HarperCollins £25 pp634

Just three weeks before the Wars of the Roses ended at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, William Caxton put on sale his newly printed edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s prose epic Le Morte d’Arthur. Despite running to 860 pages, it was an instant hit. Malory, as Caxton explained, had “taken” the tales “out of certain books of French”, then “reduced” them into English. He was more of an editor and translator than an author; yet his singing style, easy colloquialisms and robust preference for British identities and settings assured his fame. Much of what we know about Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad and all the other Knights of the Round Table comes from this book.

But who was Malory? Until 1895, nobody knew. Then the archive doors opened, and the revelations began. He was a wealthy Warwickshire landowner, who in the 1450s was tried for attempted murder, rape, theft, extortion and poaching. Two rapes were alleged, one possibly a gang rape. Suddenly, the 15th century had a new dimension. Historians described it as the age of “bastard” feudalism, when lords became thugs and chivalry meant perverting the course of royal justice for your pals.

Christina Hardyment wants to do more than exonerate Malory. She boldly seeks to write his biography. Since fewer than 50 references to him occur in the sources, she is forced into thickets of conjecture. Her aim is to reconstruct Malory’s world and in the process “sketch out a likely career for him which, though necessarily imaginary, fits the known facts”. This, certainly, is a different sort of biography.

Her approach can work brilliantly. She shows convincingly that Malory was born around 1399, some 20 years earlier than is usually thought. At the age of 15, he followed his father into the retinue of a leading Midlands magnate, the Earl of Warwick, fighting in the final decades of the Hundred Years’ war and travelling across Europe. This is when he gained much of his experience of battles, jousts and tournaments, so evocatively described in Le Morte d’Arthur.

Almost as successful is the demolition of Malory’s “criminal” record. Drawing on an American legal scholar’s researches, Hardyment argues that the rape charges were spurious. They related to the same woman, relying at a critical moment on legislation enabling aggrieved husbands to recover damages for chattels taken by an absconding wife, often a battered wife rescued by her relatives. As to the rest of Malory’s startling “ criminal” career, undoubtedly he was in part just another Midlands landowner involved in a series of violent clashes over titles to land, tithes and church patronage. No national system of land registration existed before 1925 and, with Henry VI’s mental collapse and the onset of the Wars of the Roses, it was every man for himself.

Two things are, however, remarkable. First is Malory’s bravado. Arrested by his enemy, the Duke of Buckingham, and imprisoned in a moated manor house, Malory jumped out of a window, swam across the moat and escaped. Later, after his case was transferred to the Court of King’s Bench and Malory was out on bail, he was rearrested on new charges and clapped in irons. Once more he broke free, this time with the help of armed accomplices.

Second is that, in the space of eight years, Malory was held in every prison in London, including the Tower, and, when bailed, his sureties had to pledge up to £2m in modern values. This enables Hardyment to develop her core thesis that Malory was a political prisoner, trapped between rival Midlands magnates whose power was evenly balanced — one the new Earl of Warwick alias “the Kingmaker”, the other Buckingham. Less a thug than a prey to the factional alignments in an evolving civil war, Malory fell into a legal limbo. His swings of fortune closely mirrored those of Warwick, his feudal lord.

It is a tempting argument, but not fully clinched. A crucial Latin entry in the King’s Bench records is splendidly illustrated, but shows that Hardyment has misunderstood it. And although she deals extensively with the power struggle at Henry VI’s court, she pays scant attention to Warwickshire. When the young and inexperienced Henry Beauchamp was Earl of Warwick in the early 1440s, he had allowed his retinue to split, so that elements within it formed alliances with Buckingham’s men. This left Malory with unreliable friends and made him an easy target for predators.

Other claims are flimsy. There is no proof that Malory was dubbed a knight by Henry VI in person rather than by his lieutenant on the battlefield. The idea that Buckingham’s enmity might have been incurred because his wife was Malory’s lover is fanciful, as is the notion that Malory secretly visited Henry VI in the Tower, where he read him tales from Le Morte d’Arthur. And yet, amid the romance, there is gold if you’re willing to dig for it.

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