Thomas Malory

Thomas Malory was a Warwickshire knight who sat in Parliament and spent much of his last twenty years in prison on charges of theft, extortion, rape and attempted murder, and who wrote, in Newgate around 1470, the book Caxton printed as Le Morte d’Arthur. It gathers the French Arthurian romances into one English prose account of the round table, from Arthur’s begetting to the last battle, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Grail, and the end of the fellowship. Tennyson, Twain, T. H. White and every later Arthur come from it, and its Middle English is plain enough that the lists read it in the original.