Although Malory mentions rather disparagingly an English source only once, cites his ‘Frensshe book’ at least seventy times, and conceals his indebtedness to English works, he imitated the style of the English prose chronicles and probably hoped his book would be a substitute for the Arthurian story that English readers knew primarily from those chronicles.

Although Malory cites his ‘Frensshe book’ as the source for what he tells us about the final destination of Lancelot's knights, these details do not appear in his French sources or in any of the English ones either, and he is here trying, as he often does, to conceal his addition of information not in his sources, information that in this case may have been suggested by some non-Arthurian work, or that may, as Peter Field suggests, have had a biographical origin. The quotation is of interest not just because it is an instance of Malory's adding material to his adaptation of the Arthurian stories but also because it reveals much about his attitude toward his English and his French sources.