With Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (aka Morte Darthur, hereafter MD) published by William Caxton in 1485, mass audiences at last could read about Arthur because finally he was in print, but Malory's popularity did not peek until the arrival of mass public education in the nineteenth century. His book then was reprinted in the wave of late romantic medievalism led by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey, and later in the Victorian era with Alfred  Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85) and socialist  William Morris’s "The Defence of Guenevere "(1858). Malory's popular influence has continued to grow in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958), and a myriad of other works down to Monty Python's Spamalot (2005).

Feudal futility
If he was who most scholars take him to be, Sir Thomas Malory (cir. 1405-1471) was one of many victims of the political chaos of his time. He was repeatedly arrested and jailed for long years but, as there is no record of any trial, he may have been held solely for political reasons. Malory probably completed Morte Darthur at the end of his life, possibly while still in prison. In any case Arthurian literature appears to have interested to the author of Morte Darthur insofar as it mirrored his chaotic times including civil wars, religious morbidity, private armies, and weak kingship unable to rule aristocratic arrogance or maintain peace. Malory's Arthur and Guinevere seem to be references to his king, the devout and feeble minded Henry VI (1421-1471), and Henry's allegedly unfaithful queen, the beautiful and ambitious Margaret of Anjou (1430-1482).

When Malory was a boy, England had conquered large parts of France under the brief reign of Lancastrian Henry V, but the young king suddenly died of dysentery on campaign. After the succession of the infant king Henry VI in 1422, there was no central control of the state, all of the French territories were lost, and England plunged into a long and bloody series of civil wars, the Wars of the Roses between Lancastrian and Yorkist rivals.

Malory did not live to see these wars end. He was dead when his book was published 1485. That year the new Tudor dynasty was established after the Battle of Bosworth Field, when Lancastrian Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York. Henry's Welsh ancestry probably moved Caxton to print MD; it certainly moved Henry in naming his children, the first of whom was Prince Arthur. Nevertheless, MD is a parable of the failed medieval order which Henry wisely would bring to an end.

Form and Style
Malory pushes his stories along much faster than the leisurely French Arthurian romances that he used as sources. He cut their explanations and moralizing while he maintained their action. The result is an enigmatic, at times confused set of plots that are episodic and diffuse, filled with scenes of brief dialogue and a big cast of characters, often featuring minor figures like Sir Pinel and Patrise in "The Poisoned Apple," or Lucan and Bedivere in "The Day of Destiny." There is no central controlling hero, or other unifying plot device, to bring continuity to the narrative.

The tangled disunity of Malory's fiction is reflected at the sentence level, too. Malory uses a simple but rhythmically powerful prose style that captures effects from the alliterative English romances he knew. Rhythmic drive comes from persistent repetition and, especially at moments of high emotion, alliteration:

“‘What sawest thou there?’ said the king.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I saw nothing but waters wap and waves wan’” (“The Day of Destiny”).

Malory is not Hemingway, but he is an originator of paratactic sentence structure, its independent clauses linked by simple conjunctions, and without the implicit explanatory logic of subordinate clauses. There are few transition words or none. Events and speeches are abbreviated, leaving much to the reader's imagination. The style is perhaps not well suited for aristocratic ladies or monks with lots of time to kill. It seems more well suited for a broad and impatient readership. Morte Darthur is the first book in English that can be called popular.

Caxton’s Prologue
Caxton’s Prologue is not unlike a jacket blurb today, using the words of persons of prestige to promote the appeal or social utility of the merchandise. Note Caxton’s insistence on the “noble and dyuers gentylmen” who press him to publish a full Arthurian narrative. He touts his book politically, too: the French in one direction and Welsh in another have all the stories of Arthur, but the English “nowher nye alle.” Caxton will supply the lack, though he does even this under the favor and correction of both lords and gentlemen. Literate clerics are not the author's only choice for audience any more, nor is the noble patron the sole supporter of the writer's enterprise. The new commercialism of the age of books is already under way.

Caxton recognizes that there are those who read to learn the truth and those who read for pleasure. He is sure that Malory's book will find acceptance by the latter. The truth of the story may not be literal truth, he admits, but virtue is rewarded and vice punished, so Morte Darthur is claimed to be a practical guidebook on how gentlemen should and should not act.

The Miracle of Galahad
The Wars of the Roses were in part religious wars, insofar as the usurping Lancastrians attempted to justify their cause on  grounds that their Yorkist rivals were spiritually deficient or unorthodox. Exaggerated Lancastrian pietism seems to be reflected in Malory's emphasis on sacraments and miracles.  However, these elements may simply reflect their author's compulsive need for fantasy in the context of his prison life. MD can be read as the record of a sustained meditation that shifted Malory's attention from personal misery to a hoped-for mystical union of all faithful knights in a next world.

The acceptance of death is the same theme as presented in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but Galahad brings no garters back to Camelot. He doesn't even come back. Galahad's vision of the grail is represented in terms of the Eucharist, the mass as a repetition of the Last Supper (note also the twelve knights at Corbenic), and the transubstantiation of the wafer into the body of Christ. The Lord's meal transforms the flawed Round Table to a imagined spiritual fellowship on an unearthly plane.

Galahad's tale is thick with death, corpses and burials and the wish for death. The saintly knight heals the wounded and the sick, but it's a bizarre sort of healing that frees the patients to die and leave this world, rather than rejoin and reform it. No other knights can match Galahad's level of detachment. The last words of Lancelot's son are unsuccessful in raising Lancelot from entanglement in the world and tragic passion for Guinevere.

The Poisoned Apple
The religious grail quest has been a disaster for the secular Round Table, and Sir Bors returns from it to a mere “remnant” of the prior company. The surviving characters seem stuck in this diminished world, though, playing out old passions and hostilities with a sense of exhausted inevitability, banal and doomed. Lancelot has had a brief vision of the grail and the warning from his son Galahad, but he takes up with Guinevere anyway, resuming an affair that now has become a spiteful, weary argument.

The poisoned apple explores the sad paradox at the center of MD: Arthur can't win with or without Lancelot. Desire for Guinevere is what keeps his star knight at court, yet overall it undermines the codes and cohesion of the court. Public celebration of the Round Table is possible only in silence about the affair.

Arthur is undone by the animosities among his knights. Sir Patrise is killed accidentally when Sir Pinel tries to poison Sir Gawain. Sir Mador then tries to avenge the death of Patrise, resulting in the recall of Sir Lancelot and renewal of his affair with Guinevere. This in turn results in the death of Gawain's brothers, who are attempting to expose Lancelot's adultery, so Gawain takes revenge against Lancelot, and the whole kingdom is weakened to the point that Arthur is doomed.

The Day of Destiny
Arthur's kingdom is unsustainable. It seems bent on its own destruction. Brief moments of knightly harmony are always hedged by potential strife and violence. The court holds together only temporarily and only because of moral compromises, such as silence about Lancelot's affair with Guinevere. This is a reflection of the collapsed medieval world, when barons had more power than kings leaving states vulnerable to invasion, prone to civil war and marauding. We might ask the question, what is Arthur's economic program? The obvious answer is that he hasn't got one. Arthur is no leader. He merely reacts to the petty personal activities of his knights.

Morte Darthur describes the death of the old order. The final episode is itself littered with texts of death: fake letters announcing Arthur’s death, tombs, inscriptions, tales of death, and most poignantly Gawain’s letter, his dying effort. The legacy of these heroic people and their glamorous society is nothing but tombs with inscriptions on them.

“The Day of Destiny” sees the final conflict between feudal loyalty to Arthur and loyalty to clan, as Gawain seeks vengeance for Lancelot’s killing of his kinsmen. Arthur’s absence while prosecuting that kinship vendetta provides Mordred with the chance to kill his father--first in fake letters and then in fact. He would if he could replace Arthur on the throne and in the bed of his stepmother. Many of the common people seem to support him because Arthur's reign has brought them nothing but warfare. Only the church supports Arthur.

The future already is more than stale.  It's degenerate. Throughout the final episode, the abandonment of the secular world witnessed in the grail quest is repeated, as one public character after another abjures the world, to become a hermit, a nun, or a man suspended near death on an unknown island (rather like Henry VI).  Faith and devotion console these individuals but destroy the fellowship of the round table which should hold the kingdom together.