Chivalric Romances

This final chapter will look at the tradition of courtly Chivalric Romance characteristic of ‘The Matter of Britain’, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries generally meant tales of King Arthur and his court. This will be my main focus but I will look more briefly at Lydgate’s contributions to the other main chivalric tradition, ‘The Matter of Antiquity’, or of Greece and Rome. (The non-courtly or Popular Romances have already been discussed in Chapter 6, and Chaucer’s contributions to ‘The Matter of Antiquity’ were discussed in Chapter 7.) Arthurian stories were the more popular because England was at war during this period, the Hundred Years War with France reaching from 1342 until 1453, and the Wars of the Roses continuing the fighting at home until 1485, for the ancient story of the Death of Arthur includes both foreign invasion and civil war. Thomas Malory, the author of the most important collection of Arthurian stories, was himself involved in these dynastic wars, and it is tempting to conclude that his Morte Darthur, completed in prison in 1470, was shaped not only by the texts of the Arthurian tradition from France and England, but also in the heat of his own experience of war.