spites of the round table
Or, a cover reveal and the cartoonish prank wars of Sir Thomas Malory.
Hello, friends!
First, before we get into this week’s dirtbag! I have something beautiful to show you!
Our Rotten Hearts has a cover, designed by the incredibly talented Emily Mahon! It’s moody and atmospheric and does things with fonts that make my heart sing, and I’m so grateful to the Doubleday team for their excitement about this book.
It’s also been getting some truly spectacular early blurbs from authors I adore and respect deeply, which I look forward to sharing with you in the near future. Suffice to say: I’m hype, my hopes are catastrophically high, I’m careening too close to the sun and I look forward to a harsh reality check when something inevitably goes wrong.
You can read the full book jacket copy and add ORH to your TBR list on Goodreads if that’s a thing you enjoy doing, or place an extraordinarily early preorder via your bookseller of choice if you’re in the US or Canada and like to be eight months ahead of the game. We’re hitting shelves on February 25, 2025, which is still so far away it feels like a fake date, so I won’t harp now. Just know the percentage of this newsletter that is “Allison yells at cloud about Charles Dickens” is set to escalate dramatically over the next two fiscal quarters.
Anyhow! Our feature presentation. My pass pages were due yesterday and I am once again behind schedule, which is becoming so much the norm it’s hardly worth bringing up. So I’m doing what I tend to do when up against a deadline: write an extremely short newsletter about one of my Old Favorite Terrible People I Learned About In College At Some Point.
This week, you’re getting…
Sir Thomas Malory, the Comically Unhinged Cartoon Criminal and Also Father of Arthurian Mythology Somehow
Malory was a suggestion from my friend Jessica, which I have wavered on undertaking because the records that exist on this man are extremely old and extremely sketchy. But when I sat down to write this, it occurred to me that I’ve never let an absence of facts get in my way before, so why start now? Just bear in mind that we’re hand-waving a bit more vigorously than usual here.
So let’s start out with what we know for sure: Sir Thomas Malory is the guy who gets credit for writing Le Morte d’Arthur, the most famous collection of the King Arthur mythology and the first version published in the English language. Also maybe the first English-language novel? Opinions vary.
By the way, if it seems strange to you that a book with a French title is the first English translation of the Origin Myths of England, good. England does not make sense.
Live (Tho)Más
Le Morte d’Arthur was published in 1485, so we at least know when Thomas Malory was alive, generally speaking. The problem, though: Every man before the year 1700 was named Thomas. So actually, that doesn’t narrow it down much.
“Surely not every man!” you say. Actually, I’m barely exaggerating. Some sources claim that 70% of British men in the 15th and 16th centuries were named John, Thomas, Robert, William, or Richard.
As a person who has written historical fiction based on real 16th-century people, I can confirm this is 1,000% true. It got to the point that periodically I would pause my research to yell “Not another goddamn Thomas.” I cannot convey to you the joy I felt that a central historical figure featured in A Tip for the Hangman was named Ferdinando.
High Chivalric Crimes and Misdemeanors
So what other clues do we have to figure out which Historical Thomas was the one who brought the King Arthur mythos to England? Literally only one other: he was, apparently, a dick.
The dedication page of Le Morte d’Arthur reads, old-timey quote:
For this was written by a knight prisoner Thomas Malory, that God send him good recovery.
In other words, “Sir Thomas Malory was here, and he’s not having a nice time, please send help and also bail money.”
Historians infer from this that Malory was in prison for something or other while working on this book. So what was he in prison for, you ask? The most common explanation is also the most delightful: fucking everything.
The most commonly accepted candidate for Sir Thomas Malory the Author is a guy named Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell, who was born in *extremely circa* 1415 in Warwickshire. He was knighted in about 1440 and was named a member of Parliament in 1443. This seems to be the last good thing that ever happened to him.
Because in 1445, a guy named Humphrey Stafford became the Duke of Buckingham, who was in charge of the county where Malory lived. And these two…
Did not get along.
The Lady of the l’ACME
(this pun is borderline but it made me laugh, and as you know that’s the only quality standard for this publication)
Between 1445 and 1470, Malory and Buckingham became engaged in one of my very most favorite types of historical conflicts: the “Loony Toons rivalry.” Basically, Malory made it his life’s mission to bother the living shit out of Buckingham, and Buckingham devoted himself to repeatedly arresting the Roadrunner Sir Thomas Malory for various acts of tomfoolery and criminality.
Malory was arrested an absolutely comical number of times in these 25 years. An incomplete list of crimes includes the following:
Ambushing the Duke of Buckingham in the woods one time
Robbing people associated with the Duke of Buckingham
Blackmailing followers of the Duke of Buckingham
Assaulting the entourage of the Duke of Buckingham
Rape (not funny)
Stealing cattle from the Duke of Buckingham, twice (pretty funny)
Attempted murder of people close to the Duke of Buckingham
Extortion of the Duke of Buckingham
Looting churches overseen by the Duke of Buckingham
One of my sources described this period as Malory “violently feuding with the Duke of Buckingham,” which tracks.
Buckingham tried to put an end to these shenanigans, but truly the Tom and Jerry of it was unceasing. Buckingham would chase Malory around the country and lock him up for one crime, at which point Malory would escape, cavort off into the countryside, and resume his extremely targeted “Buck Fuckingham” crime spree.
On one notable occasion, Buckingham imprisoned Malory in a tower of Maxstoke Castle, a real classic “prison castle” situation surrounded by a deep moat. To escape, Malory—and I shit you not—swan-dived out the window into the moat, swam to safety, and then walked his ass casually back home.
I do not write screenplays, and I have no desire to. That said, if there are any TV writers out there who want to write historical slapstick comedies, I humbly offer up Sir Thomas Malory and the Duke of Buckingham. Sam Elliott can play the Duke:
Up a Leek Without a Paddle
In the midst of this crime spree, a little thing broke out in England called the Wars of the Roses. I am a Shakespeare girlie at heart, so I remember the Wars of the Roses as “the cycle of four history plays that doesn’t involve a Welshman wielding a leek as a weapon.”
Basically, here’s the TL;DR version of the Wars of the Roses: The original king (House of Lancaster) got into a legitimacy fight with his cousins (House of York), and everyone in England picked a side like they were on a four-day middle school class trip to Disney World and two of their friends had started a sleep-deprived fight over what ride they should wait in line for.
(Is this a universal experience? Perhaps not, but it was a formative one for me.)
Anyway, by the time Malory entered the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkists were in the lead. Malory started cooking up a scheme to kill the Yorkist leader, King Edward IV, which Edward IV did not like. Malory was immediately arrested for treason and thrown into prison. And for real this time: like, Newgate Prison, which had locks and doors and everything. This is what happens when you start doing crimes against people who aren’t the Duke of Buckingham.
Malory would spend the rest of his life locked up in Newgate, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. He was rich and also a knight, so he got pretty good lodgings and a set of apartments all to himself. (Plus ça change, amiright.) Still, being imprisoned is boring as shit, so Malory decided to pass the time by…writing an eight-tale cycle about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?
Listen, we all have our isolation-driven hobbies. During COVID I baked six dozen gingerbread cookies in one day and wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. Who am I to judge.
Malory also petitioned for a royal pardon some five or six times, though he was denied every time. In fact, Edward IV issued several blanket pardons that basically said “This applies to all prisoners currently in Newgate except for that dickhead Sir Thomas Malory.” I imagine the Duke of Buckingham was delighted.
Malory died in Newgate around 1471 and was buried in a graveyard not far from the prison. Someone then took the manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur to the famous London printer William Caxton, who presumably said “Hmm, someone has brought me the first novel in the English language!” and printed as many copies as possible. The rest, my friends, is English Major history.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Thanks for bearing with me during this unstructured and wildly unsubstantiated storytime. I have some time off next week and I intend to use at least some of it to write a proper newsletter. (I will use the rest of it to watch the latest season of The Bear and yell “I know that building!” every time I know a building.)
Until then, be well, and if you know of any other historical figures who have cartoon nemeses with whom they are continuously getting into prank battles I demand you name them in the comments,
-Allison
As someone who is currently in the thick of researching my own Medieval history project, I felt seen when you shared your frustration on everyone having the same names. And to really keep us on our toes, the nobles love to change their surname with each new title they're awarded. Anyway, before I go off on a rant of my own, just want to congratulate you on the book and thank you for the post. Dirtbags is always a highlight of my day when it pops up in my inbox.
“Buck Fuckingham!” I CHORTLED 😂