“‘That is no mastery,’ said Arthur.  And so he put it in the stone.  Therewithall Sir Ector essayed to pull out the sword and failed.

“‘Now essay,’ said Sir Ector unto Sir Kay.  And anon he pulled at the sword with all his might, but it would not be.

“’Now shall ye essay,” said Sir Ector unto Arthur.

“‘I will well,’ said Arthur, and pulled it out easily.

“And therewithall Sir Ector knelt down to the earth, and Sir Kay.”

And so Arthur was acknowledged king.  “And so anon was the coronation made,” Malory goes on to tell us, “and there was Arthur sworn unto his lords and to the commons for to be a true king, to stand with true justice from henceforth the days of his life.”

For the rest of all the wonderful stories of King Arthur and his knights you must go to Morte d’Arthur itself.  For the language is so simple and clear that it is a book that you can easily read, though there are some parts that you will not understand or like and which you need not read yet.

But of all the books of which we have spoken this is the first which you could read in the very words in which it was written down.  I do not mean that you could read it as it was first printed, for the oldest kind of printing was not unlike the writing used in manuscripts and so seems hard to read now.  Besides which, although nearly all the words Malory uses are words we still use, the spelling is a little different, and that makes it more difficult to read.

The old lettering looked like this:  —

“With that Sir Arthur turned with his knights,
and smote behind and before, and
ever Sir Arthur was in the foremost press
till his horse was slain under him.”

That looks difficult. but here it is again in our own lettering:-

“With that Sir Arthur turned with his knights, and smote behind and before, and ever Sir Arthur was in the foremost press till his horse was slain under him.”

That is quite easy to read, and there is not a word in it that you cannot understand.  For since printing came our language has changed very much less than it did before.  And when printing came, the listening time of the world was done and the reading time had begun.  As books increased, less and less did people gather to hear others read aloud or tell tales, and more and more people learned to read for themselves, until now there is hardly a boy or girl in all the land who cannot read a little.

It is perhaps because Morte d’Arthur is easily read that it has become a storehouse, a treasure-book, to which other writers have gone and from which they have taken stories and woven them afresh and given them new life.  Since Caxton’s time Morte d’Arthur has been printed many times, and it is through it perhaps, more than through the earlier books, that the stories of Arthur still live for us.  Yet it is not perfect — it has indeed been called “a most pleasant jumble."* Malory made up none of the stories; as he himself tells us, he took them from French books, and in some of these French books the stories are told much better.  But what we have to remember and thank Malory for is that he kept alive the stories of Arthur.  He did this more than any other writer in that he wrote in English such as all English-speaking people must love to read.