War of the Roses

The War of the Roses appears in the book’s account of the historical conditions surrounding Malory’s writing, not as an episode in the Arthurian narrative. It belongs to a period described as socially and morally unsettled: the preface associates the conflict with the suppression of the Lollards and the licentiousness of the court, yet also finds in Malory’s work signs of an emerging moral life and a literary achievement that outlasted its age.

Historical Setting

The preface places Malory’s writing in the days of Edward IV and argues that the War of the Roses, together with the suppression of the Lollards and the conduct of the court and courtiers, had cut the country’s moral and social life down to its roots. This is a broad diagnosis of the period’s damage, rather than a description of particular battles, factions, or political events. The war matters here as one element in a troubled historical setting that helps explain the cultural weight assigned to Malory’s book.

Malory’s Work and Its Sources

Against that background, the preface rejects the view that Malory was merely a compiler and translator. Although Caxton described him as drawing on French books and rendering them into English, the preface argues that Malory was also the work’s maker: he rewrote and reshaped inherited material, changing the order and substance of incidents to give the whole a unified, epic character. The surviving narrative, on this account, was formed from materials many times its length; its roughness does not erase the evidence of deliberate artistic construction.

The account of Malory’s sources makes that process more concrete. Dr. H. Oskar Sommer’s research arranged the identified romances into four groups—the Merlin, Lancelot, Tristan, and Prophecies of Merlin—and compared their manuscripts and printed editions with Malory’s text. Most adventures could be found in one or more of these sources, sometimes transferred almost word for word, but often compressed and fused into a new form. The Beaumains story, an enlargement of the La Cote Male Taile narrative and altered by Malory, is identified as an exception to the general account. These findings distinguish the inherited materials from the structure Malory made from them.

Moral Tensions and Cultural Legacy

The preface does not claim that Malory had already reached the moral outlook of the Elizabethan period. It instead describes his work as showing signs of a new moral life beginning to emerge amid the unsettled conditions of his time. That assessment stands beside Roger Ascham’s later objection that the book’s pleasures lay in violence and adultery. The contrast registers a dispute over what the romance did to its readers: it could be condemned for its represented conduct while also being understood as a work that embodied chivalric ideals for a readership still able to take knight-errantry seriously.

The preface further contrasts Malory’s moment with a later age in which the spirit of chivalry had departed from its old forms: Spenser could use those forms as allegory, while Cervantes treated belief in knight-errantry as the fantasy of a generous but deluded mind. Malory, by contrast, could present chivalric ideals through characters treated as serious figures, and the preface credits his book with the capacity to influence national character and manners. The War of the Roses thus frames a paradox: the work emerged from a period of severe disorder, yet the inherited romances, reordered and remade, became what the preface calls a possession for all times.