In 1856 Dante Gabriel Rossetti told William Morris that Malory’s Morte Darthur was one of the two greatest books ever written, the other being the Bible. Although today readers of Malory might question Rossetti’s judgement, his choice of Le Morte Darthur may not be surprising given the great reverence for and influence of Malory’s work in the nineteenth century. More surprising might be Rossetti’s choosing the Bible as the second book. The website of the Freedom from Religion Foundation presents a write-up on Rossetti that includes a quotation in which his brother referred to him as one who ‘professed no religious faith and practised no regular religious observances’. His father, a political refugee from Italy granted asylum in England, was a Roman Catholic who opposed both the papacy and attending Mass. His mother, an Anglican, had her children baptized into the Church of England. His two sisters were devout, with the poet Christina writing a number of Christian poems, including one that would be set to music as the familiar Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Dante Gabriel, however, at the age of fourteen followed in his father’s footsteps and stopped attending church. Although he came to question formal religion, earlier in life he would have both read and heard read the King James, or Authorized, version of the Bible, which by the nineteenth century was regarded by many as not only a sacred text but also, perhaps primarily, a great literary one and, Gordon Campbell writes, ‘a high water mark of the English language’.

This essay will discuss affinities between Morte Darthur’s narrative style and that of the King James Version (henceforward KJV). Since Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites disliked realistic art and narrative, the similar archaic style of these two books could account for Rossetti’s associating them. The KJV, known to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestants throughout the English-speaking world, would have prepared them for Morte Darthur, for they would have found in Malory’s book a type of narrative style with which they were familiar. Roman Catholic readers of the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible would, to some extent, have observed these similarities, but certain historical circumstances meant that nineteenth-century Roman Catholics would have been less likely than Protestants to read the Bible.

THE early eighteenth century antiquarian Thomas Hearne (1678–1735) devoted much of his life to publishing medieval chronicles of England written in Latin and in English. Although his efforts, Joan H. Pittock observes, were condemned by contemporaries as work that was ‘self-evidently lacking in utility, refinement, and especially in application’, they contributed to the ‘preservation of a past no longer fashionable’ and demonstrated ‘root characteristics of Englishness which otherwise would not have survived’. Although many in England expressed disdain for the study of the Middle Ages, many others appreciated his efforts to inform readers about England's medieval past, and his books sold well. In the paragraphs below, after discussing Hearne and his publications, I shall turn to his interest in four chronicles written in English that I became acquainted with over thirty years ago when working on A Manual of the Writings in Middle English: the early fourteenth century metrical chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and Robert Mannyng and the sixteenth-century prose chronicle generally known as ‘Hearne's Fragment’, all of which Hearne edited; and a chronicle that he had planned to edit, the late fourteenth/fifteenth century English Prose Brut. As will be apparent from the paragraphs that follow, Hearne's comments about these works in his introductions, diaries and notebooks indicate that he, unlike many of his contemporaries and later scholars, realized their importance, and the importance of other chronicles, to English historical and literary studies. He also anticipated some modern theories about editing and about the value of the study of individual manuscripts.

Hearne was trained as a classicist at Oxford. He entered St Edmund Hall in 1696, received his BA in 1699 and his MA in 1703, and lived there for the rest of his life. He began his scholarly career with the publication between 1703 and 1708 of four editions of highly regarded classical authors, or ‘Ancients’ as they were then known. From 1709 on, however, most of his efforts, except for an edition of the Acta apostolorum (1715), went into publishing the first editions of many medieval and early modern writers.