One of my principal contentions in this book is that the Winchester manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, London, British Library Additional MS 59678, serves not only as a textual witness, but also functions figuratively as a tomb and memorial to the knights of the Round Table Fellowship and the ladies who inspire, threaten or instigate chivalric adventure. The close interaction of material manuscript and lexical narrative for which I am arguing is mirrored by the various memorials and tombs erected by Merlin and others within the narrative, whilst the manuscript and its rubrication function as a memorializing tomb for the tragic narrative and its earthly characters. Since Merlin (or Merlin with Blaise as amanuensis) also regularly records the major deeds and events of the Round Table, there is perhaps a self-referential and slightly tongue-in-cheek doubling on Malory's part of his authorial identity with Merlin's. Even without Merlin's efforts to memorialize the deeds of the Round Table Fellowship, Malory's Arthur is careful to ensure that his knights regularly testify to and record their adventures. Thus, to take a few notable instances, Gawayne, Torre and Pellynore are each made by Merlin and Arthur to ‘telle of hys adventure(s)’ during the three quests celebrating Arthur and Gwenyvere's wedding (respectively 39v; 86.33–4; and 41v; 91.28–9; and, with different wording, 44r; 96.34–5); so too do Uwayne, Gawayne and Marhaus ‘telle [the kynge] all theire adventures’ (70r; 143.1–3) in the parallel set of quests that close the adventurous episode that follows the wedding and the establishment of the Round Table Oath (97.27–98.3); and Arthur has ‘grete clerkes … cronycle … the adventures of the Sangreall’ as related by Bors and Launcelot and ‘made in grete bookes’ (408v; 788.28–35). This recording of knightly deeds within the narrative is matched in the codex that contains the Arthuriad by the Winchester manuscript's rubrication of names. Winchester's rubrication accordingly signifies the importance of Arthurian knighthood and achievement.

The close interaction between manuscript and narrative, in conjunction with the elegiac function of the manuscript's rubrication of names, corresponds well with mediaeval ideas of symbolism and memory. About symbols St Augustine writes, ‘a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses’.