Yep, Malory was a real-life knight. But, sadly for him, he was born in the 15th century, a time of great upheaval in England. So, that whole knightly thing? It wasn't working out very well back then.

The 14th and 15th centuries were marked by a series of unfortunate events that included the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the Wars of the Roses. That last one was a bloody and bitter civil war in which powerful factions of English nobility fought each other for control of the country.

As you can well imagine, all these wars really put the knights' high-falutin' ideas about chivalry and honor to the test. And, well, a lot of the time the codes of good knighthood failed, friends. All of those courtesies and rules of combat that knights were supposed to follow went right out the window during these lengthy, violent wars.

Aw. But don't get too distressed yet, Shmoopers.

Enter: Sir Thomas Malory. He was quite the character. He cooled his heels in prison for a number of years, after engaging in various shady activities—including stealing sheep and ambushing a nobleman.

In a scene right out of a movie, Malory even escaped from prison this one time by fighting off some guards and then swimming across the castle's moat. We get the feeling that some of these illegal activities were, in reality, Malory's way of doing things that were quasi-knightly in nature.

So, when we consider the time he lived in and his own biography, which is full of some pretty gnarly facts about his life, we quickly understand that his great work Le Morte D'Arthur portrays a very romanticized vision of the knighthood-of-another-time. As in, it's a highly nostalgic text that looks back to a time where knighthood was still something noble, and a king could command the loyalty and love of his men. This time was not the 15th century.

And throughout the work, Malory takes several swipes at the behavior of Englishmen during his own era. He really lets 'em have it for being so "new fangled" and "changeable." Bam.

Le Morte D'Arthur

You know you're in for a downer when the title has the word "death" in it. Interestingly enough, though, this was not the title that Mr. Malory picked out for his work. Even though The Death of Arthur is how we know the work now, that was William Caxton's idea. He was the guy who first printed Malory, just so you know.

Malory himself called his work, The Book of King Arthur and his Noble Knights of the Round Table. Considering the death of Arthur only makes up the last part of this huge tome of All Things Arthurian, Malory's original title better captures the full narrative contained in the book… which basically amounts to a juicy soap-opera, only with castles, samite gowns, and lots of armor. It's pretty great, really.

Chew on This

What do you make of the tone of Malory's work? We think it can get pretty heavy, with that whole fate business always hiding between the lines. (You might look at Balyn and Balan or the very ending of the tale for examples of how fate plays a role in the novel.) Some people—us included—have even called the tone of his work moralizing. Where do you see Malory telling us how to think and feel about stuff?

Oh, and what is that "Frensshe booke" Malory keeps referencing? No, it's not his Little Black Book of Hot French Ladies. What he's referring to is his major source, the Lancelot-Grail cycle. This group of French Arthurian romances is truly huge. It's so huge, you'd have to make several trips to and from the library just to haul the thing home. Now, let's do a little exercise together. (You know you want to.) First, think about the structure of Malory's work. What do you notice about it? Hold that thought, then take a look at how we think his writing style might have been affected by this truly sprawling source he used.