English Knights, French Books, and Malory's Narrator

Summary

In the epilogue of his translation of Ramon Lull's Ordre of Chyualry (printed in 1484), William Caxton bemoans the contemporary decline of chivalry. His prescription for mitigating the problem was having knights read, and his first choice of what they should read was books about King Arthur:

O ye knyghtes of Englond where is the custome and vsage of noble chyualry that was vsed in tho dayes / … rede the noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot / of galaad / of Trystam / of perse forest / of percyual / of gawayn / & many mo.

Since Caxton was a bookseller who would print Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur the following year, his assessment may have been self-interested, but he nonetheless had a point. Chivalry was learned: both as a set of values that people were taught and as a system for interpreting gestures that had to be mastered. Because chivalry honored tradition and lineage, Caxton apparently believed that reading stories of the past (fictional or otherwise) would further chivalric ideals among the buyers and audiences of books he printed. Writing toward the end of the Wars of the Roses, when knights' duties were far from clear, Caxton seems to have hoped that these men's reading about the Arthurian past would not only result in a new chivalric community, but also satisfy the nostalgia for former knighthood and its ideals in middle-class readers.

Malory was, on the other hand, pessimistic about using stories to build collective identity.