1. Derek Brewer, ``The Presentation of the Character of Lancelot: Chre'tien to Malory,'' in Arthurian Literature, ed. Richard Barber (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), 51.

2. III Edward 25, Stat. 5, c. 2, enacted in 1352, stipulated that adultery with the king's companion was an act of treason. This provision helps to explain Malory's consistent use of the term ``treason'' when referring to Guinevere and Lancelot's relationship rather than the feudal concept of disloyalty. The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: Dawsons, 1963), 1:319-20. This law undermines Ernest York's conclusion that in equating adultery with treason, Malory is ``most probably reflecting French law prior to the twelfth century'' (``Legal Punishment in Malory's Morte Darthur,'' ELN 11 [1973]: 15).

3. All citations are from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 2nd ed., ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), by page number. Malory's ambiguity also deviates from his fourteenth-century English source, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1350). See King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthur, ed. Larry Benson (Exeter: Short Run Press Ltd., 1986), lines 1801-7.

4. Larry D. Benson, Malory's Morte Darthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 159. See Brewer, ``Presentation of the Character of Lancelot,'' 45.

5. Elizabeth Kirk, ```Clerkes, Poetes and Historiographs': The Morte Darthur and Caxton's `Poetics' of Fiction,'' in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 289.

6. I oversimplify by grouping these critics together. As a group, however, their work exemplifies a certain strain of criticism that avoids the textual problematics of the Morte Darthur by indirectly apologizing for them. Respectively, the quotations are from Terence McCarthy, Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988), xiv; Brewer, Malory: The Morte Darthur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 18; and Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 179. See also Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 13, and Brewer, ``Presentation of the Character of Lancelot,'' 26-52. Compare the attempts made by Malory's nineteenth-century editors to remedy what they perceived as the ``moral defects of the book.'' See Marylyn Jackson Parins, ``Malory's Expurgators,'' in The Arthurian Tradition: Essays in Convergence, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell and John Bugge (Tusacaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 144-63, esp. 148.

7. A useful collection that contains several essays which analyze the dissonance in Malory's text is Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak.

8. A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 40.

9. III Edward 25, Stat. 5, c. 2, cited above, n2. See John G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 63.

10. Ibid., 116'17. According to Bellamy, cases of treason by words occurred in the thirteenth century, but there were none during the fourteenth. Bracton discusses treason by imagination but also makes the point that a persons accusing others of treason had to see and hear it with their own eyes and ears. See Bracton De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. George E. Woodbine, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2:366. French custom also required the same type of proof. See Phillipe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. A. Salmons, 3 vols. (1900; rpt. Paris: E'ditions A. et. J. Picard, 1970), 2:1234. All references are to this edition, by volume and entry number. During the reign of Richard II, laws were passed that made riot and rumor (5 Richard II, Stat. 1, c. 6) and compassing the death of the king (21 Richard II, c. 3) acts of treason. These laws were repealed in 1399 by 1 Henry IV, c. 3 and c. 10; they indicate, however, that the interpretive pliability of the 1352 statute was not recognized during Richard's reign. See also I. D. Thornley, ``Treason by Words in the Fifteenth Century,'' EHR 32 (1917): 556-61, and Samuel Rezneck, ``Constructive Treason by Words in the Fifteenth Century,'' AHR 33 (1927-28): 544-52.

11. See Bellamy, Law of Treason, 136-37.

12. Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 41. Fortescue is speaking specifically of statutes. Compare John Alford's comments regarding the effect of statutory law on the gap between legal theory and practice in the later Middle Ages in ``Literature and Law in Medieval England,'' PMLA 92 (1977): 948-49. Alford identifies ``legal positivism'' and ``the birth of modern jurisprudence'' with Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). For another point of view regarding the incipient forms of positivist law and modern jurisprudence in the fifteenth century, see Norman Doe, Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

13. See, for example, the Paston Letters, ed. James Gairdner (London: Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd., 1908), 1:58; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed. James Gairdner, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 28 (1880), 96; An English Chronicle, ed. John S. Davies, Camden Society 64 (1856), 60; and Rotuli Parliamentorum: ut et petitiones, et placita in parliamento, ed. J. Strachey, et al., 6 vols. (London: 1767), 5:326 (where complaints are made against people who know enough about law to pose as lawyers and seek suits on a contingency basis). See also Alford, ``Law and Literature,'' esp. 951 n34.

14. See Michel Foucault's ``Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,'' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139-64. Foucault's association of law and interpretation with acts of power has been extremely useful to me in my analysis of Malory's representation of law and legal process. Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Kafka's ``Before the Law,'' speculates that law produces the subjects it represents and that literary texts make the law (``Before the Law,'' in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge New York: Routledge, [1992]). For a discussion of the differences between objective and subjective intepretivist arguments in critical legal studies, see Robin West, ``Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations about the Law-as-Literature Movement,'' Tennessee Law Review 54 (1987): 203-78. While West skillfully reviews both subjectivist and objectivist positions, her attempt to distinguish between acts of power and acts of interpretation is less convincing, as is her distinction between literary and legal texts: ``The legal text is a command; the literary text is a work of art. This difference implies others. Legal criticism'criticism of law'is criticism of acts of power; literary criticism'criticism of literature'is the criticism of acts of expression'' (277). It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine a law or a critique of law that is not itself an act of expression. Moreover, while literary texts are not backed up by the force of the state as laws are, it does not follow that literary texts and literary criticism exist outside power and its forms. West herself cannot maintain this distinction: she interprets two literary texts to highlight what she perceives as the ``irresponsibility'' of both subjective and objective interpretivist views of adjudication. For a favorable opinion on the law and literature movement, see Brook Thomas, ``Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival,'' Critical Inquiry 71 (1991): 510-39.

15. La mort de roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier (Geneva: Droz, 1954), 121. Translations of this text are mine. In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Arthur and his knights take ``their counsel.... What best do with the queen'' and then sentence her to death (King Arthur's Death, lines 1920-25).

16. Ibid., 120-21.

17. Since Malory refers to himself as a prisoner, we can hypothesize that he had first-hand knowledge of fifteenth-century legal process. Quite apart from this, however, the attention law claimed in the fifteenth-century England exemplifies the familiar acquaintance of the non-professional with law and legal process. See the sources cited in note 13 above. For the use of the Court of Chivalry and the Court of the High Lord Steward to effect a summary form of judgment in treason cases, see Maurice Keen, ``Treason Trials under the Law of Arms,'' TRHS, 5th ser., 12 (1962): 85-104; L. W. Vernon Harcourt, His Grace the Steward and Trial of Peers (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 362-470; and Bellamy, Law of Treason, 143-63.

18. T. F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th ed. (London: Butterworth, 1956), 430.

19. Mort le roi Artu, 110-11.

20. Arthur in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur also wants Lancelot to be taken in the deed, and, as in the other two works, the plan fails (King Arthur's Death, lines 1746-77 and 1832-63).

21. Mort le roi Artu, 115.

22. OED 2nd ed., sub voce ``mainour.''

23. See Britton, ed. and trans. Francis Morgan Nichols, 2 vols. (Holmes Beach, FL: Wm. W. Gaunt, 1983), 1:36-37, and Julius Goebel, Jr., Felony and Misdemeanor: A Study in the History of Criminal Law (1937; reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 75. For a recent discussion of the association of circumstantial evidence with narrativity, see Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

24. C. L. Von Bar, History of Continental Criminal Law (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1916), 14 n15, and Frederick Pollack and William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1898; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 2:497.

25. As Bracton remarked, ``Qui suum secum portat judicium,'' quoted in T. F. T. Plucknett, ``The Origin of Impeachment,'' TRHS, 4th ser., 24 (1942), 60. See also Pollack and Maitland, History 2:580; Statutes of the Realm, 1:81; and Britton, 1:56-57.

26. For opinions on Malory's use of mainour, see Vinaver, Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), cix and 1633, and his Malory, Works, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 775; John W. Walsh, ``Malory's Arthur and the Plot of Agravain,'' TSLL 23 (1981): 533-34 n18; and J. A. W. Bennett, RES 25 (1949): at 166. The concept of mainour was not obsolete in the fifteenth century, as Walsh surmises. In De laudibus legum Anglie, Fortescue explains that whether or not a thief is taken in the act, the penalty is death (111'13). See also H. T. Riley, ed. Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, A.D. 1276-1410 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), 195 n6 and 562. Lancelot's presence in Guinevere's room could be seen as mainour, but, as we shall see, his being there can be interpreted in a number of different ways. For adultery as trespass in English law, see Thomas A. Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 41.

27. Year Books, 19 Henry VI Mich. pl. 103, quoted in Bellamy, Law of Treason, 123n2. The translation is mine.

28. The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS, OS, vol. 136 (1908), 483-84.

29. Ibid., 485. The chronicler identifies this person as a John Kerver, but CPR 1441-46 names a Thomas Kerver. He was later pardoned since he had committed the offence in ``ignorance of the peril'' (295). See Bellamy, Law of Treason, 118-19.

30. Compare Henry IV Part One 5.2.12-13: Worcester worries that looks will be interpreted as treason: ``Look how we can, or sad or merrily, / Interpretation will misquote our looks.'' See also Richard II 4.1.8-83, where accusations of treason by words abound. References are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd. ed., ed. David Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980).

31. A phrase that appears in a case of treason by words during the reign of Henry IV. P.R.0., K.B. 27/564 Rex m. 12, printed in Bellamy, Law of Treason, 117 n1.

32. A petition made in 1442 to the king on behalf of Richard Wogan, a clerk, suggests this type of imaginative accusation. Since Wogan had ``executed certain commands of the king concerning the earl of Ormond, lieutenant of Ireland, the earl imagined (my emphasis) him guilty of treason whereof he was indicted in a place in Ireland where none of the king's lieges dare acquit him for fear of the earl'' (CPR 1441-46, 91).

33. Mort le roi Artu, 115-16. Agravain's accusations are, however, found in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. Though Lancelot is called a traitor in this source, the poem does not evoke a noise that could be heard by all the court, as is the case in the Morte Darthur, nor does Lancelot take part in the shouting as he does in Malory's text. For an analysis that compares Malory's representation of noise and the destruction of the Round Table to the dissolution of language and faith depicted in the story of the Tower of Babel, see John F. Plummer, ```Tunc se Coeperunt non Intelligere': The Image of Language in Malory's Last Books,'' in Studies in Malory, 153-72. For a reading that relates Malory's noise to chivalric honor, see Ann Dobyns, ```Shamefull noyse': Lancelot and the Language of Deceit,'' Style 24 (1990): 89-102.

34. Plucknett, Concise History, 430. In cases of murder, prosecution by hue and cry was validated by reference to scripture, namely, the story of Cain and Abel. God tells Cain that ``the voice of Abel thy brother's blood, whom thou has killed, crieth unto me from the ground.'' See Compilatio de Usibus Andegaviae,  7, quoted in A. Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure with Special Reference to France, trans. John Simpson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1913), 63.

35. Esmein, ibid., 61.

36. See Beaumanoir, Coutumes, 1:934 and 2:1637. See also R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 55-59.

37. Mort le roi Artu, 115.

38. Mainour was also associated with notoriety. See Plucknett, ``Impeachment,'' 60. For examples of hue and cry as slander, see Riley, Memorials, 576 and 592.

39. Plucknett, ``Impeachment,'' 61'2. Reputation figured significantly in the findings of medieval juries. See Green, Verdict, 8, 16-17, 20, and 26.

40. I argue elsewhere that the noise sustained against Lancelot is one of the ways Malory's text erodes Lancelot's good fame to the point that he can no longer function as a knight of the realm. In a sense the text attaints Lancelot. See ``Lancelot's Vocation: Traitor Saint,'' in The Lancelot-Grail: Text, Image, and Transformations, ed. William Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).

41. Rot. Parl., 5:176.

42. Geoffrey Chaucer, the House of Fame, 2075-80, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd. ed., gen. ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Compare Lydate's Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS, e.s. 121 (1924), 2:1226-32.

43. Rot. Parl. 5:176.

44. Ibid., 5:177. For Suffolk's judgment, see 5:183.

45. My discussion of attainder relies primarily on Bellamy, Law of Treason, 177-205. See also Michael A. Hicks, ``Attainder, Resumption, and Coercion, 1461-1529,'' Parliamentary History 3 (1984): 15-31, and J. R. Lander, ``Attainder and Forfeiture, 1453 to 1509,'' The Historical Journal 4 (1961): 119-51.

46. Bellamy, Law of Treason, 169-70. He notes one instance in which attainder was part of an actual trial in Parliament (176).

47. See Rot. Parl., 5:389, for Henry Percy's attempt to restore the reputation of his father, the Earl of Northumberland, whose heirs were ``unable to clayme or have by the same late Erle, any such name, estate or preeminance....'' Compare Henry VI Part One 2.4.90-94, where Somerset challenges Richard Plantagenet by referring to the attainder of Richard's father.

48. Rot. Parl., 5:346.

49. Ibid., 5:349.

50. English Chronicle, 83.

51. Ibid., 82.

52. Ernest York has observed that Lancelot's being called a traitor does not make him one (``Legal Punishment,'' 16). Fifteenth-century interpretations of imagining the king's death, which relied on words as evidence, and the role of ill-fame in prosecuting traitors challenge York's assertion. For the contagion- like quality of treason in Malory's text, see Deborah S. Ellis, ``Balin, Mordred and Malory's Idea of Treachery,'' English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 68 (1987): 66-74, and Stephen Knight, ``The Social Functions of Middle English Romance,'' in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Idealogy, and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 136.

53. For a discussion of lay and legal descriptions, see Kim Lane Scheppele, ``Facing Facts in Legal Interpretation: Questions of Law and Questions of Fact,'' Representations 30 (1990): 54-59. The Old French Mort Artu circuitously equates adultery with treason by way of disloyalty. Even then, however, the act of treason is not an act against the king but against a ``preudom'' (121).

54. For example, see the speech Lancelot makes to his knights after he has escaped from the Queen's chamber. Having willingly gone to Guinevere when she sends for him, Lancelot now, in this speech, imputes a treasonous motive to her summons (1171):

And thys nyght bycause my lady the quene sente for me to speke with her, I suppose hit was made by treson; howbehit I dare largely excuse her person.

55. Lancelot, of course, has killed the knights and wounded Mordred. Thus in this application of law, Guinevere must be read as a sign for Lancelot. This circumstance along with her silence at the trial suggests that Guinevere is both an extension of male identity and an object of exchange between Lancelot and Arthur.

56. Inciting the king's people to withdraw their love from him seems to have been a popular interpretation of treason by words. See Bellamy, Law of Treason, 118-19.

57. As in the case of the Duchess of Gloucester, Roger Bolingbroke, and Thomas Southwell. See P.R.O., K.B. 9/72/14, printed in Bellamy, Law of Treason, Appendix III, 237.

58. Brut, 483.

59. English Chronicle, 60.