Le Morte Darthur
words that ‘he is the servant of Jesu by day and by night,’ which
suggested the notion that he was a priest, are evidently put into that
form in order to give a rhythmical ending to the book. Nor did the
priest’s usual title of ‘Sir’ make him a knight. What we may say of Sir
Thomas Malory is that he was probably of an old English family: that he
was a knight both in rank and in temper and spirit, and a lover alike
of the gentle and the soldierly virtues of knighthood. He was a man of
genius, and a devout Christian: he wrote for gentlewomen as well as
gentlemen, believing that they would read his book ‘from the beginning
to the ending,’ and that it would call forth in them a sympathy which
would properly express itself in prayers for the pious writer.
WILLIAM CAXTON.
Of William Caxton we know more. A native of Kent, he became an
apprentice, freeman, and livery man of the London Guild of Mercers, and
was for many years resident in the English factory at Bruges, which was
under their chief authority, though it represented and controlled all
English trading interests in the Low Countries. Such factories were the
usual, and indeed essential means of carrying on trade with foreign
nations in the Middle Ages. Thus charters were granted by Henry IV and
his successors to ‘Merchant Adventurers’ trading in Flanders, which, in
giving them a corporate character, enabled them to treat with the
authorities of the country more effectually than would have been
possible to private individuals, and also to exercise needful control
over, and give protection to, their own countrymen in the place. Though
these Merchant Adventurers included many of the City Guilds, the
majority were Mercers, and the factory at Bruges, while called ‘the
English Nation,’ and its house ‘the English House,’ was practically
under the management of the London Mercers’ Guild. Mr. Blades has given
an engraving from _Flandria Illustrata_ of the ‘Domus Anglorum’ at
Bruges as it was in Caxton’s time; and he thus describes the mode of
life of its inhabitants:—
‘A great similarity prevailed in the internal management of all
foreign guilds, arising from the fact that foreigners were regarded
by the natives with jealousy and suspicion. The laws which governed
the Esterlings in London, who lived in a strongly-built enclosure,
called the Steel Yard, the site of which is now occupied by the
City station of the South Eastern Railway Company, were much the
same as those under which the English Nation lived in Bruges and
other cities. The foreign merchant had, in Caxton’s time, to brave
a large amount of popular dislike, and to put up with great
restraints on his liberty. Not only did he trade under harassing
restrictions, but he resigned all hopes of domestic ties and family
life. As in a monastery, each member had his own dormitory, whilst
at meal-times there was a common table. Marriage was out of the
question, and concubinage was followed by expulsion. Every member
was bound to sleep in the house, and to be in-doors by a fixed time
in the evening, and for the sake of good order no woman of any
description was allowed within the walls[24].’
To this house of the English in Bruges Caxton went to live in the year
1441, being then probably about twenty years of age. In 1462 he was
acting as ‘Governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries,’ and
certainly in full possession of that office and title two or three
years later. And in 1465 he was appointed by Edward IV one of two
envoys with the title of Ambassadors, to negociate a renewal of the
existing treaty of trade with the Duke of Burgundy. We do not know at
what time he began to combine his literary studies or his acquaintance
with the new art of printing with the prosecution of his official
duties: but he tells us that in 1471, at the request of Margaret,
sister of Edward IV and wife of the Duke of Burgundy, he completed his
translation of the _Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_ which he had
begun, but laid aside unfinished some time before. And then, in order
to meet the desire of many friends to have copies of this translation,
he printed such copies for their use.
He was now in the service of Margaret, and married; and about the year
1476, after thirty-five years’ residence abroad, he returned to
England, there to introduce the Printing Press, and to make himself
famous to all ages by so doing. Caxton was not only a printer, but a
translator, an editor, and the publisher of the books which he printed
in unfailing succession, during the remaining fifteen years of his
life. He was the first of that honourable order of publishers who from
his day to our own still share with authors the gratitude of men for
that inestimable boon, the Printed Book. There are still publishers
among us who, like Caxton, are themselves authors and editors of no
unimportant ability: and not only to them, but also to those who aspire
only to be the publishers of other men’s books, do we owe—what even
the art of printing could have done little towards giving us—that
broad spreading[25] of knowledge which has become to us like the common
light of day in which we live and move, only half conscious of its
blessings. Mr. Blades justly defends Caxton against Gibbon’s censure of
him because he did not print the ancient classics. He did far better.
He printed and published translations from those classics for men who
could not read the originals; and it was surely no loss, but the
greatest gain, to Englishmen that he enabled them to read Chaucer’s
_Canterbury Tales_ and the _Polychronicon of English History_ (which
latter he carried down to his own time) rather than if he had printed
Virgil and Livy in the original Latin. He laid the foundations of
popular English literature in the best possible way. He taught his
countrymen to read, by giving them a large and judiciously selected
succession, year by year, of books which they could and would read. He
gave them books of piety and devotion, poetry and history, of chivalry
and romance, of morals and manners, including his own translations of
Cicero’s _Old Age and Friendship_; of proverbs, fables, and classical
legends; of statutes of the realm; and the _Game of Chess_, an allegory
of civil government. We cannot read down the list of ninety-nine books,
including several second and third editions, which Caxton printed,
without wonder and respect for the genius and the judgment of the man
whose choice of subjects was so wide, so high-minded, moral, religious,
and generous, and at the same time so popular. He was indeed, in all
senses, the first of English publishers. He died in 1491, occupied (as
his chief workman and successor, Wynkyn de Worde, tells us) on the last
day of his life in finishing his translation of the _Lives of the
Fathers_ from the French. Mr. Blades conjectures, with apparent
probability, that his wife was the Mawde Caxton whose burial is
recorded in the parish books of St. Margaret’s in 1489, and he adds:—
‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why
he in that year suspended printing the _Fayts of Arms_ until he had
finished a new undertaking, _The Arte and Crafte to Die Well_.’
The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the
growth and progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and
directed in certain epochs of our history by great men who have yet
themselves been made what they are by those very laws. Among such laws
are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold aspect of self-sacrifice and
of self-assertion. And not least among the men who have given to the
spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of duty
and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas
Malory and William Caxton.
§2. THE TEXT, AND ITS SEVERAL EDITIONS.
The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at
Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only
are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among
the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E.
Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at
the sale of the Osterley library in 1885[26]; and the other to Earl
Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph
‘Oxford’ on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to
Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5_s._ by
Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of
the Earl of Jersey[27]. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr.
Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these
were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy
with remarkable skill[28], though on collation with the original I have
found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton’s books but one, has
no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first
page[29].
The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde,
the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one
copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants
some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of
Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of
Contents. This edition, which has numerous woodcuts, is not an exact
reprint of Caxton’s; there are differences of spelling and occasionally
of a word; and the passage in the last chapter but one, beginning ‘Oh
ye mighty and pompous lords,’ and ending with ‘turn again to my
matter,’ which is not in Caxton’s edition, appears here, as in all
later editions[30]. The edition of 1529 is in the British Museum, and
wants the Title, Preface, and part of the Table of Contents.
In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of
‘The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was
one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaūte
knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij.
¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.’ And on the title-page, above
the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that
on the title-page of Southey’s edition is a bad copy. A copy of this
edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one
with a title which the annotator has seen.
A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without
date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British
Museum.
The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in
1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the
woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights
around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small
editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which
exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East’s folio, Mr. Wright
concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding
edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton;
but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton’s, we find the variations
almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book
into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words,
there are a number of more or less considerable variations and
additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in
his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole;
and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer
reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without
farther reference to his ‘copy,’ but in the others from a desire to
improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls ‘a more