branta

A pickle is for me a crunchy preserved small cucumber.  This little green luncheon item takes its name from the preservation method of being immersed in a brine or salt and or vinegar.

We get the word from Dutch and not only are foods preserved by pickling but so are metals; immersed in various toxic, acidic pickling liquors to give them a hardened outer layer.

The word appeared first in English in 1440 in a work regarded as a masterpiece.  Thomas Malory is a bit of a shadowy figure, having lived so long ago, but it seems that he was a knight on the wrong side of political struggle in England and spent lots of time in prison where he penned Le Morte d’Arthur; which translates as “the death of king Arthur.”

Not too long after he finished it he himself died.

Enter an almost contemporary business titan on the right side of the political powers of the day.

William Caxton made scads of money in various businesses and in his travels came across a new invention, the printing press.  After a printing partnership in Belgium began supplying England with the first book ever printed—as opposed to hand written—in English, he promptly set up a press in England too.  The fact that his first authors included close relatives of the king shows how much he was on the right side of the politics of the day.

He also printed Le Morte d’Arthur as well as Canterbury Tales.

Both of these are still in print but most of the versions of Le Morte d’Arthur are different than what that old political prisoner Malory actually wrote.  We know this because one day in 1934 there was housecleaning going on in the library at Winchester College. A guy named Oakeshott was a specialist in how medieval books were bound and went to look at a pile of manuscripts that were tucked away in a safe place.  The library knew they were valuable, just because they were old, but hadn’t bothered to figure out exactly what they were.

Oakeshott was really disappointed because none of the old documents were bound in any way so there was nothing for him to study.  Still, you don’t get to look at 500 year old books too often so he thumbed through them…carefully.

Years later he was embarrassed to admit that he had never read Le Morte d’Arthur at that point and so no special little bell went off in his head at the time.

A couple of weeks later he was preparing a book display and noticed some familiar wording on one of the books on display.

NOW the bell started to tingle.

He runs down to the bookstore and buys a cheap copy of Le Morte d’Arthur and goes to the old hiding place to compare it to one of the manuscripts.  By now the bell is gonging because what he found was the only known manuscript.  All the books that had been produced over the intervening centuries had been copies of the printed version.

Subsequent scholars have noticed something else.  As well as Malory’s handwriting—actually it was the handwriting of a copyist—on each page of the manuscript there are also little ink smudges.  These ink smudges match the printed version that Caxton produced so that it seems that William Caxton actually had this particular manuscript in his printing shop when the book was being printed and compared the printed pages with the original, one by one, allowing the still wet inked pages to rest against the original as he moved to the next page.

This underlines both the lack of copyright laws at the time and Caxton’s business sense, because he has edited the text of the printed version to suit his purposes and it seems clear that he had the original and knew that he was making changes to it.

In closing, word lovers will appreciate that the name Malory means “unlucky.”