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"Conjecture, unverified supposition, guesswork, surmise, suspicion, rough guess, shrewd idea, speculation, shot in the dark"
Roget’s Thesaurus
"Fools rush in, where wise men never go"
Elvis Presley, quoting (probably unknowingly) Alexander Pope
I first read Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur when I was a student in the 1960s. I bought it in one of the prettiest and most accessible of its many editions, the set of three slim morocco-bound pocket volumes published at the turn of the century by J. M. Dent in the Temple Classics series. It cost me three shillings on David’s secondhand bookstall in Cambridge market. I bought it because I’d been reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, a four-part novel about Arthur which pays constant affectionate tribute to Malory. Its first and best known part is The Sword in the Stone. The sound and spirit of Malory’s voice has reverberated in my head ever since, and I still love his combination of high ideals and realistic acceptance of the limitations of ‘sinful man’ and ‘sinful lady’.
It wasn’t until I decided to include Malory in a book which explored the places in which writers lived and set their stories that I discovered that pathetically little was known for certain about him, and that what had been discovered suggested he was an incorrigibly violent criminal who had spent most of his life in prison. But the more I looked into what was known, the more it seemed to me that unfounded assumptions about motives and guilt had been made, and that very few of his disparagers knew enough about the social circumstances of his life and the realities of medieval politics and law. I didn’t either, but I decided to find out, and to write a biography that would be worthy of Malory, if possible clearing his name. I also wanted people to realise that his timeless book was not a remote, literary Everest but accessible, inspiring and touchingly human. I gave myself two years.
Five years on, I still feel I could dig deeper. It has been a far more difficult task than I anticipated when I first set out with courage high and heart aglow. The wise scholars who shook their head sadly at my presumption were absolutely right to do so. My book, stuffed to the brim with conjectures, breaks a great many scholarly conventions, and I am well aware that it is as much an imagined life as a true biography. It differs materially from the entry for the author of the Morte Darthur in the new D.N.B. But it is the first book to make the puzzling evidence we have about Malory’s life match the character of the author of the Morte Darthur, and the first to set him convincingly in the social and political world of his age.
Following up the scattered clues to Malory’s doings was a journey of discovery which led me to medieval glories in England, France, Italy and Greece: the ruins of castles at Hanley, Castle Bytham and Fotheringay, remote country churches splendid with Templar gargoyles, delicately-carved tombs of time-polished alabaster, iridescent coats-of-arms in stained glass windows, the ancient streets of Sandwich and Rouen, the formidable castles of Caen, Falaise and Gisors, Hospitaller houses in Rome and the walled citadel of Rhodes, where the Malory coat-of-arms can still be seen on the Inn of the English. Research into medieval records, even when puzzling over all but illegible handwriting, medieval Latin abbreviations and arcane legal terms, has been infinitely seductive. I was lucky enough to be able to do much of it in the gold-grey twilight of Oxford University’s Duke Humfrey’s Library, a painted cave of a room finished only a decade or so after Malory’s death, where rows of leather-bound books rise to an intricately carved ceiling above long oak desks. I have no doubt that more discoveries will be made about Malory, and I hope that I have pointed the way towards some of them. But it is time to pass on my charts to the next explorer.
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Malory - The Life and Times of King Arthur's Chronicler