Caxton’s 1485 Westminster edition of Le Morte Darthur gave printed form to the work attributed to Sir Thomas Malory and became the textual point of reference against which later editions were measured. Its history is not simply one of survival: successive printers altered the text, and a nineteenth-century reprint passed later material off as Caxton’s before editors traced its sources. The edition’s authority and the effort to make it readable have therefore shaped both the book’s circulation and its textual identity.

Origins and the 1485 edition

In his preface, Caxton presents himself as moved both by requests from gentlemen and by his own reverence for chivalric deeds. He believed the book could instruct and benefit readers of every social rank, and he appeals to the knights of England in support of its value. Yet he credits Malory with supplying the copy he printed. The work’s authorship and its first printed publication are thus distinct: Malory receives the credit for the book, while Caxton stands as its first English printer and a forceful advocate for its readership.

Caxton printed the first edition at Westminster in 1485, a date recorded in its colophon. The surviving edition is a folio in black letter, with broad margins, and is described as among the finest examples of Caxton’s printing. Only two copies are known. The Osterley copy is complete; its first leaf bears the autograph “Oxford,” and its recorded ownership history runs through the Harleian Library and bookseller Osborne to Bryan Fairfax. The other, the Althorp copy, was bought in 1816 with eleven leaves missing. Mr. Whittaker supplied facsimiles from the Osterley copy to fill the gaps, but later collation identified many errors in those replacement leaves.

Like almost all Caxton’s books, the edition has no title page: its Prohem, or preface, begins at the top of the first page. That physical arrangement matters to the book’s early presentation. The reader encounters the printer’s framing words at once, while the work’s printed authority rests on a text Caxton attributes to Malory.

Caxton as printer and publisher

Caxton’s work on Le Morte Darthur formed part of a larger career that joined trade, translation, editing, and printing. A native of Kent, he belonged to the London Guild of Mercers and spent many years at the English trading house in Bruges, known as the English Nation and managed in practice by the Mercers. He went there in 1441, when he was probably about twenty. By 1462 he was serving as governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries, and in 1465 Edward IV appointed him an ambassador to negotiate a renewed trade treaty with the Duke of Burgundy.

In 1471, at Margaret’s request, Caxton completed his translation of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, which he had begun and then set aside. To meet friends’ demand for copies, he printed the translation. Around 1476, after thirty-five years abroad, he returned to England and introduced the printing press there. For the remaining fifteen years of his life, he continued not only as a printer but as a translator, editor, and publisher. His programme included devotional writing, poetry, history, chivalric romance, books of morals and manners, proverbs, fables, statutes, and works on civic government. The account of his career presents this broad, deliberate selection as foundational to popular English literature: Caxton supplied books that readers without access to classical languages could actually read.

His decision to print Malory’s book accordingly belongs to a publishing practice guided by both literary and public purposes. The preface’s appeal to readers “of whatever estate or degree” matches a body of work intended to extend beyond learned specialists. Caxton’s edition made the Arthurian material available in English print, while his framing of it as instructive chivalric writing urged readers to approach it as more than entertainment.

Reprints and textual change

The first two later editions were printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s chief workman and successor, in 1498 and 1529. Only one copy of each is known. The 1498 edition, held at Althorp, lacks some pages but preserves Caxton’s preface, repositioned after the table of contents. It includes numerous woodcuts and is not an exact reprint: spelling and occasional words differ. It also contains a passage beginning “Oh ye mighty and pompous lords” near the end of the book that is absent from Caxton’s edition and recurs in later printings. The 1529 copy, in the British Museum, lacks its title, preface, and part of the contents table.

William Copland reprinted the book in 1557 under a title describing Arthur as one of the Christian Worthies and celebrating the Knights of the Round Table. A woodcut of St. George and the Dragon appears on its title page. Thomas East later issued an undated folio and quarto, probably around 1585. The last black-letter edition followed in 1634, printed by William Stansby. Its woodcut shows Arthur in the centre of the Round Table with his knights around him. A matching omission in Stansby’s edition and East’s folio led Mr. Wright to conclude that one had been printed from the other.

The distance from Caxton widened with each successive edition. Stansby’s 1634 text remodelled the preface, divided the book into three parts, modernised spelling and vocabulary, and introduced extensive variations and additions. The editor estimated more than twenty thousand changes. Some, he suggested, may have arisen when a printer relied on memory rather than returning to the copy; others reflected an effort to replace the original’s simplicity with what an editor called a more ornate style. The edition history therefore records not only the work’s persistence but a continuing recasting of its language and shape.

Nineteenth-century editions and the problem of authenticity

Two popular editions appeared in 1816, one in two volumes and one in three. Both modernised the text, and the account identifies them as common routes by which a generation first encountered Arthur and his knights, while judging neither to have editorial merit. In 1817, Robert Southey introduced a two-volume edition as a reprint “with scrupulous exactness” from the Caxton copy in Earl Spencer’s library. That copy, however, lacked eleven leaves, and the edition’s substitutes did not reproduce Caxton’s text faithfully.

The differences were more than cosmetic. In one passage from the last book, the reprint interpolated the “O ye myghty and pompous lordes” passage, absent from Caxton, and its first eleven lines contained thirty-five spelling and punctuation variations, along with words not found in the original. Across the seventeen pages supplied in place of missing leaves, wording and sentences also diverged. Although Southey’s editor, Mr. Upcott, elsewhere marked a small addition as absent from the original, he did not disclose that these seventeen pages were also supplied from other sources. As a result, critics quoted the interpolations as Caxton’s genuine text for fifty years.

Collation in 1867 exposed the discrepancy. Comparing Earl Spencer’s copy with Southey’s edition, the editor found that the substituted passages did not match Caxton’s text as represented by Whittaker’s facsimiles; comparison with the Osterley copy confirmed the result. A further collation showed that, apart from the opening thirty-six lines of one chapter, the passages largely came from Wynkyn de Worde’s first edition, with occasional spelling changes and small alterations. The supposed faithful reprint was thus a composite, its borrowed pieces made difficult to recognise by editorial adjustment. This episode made the distinction between Caxton’s text and later editorial reconstruction a practical, not merely bibliographical, concern.

Readability, scholarship, and continuing authority

The 1868 edition discussed in the account set out to make Caxton’s original available to ordinary readers, especially boys, without reproducing every obstacle of early spelling. It modernised spelling, replaced a few unintelligibly obsolete words, and retained older forms where context made them comprehensible, explaining meanings in a glossary. It also omitted or replaced some material judged incompatible with modern manners, while distinguishing that editorial choice from an attempt to repair the book’s moral shortcomings. Its editor argued that the work nevertheless offered readers examples of magnanimity, courage, courtesy, reverence for women, gentleness, self-sacrifice, chastity, and other virtues. The omissions were described as limited and not an abridgment; the aim was to preserve Caxton’s text in a form that could be read without specialist knowledge.

The same edition used Southey’s text as its base after checking it against the Althorp and Osterley copies, but restored disputed passages from the original Caxton. Later abridgments appeared in 1862, 1868, 1871, and 1880, and Ernest Rhys published a modernised reprint of fourteen of the twenty-one books in 1886, using the version of Mr. Wright. Such editions widened access but also made the editor’s choices part of the reading experience.

Between 1889 and 1891, Dr. H. Oskar Sommer edited a three-volume scholarly edition. Its first volume reproduced the Althorp copy page for page, line for line, word for word, and letter for letter, changing only black-letter type to Roman. Because the Althorp copy included Whittaker’s facsimile leaves, Sommer’s exact reproduction also repeated their mistakes; the second volume supplied collations with the Osterley original, along with a bibliography, an index, a glossary, and an essay on the language. The third volume presented studies of Malory’s sources and made two previously inaccessible source texts available from manuscripts in the British Museum.

The publication history circles back to the authority of the 1485 edition. More than four centuries of readers, the account argues, have continued to prefer Malory’s book over older forms of Arthur’s story, while editors and scholars have returned to earlier sources to explain it. Caxton’s first printing endured not because its descendants remained unchanged, but because the work repeatedly invited both popular reading and textual scrutiny. Its successive forms reveal the tension at the heart of its afterlife: making the book accessible has extended its readership, while every modernization, substitution, or embellishment has sharpened the need to know what Caxton actually printed.