evidence has come to light that definitively links the author of Le Morte D’Arthur (also known as the Morte Darthur and the Morte D’Arthur) with any one of them. What the author tells us about himself is scanty; he says that his name is Sir Thomas Malory, that he is a knight and a prisoner, and that he finished his book in the ninth year of the reign of King Edward IV—that is, in 1469 or 1470. He wrote no other work that is known. Since the late nineteenth century critics have for the most part believed that he was Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, though substantial objections have been raised to this identification, primarily because the Warwickshire Malory seems to have been a man of habitual and extreme violence. He was indeed an imprisoned knight, but his crimes of “rape, church-robbery, extortion and attempted murder” seem very much at odds with the Christian and chivalric attitudes expressed by the author of the Morte D’Arthur (Field, Life and Times, p. 5). Nevertheless, it is clear that the author Malory (whoever he was exactly) knew two things extremely well—the vast body of Arthurian literature that came down to him, and the business of warfare.
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