in love that she besought Sir Launcelot to were uppon hym at the justis [jousts] a tokyn
of hers.Lancelot demurs, then decides to bear her token, ‘that none of hys bloode thereby
myght know hym’. Wearing Elayne’s sleeve of scarlet silk, Lancelot receives a near-
fatal wound; she nurses him back to health. When he is ready to leave, she says
‘have mercy uppon me, and suffir me nat to dye for youre love.’ ‘Why, what wolde you
that I dud?’ seyde Sir Launcelot. ‘Sir, I wolde have you to my husbande,’ seyde Elayne.
‘Fayre demesell, I thanke you hartely,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘but truly,’ seyde he, ‘I caste me
[am resolved] never to be wedded man.’ ‘Than, fayre knyght,’ seyde she, ‘woll ye be my
paramour [lover]?’ ‘Jesu defende me!’ seyde Sir Launcelot. ‘For than I rewarded youre
fadir and youre brothir full evyll for their grete goodnesse.’ ‘Alas, than,’ seyde she, ‘I must
dye for youre love.’Sir Lancelot offers to settle upon her and a future husband a thousand pound yearly.
She declines; he departs. After ten days she dies, and her body is placed in a black
barge which comes down the Thames to Westminster, ‘and there hitt rubbed and
rolled too and fro a grete whyle or [before] ony man aspyed hit’. This story has the
same basis as Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott(p. 274).
Malory’s prose is rhythmical, and there is a larger narrative rhythm to his scenes.
His well-paced narrative, with its dramatic exchanges, tells of conflict and loss in a
world both marvellous and everyday. Malory begins his book with Arthur’s begetting,
his miraculous youth, and his foreign conquests. The Hundred Years War fought by
the English against the French had been lost when Malory was in his prime, and he
knew well that the chivalry he portrays in his central books of Sir Gareth, Sir Tristram
and the Grail was not to be found.Nor were loyalty to the king and courtesy between
knights found in the Wars of the Roses, in which Malory had fought.
The imprisoned author ends the Mortewith the break-up of the Round Table and
the death of Arthur. In the feud that follows the ‘outing’ of his adulterous love for
Guenevere, Lancelot kills Gareth, Gawain’s brother, and leaves the Round Table for
his nativ e France. Gawain, with Arthur his uncle, seeks vengeance on Lancelot, and
in their absence the traitor Mordred claims the throne. Many side with him against
Arthur, and Malory, a Lancastrian, exclaims: ‘Alas! thys ys a greate defaughte of us
Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme [for any length of time].’
Without Lancelot, Arthur loses. The close, with the deaths of Arthur, Lancelot and
Guenevere, is full of mistrust and regret. Arthur’s last knight Sir Bedwere falsely tells
him that all he had seen at the lake was water lapping and dark waves: ‘watirs wap
and wawys wanne’. Arthur replies ‘A, traytour unto me and untrew ... now hast thou
betrayed me twyse!’ Bedwere puts Arthur into the barge in which the ladies are to
take him away to the vale of Avylyon to heal him of his grievous wound. Then
Bedwere cries: ‘A, my lorde Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye go frome me
and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes?’ Malory gave the ramifying
Arthurian story its classic form. ‘Many men say’ that there is written upon Arthur’s
to mb:HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS (‘Here lies
Arthur, the once and future king’).The arrival of printing
The status ofLe Morte Darthurowes much to its printing by William Caxton
(?1422–1491),an entrepreneur who had learned printing in Cologne and Bruges70 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500