was closely related to the knight listed next to him in the short list of those excluded, concluding that the document referred to the Northern Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, a probable Lancastrian - and not the Midlands Malory of Newbold Revel, who was a Yorkist and would have been far too old to have taken part in this Northern military campaign. Matthews therefore promotes this document as evidence that Malory of Hutton Conyers was indeed a knight after all. Matthews's interpretation is not universally accepted. P.J.C. Field argues that the 1468 exclusion from pardon refers to Malory of Newbold Revel and instead shows that that candidate changed his lifelong Yorkist loyalty to become a Lancastrian. Other than this document, Malory of Hutton Conyers is not recorded as having been knighted. However, his elder brother John and most of his recent forefathers were knights. Thomas Malory of Wales Even only a few years after the original publication of Le Morte, there was speculation as to Malory's identity. The earliest identification was made by John Bale, a 16th-century antiquarian, who declared that Malory was Welsh, hailing from Mailoria on the River Dee. This theory received further support from Sir John Rhys, who proclaimed in 1893 that the alternative spelling indicated an area straddling the border between England and North Wales, Maleore in Flintshire and Maleor in Denbighshire. On this theory, Malory may have been related to Edward Rhys Maelor, a 15th-century Welsh poet. It was also suggested by antiquary John Leland that he was Welsh, identifying "Malory" with "Maelor". However, most modern scholars have disregarded this early work on the basis that no such place as Mailoria has ever been identified on the Dee or elsewhere; no Welsh Thomas Malory appears in the surviving historical record; and Malory identified himself as English rather than Welsh. Works Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur) is the source of the modern form of most Arthurian mythology, and is the only major major work of English literature between Geoffrey Chaucer, around a century earlier, and William Shakespeare, around a century later. It has been called the first English novel. Malory's main sources for his work included Arthurian French prose romances, mainly the Vulgate (Lancelot-Grail) and Post-Vulgate cycles, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), and two anonymous English works called the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Stanzaic Morte