When Sir Thomas Malory completed his Morte Darthur in “the ninth yere of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth” he was nearing the end of his life. He had spent much of that life as a knight during troubled times, and his life records show that he faced adventures as difficult and dilemmas as painful as any he would write about. Despite a busy life of action, however, he must have also found time to indulge a love of reading, particularly of romance. Although we cannot know how much of Malory's life was spent in the actual composition of this work, the learning it displays from a variety of sources must have taken years to acquire. The Morte Darthur was to be the last great piece of medieval Arthurian literature, and it is a culmination of many strands of that tradition.

This tradition began to take shape at least three centuries before Malory's time. In the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his Historia regum Britanniae, which was the first work to give King Arthur a coherent biography. This work introduced many of what were to become the major Arthurian themes, such as the obsession of Arthur's father Uther for the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, Arthur's continental warfare against the Roman Empire, and Arthur's tragic defeat at the treacherous hands of Mordred, here described only as Arthur's nephew, not yet his incestuous bastard son. This work gave rise to what is often called the chronicle tradition of Arthurian literature, in which Arthur is given a specific place in British history.