Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2003
Q: Is it true the
King Arthur story was invented by a criminal?
—A Doubting Freshman
A: The “King Arthur story” is a complex mix of legend and literature both ancient and modern, and probably based in fact, to boot. No single person really invented it.
But it is true that Sir Thomas Malory, the author of the definitive Le Morte D’Arthur (1485), was charged with a lengthy list of unpleasant crimes and died as an apparent political prisoner. He finished his book in jail.
The idea that the author of the epitome of medieval chivalry acted more like the Black Knight was, and is, quite the literary scandal.
For more than 400 blissful years, almost nothing was known about Malory. In an afterword in his book, he described himself only as a knight and said he finished writing in about 1469.
In the late 1800s, Harvard scholar George Kittredge identified the author as Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, a nobleman and one-time member of Parliament (in 1445). At least, that was the only Sir Thomas Malory around in the 1469 era. So far, so good.
But in the 1920s, a follow-up researcher discovered Malory’s rap sheet.
In 1443, Malory was charged with the battery, kidnapping and robbery of one Thomas Smith. The charges were dropped.
Malory started 1450 by joining 26 armed men in an attempted ambush of the Duke of Buckingham near Malory’s hometown.
He was twice charged with rape of one Joan Smith, and once with stealing from her husband. And he was hit with three counts of extortion.
In 1451, he allegedly stole “7 cows, 2 calves, 335 sheep and a cart worth 22 pounds.”
When the Duke of Buckingham turned the tables and came after Malory, he responded by raiding and vandalizing the duke’s hunting lodge and poaching a bunch of deer.
Finally captured, Malory promptly escaped by swimming a moat, and soon conducted two raids on a nearby abbey. Recaptured in 1452, he got out on bail and immediately stole a bunch of horses, and escaped again after being jailed for that.
He was jailed yet again, but never went to trial on any of these charges. Instead, he was pardoned by a new political regime. But around 1468, the political power shifted again, and his pardon was revoked. He apparently died in prison.
Any hope that this was some other Thomas Malory faded in 1934, when a manuscript version of his book was found. In the original version of the afterword, Malory also described himself as a “knyght presoner”—a knight prisoner.
Malory apologists note that the troubles with the Smiths might have been a personal dispute, and that “rape” at the time could also mean attempted elopement.
The other
crimes may have been political piracy related to the era’s Wars of the Roses,
the power struggle for the throne between the houses of
But the
pattern of the crimes and pardons indicates that Malory
played both sides at best, and may have just used the war as an excuse.