The man who wrote King Arthur's chivalry may have been a jailed bandit
Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485, is signed by a knight prisoner called Thomas Malory. The leading candidate for that name had been locked up as a thief, kidnapper and worse. Scholars have spent over a century arguing whether such a man could have written Lancelot's scorn for knightly criminals.
The author left little beyond prayers tucked into the text. In the Winchester Manuscript, found in 1934, he asks readers to pray that God grant him good deliverance, and calls himself a knight prisoner. Caxton replaced those notes with one closing plea dating the book to the ninth year of Edward IV's reign. Most of the notes speak of Malory in the third person, so a copyist could have added them, but the consensus is that they describe the real writer. Because so much was drawn out of French, he was probably educated and well off.
Harvard's George Lyman Kittredge proposed Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire in 1894, having found him in William Dugdale's 1656 history serving the Earl of Warwick at Calais with one lance and two archers. He is the only Thomas Malory alive at the time who is plainly documented as a knight, and he sat in Parliament. Yet Dugdale, who knew the family, never mentions the famous book. In 1928 Edward Hicks uncovered his imprisonments for theft, banditry, kidnapping, attempted murder and rape; Helen Cooper said his life reads like exemplary thuggery.
Age is the other snag. If he served under Henry V around 1414 or 1415, he was born in the 1390s and was at least 75 when the book was finished. Some scholars instead place his service in a brief 1436 mobilisation, making him about 55 to 58. William Matthews found Dugdale's own French notes on the Agincourt roster, listing knights who died long before 1436, and backed the older timeline, remarking that 75 is no age at all to write in prison.
Rivals include Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes and Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire, both from knightly families and of a likelier age, though neither is known to have been jailed. Cecelia Lampp Linton argues that the Hutton Conyers man was a knight of the church, and that Dugdale would surely have linked the Warwickshire knight to the book had a link existed.
Source: Thomas Malory
