Reign of Edward IV

The Reign of Edward IV is the setting in which Sir Thomas Malory says he completed Le Morte Darthur, in the ninth year of the king’s reign, identified as 1470. It also gives the work’s editor a historical frame for reading its moral tensions: an age marked by political and social disruption, yet one in which ideals of rightful rule, justice, and chivalric conduct remain powerfully imagined.

Malory’s date and historical setting

The book’s closing statement dates its completion to the ninth year of Edward IV’s reign. The editor places Malory’s work amid the suppression of the Lollards, the Wars of the Roses, and the licentiousness of the court and courtiers, forces said to have cut the country’s moral and social life down to its roots. The account does not treat Malory as having leapt beyond the moral outlook of Chaucer’s age to that of the Elizabethan period. Instead, it identifies signs of a new moral life beginning to emerge within a work still deeply shaped by its own troubled time.

The reign also matters to the book’s conception of political authority. In its account of Uther Pendragon’s death, the barons face a succession crisis as powerful lords strengthen themselves and many aspire to the crown. At Merlin’s counsel, the archbishop summons the lords and men of arms to London at Christmas, where a sword fixed in a stone declares that whoever can draw it is the rightful king of England. Arthur alone succeeds. At Pentecost, before lords and commons, the people acclaim him, and he forgives them for having delayed his recognition. His coronation is followed by an oath to uphold true justice and by the restoration of lands taken from their owners after Uther’s death. In this narrative, royal legitimacy is established through a combination of inherited claim, divine sign, public recognition, and the king’s obligation to govern justly.

Rule, loyalty, and conflict

The work also presents kingship as a contested political order, not a settled inheritance. Eleven kings bind themselves by oath to destroy Arthur, assembling a host of fifty thousand mounted men and ten thousand on foot. Their gathering at Bedegraine Castle follows the insult and rebuke the six kings had suffered at Carlion. The episode makes rebellion a matter of both armed power and pledged alliance, setting Arthur’s rule against a coalition whose members promise not to abandon one another in fortune or adversity.

Later, after a period of peace, Roman ambassadors arrive at Arthur’s feast bearing olive branches and demanding the tribute they claim Britain owes the empire. Their demand invokes Julius Caesar’s conquest and earlier payments by Britain’s rulers. Arthur prevents his young knights from harming the envoys, orders that they be lodged and treated well, and takes counsel before answering. His restraint toward the messengers contrasts with the force of the demand itself: the Romans require acknowledgment of their lordship, while Arthur rejects tribute to any earthly prince and claims sovereignty of the empire by the right of his predecessors. His allies promise military aid, and he sends the ambassadors back with gifts and an escort. The scene presents sovereignty as a claim argued through descent and tested by the competing obligations of tribute, protection, counsel, and war.

Textual afterlife of the reign’s book

The book’s completion during Edward IV’s reign became the starting point for a long and complicated print history. William Caxton printed the first edition at Westminster in 1485. Only two copies were known to the editor: the Osterley copy, described as complete, and the Althorp copy, which lacked eleven leaves later supplied in facsimile from the Osterley exemplar. Caxton’s edition had no title page; its preface began at the top of the first page.

Wynkyn de Worde printed later editions in 1498 and 1529. The 1498 edition included numerous woodcuts and differences from Caxton in spelling and wording; it also contained a passage absent from Caxton that appeared in subsequent editions. The 1634 black-letter edition departed much further from the first printing, modernizing language, reshaping the preface, dividing the work into three parts, and introducing extensive changes and additions. The editor estimated that these variations exceeded twenty thousand, distinguishing the transmission of Malory’s book from the date of its composition.

A particularly consequential confusion arose in Southey’s 1817 edition, advertised as an exact reprint of Caxton. Its source copy lacked eleven leaves, and the supplied passages did not reproduce Caxton’s text. For about fifty years, critics treated these interpolations as authentic, quoting spurious passages as Caxton’s. Collation with the surviving Caxton copies and comparison with earlier editions traced most of the inserted material to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1498 printing. The episode shows how the history of Edward IV’s reign as Malory’s compositional setting became entangled with a later history of editorial substitution and mistaken textual authority.

Moral and literary significance

The editor’s account resists a simple judgment of the period or the book. Roger Ascham condemned the work for taking pleasure in killing and adultery, while the preface argues that Malory could still embody chivalric ideals in serious, consequential figures and thereby influence English character and manners. These competing assessments make the reign more than a date attached to the book: it marks the historical distance between social disorder and the chivalric order the narrative tries to give imaginative form.

The editor also contrasts Malory’s moment with a later age in which the spirit of chivalry had departed from its old forms: Spenser could use them as allegory, while Cervantes could treat belief in knight-errantry as the fantasy of a generous but deluded mind. In the Reign of Edward IV, by contrast, Malory could present knight-errantry as a serious ideal embodied by actual-seeming personages. The book’s later editions, revisions, and textual corrections extended that inheritance, while also making clear that its received form was shaped by printers and editors as well as by its fifteenth-century author.