Introduction: The History of the Roman War

The production history of the Brut, as Professor Radulescu has shown, gave the late medieval gentry a point of focus for self-fashioning and political debate: it gave them books to own and annotate, leaves on which to inscribe their names and arms. Within just this context of book-ownership and book-use, the chronicle tradition of Arthur's Roman War gave both Malory and Caxton a particular place to express anxieties about England's political continuity, the civil costs of war (and peace), and the logic of monarchical succession – anxieties, in short, about England's constitution. It is important to remember, however, that the times of Malory's and Caxton's respective encounters with this narrative were at opposite ends of the Morte's production continuum. At the earlier end lies Malory's adaptation of the fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthure. Whether or not Malory's version of Arthur's war with Emperor Lucius was, as Vinaver argues, the first written of the Morte's sections, it is among the very earliest.