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didn't thrill her too much, so she read books. Books were very
expensive in the twelfth century because they had to be copied by
hand, but Eleanor didn't care. She had money, if not freedom, so she
could afford to pay assorted indigents with literary pretensions to
write the kind of books she liked. Given Eleanor's background
it's understandable that she liked books about kings, knights in
shining armor, pretty young fellows who played the lute and sang of
love with throbbing emotion, and fair damsels cruelly imprisoned in
towers. Her literary tastes gave rise to troubadour poetry, the courtly
love tradition, and whole libraries of interminable French romances
that concentrated heavily on 'The Matter of Britain' (King Arthur et
al) and 'The Matter of France' (Charlemagne and Co.).
Now we jump forward three hundred years to the Wars of
the Roses. There was a certain knight named Sir Thomas Malory
(probably from Warwickshire) who sided with the Lancastrians.
When the Yorkist faction gained the ascendancy~ Sir Thomas was
clapped into prison. He was not, strictly speaking, a political
prisoner, however. He was in prison because he belonged there, since it
appears that he was a career criminal more than a political partisan.
There may have been some politics involved in the various charges
leveled against him, of course, but the preponderance of evidence
suggests that he was a sort of medieval jesse james, leading a gang
of outlaws on a rampage through southern England. He was
imprisoned for sedition, murder, the attempted murder of the Duke of
Buckingham, cattle-rustling, horse theft, the looting of monasteries,
jail-breaking and not infrequently of rape. Sir Thomas seems to have
been a very bad boy.
He was still a nobleman, however, and a sometime member of
parliament, so he was able to persuade his jailors to let him visit a
nearby library (under guard, of course). Sir Thomas was quite proud
of his facility in the French language, and he whiled away the hours
of his incarceration translating the endless French romances dealing
with (what else?) King Arthur. The end result was the work we now
know as Le Morte darthur.
A technological break-through along about then ensured a wide
distribution of Malory's work. William Caxton had a printing press,
and he evidently grew tired of grinding out religious pamphlets,
so, sensing a potential market, he took Malory's manuscript and
edited it in preparation for a printing run. I think we underestimate
Caxton's contribution to Le Morte darthur. If we can believe most
scholars, Malory's original manuscript was pretty much a
hodgepodge of disconnected tales, and Caxton organized them into a
coherent whole, giving us a story with a beginning, a middle, and an
end.
Now we jump forward another four hundred years. Queen
Victoria ascended the British throne at the age of seventeen. Queen
INTRODUCTION
Victoria had opinions. Queen Victoria didn't approve of 'naughty
stuff'. Queen Victoria had a resident poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
and he cleaned up Malory for his queen to produce a work he
called Idylls of the King. Idylls of the King is a fairly typical Victorian
bowdlerization that accepted the prevailing attitude of the time
that Le Morte darthur was little more than 'bold bawdry and open
manslaughter'. It glossed over such picky little details as the fact