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Malory, Sir Thomas d.1471
English writer

In William Caxton's preface to Malory's masterpiece, Le Morte d'Arthur, it states that Malory was a knight, that he finished his work in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV (1469-70), and that he 'reduced' it from some French book. It is probable that he was the Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, whose quarrels with a neighbouring priory and (probably) Lancastrian politics brought him imprisonment. Of Caxton's black-letter folio only two copies now exist. An independent manuscript was discovered at Winchester in 1934. Le Morte d'Arthur is a prose romance, which gives epic unity to the whole mass of French Arthurian romance. Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne and many others took their inspiration from Malory.

Bibliography: S Johnson, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (10 vols, 1779-81)