Winchester Manuscript

Le Morte d'Arthur (originally spelt Le Morte Darthur, Middle French for "the death of Arthur") is a reworking of traditional tales by Sir Thomas Malory about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory interprets existing French and English stories about these figures and adds original material (e.g., the Gareth story).

Le Morte d'Arthur was first published in 1485 by William Caxton, and is today perhaps one of the best-known works of Arthurian literature in English. Many modern Arthurian writers have used Malory as their principal source, including T. H. White in his popular The Once and Future King and Tennyson in The Idylls of the King.

The exact identity of the author of Le Morte D'Arthur has long been the subject of the speculation, owing to the fact that a number of minor historical figures bore the name of "Sir Thomas Malory", but scholarship has increasingly supported the notion that the author was the Thomas Malory who was born in the year 1416, to Sir John Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire. Sir Thomas inherited the family estate in 1434 after his father died and is believed to have engaged in a life of crime punctuated with long periods of imprisonment. As early as 1433, he was seemingly indicted for theft and, in 1450, it was alleged that he was involved in an attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, robbery, rape, and an extortion scheme stemming from a cattle raid. Although in 1450 he was a member of Parliament. He was imprisoned in Coleshill but escaped and soon after robbed the Cistercian monastery. Malory was once again arrested in 1454, but two years later he was released through a royal pardon.

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