here is the end of the death of Arthur,’ taken with their context, point to the same title. It was indeed before Malory’s time, and has been ever since, the traditional title of this story. We have Mort Artus and Morte Arthure in the earlier times; Ascham, in Henry VIII’s reign, calls this book La Morte d’Arthure; Tyrwhitt, Mort d’Arthur; and Walter Scott and Southey, Morte Arthur, which last probably many of us are familiar with as the old name which we heard from our own fathers.
§3. An Essay on Chivalry.
St. Augustine replied to the enquiry, What is time? by saying, ‘I know when you do not ask me:’ and a like answer suggests itself to us if we try to find an adequate reply to the question, What is Chivalry? For chivalry is one of those words, like love, duty, patriotism, loyalty, which make us feel their meaning, and the reality of what they mean, though their ideal and comprehensive character hinders us from readily putting it into the forms of a definition. When the alchemist in the Eastern tale compounds, with all the resources of his art, the universal solvent before the expectant eyes of his pupil, the pupil, seeing the mysterious fluid lie quietly in the crucible, exclaims, with not unreasonable doubt, ‘O Sage, be not deceived: how can that which dissolves all things be itself contained in a ladle?’ And how shall chivalry, sparkling and flashing everywhere as it runs through that great complicated tissue of human life which we call modern civilisation,—how shall chivalry, the humaniser of society, be brought within the limits of a definition?
Chivalry, indeed, exists for us in spirit rather than in outward and visible form. It no longer comes to us with the outward symbols of war-horse, and armour, and noble birth, and strength of arm, and high-flown protestations of love and gallantry; yet we never fail to know and feel its presence, silent and unobtrusive as it now is: we recognise the lady and the gentleman not less surely now than they did in old times; and we acknowledge their rights and their power over us now no less than then. And if the spirit of chivalry does live among us still, we may read its past history by its present light, and say in Spenser’s words,—
Let us then look back to those times when chivalry had an outward, visible form, and was embodied in its own proper institutions, with orders, and statutes, and courts of its own jurisdiction, and rituals, and customs, like those of other great social institutions and members of the body politic.
The deluge of the Teutonic nations which broke up the old Roman civilisation threatened for some centuries to overwhelm Europe with mere barbarism. We know now that the germs of a far higher and better civilisation were everywhere ready to burst into life as soon as the fury of that deluge had spent itself; but for a long period the evil seemed mightier than the good. From time to time the clear head, the noble heart and conscience, and the strong arm of an Alfred, a Charlemagne, or an Otho, might bring a temporary calm and order into the storm; but when the personal influences of such great men were withdrawn, society relapsed again and again into ever new anarchy, and war—at once the effect and the cause of anarchy—savage, cruel war became the business of all men throughout Europe. The selfish, the rapacious, and the unscrupulous fought for power, and plunder, and love of fighting; and while violence could only be resisted by violence, and each man had to defend himself, his family, and his possessions as best he could, with no effectual aid from law and government, there was a constant tendency to increasing barbarism and brutish, or worse than brutish, instead of human, existence.
But man differs from the brutes in this, that while he can fall lower than they, he can also rise higher, and that even the passions and the impulses which he has in common with them may be subdued, and refined, and modified, till they become the servants and instruments of his human life, and the means by which all that is properly spiritual in his being may be reflected and symbolised upon this earth in outward, visible form. The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the conquest of them, to new and higher life.
And so it was in the Middle Ages. The Church was, no doubt, the great civiliser of the nations: still, whatever aid the State derived from the Church, it then, no less than now, had a position and processes of its own, by which it did its own work of civilisation too. And its first great work for controlling the universal anarchy of which I have spoken was the extension and firm establishment of that half-patriarchal, half-military organisation which we call the Feudal System. Every man who was not rich and powerful enough to be a lord became—willingly or unwillingly—a vassal; and all men, from the king downwards, were bound to each other for reciprocal service and protection—a service and protection partly military, but partly patriarchal, since they were rendered not by men strangers to each other except for what Mr. Carlyle calls ‘the nexus of cash payment,’ but united by ties of family, and neighbourhood, and clanship, and by the interests and sympathies that grow out of these. But the protector of his own vassals easily became the invader of the rights and ravager of the possessions of his neighbour and his vassals; and so the old evils of anarchy and violence grew afresh out of the remedy which had been devised to meet them. The ‘monarchies sank into impotence; petty, lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot,’ says a learned historian of this period, ‘and all attempts after scientific instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe, merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It is a sign of the prevailing feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years of our æra were drawing to their close, the people in every country in Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world. Some squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it for the good of their souls on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay day and night around the altars; some looked forward with dread, but most with secret hope, towards the burning of the earth and the falling in of heaven. Their actual condition was so miserable that the idea of destruction was relief, spite of all its horrors[39].’
The palliatives with which men tried to meet the evils of the times indicate the greatness of the evils, but also the moral feeling which was the promise of better things. Such was the so-called ‘Peace of the King,’ by which private wars were not to be entered on till forty days after the committal of the alleged crime which was to be avenged; and the ‘Truce of God,’ by which all these acts of private hostility were suspended from Thursday to Monday in each week. And at the Council of Cleremont, held by Urban II in November, 1095, a severe censure was pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God was confirmed; women and priests were placed under the safeguard of the Church; and a protection of three years was extended to husbandmen and merchants, the defenceless victims of military rapine. We are reminded of the law of Moses, which provided Cities of Refuge for the man who accidentally and without malice killed his neighbour, but who could not look for protection from the vengeance of the family of the slain man except within those special safeguards. In each case there is the same unreasoning rage of the half-civilised man brought face to face with the demands of religion and civil law: and each is obliged to yield something to the other till the better cause has had time to prepare and strengthen itself for a more complete triumph.
Chivalry, then, was the offspring of the same spirit which dictated the Peace of the King, the Truce of God, and the decrees of the Council of Cleremont. Chivalry has another name—Knighthood—and the two are wanted to express all that we mean by either[40]. The chevalier was the soldier who rode the war-horse: he whose birth entitled him, and whose wealth gave him the means, to ride at the head of his vassals and retainers to the war: all ideas of lordship, and mastery, and outward dignity and power, are here embodied before us. But this ‘chevalier,’ this ‘ritter,’ or rider of the war-horse, was also to be a ‘knecht,’ or servant: ‘He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant.’ The knight was to obey, no less than to command; he was to exert his strength and power, not for selfish ends, but in the service of others; and especially in the service of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed, who could not help or defend themselves. It was, indeed, no new discovery in the world, that such are the duties of him who possesses power, and above all the power of the sword; and they who have tried to trace the origin of chivalry to some particular place and time have had to go to the Germans of Tacitus, to the Crusaders, to the Saracens, to the Romans, the Greeks, the Trojans, the Hebrews, only to come to the conclusion that chivalry belongs in its spirit to man as man; though the form in which that spirit was clothed in Europe in the Middle Ages has an individuality of which some of the sources may be ascertained, and though from that time forward its power has been established, and extended, in a manner, and with a greatness unknown to the ancients.
In those days society was essentially military. In this our own time the main offices, interests, and occupations of the great body politic are non-military, and the army is but a small portion of the nation, specially trained for a minor, though indispensable, function therein. Peace, for its own sake, and for the sake of the objects which can only be obtained by the arts and with the opportunities of peace, is the end and aim of every civilised nation now; and war is only an occasional means to secure that end. But in the Middle Ages war was, or seemed to be, the chief end of life to the greater part of every nation, and especially to all who possessed rank, and wealth, and power, and were in fact the leaders of the nation. And therefore chivalry, the spirit which was to humanise those warriors, needed to be warlike too, and thus to sympathise with those to whom it addressed itself.
Much, too, of its special form it no doubt owed to that wonderful race of heroes, the Normans. The romantic love of adventure; the religious and the martial enthusiasm; the desire to revenge injuries, and to win wealth and power; the delight in arms and horses, in the luxury of dress, and in the exercises of hunting and hawking; the eloquence and sagacity in council; the patience with which when need was they could endure the inclemency of every climate, and the toil and abstinence of a military life; and the gentleness, the affability and the gallantry, which were the characteristics of the Norman race; these must have been more or less impressed on men’s minds wherever the Norman sway or influence extended, from England to Sicily, and must have reproduced something of themselves in the social habits and manners of the times. When we read the description of William of the Iron Arm, the first Norman count of Apulia, so strong, so brave, so affable, so generous, and so sage above other men—a lion in battle, a lamb in society, and an angel in council—we are reminded of the heroes of chivalry in the days of its greatest refinement, the Black Prince, Sir John Chandos, and Sir Walter of Manny, as they still live in the pages of Froissart; or their counterparts in romance, King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England.
The Normans, the latest of the Northern races who descended, full of wild life, from their mountains and forests, upon the comparatively civilised plains of Europe, may have brought a newer and fresher feeling for those old manners and customs which Tacitus describes as characterising the Germans of his time, and which are with so much probability connected with the chivalry of the Middle Ages. In ancient Germany, and in Scandinavia, it was the custom for each youth, when he was of an age to bear arms, to be presented with a sword, a shield, and a lance, by his father, or some near relation, in an assembly of the chiefs of the nation; and from that time he became a member of the commonwealth, and ranked as a citizen. He then entered the train of some chief, of whom he and his brother youths became the followers and companions, forming one brotherhood, though not without ranks and degrees, while a generous spirit of equality ran through all.
In ancient Germany, too, women were held in a peculiar reverence, beyond what was known in the other—and otherwise more civilized—nations of antiquity; and the presence of women in the hour of battle with their husbands, brothers, and fathers, was regarded by those warriors as an incentive to courage, and a pledge of victory, which (as they boasted) their Roman foes were unable to appeal to for themselves. And this old Teutonic reverence for women conspired with the new Christian reverence for the Virgin Mary as the type and representative at once of her sex and of the Church, to supply the purer and nobler elements of the gallantry which forms so large a part, not only of the romance, but of the actual history, of chivalry.
But Christianity exercised not only an indirect, but also a direct and avowed action upon the forms of chivalry, as they attained to their full proportions. Knighthood was certainly a feature and distinction of society before the days of Charlemagne, who in permitting the governor of Friesland to make knights by girding them with a sword, and giving them a blow, adds ‘as is the custom.’ But no ritual of the Church as yet consecrated that custom. Charlemagne girt the sword on his son Louis the Good without religious ceremonies; and a century later the Saxon king of England, Edward the Elder, clothed Athelstan in a soldier’s dress of scarlet, and girded him with a girdle ornamented with precious stones and a sword with sheath of gold, but without religious rites. But in the next century, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, we read that Hereward, a noble Anglo-Saxon youth, was knighted by the Abbot of Peterborough, with confession, absolution, and prayer that he might be a true knight. And this the historian describes as the custom of the English, as indeed it was, or soon became, that of all Europe; the Normans resisting the innovation longest, but at last adopting it with their wonted ardour. The candidate for knighthood confessed his sins on the eve of his consecration (for such it now was), and passed the night in prayer and fasting in the church: the godfathers, the bath, the white garment, and the tonsure (sometimes limited indeed to a single lock) were the symbols of the new and holy state of life to which he was now called: next morning he heard mass, offered his sword on the altar, where it was blessed by the priest; and he was created a knight—either by the priest of highest rank present, or by some knight, who, in virtue of his knighthood, was qualified to confer the sacred office he had himself received—in the name of God, of St. George, and of Saint Michael the Archangel. He swore, and received the holy communion in confirmation of his oath, to fulfil the duties of his profession; to speak the truth; to maintain the right; to protect women, the poor, and the distressed; to practise courtesy; to pursue the infidels; to despise the allurements of ease and safety, and to maintain his honour in every perilous adventure. And the Council of Cleremont, of which I have already spoken—as if in order to give the sanction of the Church in a still more formal and comprehensive manner to the whole system of chivalry—decreed that every person of noble birth, on attaining the age of twelve years, should take a solemn oath before the bishop of his diocese to defend to the uttermost the oppressed, the widow, and the orphans; that women of noble birth, both married and single, should enjoy his especial care; and that nothing should be wanting in him to render travelling safe, and to destroy tyranny.
Thus, as has been justly observed, all the humanities of chivalry were sanctioned by legal and ecclesiastical power: it was intended that they should be spread over the whole face of Christendom, in order to check the barbarism and ferocity of the times. While the form of chivalry was martial, its objects became to a great extent religious and social: from a mere military array chivalry obtained the name of the Order, the Holy Order, and a character of seriousness and solemnity was given to it; and it was accounted an honourable office above all offices, orders, and acts of the world, except the order of priesthood.
The education for knighthood usually began at a still earlier age than that mentioned in the Canons of Cleremont. The castles of the princes and nobles were the schools of those days, at least for the youth of their own class. Every feudal lord had his court, to which he drew the sons and daughters of the poorer gentry of his domains; and if he were a knight distinguished for his merits, his castle was also frequented by the children of men of equal rank and reputation with himself: for the prudent and careful father would often have some brother in arms whom he thought better fitted than himself to educate his children in the accomplishments and duties of his station. So, long after, Ben Jonson, looking back on those old times, and picturing them in their ideal aspect, says, that then