Caxton called it a “noble and joyous book,” but Le Morte d’Arthur is also full of a sense of doom that foreshadows the “dolorous death and departing out of this world” of its great hero and his valiant knights. Its author was a prisoner when he wrote it, a prisoner who longed for the day of his deliverance. He was probably Sir Thomas Malory, a Warwickshire gentleman who once served in Parliament. Later, however, he apparently turned to a life of crime. Accusations of rape, robbery, cattle thieving, extortion, and attempted murder are recorded against him, and he was imprisoned for years in
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